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Traps ‘n
Accordions – An interview with KTU/King Crimson's
Pat Mastelotto |
Ryan Sparks
Drummer Pat
Mastelotto’s first taste of success in the music world arrived in the
mid 80’s with Mr. Mister, a band he helped create. While their time in
the spotlight was rather short lived their debut album Welcome To the
Real World released in 1985 yielded two number one singles with “Broken
Wings” and “Kyrie”. If you were around the radio in the mid 80’s it was
hard to miss these chart topping singles. After the band disbanded at
the close of the decade Pat initially ventured off into doing session
work for the likes of XTC, Matthew Sweet and The Rembrandts. In 1993 he
landed the gig as the touring drummer for David Sylvian and Robert
Fripp’s tour in support of the duo’s album The First Day. This gig was a
classic case of perfect timing for Pat because Fripp already had the
wheels in motion for the return of his highly influential progressive
rock band King Crimson.
Pat became a member
of the initial double trio version of Crimson the following year. In
this incarnation he shared the drum stool with the legendary Bill
Bruford and together they played a pivotal role shaping the groups
improvisations in concert. Although this version of Crimson only lasted
a few years Pat still remains a member of the band to this day, although
the group seems to be on a hiatus at present. In the meantime, never
one to sit idle Mastelotto has continued to forge ahead with new musical
partnerships and is intent on further expanding his already diverse
sonic palette. One such individual that he continues to collaborate with
is ex- Crimson stick player and touch guitarist Trey Gunn. Their TU
project has expanded into KTU, which in addition to the duo features the
eclectic sounds of Finnish accordion player Kimmo Pohjonen. I recently
caught up with Pat to talk about KTU’s just released debut studio album
Quiver. He also discussed at length his admiration for electronic music
and some of the albums in that genre that have influenced him over the
years. I also got his reflections on Crimson, the current state of the
band and whether or not he thinks they will indeed fly again.
Ryan: Quiver is the second album and first studio release from KTU. The
seeds of this project actually go back ten years. Can you tell me how it
all started?
Pat: About ten
years ago in 1997 when King Crimson stopped we broke the band into
smaller components and did improvisational gigs, which was sort of
research and development for more material. One of those projects was
ProjeKct 3 which was based around a couple of gigs that I got for us
here in Austin. (Robert) Fripp said “You road manage Pat, you book the
flights and the hotels and put the gigs together”. So I did that and I
wanted to plan an opening act for these shows but I didn’t want a loud
progressive guitar band so I searched out this really great flamenco
guitar player here in town who performs with a couple of bands. I
thought that added some nice spice for fans of guitar music but not the
same thing that we did together with Robert and Trey. Then my other guy
turned me on to Kimmo so I got Kimmo as the other opening act. That was
the first time I saw him. We met, hung out, and found that we liked each
other. His manager Phillip has lived in Finland for about twenty five
years and he and I have a lot of common friends. We always stayed in
contact and talked about the possibility of doing something. This was in
’98 or ’99 and it took four years until when Trey and I stumbled on TU.
Right after The Power To Believe album Trey and I formed TU. I went up
to Seattle where he lives and we got together with drummer Matt
Chamberlin, used his studio and did a record of little tidbits that we
had leftover that weren’t used with Crimson. When we finished it we were
thinking about doing some live shows and I stumbled upon the idea of
calling it TU. I thought what if we got two other people and made it TU
plus two, so each gig could be a unique show because we’d have a duo
join us maybe halfway through each show making each one totally unique.
It dawned on me right there that Kimmo and his duet called Kluster with
Samuli (Kosminen) would be a great idea so I called them and we pieced
it together. Trey and I flew over there and Phillip pieced together a
few gigs and he got us some interest in Japan. We just about broke even
on the run but we had about I guess ten days together and a couple of
rehearsals with some songwriting, and these couple of gigs in Helsinki.
I think we did four shows in Japan and we ended up recording all of
that.
