Untying Loose Ends: An Interview with Untied States

From the dissonance of the preliminary drones and ensuing dual-guitar aggregation on “Gorilla the Bull”, you might suspect you’re cashing in on a hefty slice of serrated experimental rock. You are, and it might be about time. Untied States, a blusterous four-piece from Atlanta, Georgia, has been banging away at their instruments for over seven years. Possibly breaking too many mirrors recording two full-length releases and still flying under the radar, their third record would be the one to finally end the curse.

With any expectations knocked into a cocked hat on their 2010 Distile release Instant Everything, Constant Nothing, Untied States alchemize visceral post-punk riffs and spurning No Wave irreverence into three-quarters of an hour of amnesic math-rock esprit.

Finding it absolutely necessary to hear for myself how these fractured tracks coalesce in a live set, I made my way out to Garfield Artworks in Pittsburgh to see how the proverbial land lies. The Untied States were third on the bill and that gave me the opportunity to chat with the band about the new record, their hometown in the South, playing shows together, and their recording processes past and present.

The Untied States are Colin Arnstein (vocals and guitar), Skip Engelbrecht (guitar, bass, and effects), Darren Tablan (synthesizers and bass), and Satchel Mallon (drums).

Is this your first time in Pittsburgh?

Colin: Yeah, it's our first time.

You guys are gonna spend some time in the city, maybe, and check out some things?

Colin: Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna check it out tomorrow 'cause we have, uh, I think we have a good break. We're only goin' to Columbus, so...

Skip: How far is Columbus? Do you know? Three hours?

Four hours maybe? Something like that. Definitely not as bad as what you guys had already pulled last night. You guys came in from Providence?

Colin: After what we pulled, exactly. Right.

How was the show in Providence?

Colin: It was, uh, interesting. It was at a really cool place.

Skip: We played RISD, the school of design.

Colin: It's called the Tap Room.

Skip: It was, like, the Talking Heads had played there before or something. That's what they said.

Tap Room? Do they have a good beer selection there or something?

Colin: Uh, no. It was a university deal. They had money so they paid us well.

Skip: We had to sign that W-9 or something to get the money, really…

Colin: Very professional.

Skip: But it was in their Memorial Hall and it was, like, pretty swank. You know, but it was kids—Monday night and it's finals week and supposedly that school has, like, the heaviest load in the country.

Now, the band hails from Atlanta. You guys grew up around there. Tell me about that scene.

Colin: That's interesting. There's a lot going on there. There are pretty much kind of two big groups out of there.

Skip: Deerhunter and Black Lips.

Colin: And Mastodon.

Skip: We know all these people, pretty well.

Colin: I think we fit in a different category between them. You've got, you know, Black Lips—really garage-y primal rock. Then, Deerhunter's ethereal. And then, obviously, we're nothing like Mastodon. We fit somewhere in between.

(motorcycle flies by)

Colin: That's our amp starting up! (laughing)

You guys are playing Garfield Artworks here in Pittsburgh. Do you guys prefer playing art galleries versus dirty rock clubs?

Colin: Yeah, because i think people are more enthusiastic. We played a couple shows. We just played in East Hampton, which is in Massachusetts, which is a big art space.

Skip: It's always less pretentious. and people feel free to be loose. And, they consider themselves artists too.

Colin: Yeah, there's more like a communal back-and-forth kinda thing… and, the kids are going nuts as well.

I actually took that from an Ian MacKaye interview, and he also said the same things. You know, because he's also trying to get out of the 'black boxes'…

Colin: Exactly, because clubs are just… it's a weird thing. You walk in the door, you pay money…

Skip: They're not friendly for people to go into.

Satchel: Well, i think they're kinda used to a bunch of assholes all the time, drinking…

Colin: They stink, cigarettes…

Satchel: Beer, and they're all fucking black. They’re depressing.

Let’s talk about the record. Untied States' material capsulizes a sense of alienation and paranoia.

Skip: (laughing)

Colin: Interesting.

Satchel: Great.

I was thinking kind of a jaggedy retelling of OK Computer. Now, I understand that you guys construct each of the tracks in such a way to get certain emotional responses out of the listeners. What “strings” do you like to tug at?

Colin: I think the best analysis of what we do is that we are kind of answering to a world that wants this instantaneous gratification; this “I gotta have everything.” We're kind of answering that tempo that is set.

Aptly titled on the album.

Colin: Yeah, right, exactly, it's like the promise of everything; the emptiness.

Skip: The alienation thing is something that we definitely don't want, though…

Colin: We're just products from our environment.

