Dylan Ryan Interview: Here I Am, I'm Sitting on the Floor
Dylan Ryan; Photo by Alessandra Santucci
BY JORDAN MAINZER
The artistry of Dylan Ryan is evocative and imaginative, and certainly not literal. Case in point: His latest record In The Same Room With A Cactus (ears&eyes) was constructed in his kitchen in his former home in Los Angeles, but there was no cactus to be found--Ryan was just waiting for the right time to use that title. What the album does encapsulate, however, is the sort of existent minutiae the title suggests. In the summer of 2022, home from touring with Man Man and attempting to write a new batch of songs for his trio Sand, Ryan caught himself staring at his long-untouched synthesizers. Compelled to pick them up, he started messing around, forming tunes on an old Korg and Rhythm Ace instead of on his usual guitar. His sketches turned into compositions, diverging from anything resembling Sand. All the while, he was writing sitting at his kitchen table in Los Feliz, looking out his window and observing the same-yet-slightly-different routines of passersby.
Ryan, who was born in Chicago and grew up in Wilmette, eventually moved back to the Windy City two years ago after a decade-plus of living in L.A. With this collection of songs--mostly fleshed out with synths, guitars, vibes, percussion, and melodica--he reached out to saxophonist Nate Lepine and bassist Willie Blair to put the final touches on a couple tracks. The finished album takes you back to Ryan's kitchen even though you were never there. On "Liaison", whose pace is supposed to mirror the shadows winter light created as it progressed throughout the day, long synth tones are interrupted by toms and melodica, notable enough to signal a shift, subtle enough to seem natural. Drums and synths patter and blip like raindrops on "Orange Umbrella", free cymbals crashing as drops turn torrential. Other tracks reflect the drama of witnessing something big unfold before your eyes--maybe in a voyeuristic way from a window, but more like you're watching a movie, as on the rubbery panning of "Spericolato" and contrast between drones and freewheeling instrumentation on "Divano". Throughout the album, Ryan effectively inserts small moments of tension into an otherwise loose piece, an apt parallel to looking at the world go by.
Back in February, I spoke with Ryan over the phone. We talked about In The Same Room With A Cactus, sure, but as Ryan's clearly an avid consumer of art and stimuli in general, we spent about half of our conversation shooting the shit about new music, concerts we had been to or were about to attend, and both growing up in the Chicago area. On Sunday, Ryan will play a free record release show at Tone Deaf Records, two sets at 3 and 4 P.M., accompanied by Lepine. "There's a chance it won't sound like the record, which I think is okay," Ryan said. "There was an improvisational element to the recordings on my record, so I have to embrace that attitude in order to pull it off." Considering he was able to set in motion a sonic universe from dusty hardware, I have faith he'll pull it off just fine.
Below, read our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
In The Same Room With A Cactus cover art
Since I Left You: Does listening In The Same Room With A Cactus take you back to your life in L.A., even though it's very much an indoor record?
Dylan Ryan: Based on the overarching concept, yeah, that's true. I do vividly recall sitting in that kitchen, which I loved. It was a happy kitchen.
SILY: Were you literally in the same room with a cactus?
DR: [laughs] No. That's just a title I've been banging around for a couple years, and I thought, "I'm gonna use this someday." I had been waiting for the right record. I'm trying to summon titles right now for another record that's done. The spirits have not been gracing me with their blessings for titles. I'm waiting and waiting. Gotta get my radar more refined.
SILY: Do you usually go for something specific or kind of humorous or weird? Or whatever fits the music?
DR: Sometimes, I'll go with brevity. [But it's] timing and synchronicity to some degree. For example, I had a record that was [by] my heavy loud music band [Ether Feather] that, with the style of music, it had to have a certain type of title. The overall aesthetic [was] certain tones and colors. I wanted a record title to reflect that. I was watching that movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, and the last line of it, he has this weird monologue as he's disintegrating into nothing. He gets so small. He says, "There is no zero," and I thought, "What's that all about?" I just called the record There Is No Zero. Most people haven't seen that movie, so they think it's some sort of ancient math question. But it's just because I was watching that movie while I was writing the music.
SILY: You usually write on guitar. When you wrote the songs on In The Same Room With A Cactus, for some reason, you picked up synths. Do you remember exactly why you picked up those instruments?
DR: I think because they were just sitting there. I was in this band Man Man for a while. We were done with tour. I had just gotten sick with the coronavirus. I was at home and was supposed to be working on what was supposed to be [music] for my trio Sand, [for whom] I had written two records. I was like, "Let's see what happens if I just play on this." I kind of wanted to start to incorporate another chordal instrument, [something] textural. I like synthesizer stuff. This synthesizer player Peter Adams was joining us live from time to time in L.A. I was like, "What if I just come at it from that angle instead?" It wasn't any sort of grand scheme about it. I'm not a shredding keyboard player, and I started messing around with it. I didn't have an agenda. I got off track of what I thought a Sand record would sound like. That led me into this other [place] I was able to wander around in. I realized it was going to be a different project. I don't even like using that word "project." [It's] a different collection of moments encapsulated in a recording under a specific name. That was the way that came about in terms of the deviation from the previous writing methods.
