Download: Gangi “Commonplace Feathers”

(from A coming out in May on vinyl from White Noise)

Gangi is the eclectic musical duo of Matt Gangi and Lyle Nesse. Originally from Brooklyn, where Matt wrote and recorded the first album A, they moved to L.A. to get some sun and space and accidentially encounter Mandy Moore. They will be playing a Monday night residency at Spaceland for the month of May. This interview by Steven Martinez.

You guys have a pretty complicated set up for playing your music live which involves a lot of multitasking by both of you. Do you think this adds something to your performances or do you just have something against adding more band members?
Matt Gangi (vocals, guitar): We’re into the spontaneity that our looping stations bring and the time collage that samplers add, but I have also been thinking about experimenting by adding a bass player after the Spaceland residency.
Lyle Nesse (drums, loops): People often ask how we’re able to make so much sound as just a duo. I think the fact that there’s just two of us making the sounds of several people is one of the things that sets us apart from other bands.
Much has been made of the eclectic mix of sounds in your music and it seems to be a large part of your band identity, but could you ever write a simple song? Is that something that interests you?
MG: That is a large part of our band identity—if you say so—but most of the songs start out much more minimally, with a melody.
LN: Both minimal and complex arrangements interest me. We’ve been experimenting with all kinds of different arrangements for the new songs.
Many journalists have tried to define your particular musical stylings. What would you call it?
MG: ‘Musical styling’ sounds pretty good.
LN: Maybe it’s best to let other people try.
Lyle, you said in an interview that Gangi’s first album was all Matt’s work and you downplayed your own contribution to it. Will you have a stronger presence or influence on the next record?
LN: Matt recorded A alone in his apartment in Brooklyn, so it’s strange that some writers have credited me as the producer of that record! We were friends during the time that Matt was writing and recording those songs and he came over to my place often to play me sketches. Over the course of a few months in Brooklyn, I listened as the recordings progressed from sounding like underwater field recordings to the songs you hear on that record. The live interpretation of those songs has been a collaboration and it continues to evolve. On our new recordings, I am programming electronics and playing drums. Matt is writing the songs, singing and playing the melodic instruments. We are arranging and producing the music together and I have learned a lot in the studio from Matt, as he produced the first record alone.
The move from New York to LA is one that is usually met with strong prejudices from both sides—is it really that much of a culture shock relocating from coast to coast? Aren’t the two at least a little similar?
MG: I grew up in Glendale, so it was an easy move back home. Brooklyn definitely has an energy that I miss, but the taco trucks in L.A. more than make up for that.
LN: I can’t believe how people drive their cars here in L.A. It gets scary out there but the constant sunshine helps.
How has the move to L.A. influenced your sound, if at all?
MG: As there is more space in L.A. than in New York, Lyle is able to play live drums here when we rehearse. One of the many reasons I got into programming and electronics was because it was hard to find a comfortable place to play electric instruments or live drums in New York. L.A. has made the sound more rock and roll. We’ve been working for the past week at Pasadena recording studio, recording a demo of the first track on the second album—’Gun Show.’ The space is beautiful and we have been running sounds through warm analogue gear, which is far from the tiny Brooklyn apartment where I recorded A on a computer. Also Mandy Moore has been practicing in the next room.
LN: Just having a safe place where we can be creative during the late night hours has been really huge for us. Our friend Alan who owns that studio in Pasadena has helped make that possible. And yeah, Mandy Moore’s band is super hip.
If you ever get tired of living in L.A. where would you like to move next and why?
MG: I really love Atlanta. Every time we’ve toured through that town, all the sidewalks and streets were stained from the red clay in the city and the food is really good there.
LN: Matt has a thing for the South. Every time we tour through those southern parts he wants to stay in Georgia and the Carolinas for a few extra days just to hang out, take some banjo lessons and eat some soul food. I am from Maryland and sometimes miss my home state.
I read that you two met while in Prague when a mutual interest in absinthe brought you together. What were you doing in Prague and at what point did the subject of music come up?
MG: I was going to film school in Prague, making a short and digging on Jan Svankmajer’s films.
LN: I was bumming around with a backpack when I met Matt, but it wasn’t until we later reconnected in Brooklyn that we talked about music.
Appearing on Spin’s Best of CMJ 2008 list must have increased the visibility of your band. How has this affected you most directly?
MG: It is amazing how many people read Spin. We sold out Spaceland when we got back from CMJ, which awarded us our residency there.
LN: My old man was pretty happy to see that. At the beginning it was always more underground blogs and ‘zines that wrote us up, so he called me up when he saw that and said, ‘Even I know Spin magazine.’
You guys seem to enjoy a variety of choice in your musical tastes both on and off stage but if you were forced to choose one album to listen to for the rest of your life, what would it be?
MG: A collected album library of zipped up albums.
LN: John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. On vinyl.
You said that making art that makes people think is important to you. What do you want people to think when they hear your music?
MG: It’s up to you. What do you think?