Does that spawn from the scene in Atlanta at all?

Colin: No, we're really personable guys.

The band is embraced very well there.

Colin: Yeah, yeah… it’s just different. We don’t try to do anything on purpose. We just say what we feel, you know. While we made that record, it was pretty crazy.

With all of the off-metered time signatures that you feature in your music, it's almost expedient to assume that everyone in the band enjoys listening to their share of progressive music and art-rock. Who do you guys like to study?

Colin: Well, the thing that we kind of get weird with is we don't like the word 'progressive'.

They kind of did away with that word.

Colin: Yeah, it just implies… we’re not musical nerds. I mean, Darren and I have a little bit of classical background. But, we all take from big ideas, you know, we like big things. And, I like a lot of older music just because the arrangements were wilder. We're not trying to do anything that's complicated. We just want to make a good song.

Skip: As far as groups, I mean it's endless. When you listen to some of our songs, you can pull a melody from an old Beatles song, you know, and then weird stuff from other others. We like all kinds of stuff. We like all music, so...

I was hearing a lot of different influences on the album.

Colin: I guess anytime you do anything as an artist that's obviously too “something”, you wanna go and not make it so...

Fuck it up a little bit or something.

Colin: Exactly.

Because of those winding progressions and the tempo shifts, do you guys ever have trouble playing older material because you forget all the parts?

Satchel: You have to relearn...

Colin: When we make our record, there're a couple of tracks that we made, you know, we kind of built them up from all these places. We had a sample from one night drunk at the house, and then a sample of where it stops. Sometimes, we have to learn it from the recording.

Skip: The prior record, if you asked me to play one of those songs, i'd be like 'fuck you'. (laughing)

Colin: We want to get to the point where we're doing the oldies, but we've always been doing fresh music. We're doing three new songs tonight that aren't on the record.

Yeah, I had heard something about an EP?

Colin: We're working on it. We just laid some basic stuff. When we get back, we're gonna finish it off.

That's great. You have that excitement—you put something down and you just want to release it.

Colin: Absolutely.

Do you guys have any idea how difficult it is to search the words “Untied States” on Google?

Colin: Yeah… (laughing)

Skip: You gotta hyphenate it, or something. You gotta put it in quotes in Google. (laughing)

Colin: It's weird, I don't know what it says about our group. We made that name thinking “okay, let's just take something and tweak it a little bit.” And, it's come back to mean a lot of different things. And, you can't search us. It says "Did you mean... ?"

There you go. You’d have to contact 'big brother' on that one. Going back to the album, a lot of the songs on Instant Everything, Constant Nothing are so thickly-textured and frenetic, yet all of the band members seem to contribute to the material and complement each other so well. Did any of these songs come together out of a jam or just letting the tape roll, that kind of thing?

Colin: Yeah

Skip: No, you tell me which one.

Colin: “Wrestling with Entropy…” is a total mash of five different worlds. We grabbed the samples...

Skip: Yeah, but it didn't come off from a jam.

Darren: Well, it kind of did. We took a lot of stuff from jams, recorded it, and then used the samples for that. So in a way...

Skip: I guess you're right.

Colin: Yeah. There's a lot of stuff like that, and it's not so much as the previous record. This was a little more cohesive. Let's go in, do more cohesive pop songs. Our last record was “off the wall”. While we didn't think so, but then when we played it for other people and they looked at us upside-down. Then we knew.

Satchel: The songs changed as well. When I entered the band, it was like “here's this other material, some of its done, some of its not”. So there's room to...

Colin: It's a very crazy thing. The thing that's interesting is that Darren was working at this high-end studio and we kind of came in with parts of this dirty world that we recorded and then we brought it into this kind of high felluten thing. So, there's this mash of really lo-fi and really hi-fi.

How long did it take to put each track together?

Skip: It's wild because we had this house where we started the recording in and we built it out to have studios and different booths and stuff and it was like real swank and we were really fortunate to be there, but then the shit hit the fan there and we had to leave in one day.

That wasn’t the empty warehouse?

Colin: No, that's where we've been recording recently.

Skip: And, then we met up with Darren and it was sort of like 'hey, bring those tracks here'. But, then the problem with going there was that we were recording for free after hours and we would, like, get kicked out of the studio for Bruce Springsteen to come in and record.

Where was this at?

Skip: Southern Tracks.

Colin: So, it added a little bit to the mystique.

Skip: So, it took a long fucking time.

Satchel: …looking at all the gold records on the wall, and (Bruce) is, like, hanging out.

