a dusty songbook that you could pull out of a piano bench - interview with Alex Daud

good morning ~

(click the waterpark construction / link to listen)

today’s track continues my recent obsession with using amen breaks all over the place

Two quick things - yesterday Tiny Engines released another unheard outtake from the Youth Pastoral sessions ahead of the five year anniversary repress - you can hear the piano version of “Bowing Cypress” on Bandcamp and on streaming. Vinyl dropping soon!

I’m also playing Tubby’s tomorrow eve ~ ripping with the power trio, opening for OHYUNG who just dropped a sick album. She also was kind enough to do one of these interviews a couple of weeks ago if ya missed it.

had a very nice chat with Alex Daud of the upstate NY band Fascinating Chimera Project who just last week released their album "Songs for the Moon," a collection of homey, vibey piano songs with the comfort of a worn-in couch. The music also ventures into more occult territories and features, for the first time on record, Alex singing in Portuguese. She also hosts a monthly radio show on WGXC called A Frequently Visited Dream and the band will be playing their local release show at Avalon tomorrow.

AD: I’m just chillin’ with a cup of ginger tea, thinking about…our album?

MBB: Cool, we’ll make that your official introduction. The album’s out! How you feelin’ about it?

AD: Good! It feels like a celebratory week.

MBB: How was the show at Stone Circle Theater?

AD: It was great. The venue’s actually a church and we lived across the street from it for five years without ever going in there. But I really liked playing in a church, I loved the natural reverb, it worked really well for us. And the people that work there are so nice.

MBB: Do you feel like there’s any devotional or religious energy to the record?

AD: Yeah, definitely. I feel like it’s there on “When I Was a Girl,” with the three part harmony. I wanted it to sound like a dusty songbook that you could pull out of a piano bench. “Song for the Moon” is a devotional to the moon.

MBB: There’s a lot of water imagery, and with that song “Redwoods” there’s kind of a Pagan thing going on. Your chord movements, too, are almost renaissance coded.

AD: That’s definitely true [laughter]. I think it’s the mixolydian vibe, of which I know you’re a big fan, too.

MBB: It’s the trance-inducing mode, the flat seven is hypnotic. I wanted to ask something specifically about the Stone Circle Theater show - what was up with the puppet dancing on the piano?

AD: Ah, yes - that’s a marionette from the Czech Republic that Andrew got me for my birthday a few years ago. We named him Slav and he exists in our living room so he’s always with us.

MBB: He’s an integral part of the living room vibe cultivation.

AD: Exactly - we like to do a little jig with him sometimes. But that’s all Dylan - Dylan is the puppetmaster.

MBB: Is there any special significance to the marionette? Are you into puppets generally?

AD: Well, at one point I just wanted a high-quality, beautifully handmade puppet. I kept browsing for them online. This one’s a mushroom - he looks really stoned and he’s got this knapsack and a stick, so, you know, he’s ready for adventure.

MBB: He suits the music.

AD: Yeah, as a viewer of music I love experiencing a bit of levity or audience engagement in a set, so I try and do that with our sets, too.

MBB: When was the last time you played in New York City? How did it feel to be back in the old neighborhood?

AD: We actually haven’t played New York since 2019, and we only ever played as Fascinating Chimera Project once. It was sweet, a lot of my old friends came out. Felt good to play in a part of town we knew so well.

MBB: Was there something you set out to accomplish in sharing that music? And have you done it yet?

AD: We make the music for fun and for our enjoyment. And then we just hope that it connects with some people. After we stopped playing with Freind I was disillusioned with the music scene. I was playing guitar and having to haul this huge pedalboard - I just started to hate hauling shit around. Booking shows can be really challenging and tiring, too.

But when things started opening up after COVID and we were getting to know people by going to the Avalon Lounge, I just felt like my creativity reawakened. I was just inspired by the community and the shows, which got me writing songs again and wanting to share them.

