Paper Thin Walls

Paper Thin Walls feature on the making of Red State

(originally published winter 2007)

We started working on what became “red state” after touring the east coast with amps for christ in fall 2005.  we decided the best place to do it would be my parents lake cabin in south dakota since it was fairly isolated and we could make noise.  when we got there they had a bunch of old newsweek magazines lying around and one of them had a big cover story on meth, and how popular it was and it had all these fucked up stories and pictures of people who had lit themselves on fire and melted their faces and teeth, and statistics talking about how whole towns in the midwest were on it.  this was during the same time that south dakota was trying to become the first state to totally ban all forms of abortion with no provisions for rape or incest or a woman’s health.  i had just come off a tour of the east coast and before that had been living in los angeles, amidst these kind of liberal enclaves where everyone was an artist and no one had kids.  but that’s not really where i was from, so going back home and then seeing all these mainstream “news” magazines about anorexia and drug abuse and teenage pregnancy, i knew i wanted to make a record about that, because that is what so many people’s real experience is like.  lots of media and art comes from new york and LA and other big cities,  but lots of people live in the middle of nowhere.  i’m from the middle of nowhere!  and i wanted to make something that reflected that experience. 

 

i like to call this record “over the counter psychedelic”, because it’s jagged and stream of consciousness and to me it really feels like drugs, not the amazing wonderful acid trip that is oft-represented by wailing raga guitar solos, but shitty drugs or medications or over the counter things that real people take.  it feels disjointed and confused and ambivelant and dirty, and there is always a comedown. 

 

it’s true that there are a lot of drug references on the record, but it’s never glamorized and i hope it’s not gratuitous.  i feel like it accurately reflects what people do when they grow up in a boring, hopeless place; they obliterate themselves. 

 

FARGO

 

EMA:  i was driving one day and i had a vision of this and used it later in a song.  i can’t explain it much more than that.  i have never actually been in that room but i have a very vivid memory of it.  the craziest part about this was one day showing up to visit our friend (and current bass player) aaron davis in olympia, who happens to be from north dakota.  he was living in a blue basement apartment with an american flag covering his living room window.  he grew up outside an air base in minot and his dad was career military. 

 

Ezra Buchla: The keyboard part was originally from another song, a radically different sounding version of “subside.” I gave up on that one but I’d made these nice staticky organ chords so I handed them to Erika for salvaging and she layered all the changes over the D major and made this lovely sliding drone thing. It seems like sometimes these stories and ideas exist already and then if you’re lucky a certain sound gets in the head and pushes them to the surface. 

 

ROPE

 

EMA:  all the songs on the record are different colours to me.  they are like a spectrum.  “fargo” is a blue spectrum with some gold and yellow in it, and rope is like a darker blue.  the rhythmic processed guitar starts out kind of a jagged indigo and then the chords come in and each key is a shade of blue and green, and they are like the colours of a stained glass window i once saw. 

i originally wrote this song with my college boyfriend in a motel room.  it accompanies a really dark vision that is probably even worse than the hanging death that the lyrics imply.

at the lake in south dakota ezra was drunk and talking about tarot cards.  he said that if i were a card i would be judgement, which i originally thought meant that i was judgemental, but the card of judgement actually shows an angel with a trumpet and it symbolizes change and resurrection.  i feel like i didn’t know that until i just looked it up, but considering the lyrics that seems crazy and i must have known.  did i? 

 

EB:   This is the one song that existed in any concrete form before we started playing together, so I guess it was the first Gowns song. Erika had done it on a four-track in college, and we played it live a bunch of times before recording it. I would always sample her live guitar and the samples would slide in and out of phase, so you can hear that on the recording except it’s done with a tape. The rhythmic noise at the beginning is also generated from the acoustic guitar line. The organ parts are pure sine waves in some kind of just intonation and each voice is treated with its own very fucked up panning algorithm; the combined effect is that it disappears into a subliminal part of the mix and makes you feel a little ill. 

 

FAKE JULY

 

EMA:  this song changes the colour of the record from blue to orange.  this song is a fire colour with yellows and bright reds when the synths come in.

ezra wrote these lyrics several months before hurricane katrina but now that’s all i can think about when i listen to it. 

 

EB:  This is still hard for me to understand. At some point I was thinking about the mudslides in southern California that killed some people in Santa Sarbara and fucked up our friend Carla’s house (Carla is on this record a lot, actually, in spirit). California is home to a lot of natural disasters of the earth and fire varieties and I guess that’s what the song’s about. Assuming that it’s possible to consider one’s own death after the fact, what would it feel like to die as a statistic in a seasonal mudslide or forest fire? Kind of sour, probably, especially if you’re expecting Heaven? I think probably the only afterlife is the world’s memory of you, and it’s likely to be a name and a number, if anything. 

So, there is a buzzing, jittery, drifting analog synth part, and some sour visions: I flashed this one of a short, balding man, unpleasantly drunk, leaning late at night on someone’s doorbell. I also remembered this actual thing: an attractive young lady, a tourist in southeast asia, losing her fancy pocketknife and accusing a boy of stealing it when in fact she had a hole in her coat pocket. There was a verse about this layered over the end, but it never sounded quite right so I used violas instead. 

