Dean Spunt Interview: An Archaic Piece of Gear
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Of No Age drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt's solo releases, the one that's wholly a demonstration of an obsolete Aughts-era synth is his most personal and accessible yet.
A couple years ago, Spunt stumbled across the E-mu Mo'Phatt, a module popular at the turn of the century for hip-hop and R&B production, and found one for $50 on OfferUp. Playing around with it, and not having performed live in years due to the pandemic, Spunt jumped at a friend's offer to play a show and decided to bring along this new piece of gear. One show turned into a few shows, and eventually, Spunt was intrigued enough by the instrument to record with it in 2023, taking advantage of the 64-voice E-MU modules within it. Orchestra stabs, vinyl scratches, and vocal samples may be well worn territory for producers, but not for Spunt. "I was intrigued by the ridiculousness of it all," he told me over the phone last week, "because I don't make music like that."
The result was Basic Editions, released in September on Drag City. Though the songs are much more abstract than the high wire art punk of No Age, they're also far from the musique concrete of Spunt's debut solo album EE Head and collaboration with John Wiese, The Echoing Shell. For one, on Basic Editions, Spunt didn't deviate much from the source material--he's described his process as "using sounds" rather than "making sounds"--recording the Mo'Phatt into a computer in order to be able to chop, segue, and delay. "This record is very much in the box," he said. Though one can change the BPM of the presets, add internal effects to them, and modulate each of the four layers within the preset, Spunt barely tweaked the presets themselves. It was less of an artistic choice than a necessary one: Spunt didn't really know how to work the machine. But there's undeniable artistry in his presentation. On "Critic in a Coma", bowls whoosh, gurgle, and bubble; it reminds me of the sound effect most often used to denote time passing in a movie. Indeed, the E-Mu module used on the song was meant for composers. "I liked being able to pick out the things that might feel corny," Spunt said, noting that when presenting them in context of an experimental record, "You're mind's able to think about them a little differently."
From the start, the Mo'Phatt felt like familiar territory for Spunt, even more than just recognizing its "eerily familiar" sounds from the music of the early 2000s. It actually reminded him of working at his mother's screen printing business when he was in high school. Just like one could purchase expansion cards for the Mo'Phatt, Spunt worked with clipart programs, books with CDs of extra images. "If someone wanted a balloon logo for their party shop, you'd type in 'balloon,' and there would be 350 different images of balloons," Spunt said. "[Working with the Mo'Phatt]...reminded me of that." Spunt pays further tribute to this connection with the album art, an image of a box that the orchestra card came in. "It also seems like it's probably clipart, which reminded me of my mom's shop," Spunt said. "I like that there's a score on there that I don't know."
Embracing what Spunt didn't know also meant that he had to learn how to play Basic Editions songs live. "When I first recorded the record, besides recording into my computer, I didn't save any of the patches because I didn't know how to," Spunt said. He figured out how to do so later and was able to recreate the songs for a performance, having to recreate them because you cannot add your own samples to a Mo'Phatt. To Spunt's credit, live, he runs two Mo'Phatts with a delay pedal. "I'm pretty versed in [the Mo'Phatt] now," he said. "I can get in there and change things around. To get inside and manipulate stuff live can be a challenge, so you have to do it quickly. I have a controller plugged in, and with a controller, you can change parameters around what you're triggering."
Spunt performs tomorrow night at Judson & Moore, and hopefully, it won't be the last time we see him come through with his trusty Mo'Phatts. He already has plans to record more with it in December. "[Basic Editions] is not a one-off thing," he said. "[The Mo'Phatt] feels like an instrument I want to learn and master. It's an archaic piece of gear, but so is the guitar."