The recordings were
pretty tough and we hired an engineer to start working on it but he gave
up so the project ended up looking pretty doomed. I told Phillip and the
guys to send me the tapes and I’d see what I could do rather than just
give up on the whole thing, so that was the first record we did. It was
a little tough because the accordion has an open microphone so
everything bleeds into it; you’ve got drums and everything in there. On
top of that Kimmo processes it all so it’s just a big garbled mess. It
took a long time for me to sort out a way to clean up the accordion
recordings, and the drum sounds weren’t too great either. The mics must
have been upside down or pushed away or whatever because I had to
reinforce it with a few samples and fix some things up. Most of the
record is a straight up live performance and there’s not even that many
edits on the record, only one or two where there’s a full band edit and
a chunk or two where I lifted Trey’s solo from a different night and
inserted it in to improve on another solo, stuff like that.
Ryan: What was
the initial goal with KTU? What did you want to do to make this
different from your past work?
Pat: Well it’s not
like we set out to make it different. The main thing was we enjoyed
Kimmo’s company and we thought that he and Samulli did great stuff. For
us it was a chance to explore working with musicians who weren’t the
normal kind of guys that we would work with. We’re more traditional rock
players whereas they come from a whole different background and it was
just really interesting. As soon as we got the project going there was a
great appeal because the accordion and the Warr guitar, or touch guitar
that Trey plays, they’re both full range instruments. They’re unique in
a way that they can play bass, melody or chord accompaniment. There
aren’t many instruments where you can accompany yourself while you solo,
so it became a really twisted little genre. I don’t know where you’d
really fit us in, if we’re a rock band or world music or jazz. We’ve
played at all these festivals and it’s obviously hard for the promoters
because there’s not a slot or a pigeon hole for them to put us in.
Ryan: I guess it’s a bit of a dilemma as you said but on the other hand
who cares where it fits in you know?
Pat: Well I don’t
care and I don’t think most musicians care, it comes down to how do you
sell it? Is it Kleenex or toilet paper? It’s the same thing but how are
we going to sell it? People seem to be very afraid of the accordion,
there’s this quick assumption that we’re going to play polka music or
something. If you heard the music it’s nothing like that. We’re some
avant-garde jazz, rock, world music ensemble. I don’t know anybody who
has seen us live or seen a video of Kimmo that didn’t love the band.
Honest to god once you see Kimmo all your accordion fears goes away.
He’s just fuckin’ brutal onstage and I would challenge you to put us in
front of Metallica or Marilyn Manson or the softest Kronos Quartet or
whatever, we just need an opportunity to get in front of people. It’s
difficult because we’re so far apart and the expenses are pretty
high.
Ryan: You and Trey really seem to thrive in a live context regardless of
who you’re playing with. That being said is it challenging for you to
try to capture that same spontaneous feeling when you’re putting
together a studio project like this?
Pat: Well first off
I don’t know that if we thrive any better in one environment than the
other. We’re both really comfortable in the studio. It was interesting
to work with a guy like Fripp because he hates being in a recording
studio, he’ll get out as soon as he can. He’s definitely a guy who’s
much happier onstage than he is in a studio. Which is the exact opposite
to someone like Adrian (Belew) or myself because we love to develop
stuff in the studio. We grew up with the Beatles and like the idea that
you can use the studio as an instrument to create atmospheres and things
as you compose the material. So it’s not an either or thing because we
like both. It’s from a certain amount of experience that leads me to a
place that when I do record I’m probably more reckless in the studio
than I am live because I know that nobody is watching. There doesn’t
have to be a net if I fuck up, I can just go back and replay it or
replace it. There’s a real go for it attitude when I record most of the
time unless it’s a straight ahead pop record where you’ve got a bunch of
guys in there tracking people and you don’t want to keep them there all
day. You want to get a somewhat conservative take that you can play over
and over, but most of the music that we’re talking about can be pretty
ruthless in the studio. So it wasn’t hard that way, I mean the first
record was all created completely live onstage.
Ryan: How did the recording process unfold for Quiver, were the three of
you able to all get together for the principal recordings?
Pat: Yeah and there
was a lot of logistical effort put into that. We were able to arrange a
little bit of work that Kimmo had in the United States with Kluster and
The Kronos Quartet so we used that opportunity to fly him down to Texas
where I live. I have a studio in my house and there’s a studio close by
with a little bigger room that I use a lot called The Zone. The owners
that run it are good friends so they give me good deals and I trade with
them, we barter a lot. And I have the ability to house a bunch of people
at my place so that’s another asset to be able to put four guys up here.