 

WHITE LIKE HEAVEN

 

EMA: this is the thing that took longest on the record.  probably 2 years overall, from when gowns began until i made the record late in coming out.  i recorded it over and over and mixed and remixed until ezra wanted to kill me.  but if i hadn’t i think the record would not hold together the way it does.  

the first version of the song was just me and electric guitar in a garage in LA.  the second version was recorded in south dakota and had about 5 different vocal tracks.  it was ugly.  the third version happened after i came back to LA from south dakota.  i didn’t have anywhere to live, and carla b. was very generous and let me live at her house for a little while.  she had a protools rig in her living room and i would spend hours trying to mix the record.  carla knew i was stuck on this song and offered to take a crack at it, so she ran all the different tracks out and into small amps and radios and ran them back in and edited the fuck out of it.  it was a totally different beast.  there was no serenity left in it at all, it was just an out-of-sync chorus of wide-eyed crazy girls that couldn’t sing.  it was amazing and terrifying.  but i knew no one would want to listen to it more than twice; it was like the margaret keane painting equivalent of harsh noise.  later i re-recorded it AGAIN in berkeley with just one vocal take.  the final version has tracks from every one of the previous versions in it, kind of a sedimentary history. 

when it says “it was just like the movie and i couldn’t move”, the “it” is the nothing and the movie is the never ending story.  the drugs were one regular dose of dayquil and half an ultram (i used to have a messed up back), and one hit of pot.  really nothing too spectacular.

the way this song looks to me is like a body.  the most important is the low oscillator which is a throbbing dark purple.  it is like the backbone of the song but because it’s alive it’s the spinal cord instead.  it moves.  all the other sounds here hang off of that like meat, they are all orange and red like organs and they are woozy and throbbing like blood.  this song is alive to me!  it’s a real breathing beast.  the drums and words are bright white and yellow, and they are the synapses firing inside the brain. 

besides taking the longest, this is probably the most important song on the record to me.  writing it was really freeing, just realizing, “oh, i can just do whatever the fuck i want, i can just tell this story for 8 minutes and say a bunch of weird shit!”  and then shyly playing the demo for ezra and having him actually think it was good.  for whatever reason getting his approval on it just changed everything for me, and allowed me to entertain the notion that people might be interested in all the weird ideas i had in my head.  now i don’t worry so much about approval.  but i think that’s part of the reason this song was so important to me, just writing it changed me; it was about coming out of a paralysis. 

 

 

 

EB:  I have a really strange relationship to this song. It’s Erika’s thing of course, but we’ve played it many many times and it’s often felt like trying to move in twelve directions at once (at least for me…when we were playing as a duo I’d be trying to make a ton of different sounds, that all play continuously and move concurrently, and I had to invent techniques or technologies to do this). We have about 12 recorded versions that should probably all go on one mega-single CD someday; here we took the other route, making a vertical amalgamation. 

There are a couple weird things about the last recording process: I was finally really happy with the main vocal sound, which was a very complicated affair; reverberation came from a bass amp at the top of a weirdly shaped stairway and a mic at the bottom; high frequency distortion courtesy of a small speaker close-mic’d. We used only cheap microphones and shitty digital preamps on this record, so getting the right balance of grit and fullness was sometimes a problem, especially for Erika’s voice at higher volumes. Making whispers sound nice is easier, somehow. 

The drums were almost an afterthought. Again they were recorded with total crap equipment, in a dead room which was maybe a mistake. We did a mix where we tried to make them sound huge but it seemed to serve the song better to keep them kind of clattering and shitty. You may notice this one bass oscillator that sweeps its pitch in response to the volume of the kick drum, a very retro-signifying electro sound. I don’t know exactly what made me want to do that but I liked how it made the whole aesthetic that much more confused… 

 

 

WHEN IT BURNED

 

EB:  This is a song about a little kid drinking bleach thinking that it will make him die but of course it just burns your throat and stomach and then makes you throw up and then burns you again. How maudlin. 

SUBSIDE

 

EB:  This song is about waking up in the middle of the night and not knowing who is touching you. The sensation is shocking, and eventually dies away but leaves a kind of stain. 

The first version of this sounded much different, really pretty and hymnal with the organ that ended up in “fargo”, but it wasn’t working. I kind of gave up and decided one sine wave, and some discontinuities in time, would suffice. It is gave-up-sounding; the themes of the song infected the process of making it… there was going to be more singing but I gave up on that too, so there is kind of a floaty hole instead that the song falls into. 

The vocal treatment included using two microphones, each with a different compression curve and a minutely varying displacement in time and stereo location. 

Again I added violas later, which is maybe just my instinctual reaction when I think the ending of a song needs help, oh well, but in this case the parts kind of wrote themselves so I figured they should stay. A cut-up guitar shows up in a sort of dissonant meter, and erika’s weird crooning style which she is normally embarrassed to use but since this was “my” song she kind of didn’t argue too much. Maybe a picking-your-battles thing. 

