Archive for Interviews
What makes a music scene?
I recently had the privilige of interviewing Jacob McMurray Senior Curator of the Experience Music Project for a feature piece on music museums. Within the contect of describing his upcoming exhibition Nirvana in the Northwest Underground, 1982-1992 Jacob articulated a really interesting understanding about the development of music scenes:
“Nobody had looked, commercially, at the Northwest for a long time. What were the pieces of infrastructure in the creative underground that needed to be in place for their to be a scene in the first place? That’s one of the things that I’m really interested in exploring. In order to have a scene you have to have a sort of renewable source of music like a college. Olympia is a great example of this, Evergreen College there. You have to have a source of communication for your underground message. Like fanzines and radio, like the college radio, KAOS radio, or Op magazine. In Seattle the Rocket would serve that. You had to have venues. You had to have record stores to reinforce this underground message. And so trying to build step-by-step what it takes to develop the scene in the Northwest.”
Interview with Ed Ackerson
This is the full transcription of an interview I did with Ed Ackerson. A legendary musician and producer in Minneapolis, Ed has been on the scene 20 years playing pure, exciting power-pop. Ed’s band, Polara, found success in the heady days of the mid-’90s, back in the days when bands actually got signed to labels. Cool. At the time of this interview, Nov. 2007, Ed was just releasing his first solo record on his own Susstones label. Highly recommended. Here’s a video for the song “Wired Weird” (ah, that good old grey MPLS sky).
ED ACKERSON TRANSCRIPTION
I have to tell you, I love the album. You’ve gotta be really happy with it too.
Yeah, I think it turned out alright. Bit of a departure, but I think it’s a good statement. Definitely a different type of record for me.
How so?
The last bunch of records that I’ve done with Polara are all very much oriented toward what that band does: it’s a group of people that make a very noisy and highly, densely-layered sort of thing. [Polara] is also very orchestrated in a sonic sort of sense. I’ve really gotten used to writing for those people, for the band, like for what Peter (Anderson) is going to play drums like and what Jennifer (Jurgens) is going to be doing vocally and keyboard stuff. So as I’d be writing songs for Polara, I’d always be thinking in the back of my head about what those guys would be contributing.
This record is totally different because it’s not like that at all. This record is really like I was writing songs and going in and recording them immediately. Just with nor preconceptions at all.
That’s cool. So one thing I was wondering if you had these songs tucked away, if this was something you’d been thinking about for a while and you had been saving things up, that it was a coming-to-a-head type of thing, Was there some of that to it?
No, not really. I think a couple of songs had been rattling around for a while but not very long. The bulk of the writing – I think I wrote fifteen or sixteen songs – for the record, of which there are eleven or something on it, happened within a two-month period.