MBB: We share an avid love of Avalon. It’s wonderful in many ways, but I do feel like the kinda banged up upright piano they keep as part of their backline is one of the secrets to its charm. It’s egalitarian in a way, letting the community play the piano. There’s a living room quality to Avalon that I also hear reflected in your music.

AD: Yeah, that’s true. I love that Avalon has a piano. It just invites different types of music. Someone doesn’t need to own a synthesizer or a digital piano, they can just play a homey old upright.

MBB: The sound of the piano on your record is familiar - it’s like the platonic ideal of a family upright piano.

AD: Yes, that’s awesome to hear. When we recorded it, we wanted it to sound like the listener was sitting at the piano and playing it. So we mic’d it in stereo and had the notes splay out naturally in the sonic space.

MBB: Right, because when you sit at a piano and sing, the instrument reflects your own voice back to you while the strings rattle in your lap - it’s very intimate. You’re really inside the instrument, and you really nailed that perspective in the recording.

AD: Right, we wanted the piano to be frontal, the focus of the record.

MBB: I wanted to ask you the difference between a vocal track and an instrumental track - what is the difference between them and why are there both on the album?

AD: I listen to about 50/50 instrumental/ambient stuff and music with words, so it could just be a reflection of my own listening habits. But I do feel a bit freer with an instrumental track. I tend to get hung up on lyrics and what I actually want to say, even if I have a clear idea of what I want the song to feel like. An instrumental track dissolves that tension and lets the melodies speak for themselves. And I do definitely intend to keep writing instrumental music, maybe even more so.

MBB: One of the standout instrumental tracks on the record is “Big Red’s Theme” - and I do want to talk about the music video in a second - but it just has such a delightful array of aux percussion, there’s the clave, the flex-a-tone, the shakers. It’s the moment of most levity on the record - it must have been fun to record all those parts.

AD: Yeah, that was all Andrew - he’s a collector of miscellaneous percussion. We got the vibraslab, the megaphone that does a cop siren, there’s a metal bowl that he dents, maracas, a ceramic bird whistle.

MBB: Oh, that’s not a real bird?? It syncs up so nicely in the video.

AD: No it’s this ceramic whistle we got in a park in Spain, you fill it with water and blow into it.

MBB: And there’s also the sound of someone dropping a spring reverb, it’s like an I Spy book of percussion sounds.

AD: Oh my gosh, I used to love I Spy…yeah originally I wrote it as just the piano part, and then Andrew started adding all this percussion. At one point we stopped to ask, is this too silly? But then it was like, nah, why not?

MBB: There is a playfulness. The music is thoughtful and minimal in a way that shows craft. But the band name comes from an obscure video game and your website is very GeoCities coded and the Madonna cover you guys have been doing live is the best kind of comedy in that everyone who hears it is like, “oh fuck, I love this song from the Austin Powers soundtrack.” Do you guys talk about humor in the band? Or is it more that you’re comfortable and in that comfort the humor can come out?

AD: Yeah, I do think it’s the latter. I might not come off this way when I first meet people, but I’m a very playful person. I love playing, I love video games, any kind of game really, and I play my instruments for my own enjoyment primarily. I want to have fun with it. It’s not that I don’t take myself seriously, but I want people to feel multiple types of things when they hear our music or see us play. I want them to have an emotional arc that includes humor.

MBB: Let’s talk about this music video for “Big Red’s Theme” because it’s phenomenal. I was super impressed with Vanessa (Castro’s) work. Do you want to talk about how that came to be?

AD: As soon as I wrote that song and dedicated it to our neighborhood cat, I really wanted to make a music video for it in the style of a videogame. I was originally thinking something more like an 8-bit, pixel style. But then Vanessa, who I lived with in that apartment across the street from Stone Circle Theater like ten years ago and bonded with over music and playing Ocarina of Time, sent Andrew and I these animated videos for her own songs. One was shot in the Sims and we were just really impressed by it, having her do the video for this was an obvious idea. We pitched it to her maybe 9 months ago and had been working on it ever since.