 

CLAWLESS

EMA:  i took ambien and got in the shower.  when i got out i recorded this directly into garageband.  for months and months afterward i tried to record it again because it was poor quality and had lots of noise in the background and i fucked it up at the end.  but i could never get it to be as candid loose unguarded; everything i tried to do sounded too self conscious.

 

EB:  The low tones in this song are often thought to be a synth but are actually a marimba, played by Corey Fogel who did all the drums too; he kind of kidnapped the recording and brought it back with several layers of this sound. Wherever he recorded had a bunch of little kids yelling on the street outside, or something, which is kind of crazy; I think you can sort of hear them in there but I must be fooling myself. One weird thing was Erika did all the vocals first, using only her computer’s built-in mic and monitoring through the effects in Garageband. So the only rhythmic reference she had was the hard drive making those little purring sounds through some echo, and the only pitch reference was her own reverb tails. As a result her intervals are impressively accurate, but the overall pitch drifts very slowly up and down (mostly up, I think?). I made an analysis of the drift and used it to affect the playback rate of the marimba recording to sort-of try (but not too hard) to keep them together. It’s a really small and slow effect but it makes the relative drift kind of up and down as the process plays catch-up, rather than having them just be more and more out of tune, and I think it makes the marimba sound less like an instrument of the real world. Erika will make fun of me for talking about this, she thought it was a dorky obsession in the first place and she’s probably right. 

 

MERCY SPRINGS

 

EB:  ”Mercy Springs” is an exit off of the 5 freeway. the song is about spontaneously driving really far to escape from a bad situation. I’ve found that this can simultaneously make you feel a little comforted and totally crazy. I once drove almost completely across the country in this state of mind, with an old Marantz field recorder on the passenger seat, mumbling and humming into it the whole way; I thought I was escaping the worst period of my life but I was actually starting it: moving in the direction of worseness. 

The drone that starts the song is an ancient space heater that I was using one winter. It made this beautiful E somehow, and I took it and picked out a lot of harmonics with a bandpass filter. (Actually, maybe I had to first pitch it down to get E, can’t remember.) I did each vocal take without listening to the others, which had the effect of randomly improving on my plan for asymmetry. The last section sounds especially inhuman because all the inhalations are cut short automatically. Initially the song had no drums and the vocals were louder, which in hindsight I maybe sort of prefer; it made the screams super scary when there was nothing around them. At the last minute I did this thing that I sometimes do, where I got really self conscious and turned the vocals way down in the mix. Oh well… 

 

EMA:  this song was a mess until i got a hold of it with my little OCD editing brain.  originally the end was going to be buried beneath everything.  i scaled all the noise back and i felt like i was excavating this beautiful little layer of ezra’s voice.  a lot of gowns songs are written in the editing process.  like: take an idea, record it, improvise it, and then put it back together.  rarely do i sit down with a guitar and like play a bunch of chords over and over.  i often feel like a sculptor with a piece of rock, i know there’s a song in here somewhere! 

 

ADVICE

EMA: ezra and i mic-ed a piano and ran it through some pedals and amps and made a weird feedback loop with it.  this is him improvising and me obsessively editing.  there are about 20 versions of this song and they probably sound exactly the same to everyone but me. 

“a lot of brilliant minds out there have been destroyed and mine was one of them.”

the woman talking is a good friend of mine.  she is my best friend’s mother, who grew up in south dakota but moved to san francisco in the mid-60s and just lived the hippie thing to the fullest, from communes and love-ins to charlie manson’s bus.  she is wise and witchy probably a little damaged.  we hang out as often and possible and talk and talk.  it’s easy to imagine our roles reversed, that i could have lived that life if not for a few deciding factors.   

 

EB:   These are really one song. I kind of wanted them to be one track but I was vetoed, which is only fair because my contribution was to set up a ridiculously convoluted feedback network around a grand piano and record an hour or two of stuff, ranging from total noise to the four-chord progression that you hear a lot. At some point Erika heard that and instructed me to just keep playing it for a while, then she did the initial vocal takes on the spot through walkie-talkies. Then she spent many months cutting up noises and layering them and changing the timing of everything, and I eventually helped mix the piano and vocals at the end a little, and that was that.

 

CHERYLEE

EMA:  this is a lot of people’s favorite song on the record.  it’s so funny, we’re at a point in time where lots of people listen to all sorts of experimental stuff, but everyone still totally responds to four chords and a voice singing to them.  i do.  that shit is good! 

when the vocals go up high and split into harmony, that is probably my favorite moment of the record.  everytime i listen i think “why aren’t there more verses?”  but that was how many times ezra played those chords in a row when we were fucking around.  isn’t that funny?  someone called this “the eeriest power ballad of all time”.  it is a power ballad.  it’s just that the structure is scrambled because it was recorded first and written later.  but i think that’s ok.  everyone has heard enough pop music in their lives to understand exactly how it would sound otherwise.   

my best friend had just quit drinking after years of some serious abuse.  i wrote this song for her, and for me, and for all the other ladies i knew who had problems with trying to stay sane.