GANGI WITH HEAD LIKE A KITE, DADDY KEV AND BLANK BLUE ON MON., MAY 4, AT SPACELAND, 1717 SILVERLAKE BLVD., SILVERLAKE. 8:30PM / FREE / 21+. CLUBSPACELAND.COM. GANGI’S A RELEASES ON VINYL THIS MONTH ON WHITE NOISE. VISIT GANGI AT MYSPACE.COM/GANGIMUSIC.

(from A on Office of Analogue and Digital)

Is your new attic in Glendale healthier than your old bedroom in Williamsburg?
Matt Gangi (guitar/vocals/samples/drums): Definitely. I don’t know if it influenced the record, but there was black mold and mushrooms growing out of the wall—bigger than the size of my hand. And growing out of the ceiling. The place was rent-stabilized and the landlord didn’t care because I was just like a noisy kid paying cheap rent.
He didn’t care if you lived or died?
M: It was pretty terrible. They cut open the ceiling and this green and brown stuff was dripping all over my stuff. My neighbor came down and said, ‘That shouldn’t be exposed! I built your walls out in the ‘60s and that’s asbestos!’
Lyle Nesse (drums/keys/samples/vocals): Matt always called me thinking he was dying—that’s just his personality.
M: I’m a hypochondriac in general.
L: That’s an understatement! But I went up there and there actually were huge fungi and mushrooms growing out of the wall.
M: Completely non-edible.
Did you try?
M: We don’t go that far out, man! People in the building got really sick. In Williamsburg, people were getting all these cancers—sarcomas. Someone got cancer in my building, and the person who lived above me got nose infections from the toxic mold. And he got an autoimmune disease akin to lupus and had to take HIV medication. I was finally like, ‘Hey, man, the album’s done—let’s get on the road!’
When you came to L.A., were you like, ‘Ah, smell that fresh air?’
M: Exactly. Better that than aspergillus.
What are your favorite two songs to DJ together?
L: When we DJ out, Matt and I are pretty much switching every song. I usually bring hip-hop, Afrobeat, some gamelan music—so beat-heavy music and hip-hop and then Matt playing a lot of psych and reissues. So that idea of bringing together all of that and people who listen to all that music, and the people who listen to only that music exclusively.
Have you been to Low End Theory?
M: We’re really into Low End Theory. We were there just the other day to see Gaslamp Killer. He’s amazing. Crystal Antlers played a couple weeks ago. It’s really exciting when these communities come together. There shouldn’t be a separation between those scenes, and there’s not.
What is an information bomb and how do we live in it?
M: We decided before not to burden you with this kind of an interview.
Really?
M: ‘What if we just took it really conceptually and answered by putting every interview question into Google searches?’ Why even answer an interview about ourselves when you can type in a question and get so many voices and experiences? That’s more interesting than anything we could say.
What is interesting then?
M: What’s interesting is what would survive. Lyle comes from a hip-hop background—so it’s which samples survive—which ones are interesting and relevant. What’s interesting about an information bomb in general is the back catalog of information. A catchy little phrase or word combination in the future might be really interesting to people in a way it isn’t now. We played at Little Radio and the sound guy was talking about John Titor. It’s just kind of silly but an interesting idea. That a blog from the past could foretell the future. That’s kind of why I’m into all the reissues coming out now. I’ve really been digging on like Brazilian recordings that made it out when all the psych recordings had been destroyed by the government for being subversive. That Marconi Notaro record.
L: To me what’s interesting is what part is preserved and what ends up in a basement somewhere. From a sampling and beatmaking background—it’s the more obscure things that you as a producer can blow off and bring into the light.
Like the Skull Snaps.
L: Just bringing it back into circulation. Like in psych and folk with all the reissues coming out. It’s so confusing to me that appropriation is looked down upon in some circles. It’s so important to culture to bring things back out.
M: The act of appropriating in general is a political act because of all the things it brings up. Every phrase is like trademarked now—the Situationists had that line ‘revolutionize your everyday life’ and now that’s how products are being sold.
L: You just made me think of the book I’m reading now—by an author Matt’s been corresponding with. Sebastien Doubinsky. For his first draft of his new book Potemkin, he took the titles for his chapters from the songs on our record.
M: It’s interesting how the internet creates all these new worlds. When I was creating the album, I was just throwing new ideas on Rupert Murdoch Myspace and you’d get people writing me like ‘Check my work! Check my blog!’ He was like, ‘Read my writing!’ And it ended up his writing was really interesting. As I was recording, he was taking the song titles and writing along with it. But that’s my idea lyrically—by writing with disjunction or different voices, hopefully the person who is listening has more room for interpretation. ‘Commonplace Feathers’ has a line about ‘these matters shook up the community.’ The line is taken from a farming book. People are like, ‘Oh, September 11?’ It’s those things that the culture is putting in and interpreting. A lot of words and images from outside. But we’re creating them as much as any other author who is like, ‘I am the author! I’m speaking from the energy flowing through me!’ If you approach it more conceptually, you can kind of make a statement about the fact that most stuff is regurgitation. A catchy sample or a catchy meme—information that’s surviving and moving into the future.