So on our way to Mexico to do a few shows we snagged Kimmo and had him
here for about five days or a week I don’t remember. Some of that time
was spent writing, arranging and then recording. I think we were able to
do that two or three times, where we were able to hook up in one room.
Previous to that we had been constantly sending e-mails and ideas back
and forth to get things generated. And previous to that when we were
doing gigs, we’d be doing improvisations, there’s a piece on the album
called “Wassabi Fields” which was kind of developed spontaneously
onstage from an improvisation we did in Vienna. So that kind of
developed right off the stage. I’m trying to remember some of the others
because we changed a lot of the titles at the last minute, things like
“Kataklasm” kind of started with Trey sending an idea.
Ryan: The songs
cover the full gamut ranging from all out muscular, heavy progressive
rock stomp of “Kataklasm” and “Aorta” to a softer more minimalist and
atmospheric approach on compositions like “Womb” and “Snow Reader” .
There’s a nice balance and a real cohesive feel to it over all.
Pat: Good. The
running order and the fact that it was the same guys playing kind of
nurture’s it into a common sound I guess. “Snow Reader” was a track that
we used to play live for about a year; with the idea of when we were
playing it live we wanted to have something really minimalist. For a
long time there were almost no drums on it just a pulse from a shaker
and a few overdubs with low electronic drums. So we played it live that
way and in my mind it allowed a lot of space for the accordion to kind
of be more romantic and it was a good challenge. It’s from playing live
really that we were thinking of how to shape our live show so that has
some impact with big bombastic stuff, but at the same time we don’t want
to stay there all night. We want to kind of touch on that feeling and
then go someplace else that’s really soft to give it a break.
Ryan: To be honest with you before I heard KTU I never thought it was
possible to get those kinds of sounds out of an accordion. What is
Kimmo’s setup like; does he use a lot of effects?
Pat: He uses a lot.
He’s got like a Midi-fied accordion, they make them now and even Roland
sells them but his is all homemade and he’s been doing it for more than
ten years. He uses stomp boxes and samplers, and like I said the
toughest part is there was no midi translator so he’s got microphones
that convert to midi. The accordion is like a big open mic onstage, all
my drums, the guitar and everything just bleeds into this thing, and
then it gets processed by Kimmo in real time. He does the same thing
with his voice, I don’t know if you’ve seen him but he wears a headset
and he processes it himself before it gets to the soundman. I do a lot
of that myself and the drag about that is you’re mixing from the stage
where you don’t hear the whole picture, so sometimes the poor sound guy
at the front of the house will be like “Wow that’s like sawing people’s
heads off”. We’re really lucky to be working with a couple of great live
sound design engineers; they’re two guys who have worked with Kimmo on
all of his projects for years. Kimmo is a nut for being in surround
sound so all of our shows are in surround, not just four, but complete
surround speakers around the venue. We’ll separate out some routing for
my electronics and dedicate some things to go to the back or the side of
the room. Other things which are just in the moment the mixer can take
an element or even say you take the accordion and put a reverb or an
effect on it and send it to the back side of house, and turn off the
front drive signal so a song can start from behind your head and then
the front sound can come and join it. David Fricke the writer came to
one of our shows and I remember he came backstage to meet us and we were
really excited to meet him as well and the first thing he said was “Were
those fucking chickens behind my head?” We have this “Untamed Chicken”
piece that Trey and I like to do with chickens squawking, so that must
have been a case where the sound guy put it to the back of the house.
Ryan: You’re always incorporating new sounds and beats into your
repertoire, what was the initial attraction for you that made you want
to go about blending acoustic and electronic sounds in percussion?
