Despite the absolute chaos of the last few years, the music has been relatively kind. Not the business of music, of course, but the music itself. Not only are we routinely surrounded by new and upcoming tunes of all kinds, we’ve also had the pleasure of witnessing some truly epic comebacks and second chances for bands ahead of their time.
Drill for Absentee, for instance, in our opinion, was simply a couple steps ahead of the crowd when they first appeared in the 1990’s – they had everything important in common with bands like June of 44 and Slint, but perhaps DFA’s feverish, borderline possessed presence made them harder to pin down.
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If anything, this self-obscuring nature makes DFA all the more endearing to us, especially now that they’re back in the saddle, still writing songs that freeze listeners in their tracks with poetic visions of an abstract conviction. After their comeback EP Vol. 1: Strands of a Lake, the band re-released Circle Music as Circle Music + 4, an anthology of sorts which was fortuitously picked up by Expert Work Records for another run on vinyl.
On a personal level, for years now Drill for Absentee has long been somewhat of a fascination for us – those first two EP’s from the 90’s are deliciously dark and unique, which is saying something because tons of bands in the underground scene at the time were trying to do something similar and all sounded the same. With DFA, it only takes a few seconds to tell it’s them, and for us that’s a big deal, so it brings us great honor to present the following chat with bandleader Michael Nace.
Out of all of the post-hardcore figures we’ve spoken to over the years, Nace takes the cake as the most knowledgable, forthcoming, and self-aware, so this was a real treat. One of the most interesting things we went into is something Nace points out a couple of times, being that DFA’s place in history is having a moment again – as kids grow up and latch on to new music and new avenues of getting to it, 1990’s post-hardcore is more studied, collected, and notated than it ever has been. We would say the kids are alright, but we do our best not to assume – we will say though, if they continue to find love for bands like DFA, they’ve got a fighting chance.
Enjoy!
FB: In many ways Circle Music + 4 is the ultimate DFA package – how did the idea for this record / remaster come to be?
Michael: I think the driving force behind reissuing all of the 90s DFA releases on vinyl was the fact that our music has found a younger and much larger audience in the 20+ years that we were inactive. Without doing anything, our music grew in visibility among those who are interested in the 1990s post-hardcore underground scene. We’re part of the musicological history of the 1990s US post-hardcore underground, and because of that, people want to collect our music. Adding to the fact that the Circle Music EP was never released on vinyl and that, combined, only 2,000 copies of the 7-inch and EP were produced and sold, we recognized that there was a pent-up demand for the music to be re-released. So, it seemed like a good idea to do as a precursor to releasing Strand of a Lake, Vols. 1 and 2.
FB: Were there any surprise insights or forgotten memories jogged when revisiting the old masters?
Michael: One thing that jumps out to me is the recording quality of the 7-inch tracks, plus “Drown In Words.” While the Circle Music EP was recorded at WGNS Studios in Washington DC with Geoff Turner — the veritable “Steve Albini” of our scene who had recorded every record that we cared deeply about at the time — the 7-inch was recorded a couple of years before in a small basement studio by a local sound engineer named Jim Mobile with no cachet in the underground music scene. We knew much less about recording at the time that we recorded the Infinity Session, but I think Jim did a fantastic job of recording that session. There’s nothing particularly artistic about the sounds that he got, but he did do a very good job of capturing the band in a way that recreated our live sound. You can’t ask for more than that.
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FB: Are “Drown in words” and “Sea is Watching” songs from the same era?
Michael: Not exactly, no. “Drown In Words” was recorded during the Infinity Session, and we even considered putting it on side B of the self-titled 7-inch instead of Detunist. It was our mainstay opening song in live sets from 1996-1998. So, getting that track onto vinyl was really important. “The Sea Is Watching” was a song that we worked on later on. As we’ve explained in the Circle Music + 4 liner notes, the track on the LP is a re-creation of the song that we were working on in the late 90s but never finished. To my knowledge, we never played it live — the song was maybe 75% completed but we ended up dropping it for whatever reason.
The new track is built on a recording of the bass line that Kevin hastily recorded in our practice space so that he wouldn’t forget it. We were happy to use that recording as a loop because the entire song was based on that bass line, which he played continuously through the song as an ostinato (similar to “Naked Singularity”). The bass is the only thing recorded from the 90s; everything else is new. My singing vocal and guitar part is a recreation of the parts I had worked up in the 90s, but Kevin’s narrative vocal and all of Ken’s drumming are brand-new.
I am somewhat confused about when Kevin recorded the bass line. According to my own liner notes for the fabled “DFA Box Set,” I apparently noted that “The Sea Is Watching” was recorded on my Dad’s dictaphone, which I’d use sometimes to project field recordings through my pickups live. The liner notes read as such:
“Tracks 1, 10, 19, and 25 were recorded on a dictaphone. The dates and chronology are unknown.”
I seriously doubt that the bass line was recorded on the dictapone — it sounds too good. It was likely recorded on Kevin’s 4-track.
