Two days ago I posted about Cool Angels without knowing that a new album recently came out on Dream Recordings. Here's a song taken from Slow Chase Scenes.
Il y a 2 jours, j'ai publié sur Cool Angels en ne sachant pas qu'il y avait un nouvel album de disponible depuis peu. Voici un extrait de Slow Chase Scenes paru sur l'étiquette Dream Recodings.
Nina Chase in conversation with Sky Madden for Decades Magazine Summer 2013
When I decided that I wanted to interview Nina, I thought about the way that I had first encountered her and how I stumbled upon Some Ember. It was at this time last year that Moonbell and Chasms wanted to play a show together and it was finally happening. I got Cool Angles on the bill too and then last minute Nick moved to New York and I was back on the search for another band to play with us. I had an email correspondence going on with Jason Hendardy (Permanent Collection / LogLady Records) who immediately suggested a band I had never heard of at the time. It was Some Ember. I looked them up and sure enough they were playing in Oakland that night. I had a bone to pick with Nick from Cool Angels who was in the East Bay but leaving for New York soon. In hopes of getting him to come out to this Black Jeans, Some Ember, Tollund Men, Transformations show at Lobot, I hoped that the least he would do was give me a demo tape of "Slow Chase Scenes" before he was off to the east coast and I wanted to see this Some Ember band so I went.
This is still the best Lobot show I have ever been to and Some Ember blew me away that night. I walked in and four strange characters from a different anachronistic times and places took up the entire span of the back wall, opposite the entrance, with big bright, undulating projections pouring down on them in slow motion. Pinks and greens were shooting everywhere and the Lobot sounded damn good. At the time I didn't know it, but the song they were playing was "Era of Wind." They were totally emotional and unlike anything I had seen in the Bay up until that point. I walked up to Mick Goldwater, who was doing sound for Some Ember that night, sitting at the mixing board with a pencil. "They have no idea how good they are," he phonated with Dad breath through an impassioned whisper.
SKY: How was practice last night?
NINA: Practice was good, I got a new pedal and that was really fun so..
SKY: What kind of pedal?
NINA: TC Helecon
SKY: Oh cool! Is it the grey and blue multi-FX one?
NINA: No it's the red one.
SKY: Oh cool I have the orange one that's reverb specific.
NINA: Cool!
SKY: The last time I saw you, Chasms and Grave Babies played with Some Ember at La Suite, a fantastic indoor/outdoor house spot in Oakland where you actually used to live. It was May 5th when I saw you. This is the last time that Some Ember played as a four-piece.
NINA: Yeah totally, La Suite is also the place we had one of our very first shows and we weren't even fully a band yet at that point. But yeah the Chasms/Grave Babies show was the last show where we played as a four piece.
SKY: How did you first come into Some Ember?
NINA: I was invited to a practice by Josh who was more recently our drummer and I've know him forever, I've known him for like ten, eleven years. Josh and Dylan had been working on other projects together and I lived across the street from them at the time and I went over there and we jammed. The rest is history.
SKY: When did Peter come on to play guitar for you guys?
NINA: Before Peter, we had another guitarist from San Luis Obispo named Jameson Swanson. He played a few shows with us like our very first First Friday in Oakland and then we had a show with Sleepy Sun at The Independent and Jameson couldn't make that show and we thought, "What about Peter?" Dylan and I have a lot of connections to Peter too and he's also from Santa Cruz. He and Dylan had been exchanging emails about Hotel of Lost Light coming out and Peter was into it so when we needed a guitarist for the Sleepy Sun show that's about when Peter came on.
SKY: So there had been some sort of chemistry that was working for there awhile.
NINA: Yeah I mean we've all known each other for a really long time. I've seen Peter play before I even knew who he was back in Santa Cruz in some of his past projects and Dylan, Josh and Peter have known each other for a while from a history of all our friends and living in the same town for awhile.
SKY: So geography has been important and it's obviously played a part in the band and band dynamic as well.
NINA: Yeah. After our long tour… we went on this long tour and we were basically on the road for 2 months this year which was super brutal. Tour ended a little bit after SXSW and then we were all super broke and a lot of went to go live back with our parents and some of us were in San Luis Obispo and some of us were in other places, Josh with his parents and Peter with his girlfriend. At the time Dylan said, "I'm still going to do this, I'm going to continue and I need to stay here, I need to be here." I went with him to San Luis Obispo and Peter and Josh headed back to the Bay. We were still constantly booking shows and then it became really hard to schedule practices and coordinate everything between the four of us. There were four individuals and a four hour gap of distance between us. It put a lot of stress on practicing and on being a band. We're on different pages now, a lot of us, but I still text with Josh and talk to him every day.
