Interview: Junior Low.
April 11, 2011, 0 comments
A short while ago, Southern California imprint Bridgetown Records released the second (or third, depending on the counting) cassette by Junior Low. The six-song effort Almost Forever is an amazing piece of true to the letter shoegaze, with stunning harmonies hidden behind an overwhelming wall of sound of most honest Phil Spencer reverence and without doubt among the finest that has been released since the recent resurrection of the mid to late eighties fuzzed-out dream pop movement. The man behind the Junior Low is Colorado native and resident J.T. Schweitzer, who has also been part of the now more or less defunct buzzband Weed Diamond. We’ve sat down with him to have a little e-mail conversation about Almost Forever, the development of his musical endeavors and his thoughts on the Colorado music scene.
Junior Low is a one-man project. How do I have to imagine your recording process?
It’s not very involved or complicated. It’s mostly just constructing a song in my head then recording each part individually. I prefer to focus on the textural elements of the song, and not as much on the conceptual content. I spend a lot of time getting certain tones and timbres rather than composing lyrics and expressing ideas through rhetoric. My lyrics are all pretty nonsensical and loosely based on any experiences I’ve had, and as such I try to keep them vague. I feel like it’s easier for someone to relate to a song if its lyrical content is more general, but when I compose songs I’m more focused on how the song sounds than what it’s about. I want people that listen to it to give their own meaning or have their own experience from it. I focus more on the timbre of the song because I think it’s more effective in impacting a person’s subconscious or triggering some kind of memory that they can get some sort of meaningful experience out of.
Are you planning on going on tour?
In a perfect world. The reality is, probably not anytime very soon. I feel like trying to put a band together and telling people I want them to play exactly what I wrote and how to play it, and how it should sound, etc, is a difficult process. The concepts I have for a Junior Low live performance are pretty specific and extreme, and at the place I am at in my life it just doesn’t seem very viable. Hopefully someday though.
Comparing Almost Forever to Heavy (Junior Low’s predecessor on Bridgetown Records from 2010), in which way has Junior Low changed, and your approach to the project?
I really think I kind of half-assed Heavy. It was a follow up to my first self-titled cassette on Leftist Nautical Antiques (which never actually got released for reasons I still am not sure of, the dude who runs that label just like kind of disappeared for six months, and like he made the tapes and everything, but I never got any copies of them and it was never really released). That first release was more artistically involved because it was produced at a time I was going through a shitty situation with a girl, and those songs are super honest and apathetic, which created a really turbulent and noisy sound, super hopeless sounding. I really think it was a better piece of art in general. I approached Heavy with kind of a more misanthropic attitude, which sort of made it cool in its own way. Like I had recorded all the songs, but they just sounded tame and boring, and I was getting really frustrated with the process so I just said fuck it and re-recorded all the guitar parts with two fuzz pedals so it’s just a saturated mess, and I feel like it turned out cooler that way. By the time I started working on Almost Forever, I think I had worked through a lot of emotional circumstances that were involved in making Heavy, and I wanted to make a more accessible record, with more traditional pseudo-pop songwriting and production. It’s definitely a lot more listenable than Heavy, but I still tried to keep some sort of energy and saturation. I, as I’m sure any other person, tend to go through emotional cycles, so I really feel like on the next Junior Low record I’m gonna re-visit some of the same concepts I used on Heavy, but I want to take it to a more extreme level, I just wanna make the most visceral and honest thing I can with the next record.
How much do you owe to the “classic” artists of shoegaze, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine et al.?
A lot, man. Shoegaze has always been a style of music I really felt connected to, just because of the noisy and dreamy nature of it. It’s super chaotic, but it’s still melodic and beautiful at the same time, which is kind of how life is. The textural experience those bands provide is just more meaningful to me than a lot other types of music.
Sound volume appears to play an important role in your music. What are you trying to achieve or express with sheer loudness?
I think its an important aspect of the transcendental qualities of music. I can’t really talk about the science or philosophy around it, but I think there is something that’s a lot more real and meaningful about really loud sound than just background music. I only try to portray this in music because my experiences with it have been extremely meaningful and my intention is to give that experience to other people. Like I’m sure if you stood outside a My Bloody Valentine or a Mogwai show and asked people as they came how it was, not very many of them would say “it was alright I guess”. I think it’s just that the more intense a sensation is, the more it makes you stop and notice your environment, and the here and now, and I feel like that makes it kind of therapeutic.
You’ve told me that Weed Diamond was Tim Perry’s project, and now I hear it’s done. What happened?
I wish there was a cool story I could tell you about some intense fight, or a bunch of awesome drama, but in reality we all just kind of started going in different directions with what we wanted to do musically. About the time we got back from a west coast tour in the summer of last year, Michael was starting off his new project School Knights, and that was occupying a lot of his time and creativity, which I think led to a fissure in the enthusiasm we all had for the band. First and foremost, I think things just weren’t going in the direction Tim wanted to. Weed Diamond had been getting somewhat successful, but I think Tim felt like the reasons people were getting into it were causing the band to move in a certain direction that was different from where he had originally wanted to go, artistically. Tim and Michael wrote all the material we played, myself, Danny, and Chad weren’t really involved in the creative proccess, nor did we want to be, Weed Diamond started as a full band because we were all friends anyway, and Tim had these songs he made that were getting some blog attention, so naturally he wanted to play live, and therefore we started the actual band. As time progressed though, I feel like creatively, Michael and Tim were just moving in different directions, and that just caused things to flicker out.
I’d consider the Denver/Fort Collins music scene one of the most exciting in the States right now. Would you agree, and in your opinion what might be the reason for that?
To be honest, I’m not that involved in the music “scene” in Colorado. I don’t really know how it compares to the rest of the country, but I think with the internet and blog culture, it’s a lot easier nowadays for bands to get their music into the national and international awareness. I mean, if the internet wasn’t around, I know for a fact Weed Diamond wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful as it was. As far as the Denver/Fort Collins scene, I know there are a lot of bands that are getting a lot of recognition right now like Woodsman, Gauntlet Hair, Picture Plane, et al., and I think Denver has a really cool music community, and kind of always had.
How did you get in contact with Kevin Greenspon of Bridgetown?
I met him in Arizona when we were seeing Reel Big Fish play the Chandler BBQ festival while Weed Diamond was on tour. I can’t really remember the specific events that led up to me doing a release on Bridgetown, but we had previously met and talked. Everything Kevin does is awesome, his label is so unique and prolific, and extremely successful. No one else is really doing the type of stuff he’s doing right now, he is really a pioneer in the DIY scene.
What does Trish Keenan mean to you and your music, as you’ve named Almost Forever’s closing track after her?
I started listening to Broadcast in high school, they have always been an extremely nostalgic band for me. I recorded that instrumental track the day Trish died, kind of as a tribute. It’s not really anything I feel like people who like Broadcast would like, or anything, it’s more just an emotional piece that expresses how bummed I was that she had passed away, because she was a very influential musician to me. I don’t think there’s a lot of generic similarity between my music and Broadcast, but I feel like their concepts and general aesthetic is something I strive for when I make music, like they have a really washed out, vintage, warm sound that is super nostalgic and it’s just connected to a lot of memories I have and I really feel like that’s what makes music so meaningful, its ability to embed itself into your memories and be relevant to your experiences, and that’s why it’s so important to me.
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Junior Low’s Almost Forever cassette is out now on Bridgetown.
Junior Low – This Was Important
