Dummy and Moonshake Stay Artistically Hungry

David Lance Callahan is a UK-based singer-songwriter who fronted the legendary experimental post-rock band Moonshake, and whose new record, Down To The Marshes, will be out later this month; Joe Trainor is the guitarist for the LA-based band Dummy. Dummy’s latest record, Free Energy, is out tomorrow on Trouble In Mind,  so to celebrate, the two caught up about it (and more!) over Zoom.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

David Lance Callahan: Why don’t you tell me about Dummy?

Joe Trainor: Well, we’ve been a band for five or six years at this point. When we started, we had this idea of what we wanted to do, and my husband ended up joining the band about six months into it, playing drums. He had never played drums in a band before, but he had been doing a lot of ambient electronic music on his own. He’s an insanely talented sound designer and knows how to use synths better than any human being I’ve ever known. We just progressed from the early stuff — that you correctly saw as a Stereolab, Broadcast kind of thing — into whatever we are now, which is definitely less that, and in my mind feels more like us, and not necessarily so indebted to our influences.

David: The drums sound programmed on the new one. Is that right?

Joe: I think there’s some that you would be like, “Oh, those aren’t programmed?” It’s a mixture. Some songs are layered. We have this Electribe drum machine that we use a lot that’s mostly used for techno producers.

David: Yeah, it’s a really ‘90s drum machine.

Joe: It’s been an integral part to the sound of the band, and the demoing process. It really changed a lot of things for me as an artist, having a drum machine to play around with. It’s such a gift of a piece of equipment. We bought it for, like, 70 bucks from a friend, so it was just one of those beautiful, serendipitous moments [where] you get a piece of gear and it opens your brain up a little bit more. For you and Moonshake, the drums sound like they’re based off more hip hop beats, taking the programmed sample drums but then using them in a rock band context.

David: That was kind of it. We were trying to play loops even when we weren’t using loops. Hip hop and krautrock, basically, were the two things.

Joe: Yeah, the most rhythmically forward kind of music. Alex [Ewell] and I are huge hip hop people, especially early boom bap kind of stuff. The way they used the samples and the rhythm, where they would cut things in and out and take away the kick drum and then add it back in for impact, it opens up a whole ‘nother world of rhythm. I think that’s what we were really focused on for our new record — rhythm. And I think that’s why, especially Eva Luna for us — that record, there’s so much groove. There’s so much freedom in it, there’s no self-consciousness to it. It’s just such a free, wild sounding record. I’m curious, was that an influence from what was going on around you in the music world?

David: In a sense, we were kind of going against what was around us. Even people we knew and liked, if they’d done it, then we didn’t want to do it. It was a weird kind of joining together of different things at the same time, in that it was the era where grunge was happening, but record labels didn’t understand it, so they were just throwing [money at artists]. It was like the late ‘60s where the Stones were happening, and they threw money at Frank Zappa and the United States of America. So we kind of benefited from grunge in that they didn’t understand it, and people like us and Ween and all these other weird bands got money thrown at them by major labels. Which meant that we just figured we were never going to sell any records, so we could do what the hell we liked. And we were right on both those thoughts, really. [Laughs.] 

Joe: With y’all, what I find really cool is that it feels much more punk and aggro in a lot of ways, comparative to a lot of your contemporaries. On our record, the third track, I was literally thinking of “Capital Letters” and how fucked up the guitar tone is.

David: That’s the “Unshaped Road” song, right? 

Joe: Yeah. The demo of that song was called “Moon hop,” which is basically just Moonshake hip hop. Specifically the chorus is very modeled guitar-wise after “Capital Letters.” Just the whole looping beginning part into when the song kicks in and it has the sitar samples and the weird… I don’t know, what is it, a flute?

David: I don’t want to say what it is exactly, because we might get sued. [Laughs.] 

Joe: [Laughs.] OK, OK.

David: But the guitar — do you know Neu! at all? The German band. 

Joe: Yeah. 

David: Basically, we tried our best to copy the guitar sound off a song called “Negativland.” I don’t know if you know that at all.

Joe: Oh, yeah.

David: We kind of managed to get that, and then just looped it and layered it so it sounded a bit different.

Joe: All the krautrock stuff is a huge influence on our early stuff. And we consciously wanted to move away from it, because we were like, “Alright, all the songs are definitely like the Neu! beat the whole time.” Y’all were for me personally such a template of creative freedom and not really being tied down by anything. I haven’t even explored the sampling aspect — we sample ourselves, but we haven’t sampled outside things yet. I’ve never really tried to plunder for samples. How did you find the samples you used? 