L: In the book Sebastien wrote—the writing is very much sci-fi. The dystopia he creates in his book—the way people escape it is through this internet world that’s very commercial, where you create your character and go in their shops and buy their things, but this group of hackers has created another world in that world. I don’t wanna give it away but in the world within that world is the black market for culture. It’s where you go to buy all the records the government burned, all the books—to have a meaningful exchange with people.
M: We’ve been reading Virilio and he’s talking about scientific advancements—kind of how science is more destructive because we’ve created a way to completely destroy each other, and the advancements don’t outweigh the negatives. I was reading how in the ‘60s and ‘70s performance artists—a woman could take her top off and walk down the street and get arrested, and they’d say, ‘You’re a woman—you’re not allowed to walk around topless.’ And the woman would say, ‘Oh, I’m a man.’ That was really interesting politically and culturally then. Now with technology you can just get your ID scanned—‘No, you’re a woman!’—and get arrested. Today we have to find new forms. As a performative act, a hacker could hack in and change their gender from female to male, and then they’d walk free!
L: Just to be clear—I don’t endorse anyone hacking anything!
How does someone make music under the domination of the info bomb?
M: Making art that makes people think is really important.
Who has done that for you?
L: I was really into the first Eno and David Byrne record My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. Just the idea to me with all the sampling—you put that record on and it brings up all kinds of things—what you think about, what you haven’t—but it doesn’t preach. And they’re often using samples for simply the way they sound. So anything that encourages anything but passivity.
M: When Lyle and I take samples, that’s kind of the first concern—how it’s working sonically. For our cover of ‘Fire In Cairo’ on the Cure tribute Manimal Vinyl is putting out, we had that sample from the Egyptian workers’ strikes. We were listening to the different commentators—it was less about the language and more about the tonality of the voices, and how it affects the listening experience.
L: I’m listening to Rainbow Arabia and the fact that they take from so many sources is interesting—Middle Eastern sounds, Asian, African—that’s synthesis!
M: Danny from Rainbow Arabia imports all his keyboards from Afghanistan and Iran. We were talking about covering the names on our gear because it’s like branding, and he was like, ‘I have to leave this one—it’s Casio in Arabic.’ There’s something in that—how many people are creating your sound? People are so anti-sample or appropriation, but every synth sound—every plug-in in Logic or whatever interface—how many artists and designers went into making those sounds that we’re using? So many other people were involved in creating our sound. It seems it could go even further. Sampling text—emotive bloggers to corporate propaganda—because there’s already so many creative people giving input into the sound.
L: It’s great that in underground music circles that the obscure is always prized. Instead of rehashing old shit, you’re bringing something new into the cycle.
M: You can’t get away from appropriating. Just from being in a certain environment—all you are is a rehash. You can’t create outside what you know.
Public Enemy sampled Wattstax for sort of the same reasons.
L: The Bomb Squad is a huge thing for me. That brings to mind something Matt said. It’s impossible to not be political—the way the Bomb Squad sampled, it was so claustrophobic—and if you’re not taking anything from that, it’s your fault. There’s so much there.
You have that United States of America sample on the album—what else is in there?
M: ‘Ground’ sampled the EPA and the New York Times. Brooklyn was a really loud place. I recorded in my apartment and there was so much noise. I recorded sirens on my street, ambulances going by, chattering on street corners—and the EPA talking at you.
L: At our live show, we look for all kinds of stuff that catches our attention in the sampler, and because we’re looping through the mic, it’ll pick up some of samples I hit. We have a sample of Hugo Chavez in front of the U.N. yelling that Bush is el diablo, and that will get caught and create some new word.
The Chavez Diablo Vortex?
M: We’ve also been sampling news about the Large Hadron Collider.
L: This amazing propaganda film. ‘CERN in three minutes! CERN is good! The Large Hadron Collider will probably not destroy the universe!’
M: There’s a rap video my friend Kari turned me on to—people rapping inside of CERN.
How’s the production?
L: Godawful.
What would be an appropriate way for someone to build on something you’ve made?
M: However they want.
L: That’s part of the fun. Do whatever they wanna do with it. In a really cool alternate reality world, I imagine in fifty or a hundred years when it’s all dusty in someone’s basement—some kid will find it and sample from it and bring it back to life somehow. There’s a scene in Scratch where DJ Shadow is down in the basement he’s been digging in for years, and he’s basically like, ‘When you’re down here, show respect.’

—Chris Ziegler

GANGI WITH LION OF PANJSHIR, GOLDEN ANIMALS AND JEFF RAMUNO ‘N’ THE GUNSLINGERS ON THU., SEPT. 11, AT TANGIER, 2138 HILLHURST AVE., LOS FELIZ. 8 PM / $7 / 21+. FOLDSILVERLAKE.COM. AND WITH CRYSTAL ANTLERS, ABE VIGODA, PRINCETON AND MANY MORE AT THE EAGLE ROCK MUSIC FESTIVAL ON SAT., OCT. 4, ON COLORADO BLVD. BETWEEN EAGLE ROCK AND ARGUS. 5 PM / FREE / ALL AGES. MYSPACE.COM/EAGLEROCKMUSICFESTIVAL. GANGI’S A IS OUT NOW ON THE OFFICE OF ANALOGUE AND DIGITAL. VISIT GANGI AT MYSPACE.COM/GANGIMUSIC.