Colin: But, it was fun because we were literally sneaking in between Bruce Springsteen and… uh... Sugarland? Is that a band that people know? (laughing)

I think so. I have you on tape saying 'Sugarland', by the way. (laughing)

Darren: That's off record (laughing)

I'll cut that one out. Alright, just to end things up here, what are you guys doing on April 3rd of next year? Do you guys know about this?

Satchel: No…

Colin: Oh God…

WrestleMania XXVII in Atlanta at the Georgia Dome?

Satchel: Oh my God.

Colin: Well, I guess you just told us.

Yeah, there you go. Consider yourselves informed. One of the fastest-growing cities, you’re hosting WrestleMania now.

Colin: Absolutely. (laughing) Skip did the monster truck rally.

Skip: I did the monster truck rally, like, three months ago and it was wild. I would definitely go again.

Colin: Maybe we can play it? (laughing)

See if you can get that gig. That'd be a really sweet gig!

Satchel: They would love us wouldn't they? (laughing)

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Check out Untied States on MySpace

www.untiedstates.us

www.distilerecords.com

Chatting with the Radar Bros.

Exclusive interview with Merge Records' band, Radar Bros. found here at ZapTown.

Their latest album, The Illustrated Garden, is a fascinating comeback release due out tomorrow. We'd like to chalk it up as one of 2010's more promising albums thus far. Have a go at it...

The interview on ZapTown
www.radarbros.com
www.mergerecords.com

The Pacific Northwest--from Boise to Portland: An Interview with Finn Riggins' Eric Gilbert

Last Wednesday, psov posted a review of Vs. Wilderness--the delightful new LP from Idaho's very own Finn Riggins (featuring keyboardist/vocalist Eric Gilbert, drummer Cameron Bouiss, and guitarist/vocalist Lisa Simpson). They are currently promoting the record on an extensive tour of the States (including a stop in Austin for the SXSW Festival).

Amid their journey down the Californian coast to play a show at the Soda Bar in San Diego tonight, Eric took a moment to answer a few questions for us regarding the new album, the music scene in Boise, and life on the road.

Vs. Wilderness is such an invigorating and gratifying listen. Unfortunately, I had to stumble upon it rather than it being delivered to my doorstep. How can we get the word out on the streets about Finn Riggins?

Thanks! Certainly can use all the help we can get. I'd say this is a good start. Appreciate you taking the time. Glad you stumbled upon us. I see [ZapTown is] in Indianapolis. We're playing at Vollrath Tavern on May 5th toward the end of this tour. Hopefully, by then Indy will know we're coming.

It’s evident in the sound of the album that the band was having a blast during the recording sessions. Describe the process of translating the written material to studio tracks?

It's true, we had a blast. We really enjoy the music we play and I'm glad it shows. Most of this record was written and refined during a very busy touring schedule in 2008 and in the spring of 2009, and really is a pretty honest snapshot of our live sound and where the band was at that time. We tracked Vs Wilderness, mostly, live over a three day stretch in between shows last May at the Visual Arts Collective in Garden City, ID. It's a big open room and we were able to get good isolation for the drums and really play these songs like we were used to ripping them at shows. We honed some of the arrangements down for the recordings, but made most of those adjustments on the fly. We did do a decent amount of layering some parts over the top in the mixing process at AudioLab to help capture the energy of our live show. We had our hands in all aspects of the recording process, and although it was a whirlwind three weeks, we most definitely had a blast recording this album.

There is a lovely stop-animation video that was shot for the infectious track, “Wake (Keep This Town Alive)”. What does this song mean to you?

This song was the first song we wrote upon moving to Boise in January [of] 2009 and [it] was during the bottom of this current recession. There were all these questions hovering about how much harder things were gonna get. This song, to me, is about doing what you love regardless of how poor you may be in the midst of it all. It's about being rewarded with the joys of community and the common causes that bind us together through hard times. It's about valuing the little things in life. It's about local underground music and art and the spiritual backbone it provides to small and big towns all over. It's about dancing with your friends.

Built To Spill is the only other band that I can think of from Idaho. What was it like growing up and playing music in what is, historically, such a musically-devoid scene?

