Fun Fun Fun Fest: The slow evolution of Growing
Beyond the thunder-drone
As Growing's career has unfolded over the past decade, the group’s name has become more and more apt. At first following in the footsteps of their former roommate, drone legend Joe Preston, Kevin Doria and Joe Denardo brought an ethereal quality to a genre mired in rumbling bass and high volumes, experiments in sustained notes that reached their peak with the challengingly minimalist Soul Of The Rainbow And The Harmony Of Light in 2004. But since joining the roster of noisenik label The Social Registry with its back-to-back 2008 releases of Lateral and All The Way, the band has matured and expanded into newer, stranger soundscapes, metamorphosing from just another droning caterpillar into a dynamically off-kilter butterfly. Before Growing's Saturday slot at Fun Fun Fun Fest, The A.V. Club spoke to guitarist Denardo about putting the band’s past behind it, how it tries to make knob-twisting engaging, and what the increased mainstream exposure of noise rock means to him.
The A.V. Club: The last few albums have seen you move away from the sustained drone of your earlier work. What was behind that shift?
Joe Denardo: For us, drone was never a musical style. It was just a type of sound that we enjoyed making. Me and Kevin started playing that type of sound together, but we never considered ourselves a "drone band.” It was just a texture that we would use, and we used it more then than we do now. It's just wanting to keep changing—getting bored with certain things, finding new effects, processing things in different ways.
AVC: What direction do you think Growing will take next?
JD: We just finished a record; I think we're going to call it Pumps. Should be out sometime in the spring. We have a new member as of the last 10 months—our friend Sadie [Laska]—and she's doing a lot of processed vocals and electronic samples. Kevin's getting really into drum machines and the beat side of things, and Sadie is adding all this voice-based textural stuff. It's more structured and more dance-like, but still pretty strange.
AVC: Now that you’ve begun integrating more digital equipment, is there a line you draw as to how much you rely on it?
JD: Speaking for myself—and maybe for Sadie and Kevin also—we're not all that computer-savvy. I don't have that much fun in front of the computer. It's a distraction, and it tends to suck a great amount of time out of everybody's days. As far as manipulating the variables that we make our music with, clicking a mouse or typing the keys doesn't really do it for me. We've always gravitated toward more physical things that we can see—which is not to say that some of those effects aren't digital and utilizing miniature computers inside. We're not analog heads. But they take on a physical shape as knobs you can move around.
AVC: A lot of bands who rely on heavy effects and “knob-twiddling” tend to be static live performers. What do you think they can or should do to make their shows more engaging?
JD: It should mostly be about the sounds. If you're just sitting, twisting knobs, then the sounds should replace whatever people are expecting, as far as a physical presence. You can create an interesting vibe in lots of different ways. You don't have to be engaging the audience all the time. There doesn't seem to be any real rules about it anymore, which I think is a good thing. It's more up to the band to make whatever they feel is natural work for them.
AVC: Growing has used a lot video and projections in the past, but only for certain shows. What inspires you to choose to do that?
JD: Usually, when it's requested, or when it's an event or festival that's geared toward the combination of music and visuals. We did it in a couple of gallery shows, and we did it at a multimedia festival in Italy. Kevin and I went to school for photography, and I studied some video and film. It's just tough to make it a fully integrated part of the band. It's limiting if you're going to play to visuals, if you don't have an extra set of hands that can be manipulating them with the music organically. Than you're stuck to this DVD set length. It gets tough to introduce any sort of freedom to it.
AVC: Bands that rely on drone textures or harsh noise are becoming more and more common. Do you think we'll ever reach a point where it's hard to find new territory within that?
JD: I feel like every little tiny genre is getting pushed to every extreme, and there's no limit to how crazy it will get, or how many people will be into a certain thing for a certain amount of time. I'm not somebody that says I'm into “noise music,” but the fact that there is a world out there that's that obsessed about it is pretty incredible. You get in the mainstream—whatever that is—all these sounds and bits of these little scenes filtering in here and there all the time, through various sound effects in movies, commercials, all that stuff. There's noise, there's craziness. You can hear it every day on TV. The intensity is not the same, but it's all out there.
AVC: Now that you're playing more dynamically, does that also mean leaving behind the really intense volume levels of your early days?
JD: Not really. We play pretty loud, but we've had more equipment issues in recent years. Living in Olympia, things were a lot cheaper. There was a lot of gear moving around, so we could get really loud stuff. We played in smaller rooms, so it felt a lot louder. When you play bigger clubs—not that we play huge clubs or anything—it can come off quieter depending on size of the room, how hard the sound person wants to push it, all those kinds of things. We were more obsessed with volume seven, eight, nine years ago. Now we want it to be loud and present and unavoidable, but we're not going to try to kill anybody.