Pat: That goes
back to when I was a kid in the 70’s. I’ve played drums probably since
the late 60’s but in the early 70’s you had people like Carl Palmer
using synths on the drums. I was lucky enough in the mid 70’s to work
with some people like Michael Boddicker who was a synth programmer in
L.A. , and Bob Easton who was the developer of pitch to voltage
converters where we had a way to take an acoustic drum and process it
through these Moog’s and ARP synthesizers and things like that. So I was
always intrigued by that and this was before there were samplers, so
you’d take the pots and pans to the studio to do your overdubs. Then as
the 80’s came along we ended up with digital sampling and better ways to
do all these things, and eventually with midi you could play things on
pads, so it’s always been something that’s been part of my scene. I
found it interesting in the mid 90’s when I got turned on to a lot of
different electronic music and along the way became aware of Raymond
Scott. He’s one of the fathers of electronic music, he was a big band
leader in the 30’s or 40’s and tended the account with MBC the big
radio and TV station so he did a lot of those TV shows. Then he
developed some of the early synthesizers with Bob Moog in the 50’s and
what we would call the first sequencer, which he later sold to Motown in
the late 70’s. He was just a really fascinating character and all the
things that he developed. They still use his music on shows like Ren and
Stimpy, but what really got me once I started to really look into his
work was that we have the same birthday [laughing]. So I thought there’s
the synchronicity, I’ve got this guy’s DNA in me somewhere that makes me
want to fuck around with tone.
Ryan: When you’re not working on music and I don’t know when that would
be, what electronic musicians are you tuned in to?
Pat: Yeah there’s
lot s of stuff. I have to point out Samuli who’s the percussionist with
Kluster who we did the double drum thing there with him in the first
couple of years of KTU. He’s really brilliant with electronic stuff and
what I call glitch stuff; you know the crackling, crunchy sounding
samples that a lot of the kids have been using the past five years.
Preceding that there’s people like Squarepusher or Aphex Twin that were
doing a lot of hyper editing and that seemed to be a real genre changing
thing in the mid 90’s.
Ryan: Were you a fan of drums ‘n bass?
Pat: Sure all that
stuff. I kind of got in not necessarily early but I had some British DJ
friends who would have white label records, Steve Hillage and the
System 7, early Bill Laswell, there was just so much out there and I was
really sniffing around for it. Then later with things like The Boards of
Canada, I thought they did some really great stuff. Eno’s records are
great, The Drop album and the one he did with the drummer Peter Schwalm
Drawn From Life I think was the name of it, there was just so much.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s there was “Silver Apples of the Moon” and the
Wendy Carlos records. The (Isao) Tomita records were really big on my
playlist in the 70’s, YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra) as well. There’s a
Finnish group that I didn’t know were from Finland called Pansonic, they
were called Panasonic for awhile until they got sued and took the A out
of their name. That was a record I fell into in the mid 90’s around the
time of Photek and the stuff that Talvin Singh was doing. A friend of
mine from my MR. Mister band days was managing Talvin and had a label
called Quango which had a lot of great electronic music more like Kruder
and Dorfmeister, a little more like chill dance music. So all that shit
really appeals to me and to be honest it appeals to me a lot more than
conventional big band snare type drumming. I enjoy both and that’s the
balance in my life is that I get to fuck around with both genres.
Sometimes I feel like a different guy, I can work on a country type folk
record where none of that electronic shit is appropriate. I’ll build up
everything really earthy, I’ll use skin and hands where it’s like
working with bear skins and knives, just old fashioned stuff where we’re
going to rub two sticks together. Then other days I get to work with
people where it’s just the opposite.
Ryan: For someone like myself I find it difficult at times to keep up
with all the various different projects you’ve been involved in over the
years.
Pat : Yeah I bet
you don’t even know half of them [laughing].
Ryan: Right. But one of your more current collaborations that I’ve
enjoyed is your pairing with Markus Reuter in Tuner.
Pat: Yeah Markus
is great he turns me on to a lot of stuff.
Ryan: When you
worked with Bill Bruford in the double trio lineup of King Crimson was
it a challenge initially for you and him to figure out who was going to
play what in the live context?
Pat: Bill had done
the double drum thing in Genesis with Phil (Collins) and a few other
double drummer things. I had done a few but nothing as intense as what
we tried to do with Crimson. It wasn’t difficult initially it was always
difficult [laughing]. You wanted to make space and have the music be
exciting and you wanted to play. Bill and I were a bit crafty about it;
we had a list right from the beginning with our game plan and approach.