Everything on disc 2 of the Box Set was recorded in 1997 or “unknown,” so it’s possible that we worked on The Sea Is Watching in 1997. I would guess that, if we did, it was late 1997 and trailed into 1998, since, to me, the track is sonically more like material that we produced during the band’s “late period,” which ran from 1998 through the very end of 1999. Contrast it to “Drown In Words,” which is very much inspired by our influences from the post-hardcore scene.
FB: What’s changed since has it been like watching people rediscover the band, or conversely, finding out about DFA nowadays for the first time?
Michael: Even though we’re active again, the reason why DFA is relevent now — and maybe even more relevent than when we were active in the 90s — is because our music drifted from being the music of an active, young band to total obscurity and then back into relevency because we became part of the history of the 90s post-hardcore scene (which is where math rock was truly born). What we did in the 90s is part of a musicological history now, and younger people who are discovering our little scene are now voraciously consuming the music and seeking out everything that came out of it — even the more “minor” bands like DFA.
A good example is Luke Niemann, a college student in Chicago who is putting together an old-school print zine about all of the 90s post-hardcore / math rock bands. He interviewed us back in the Fall, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the scene — he not only knows all of the major bands, such as Don Caballero, Drive Like Jehu, Slint, June of 44, Hoover, etc., but also all of the minor bands.
So, for me, the new music that we’re making now is about bearing testimony to the musical ideas we had back then, as a way of shedding light on that scene. I can’t speak for Kevin and Ken, but for me, I am always trying to put myself in the mindset of the 20-something me, making the kind of music that I wanted to make back then. Truly, you can never really go back — but that’s at least what I’m striving for. It’s an aspirational goal in order to promote the sound of our scene.
FB: What’s changed since the release of your return EP Strand of a Lake Vol. 1?
The biggest change is that we found a record label home — Expert Work Records. Expert Work is one of 3 independent record labels who are currently doing the noble work of re-releasing the music from our scene (as well as releasing some great, new music): Numero Group, Solid Brass Records, and Expert Work.
While I don’t know the people at Numero, Jason at Solid Brass is a supporter of DFA and I think he is doing amazing work. His re-pressing of Kerosene 454’s Came By To Kill Me and Regulator Watts’ Mercury EP might be the singlemost important re-releases from our scene (and if you have not checked these records out, I strongly suggest reviewing them for FB — K454 and Reg Watts are exemplars of the east coast post-hardcore / math rock scene. These records changed my life.)
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Expert Work Records is run by Justin Nardy (happy to introduce you to him as well), who played in a bunch of great bands from our scene in the 90s. He’s running Expert Work exactly like how we’re used to — in that DIY / punk ethos. He’s already done an amazing job of re-releasing many incredible records from the 90s that are firmly in the OG math rock spectrum. Justin and Expert Work just re-pressed Circle Music + 4 after we sold out of the first pressing in less than 2 months, and now he is going to release Strand of a Lake, Vols. 1 and 2 on vinyl. We have truly found our home, and we’re also doing everything we can to connect the people we know from the scene with Justin to hopefully release more great stuff from our scene on Expert Work in the future.
FB: We’ve heard you’re working on a follow up as well – is it its own thing or is it the next volume of Strand of a Lake?
Completing Volume 2 of Strand of a Lake has been a 3-year process, so we’ve been focused on getting it finished and delivered to Expert Work for release. We do have some other ideas floating around out there, but we haven’t really started to develop them. Last week, we shared a little teaser of one of the songs that will be on Strand of a Lake, Vol. 2, called “Styli.” This song represents our most collaborative work thus far among the 3 of us, and I think the creative process for that song is going to be the roadmap for how we continue to write and arrange songs in the future.
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FB: There is so much poetry in DFA, musically and literally. How would you describe the lyrical process for the band – do the vocals and words tend to come after the music?
Michael: Vocals and words definitely come after the music is up and running. As we work on music and listen to it over and over, lyrics come to us through that listening process. Sometimes for me, the music strongly suggests a theme that I work from when writing the words for vocals, and I think the same is true for Kevin. For me, I’ve always taken the approach of heavily coding and obscuring my themes, rooting them deeply into the words so that they are almost impossible to recognize. Since traditional song lyrics are overt, sentimental, and denotative, turning that paradigm upside down and making our lyrics harder to penetrate has always been part of our aesthetic, I think. It allows listeners to ascribe their own interpretations.
FB: You don’t have to answer this but we are curious – have any of you ever scribbled ‘ars poetica’ on an actual parking ticket?
Michael: The words for “Ars Poetica Scribbled on a Parking Ticket” was indeed scribbled on a parking ticket. It was originally a poem that I worked for my poetry workshop when I was at West Chester University. The school had less-than-ample parking and it was common for students to have 2 or 3 $5.00 parking tickets laying around their car at any given time. One night at dusk when I was driving back to my folks’ house, I pulled over on a country road and wrote at least part of that poem on the back of one of those tickets.
The original poem is exactly as the song, with one exception: the section of the song that starts with “It’s inside / it’s outside / the corridor / of this road . . .” was added to the original poem for that one section. The words in the song’s final section that begins with, “And I think of you / lighting the candles / to replace the lamp in your room . . .” picks back up with the original poem manuscript.
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