David: It was just trying to find the weirdest noises we could — and also the most uncopyrighted noises we could as well. I was grabbing loads of old easy listening records and library records, the same things a lot of hip hop and dance guys used. But I had the idea that you could write songs with that stuff rather than just do a dance record. And the whole thing was either playing the sample as if it were an instrument, or weirdly twisting it so it would make up its own tune that was different to the original song. I’d just basically get a noise and play it on a keyboard until something weird came out. And then I might fiddle around reversing it, or all sorts of things. I was just really excited by what a sampler could do — and I was excited about for about three years before I had one, so we kind of let rip when we finally got one. I still have a suitcase full of floppy disks that I’ve just managed to put onto my laptop now, loads of unfinished songs and thousands of samples. Because I wasn’t working — I would just sit at home all day and sample stuff and do little demos of samples that work together. On later LPs, they’re so layered with samples, there’s almost nothing else there, really.

Joe: Yeah, the later stuff gets even more dense with that feeling, that claustrophobia almost, in this really cool way. It’s interesting because listening to your new record, it’s not the same thing, but I hear the same artist in it in terms of the restlessness and the use of instruments in an interesting and different way. There’s songs that have these really cool small guitar loops that are happening the whole track. It’s very trance-like in a lot of ways. It’s really just incredible that I can hear that thread throughout your artistic life. I am really curious, with this new record, how do you stay artistically hungry this far into making art? 

David: That seemed, to me, the point. When I was 18, I went to see Sun Ra and he must have been, you know, almost 80 by then, and he was still making good stuff up every night. I saw him four or five times when I was a kid, and I just thought, Well, that’s how you should be as an artist. Just keep doing a different thing every time. And there’s even a few mainstream acts, like the Beatles and David Bowie, who kind of just do a different record every time they make a record. To me, that’s how it should be. But things changed sort of 30 years ago, where you get a sound and you stick to it. I love bands like My Bloody Valentine, but they’ve got a sound and they stick to it, you know? There’s two strands where you just change all the time and it can throw people off — it’s not very assimilate-able, particularly on the internet where you have to be your own trope.

Joe: Absolutely. 

David: So I’m finding myself a bit out of sorts with that. I was looking through who had written about you, and I was like, Oh, none of those people have written about me. [Laughs.] I can’t get into any of those websites. They’re not interested. 

Joe: Well, I find the lack of curiosity with modern — not to be old-man-shaking-fist-at-the-cloud, but you’re right, people do stick to their tropes. My Bloody Valentine is a massive influence—

David: Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re fantastic.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. And they found their thing. But what I do think is interesting, when you bring that up — I do think about the bands that surrounded y’all, and every Pram record is very different from the last one, in my mind. Stereolab similarly, and PJ Harvey. Even Broadcast, their records, each one had a different sonic palette. There was a little bit of time in the 2010s with certain bands that would switch up their sound in every record, like Deerhunter and maybe Animal Collective — those bands definitely had that, each record is its own little world. 

David: Tortoise did that as well.

Joe: Oh, yeah, absolutely. 

David: I know you’ve only done two records, but there’s definitely an obvious difference between the first and the second one. It’s gotten a lot more dark and dense, I think.

Joe: Yeah, I agree. We made a pretty conscious effort to not sound as retro. And I don’t know if this is the same for you, but touring kind of fucks you up, and on our last record, we toured, like, 150 days on it. By the end of it, we were just like, “Fuck all these songs. Fuck the motorik beat.” We felt allergic to all that stuff. Was it like that when you would tour? You’d come back and be like, Alright, I gotta do something completely different. I gotta shake whatever vibe that I had before?

David: No, I loved touring. I remember in the second incarnation of the band, we did three months in the States — I didn’t want to come home. I love it, but I view it as a different thing. I’m always trying to change it up a little every night, and try and change the lyrics a bit or do something new with one of the songs. I don’t play enough at the moment. It’s kind of bottom line, really; it’s not financially viable for me to tour much at the moment. And in Britain, there’s not a lot of clubs left. So if I’m lucky, I can do 15 dates, you know. Yeah. But it’s just too expensive now. Work permits are just too expensive to go to the States, and then we have Brexit here, so I can’t go and play in Europe like I used to. It sounds like I’m moaning, but it’s just a fact of life that it’s unaffordable to do these things.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love touring as well. It’s definitely financially not viable at all. It’s really brutal. Basically everyone in the band pretty much came home and we were like, “Well, we just toured for 150 days, now we’re all broke as fuck having to rebuild our lives again.” And then now we’re about to do it all over again. Thing with us, with live performances, we definitely have a lot of improv and more ambient sections live, so we don’t have to be so stuck to just, “Here’s the song, here’s the song, here’s the song.” There’s moments for spontaneity.