We developed a vocabulary of things that we could play in unison,
although generally we didn’t try to play in unison, we usually tried to
play opposites in the sense that we would play in a different time
signature. It was kind of like when you put your hands together and hold
your fingers inside of each other. We wanted interlocking parts that
kind of sat like that but in a rock format. The most simple and
traditional way was for me to play the anchoring, drum machine part with
the basic kick drum and snare, you know the meat and potatoes kind of
thing and maybe saw my right arm off and leave a lot of space for Bill
to fill that in with more of the skittering jazz guy playing double
time. That’s probably the quickest way to answer your question of where
we came from. Then there were all sorts of nuances inside of that where
we would switch those roles either for an entire song or a section of a
song. We would play unison figures but use different timbres. Bill’s a
great improviser so for me the big challenge was that we might talk and
discuss how to do something but once we got onstage Bill would go to
plan C. It was like an arcade game where the ball was coming down the
other side and you’d have to react, hit the flipper and find a new part
to play real quick.
Ryan: When you were walking that kind of tightrope did it ever teeter on
the brink or fall off the rails completely?
Pat: Yeah there
were some times where it definitely crumbled but with Crimson it wasn’t
always that precise. Crimson could be… I don’t want to say sloppy but
everyone in the band was going for it and when you really want to go for
it and look for something new sometimes you fail. Generally rock music
of that caliber, in terms of how much of an audience you’re playing to,
usually you don’t go in front of a couple of thousand people and let
your pants go down. You play it a little safer and try to get through
the night without a clam, but with Crimson it doesn’t work like that. We
call it the clams or the brown record harmonically as much as
rhythmically, there are some very brown moments within that band
[laughing].
Ryan: I guess it’s kind of hit or miss attitude?
Pat: It’s not so
much hit or miss, because we’re going for it and we might not get there
tonight but that will get us closer to it tomorrow. After a couple of
days we might nail that and then find that it was boring so we’ d move
on to find the next challenge [laughing]. Bill and I worked our butts
off dude, on every tour we were on the bus or whatever, trying to build
a bigger vocabulary and find ways that we could recognize ways where we
could do things more in the moment. I did it with Gavin (Harrison) last
year and he and I prepared a lot as well, but he was much more
consistent than Bill in terms of the things that we talked about would
actually be the things that we would do [laughing]. In all of these
situations you want to leave some spots open, so I don’t want to make it
sound like it was too conservative.
Ryan: Last year King Crimson played some shows in preparation for the
bands 40th Anniversary which is this year, however it doesn’t seem like
Robert is too keen on going out again though is he? Has there been any
further talk about commemorating the anniversary or were those gigs last
year pretty much the end of it?
Pat: It’s very
strange. Robert’s a pretty unusual guy. We did a lot of rehearsing and
preparing last year and we had some gigs booked this year. Management
had lots of offers and we could have worked the entire year I’m sure,
but Robert wasn’t interested in that. I think it came down to we were
going to do about three weeks on the west coast this past spring, but
it was right around Christmas time that Robert and Adrian had a bit of a
falling out. You can read about that in Robert’s diaries and all that
stuff and I think it was a total, total miscommunication. I got a phone
call from Robert and he told me his heart was broken and that the whole
thing was off the table. He wasn’t even indicating then if it would ever
be back on the table. There have been a few e-mails in the past few
months that indicate we may do some more stuff next year but I wouldn’t
count on it and I’m not really sure of the lineup, it might change a
little bit. I think it will still involve me, Tony and Gavin but I’m not
sure what the resolution is between him and Adrian. It’s really a drag
because they’ve been good friends and the slightest thing – it’s been a
real pity to see it crumble the way it has. When we finished the run of
gigs in New York Robert was over the moon with excitement, popping
champagne and talking about next year like we might even work on new
material, and Robert didn’t want to work on any new material he just
wanted to do the old stuff. Besides the stuff Gavin and I did, we did
quite a bit of new drumming and reinterpreting the songs and adding
sections, but from the guitar point there wasn’t a lot of new
information brought in. It was kind of like we were going to kick it up
a notch.
www.myspace.com/ktuband
http://www.king-crimson.com/
www.myspace.com/patmastelotto