SILY: Do you remember the first song you finished from this batch?
DR: I do, and I remember what inspired it, too, which was Blonde Redhead. I was thinking about Chopin, and I knew that [Blonde Redhead vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Kazu Makino] liked Chopin and those notes and chords and relationships to one another. I [thought about my song], "This gives me a little bit of a Blonde Redhead mood." That's not on the record, though. That was the very first one I did playing around with the drum machine. I just put it out on Bandcamp. That was the very first one I did playing around with the drum machine. That one's kind of different, to be honest. It's not as spacious and textural. You could play a drum beat to it. It could be the verse in a song--maybe not a good song.
SILY: At what point in the recording of in The Same Room With A Cactus did you bring in Nate and Willie?
DR: I had a bunch of stuff I thought was over the hump. I could see the end of the forest. I could see the light coming through the trees. I thought, But I thought, "I should maybe bring in the pros and see what happens." I knew I liked the sound of synthesizers and reeds. Lepine and I have worked together for a long time in a bunch of different bands and situations and contexts. He's pretty easygoing to work with. If you don't know what you're doing--and I didn't really know what I [was] doing--you have to bounce the ideas back and forth a bunch. I'd say, "Okay, that's not really where I wanted to go," but I [didn't] know where I wanted to go because it [wasn't] fully articulated in my brain. Lepine is really great to work with in that way, because he's like, "Cool, let's do it again." [He wants to] try stuff and see what works. He can play in a lot of different moods. He's multi-faceted stylistically, very limber.
With Will, it was the same thing. I wanted to get an actual good bass player. That song with Will, ["Trees Dissolve"] was one of the latter songs, and it was all in Chicago. I had a sequence I had made and was playing with Will and I jamming over it. I like to do that a lot as a track to something, erase that initial thing you were going to: It could be a chord progression or a drum machine. Like in Tetris, when you get a full Tetris, everything shifts down, and what was level 2 now becomes your base. Everything else built on top of it has a new context. When you take that main base thing away you founded the whole song on and get rid of it, everything shifts down and has a new relationship to everything else. That's what was going on with that song, the one that Will's on.
SILY: Back to when you were conceptualizing In The Same Room With A Cactus, I can't get this image out of my head: I'm picturing you sitting at the kitchen table, really taking in the atmosphere, whether it's the shadows or the people walking by.
DR: Dude, I was like a Raymond Chandler character. I felt like an old Hollywood detective.
SILY: Or like James Stewart in Rear Window. Hopefully there were no murders.
DR: [laughs]
SILY: When you make connections between the inspirations of the songs and certain things that appear on the tracks, whether it's the instrumentation or the pace of the song, did you make those connections almost retroactively because when you were making the song, you didn't know where the song was going?
DR: Good question. Sometimes it kind of comes together where I want it to be a hard change or more compartmentalized. A lot of this music is much more linear. I guess some of the justification comes in hindsight, but a lot of it is right there, present tense ideas coming and seeing what I grab and what I gravitate to at the time.
SILY: It always fascinates me to understand intention versus something making sense to you after the fact, which is just as valid and happens all the time, I've found in speaking to people who make music. It helps me understand the record better.
DR: I just had an interesting experience as I was getting music together for [to play at the Hungry Brain with Bill MacKay and Nick Macri]. I was choosing stuff I wanted to send them and was listening to the two [Sand] records and seeing what charts I [had]. There was stuff in there I never listened to after I recorded it. We never played it live. I have no recollection of it. Yet, I spent, presumably, a bunch of time writing it and thought it was good enough to put on the record, but never thought it was good enough to play. Now, here we are, cut to all these years later, and I'm like, "This is a cool song. I don't know why we didn't give this one credence back then." To have that hindsight and perspective and be able to go back on those songs and say, "This one is actually more in line with where I'm at right now than some of that other material. I'd rather play this sort of music," that was an interesting moment.
SILY: There were certain parts of In The Same Room With A Cactus that seemed filmic to me.
DR: Oh yeah. I definitely think of things in terms of cinema and scenes.
SILY: How so?
DR: I do a lot of soundtrack work. That's one of the jobs I still do that I was doing when I lived in Los Angeles. I think the main thing is keeping it understated, letting other things take place. In a film, if there's visual information in tandem with the aural information. That needs to work together. With this music, I really wanted to keep the top line a little more minimal. I wanted there to be a lot less melody because of the way the interacting synth pads and textures overlap. The [synths] were creating stuff I was hearing differently every time. I like that for a repeated listen, to hear things differently every time because there's space to allow that to happen. I have a tendency, I think, to overdo it sometimes with the instrumentation, go a little bit more heavy-handed. I was hoping to not do that with this record. I don't know if I always succeed--it's still pretty dense--but there were some moments on this one I was really happy with, the way that it breathes. With soundtrack stuff, that's the biggest thing: There's already something else happening, and you don't need to go overkill. I'm not saying I don't like it when Bernard Herrmann goes for it, but it's sometimes not necessary.
