Interview in UK’s Plus 1 Magazine, issue #8.

Large scan of the interview here.

[Note: As this interview was done over the phone, many of Dan and Josh's statements were accidently confused in the transcription. You decide!]

FOOT VILLAGE
INTERVIEW: Richard MacFarlane

The limitations of making your four-piece drum-only rock band based firmly around the concept of a made up civilization called Foot Village are probably endless, but it’s surprising what can arise out of such chaos. Fixtures of the LA noise/DIY scene alongside the likes of No Age, Abe Vigoda et al (yes, they play at The Smell), they consist of Brian Miller and Grace Lee (also members of LA band Gang Wizard), Josh Taylor (also in Friends Forever) and Dan Rowan. Together, they make their own sort of noise with their own set of rules. There’s no electricity in this nation and it’s still under construction, but there is a lot of noise; drumming is their national language, and, as heard on their recent album Friendship Nation, there are a lot of different ways in which you can play them. They aren’t hippies and this certainly ain’t no drum circle, as I found out over some amazing futuristic sort of conference call with the band. We started our chat with discussions on the tribal or primitive, concepts a drum-only band seem to always connote.

Reading descriptions about you guys on the Internet made me think
a bit about the word ‘tribal’ which seems to come up a lot with reference to your music, or even just in music journalism in general at
the moment. How do you guys feel about that word?
Brian: I don’t know what it means.
I guess it equates to aesthetic things like tom drums and simple drums and stuff
Brian: I feel like it means something cultural, which there’s no way they can be a part of.
Josh: [laughs]
Grace: What?! I think it means more of a… well, you know how some music draws out some more primitive emotions or more primal kind of emotions that anyone can experience. I feel like with the drums it does conjure up that type of feeling in people.
Josh: I feel like it’s really bad, I mean, I’m not sure what term you would use instead of that, but I feel like it has some really terrible hippy connotations to it that just aren’t there. We don’t spout any of that bullshit and our shows are not in any way hippydom. For people to take that away from it, like ‘oh man I really just wanted to jam with you guys’, well, I kind of just wanna punch those people.
Grace: You’re so sensitive about that stuff though.
Josh: It’s terrible! When people lump us in with this like that it’s fucking terrible. Well, even if the word… if you look up ‘tribal’ in the dictionary I doubt it says anything about improvised music or, I don’t know what it would say, maybe something about a communal experience. But I think people that have read about us and read that word ‘tribal’, that might be one of the reasons why they show up to our shows with drum sticks, thinking that they can play with us, and
then we have to break their hearts. Hitting our drums while we’re playing is about the same as going to see a band playing and deciding you’re going to get up on stage and start strumming the lead guitarist’s guitar with your own pick.
Wow, so people actually come and do that at your shows?
Dan: Yeah, it does happen. We try to stop it pretty fast, but yeah. I think I nearly broke some guy’s hand because one of my drumsticks hit them.
That seems crazy, that people would try to do that. But I guess a lot of the spaces you play lack barriers between audience and band
Brian: Even at shows where there is an actual stage, we will do our best to try to keep people literally within inches of us. Which I still feel is not an invitation to play with us, I mean, there are tons of bands that do that. We like to get people up on stage or play it on the floor if it’s going to be audible. To me that’s about making sure it’s engaging, making sure it feels like they’re right there with us.
Grace: You know what the definition of tribal is?
Brian: I bet I’m gonna find out.
Grace: ‘Of relating to, or characteristic of, a tribe.
Josh: You fuckin’ asshole.
Grace: [laughs]
Brian: So it does have something to do with communal, though. For the four of us. So that kind of makes sense.
Grace: I think also to do with the way we draw in the audience. I think it’s such a base emotion that people can all experience, I feel like it brings people together in that sense.
Dan: You’re walking a fine line, Grace; you’re almost about to admit that we invite them to play the drums.
Grace: No! I mean it’s like going to watch Captain Ahab or something and getting that religious kind of overcoming or whatever. And feeling that with your fellow people at a show.
Dan: Well I do hope people come to the shows and feel like they’re having a great time.
Grace: I guess I’m just not as afraid of being called a hippy.