SKY: Now that you're a two piece you have more responsibility on and off stage than you did before.
NINA: Yeah definitely. It's definitely different and we're still trying to figure that out. I feel like each show that we do and at each venue that we play, we figure something else out. We'll decide we should get rid of something or add something and now we've sequenced a lot of things and it sounds a lot more like our recordings up there and it's a lot more dancy-er which is what we're going for. It's the vibe that we want. We want people to dance.
SKY: That's awesome.
NINA: I mean yeah it works. The live band was cool too and that had its thing. I feel like the songs were really interesting and different with a live band but now when it's paired down, it really resembles the recordings. We're able to be more dancey and we're able to try and take Some Ember in that direction more I feel. We're also able to take the music into more of a performative direction. It's like we have more control and less control at the same time. Like with the band, we all had to work within this web of each other and move with each other. Now it's different and looser.
SKY: Yeah I mean before it was like all four of you were in your different stations doing specific things. I've only been in a duo and I'm always telling Jess how I can't imagine being in anything else.
NINA: Yeah being in a band with a bunch of people is a challenge. It's interesting. It's different but there are pros and cons to being both.
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SKY: You mentioned the performative dimension of Some Ember just now and in March when I first found out you were going to do some sort of performance piece that wasn't necessarily based on something from Some Ember or the Some Ember recordings and that it was you, it reminded me of a lot of the new performance styles proliferating in San Francisco right now. And when I saw you perform a single piece before Wax Idols went on at Brick and Mortar it called to mind some of the things happening in avant drag and drag. Was that the first time you did that?
NINA: Yes. That was the first time and then I did it again the next day at Part Time Punks in Los Angeles. I've being doing performance art for a long time but this is the first time that I've ever done it like this in that context.
SKY: It was really dark and almost kind of violent. I totally didn't expect you to do something like that. Are you going to do anything like that tomorrow for the Decades show?
NINA: I think that's what I love about performance art, that there can be this mysterious quality to it where you're kind of not sure of what's going on. And definitely tomorrow yes.
SKY: The same piece?
NINA: No. I don't like to do the same piece more than once. I think that performance art can't be recreated in the same way each time you perform. That's the beauty of it and tomorrow will be very different. For that weekend with Wax Idols, I did do the same performance twice and at the second night at Part Time Punks it just did not come across as well as it did the first time. After that I realized I want to do something different every time.
NINA CHASE TOP FIVE LIVE PERFORMANCES
I definitely have to say Pod Blotz who is Suzy Poling who's actually playing with Bad News this Saturday in Oakland. Also, Uncanny Valley. Their just super weird, crazy and Kelsey is always dressing up super crazy and cool. I mean all of them are. Featureless Ghost, you would love them, they're so cool, they're so sick. They're music is amazing. On tour we played with this band called Linear Downfall and their music is kind of really insane and bizarre. They the craziest band live, the dresses are accented with neon pink and all the guys' beards are dyed pink and the girl's hair is like this beautiful crazy neon pink. They're from Tennessee. They're insane. Also definitely Majical Cloudz because it's so intense but it's so minimal and people have so many different reactions. Wax Idols always brings it.
FAVORITE LOCAL PROJECT SONGS (SF)
I really like that song "AD RE:IAN" by Wax Idols. I love that song. Red Red Red is sick, he's great. We played with him at SXSW. We did a showcase with him and he was amazing and it was the first time I met him. One song that he does "Enforcer" and I really like that song. Then there's Believe. Of course believe. I like "Encounter" by believe where Kim sings on that track. And obviously I love my Chasms. Ha ha ha ha and I love just… yeah "Bad Evolution" and "Darker Outside" is amazing too. Those are super good.
SKY: Oh no way. Those are my least favorite Chasms songs. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
NINA: WHAT! (laughing)
SKY: That's four local songs you're super into, one more?
NINA: Can I say Some Ember or is that horrible?
SKY: No no no of course not, you can say whatever you want. I listen to Chasms everyday. You know?
NINA: Okay.
NINA: The Some Ember song that I love is called "Revelation" and yeah I don't know, we need to play it live. We've played it live a few times with the live band but it's something we really need to rework as a two piece and I'm kind of like, "We need to do that. This is an amazing song and I want to do that." It's my favorite Some Ember song. It makes me want to dance and it makes me want to move.