SILY: Were you playing with a delay on most or all of these songs?
DR: Yeah. I have a pretty limited instrument collection. A lot of the bass lines came from a Kawai synthesizer, pretty basic. I have a 90's Korg with a couple good sounds and a lot of not good ones. [I have] a Korg Poly-800. [They're] very basic keyboards. [I was] kind of doing what I [could] with what I [had]. I was able to learn some stuff, too, about it all. I'm not a producer. I never ever did that, and I don't pride myself and think of myself as a producer. I was always intimidated by microphones and production. Everyone has got a lot to say about this and that: "Oh, you're using this microphone on that, you fool, what are you thinking?" [During the pandemic,] my friend said, "Dude, you've heard a lot of music. You know what sounds good. Just get some mics. You've already got GarageBand. Start messing around. We've got all this time now because we're shut down." In my studio in L.A., I just decided to do that. Fortunately, there was some work with soundtrack stuff. This composer Heather McIntosh that I work with a lot, was sending me stuff. I had these projects that I could learn on. [Another friend] sold me some overheads and a kick mic. I had a Shure [SM]57 and started messing around with it. We were still in the tail end of the shutdown times, at home a lot.
I like using the delay as a way to inspire rhythm, especially with the drum machines. I start off a lot of time with drum machines, and for lack of a better example, the way Phil Collins or Brian Eno in the 70's would use it. You can kind of displace where the downbeat is with the delay. You can take a straight beat but via a specific delay style get something vastly different. It's impossible to ever get it to be that exact way ever again. I liked the immediacy of it. I can't recreate these drum machine parts that are on this record. They were made the way they were made that day. I could get it close, but they would never be exactly the same. I would have to dial in the drum machine--[which is] an old 70's organ drum machine--and against that, get the delay pedal settings. Maybe somebody could do it--people are better than I am at this stuff, and just because I can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done [laughs]--but it would be very hard to recreate. I really like that if I want to play this stuff again, it's going to be different. The delay pedal is a humongous tool, compositionally and inspirationally. It makes me think differently about rhythm than I ever would.
SILY: There's a direct parallel between that inability to repeat exactly the sounds, and the various routines of others you were observing externally while making this record.
DR: That's a good point. I wish we had talked before writing [the] one-sheet. [laughs]
SILY: Can you tell me about the cover art you designed?
DR: I have a lot of photographs that I took I was thinking about including with the packaging, but I decided not to. I wanted each song to have an image to go along with it. I was working with shadows and light. I'm not a photographer--let's get one thing straight, buster. [laughs] But I do like the way light hits at different times throughout the day and night, and the moods that can be influenced by natural light, and the way that morning light and afternoon light differ. It's strange, the way fresh light in the morning hasn't yet bounced around. I was thinking around those terms. It's a sentiment that goes through this whole record, the way I was observing the world through that particular frame of the kitchen when I was writing. These are all mundane little things, but when you're in the midst of writing a new age record, these sorts of thoughts come to you. What can I say?
SILY: That's kind of the idea of new age, right? When you start to look at things a certain way, it compounds on itself, and that's how your perspective shifts.
DR: There's a meditative quality, and sometimes that's just looking at something and [asking,] "What is it?" The very literal thing of, "Here I am. I'm sitting on the floor:" That's it.
SILY: What else is next for you in the short or long term?
DR: I'm coming out with new songs for a new Bronze record. I've always got new songs on the various backburners and front-burners. I hope the muses are smiling on me. I'd like to get another 5 or 6 Bronze songs done before the summer. Sometimes, it takes a while to write songs. We'll see.
SILY: Is there anything else you've been listening to, watching, or reading that's caught your attention?
DR: I listened to the first side of the James Brandon Lewis record, [Apple Cores.] I've been through a big phase listening to Lush recently. That spiraled into revisiting [Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night], the Stereolab record. Bobby Hutcherson's Dialogue--Joe Chambers is on that record. Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast has been in my car a lot lately.
In terms of books, I'm trying to read less pulp crime stuff, but this author Eugene Izzi, his stuff is all based in Chicago. He was a pretty successful writer but died in the 90's, in somewhat of a questionable manner. It was a little suspicious. [There was maybe] some foul play. It was ruled self-inflicted. He's a really interesting writer. On the other side of that coin, one of my writing partners in Bronze, Scott [McGaughey], lent me the [Andrei] Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time. I've been sitting with that.
[As for] films, I had the flu a couple weeks ago and watched 52 Pick-Up with Roy Scheider, Ann-Margaret, and John Glover. I watched Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, which I had not seen. Prince of the City was a pretty powerful crime movie about corruption in the police force in a post-Serpico world. That was really good, with Treat Williams. That's the last movie I saw where I was like, "Holy cow, how did I miss this movie? How did I miss a really slow, epic, 2-and-a-half-hour cop drama?"