This is sounding pretty divisive between you guys; the hippies and the non-hippies of Foot Village. I dunno, the word ‘tribal’ is maybe misused, and ‘primitive’ often comes up as well
Brian: We just don’t use a lot of technology.
Yeah, there isn’t much electronics, though there are a couple of spots on Friendship Nation where they pop up. There’s a bit where a
vocoder suddenly comes in, and there’s another one too I think?
Josh: We had some wizard for that one. He came down just for that song.
Brian: I think there’s a lot of people that want us to be fighting some good fight against technology, or like, want us to claim some neo-Luddite sorts of politics. Even though we love the fact that we can make rock music out of such bare bone instruments, we love all different types of music, we love electronic music, rock music, guitar music, you know. We just don’t use it in Foot Village specifically. For me at least though, like having a couple of moments on the record that fuck with peoples heads a bit, being this otherwise drum only kind
of thing. Just a little nod to the fact that we’re not making some grand political gesture about what people should and shouldn’t do.
Dan: Foot Village is also no stranger to the radio drama. I think there’s like four or five tracks now that have been like, psuedo plays.
Brian: That’s the thing too, it’s not like we recorded without the use of electricity.
Yeah, and it’s not like a CD isn’t like a modern futuristic kind of thing
Dan: Nah, our CD looks like a piece of wood.
Ha-ha. Well, anyway, let’s say in terms of Foot Village’s politics; is it meant to be allegorical at all?
Dan: I always thought that it might be fantasy, even though that has horrible connotations of things that come along with that. But maybe like a dream, if you think sometime ‘man, I could make a world, wouldn’t it be so great if we just did it this way instead’? Maybe that’s part of our outlet, like let’s make a song about pissing wherever you want.
Brian: Well, it’s something we can relate to. I mean I can’t believe how many times I’ve been drunk somewhere and there’s no public restroom around and it’s against the law, supposedly, for me to go to the bathroom. That’s a funny one, that song we’re talking about, ‘Urination’. Someone actually sent us – I don’t know why they did this – but they went of their way to send us a Myspace message the other day to say that they checked out our band, but they think the
lyrics to ‘Urination’ are terrible.
What didn’t he like about them?
Brian: Well that’s the thing, I think a lot of people think it’s too ridiculous or too dumb or too crass. In general, I imagine that that’s the song that most people think is just being silly, but I think if there is a song on the album that has a sincere political message it’s probably that one that we take to heart more than the other ones. The other ones where we sound like we’re talking about something super serious, we’re more doing what Dan said and playing that game of basically writing a fantasy or a sci-fi novel.
Dan: I’m dead serious on ‘Urination’; don’t fuckin’ look at me weird, we should all be able to pee, it’s a real problem! It hurts when you have to like, choke it back.
Yeah, it’s bad for the kidneys or whatever. Okay, well, with you guys
not wanting to get too hippy with making music and not wanting to be
a drum circle, is there any idea of togetherness that is big for you?
Brian: Well, I wouldn’t like doing it even half as much if it was with a different lineup. I think about it all the time, how I like what we are and what we do because of the four different personalities. Half the time we’re disagreeing with each other but are totally comfortable with it. Somehow we just make sure that we agree on one thing, that we like the songs. It’s a great group to be a part of.
How about in terms of an audience and togetherness, like, your
performance as a group thing?
Grace: That’s actually one thing that we might disagree on. I have this feeling that sometimes we need to make our songs more poppy or more accessible to the audience, because it does tend to be brash sometimes. But I don’t think that you guys like songs like that, right? I mean, you guys want it to be listenable but, I dunno.
Josh: I think in the end we always come to an agreement that it either rocks or it does not rock. The objective – whether it rocks or not – comes from the whether or not it will go over well to a crowd. Because we all know that we’re gonna play these songs to people, and it’s either going to be a dud (and we don’t want that) or it’s going to be totally awesome.
Brian: When we play a new song, and afterwards we’re talking about how it went and maybe it felt like the audience was disengaged for the middle part or something, we’ll change it; we think about the audience a lot.
Dan: Yeah. These are our songs or our love poems to the world, about who we are, we’re writing it, more or less, for others to hear.