We wanted it to show what Big Red might get up to in a typical day after his owner lets him out. And of course we don’t show the owner in the video because we don’t know who his owner is in real life - actually we’d love to find the owner and show them this.

We talked about different ideas of what he could get up to. It was Andrew’s idea to have them sniff butts to display character stats, and we wanted sort of a “boss” figure, which is where Chiron the owl came from. Vanessa came up with a story and did an amazing job - it really makes me laugh.

MBB: Maybe this is the moment now to talk about our parallel lives in the 2010s Brooklyn DIY music scene. I realized in checking out your previous band Freind that we were playing the same venues at the same time - there’s photos of you guys at Aviv, photos of you guys playing a Shea Stadium and I played both of those places often, and we were both making this skronky, punk adjacent rock music. And goddamn, that song of yours “Chemtrails” is so good! But now we’ve both gone through a period of reflection, solitude, living in the Hudson Valley, playing the piano, etc. I guess where I want to start is, do you ever think about rocking again?

AD: I’m sure I’ll get back to it one day. I do still own an electric guitar…I just never play it. I pretty much exclusively play the nylon string, the piano, and the flute these days. And the penny whistle. I’m really focused on my acoustic instruments.

MBB: You’re going tavern mode.

AD: I like to think I’ll rock out again one day, though.

MBB: Were you trying to say something to say or do something different with the rock band? I know we’ve all collectively experienced a lot of upheaval in the last few years on the macro level, but was there something individual to you that made you switch philosophies?

AD: I think it’s more a dramatic change in my listening habits, which I think could also be a reflection of living in the city versus living in the Hudson Valley. When I lived in the city I was listening to a lot of krautrock - Can, Stereolab, Operator Music Band, generally rock music with a motorik beat, electric guitars, trying to be skronky and wonky.

For this album, it wasn’t an intentional or discrete moment, but I started listening to quieter music. Sessa’s album Grandeza really inspired me a lot and I got back into Enya who’s been my girl since childhood, the seven fields of aphelion…

MBB: The stuff I was listening to from Freind is just like, more more more! And Songs for the Moon is really on that lunar cycle, it’s stately.

AD: Yeah the Freind stuff was very maximal and - dare I say? - bombastic.

It’s really all about switching to the piano. It changed how I wrote songs entirely. On the guitar I got stuck in this headspace where I felt like I had to invent new chords and rhythms in order to write a song. Getting a piano - which I’ve played since I was a little girl - has always felt like coming home. It’s a space that’s less heated and fiery. Freind was all early 20s emotion, this album is more like: I am 7 and I am 30.

MBB: Right, I feel like that thing you mentioned earlier about pulling things out of the old piano bench is a central metaphor of the music. And I know you’ve been working on Debussy lately, how’s that coming?

AD: I’m through the hardest, fastest parts of “Claire de Lune.” I can see the sheet music from here - I’ve just got one more page to learn, then I’ve gotta thread it all together. I always considered this piece to be just above my skill level, but I realized that if I really dedicated myself to learning it, I could do it. I’ll never be able to play it without error, but that’s fine, because…it’s just for me.

MBB: Let me ask you some more Brooklyn questions - where was your favorite venue to play?

AD: Playing Shea Stadium really felt like a “we made it moment” because I saw so many bands I loved there, with everyone cramming onto that cigarette balcony. And playing Silent Barn was always fun, too. It was such a solid community space and Avalon is as well, so many different spaces to exist in and purposes that could bring you to the venue. Places where you could take a break from the show, sit down for a minute.

MBB: You gotta have zones.

AD: Yeah, you have to have zones, I agree.

MBB: Who should I talk to next?

Well, Dylan (Nowik) would be great. And maybe Stephen Bluhm? He lives in Athens, NY and makes music with a string and wind section, he calls it chamber pop.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But what about you? What are you pulling out from the piano bench? Will you ever rock again? Are you, like the mushroom puppet, ready for adventure?