I’m really excited to come over [to the UK]. Our tour in Europe was incredible. Over here in the States, they don’t really pay bands correctly and there’s no hospitality the way it is in Europe. So coming to Europe is kind of like coming to this whole new world. There’s always a place to stay, you’re being fed… It’s really nice.

David: Well, that’s because they won’t let you have social democracy in America, will they? 

Joe: [Laughs.] No, they will not. Touring here is hard, to say the least. It’s really grueling and, as you said, no one’s putting money into the arts here at all, and the arts are always the first thing to get the chopping block. I mean, it’s clear that the world is not in a great place just in general. It does feel weird sometimes to be promoting art and stuff like that when the world is so shit.

David: Well, even though obviously if you create music, or any other art, you feel like it’s the only important thing in the world to you, but it actually looks really trivial in the face of what else is going on. You know? It feels like you’re playing a parlor game, really. 

Joe: Yeah. I mean, listening to your new record, I just hear someone who loves music. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, because I feel from afar, in some vague kind of parasocial way, we’re kindred spirits. We both are very musically curious and musically hungry. I don’t know how often you’re still digging for new music — or new-to-you music, not necessarily new music. But are you still discovering stuff all the time? Or do you go back to just things you’ve listened to a lot? 

David: I still look for new stuff every day. I’ll find that in junk shops or I’ll find it on YouTube, or a friend will recommend something. I still go back to things like Tim Buckley and Can and things like that from time to time. But then I’ve got so many records that occasionally I find something I bought years ago that I didn’t actually listen to it that time. [Laughs.] So that’s quite handy. I’m always looking for new stuff and I still go out to shows and see new bands.

Joe: Have you seen anything recently that you felt really excited about?

David: There was a guitarist from Brighton called Kieran Leonard, who I saw a few weeks ago, who’s just a fantastic guitarist. It’s hard to describe what he does, but it’s kind of like Morrissey playing jazz. But that’s doing him a disservice, really. There’s quite a lot of good modern folk stuff over here, which I feel aligned to even though I’m not part of what they do. I always view what I’m doing now as kind of inventing my own folk music.

Joe: I mean, you can tell the basis is folk. But there’s so much more to it. It’s interesting you brought up Tim Buckley, because when I was listening to it, that’s where my mind went. The kind of genre mash-up that he did was so fascinating, and Happy Sad — that record is insane.

David: Yes, it’s fantastic. There’s more insane records than that he did. But yeah, that’s certainly certainly good. Um, but yeah, he didn’t feel tied down. He’s been an influence on me since I was a teenager, and it’s only now that I’ve managed to just about — I’ll never sing as well as him, but I can just about play guitar well enough to try and do that stuff myself, you know?

Joe: Yeah. I mean, I was watching a video of you playing a show — I don’t know where it was, but it was last year — and I was watching you just play guitar and I was really fascinated. The kind of finger picking style through the hollow body just really it struck me. The way you were playing felt almost African-influenced.

David: Yeah, I love Mali and Ethiopian music. I try not to copy anything, but it always seeps in, that kind of stuff. Obviously with Moonshake, I did a lot of stuff with electronics; lots of people do that now, and it’s almost like I’m being a bit of a reactionary. I just find it boring to sit there with a laptop all the time. So I basically made up my own guitar tuning and suddenly — because you probably remember that Moonshake stopped using guitars entirely. 

Joe: Yeah. 

David: I didn’t play for a few years, and then I made up my own guitar tuning, and suddenly it opened up the whole instrument again and I felt I could do something individual with it. I don’t believe in innovation anymore — I think all things are a continuum — but I felt I could do something that was true to me and unique, you know, and that was the point, really.

Joe: I agree. Listening to the new record, it felt unique. I was like, Oh, I’m inside David’s head. 

David: You don’t wanna go there! [Laughs.] 

Joe: [Laughs.] I would say that’s probably true of any artist worth their salt. You don’t want to really be in that head.