Idaho has never really felt musically-devoid to me. We all met going to school in Moscow, ID, up in the panhandle (northern Idaho), and it was and still is a very vibrant college town with free-form college radio and all kinds of touring and local musicians playing in town several days a week. Granted, a lot of our friends from the scene, when we were there, have moved to Portland, OR and elsewhere to further pursue music careers. But, there definitely wasn't a lack of creative music being made around us. Idaho does lack much representation in the music industry though, and that can be problematic trying to work in to the national scene. A lot of musicians tend to move to bigger markets because of it, but we've been able to cover some ground in the industry thanks to our relentless touring schedule and playing those larger markets on a regular basis. We're also thankful to have stumbled upon an amazing relationship with Tender Loving Empire--our Portland, OR based label--as they've helped us be fairly well-tied into the vibrant Portland scene and we often get mistaken for a Portland band. Rightfully so, though, as we definitely feel like we're part of that scene as well, despite not storing our household goods there.

With so many performances under your belt, you’ve played with a plethora of up-and-coming bands. Tell us about some of those bands and the experiences you’ve had while sharing the stage with them.

Wow. Where to start? Definitely one of the biggest rewards with playing so many shows all over the country the last several years has been playing with and seeing so many other great bands in different scenes and following them as they develop as well. We get asked about our influences all the time, and although there might not be any direct aural similarities, we all certainly feel that we're mostly influenced by our peers at this point in our history--on many levels. We love touring with other bands when we get that chance, seeing them night after night and comparing notes along the way. More the merrier tends to hold true in most cases. Some of our favorites: Tartufi, Low Red Land, Jared Mees & The Grown Children, Orem The Sink, The Globes, Boy Eats Drum Machine, Woven, Hosannas, Sister Suvi, Tune-Yards, Nat Baldwin, We Vs The Shark, Man/Miracle, The Dont's, World's Greatest Ghosts, Le Fleur, Built To Spill, Mike Watt & The Missingmen, Disco Doom, Wildlife Refugees, Ponchos, Appomattox, Yeah Great Fine, Talkdemonic, And And And, The Mutineers, Hello Shark, Love That Dress, Council of Lions, Rooftops, Test Audiences, Asher In The Rye, America Owns The Moon, and many many many more.

You have this small cabin up in the mountains. I’m sure it’s beautiful up there—a pleasant escape from the weariness on the road. What does the band do when they’re not playing or recording music? Any avid hobbies or pasttimes?

We've technically moved out of the small cabin in the mountains and down in to the "big city" of Boise. It was nice coming home to the solitude of the small mountain town, but it's been nice coming home to a more vibrant music and art scene now. I like to play basketball when I get the chance. When we were up in the mountains, I enjoyed hiking and fishing when I got some free time. Cam's an avid skier and definitely does that as much as he can. On the road, we travel with a bocce ball set and try [to] play whenever possible. Frisbee too. Lisa's the crafty one of the bunch and does a lot of sewing.

Finn Riggins seems like fun-loving people. I’m sure you get around to making conversation with some of the fans that attend the performances. What was the most supportive thing someone said to you after a show? Any good tour stories?

Definitely get a lot of time to hang with friends and [make] new friends at shows--certainly one of the joys of this endeavor. Really fun to meet like-minded folks all over this country and hear their take on their community and music, and always interesting to watch and hear how they react to what we're doing. People say a lot of kind things to us... most supportive thing though? A lot of them are too embarrassing to say. Someone that saw us recently emailed us afterward and said that we'd renewed his faith in modern music and that he was going to start DJing at his community radio station again because of it. Little nuggets like that never fail to inspire us forward. Lots of good tour stories, unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to share the juicy ones. We played in a yurt once. Coziest dance party ever. It was amazing. We're playing a party on a boat next Tuesday in Austin, we're really excited about that one.

Indie rock concert-goers will always have their stereotypes and presumptions. What was the most indeliberately insulting thing said to you after a show?

"Idaho's that state right above Kentucky, right?" Nah, not easily insulted in general. Even if someone makes an association with a band that I don't like that much, I'm usually excited they found a way to connect to our music. And, I just think it's hilarious that so many people don't know that Idaho is in the [northwest]; that it has lots of mountains, and that it's a beautiful place to live.

You’re currently on a massive U.S. tour this spring; almost seventy dates, if I counted correctly. What are your plans after things finish up in late-May? Might you be ready to head to the studio to lay down some new material?

The plan is to spend the summer and fall writing and working on a new album, while remaining open to regional opportunities and any support tours that might be offered to us. We're really excited to get to work on new material--lots of ideas being thrown around. We'll have a new practice space in Boise when we get back and all kinds of inspiration built up over the course of this three month tour. There's been talk of trying to whip up something new while on this tour with the acoustic instruments we brought with us... maybe have it ready to play by our May 5th Indianapolis show? We'll see...

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Check out Finn Riggins on MySpace

www.finnriggins.com

www.tenderlovingempire.com

www.riotactmedia.com