The shuffler: John Vanderslice, producer and frequent collaborator with bands like The Mountain Goats and Spoon and owner of Tiny Telephone Studios. Vanderslice is also a prolific solo performer whose sixth album, Emerald City, was released July 24.
The A.V. Club: Considering you're known for working with analog gear, it's sort of funny that you even have an iPod. Do you ever find that listening to music on an MP3 player compromises the experience?
John Vanderslice: Oh, not at all! Actually, my issue with the iPod is just the amplifier. I think it's really shitty. I encode stuff at 192 or 256 [kbps] and I think it's great. I don't think that that's the problem. I just think the quality of the amplifier in the iPod is really shitty, and that's where you see the most degradation [in the sound]. I don't have any problem with MP3s. You know what's funny about this, though, is I've actually never "shuffled" in my life. I had to go and look for it in the menu.
Richard Strauss, "Ein Heldenleben (Opus 40)"
JV: I have an orchestral CD of Richard Strauss' work, and a lot of his operas. I'm a huge opera, symphonic guy—a huge classical music fan. I love early Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, and Bruckner, where things are starting to fall apart and get tonally fucked up—harmonically challenging, let's say. My big obsession would definitely be Bruckner and Mahler.
Fiona Apple, "Please Please Please"
JV: This is from the rough version of Extraordinary Machine. I have the regular album, but I'm a huge Jon Brion fan, so when I found out he was working on that record, I went and found all the roughs on the Internet. The roughs to me—the Jon Brion version—is so much stronger than the final album that came out. It's kind of heartbreaking, because people got hooked on those early versions. They're much more dangerous and weird and unstable. And on the official release, even the ones they kept with Brion feel really sterilized. He didn't even end up mixing it, so the later versions are antiseptic compared to the roughs. In some versions, they completely re-tracked the vocals and all the music, and it's like a shadow of the original album. It's a real shame. I have the official release on my computer, but since I only have a 4GB iPod I have to really select what I put on here, so I only put on the roughs, because that's all I ever listen to.
Gustav Mahler, "Symphony No. 9 (First Movement)"
I was hoping we'd be more varied, but oh well. [Laughs.] This is basically an hour-and-a-half symphony—some people say it's like from birth to death, some kind of analogue in the writing that corresponds to the first moments of birth on. The first part almost sounds like you're in a rowboat. The opening 16 measures of this piece, it literally feels like you're in the womb getting ready to be born. You can follow that idea all the way to the end, because it's like 35 minutes of a repeating motif that is just unbelievably complicated but also seemingly sedate and kind of resigned. Just the architecture of this symphony is enough to spend five years on it. I'm sure many people have.
The Mountain Goats, "Tianchi Lake"
JV: This is from the demos for the new Mountain Goats record, which is going to be insanely, incredibly good. We're listening to everything now—me, Scott [Solter], and John [Darnielle]. Jon Wurster's gonna play on it, Erik Friedlander. We're all spending a lot of time listening to these demos right now, in pre-production mode. We're going to be in California working on it at the end of August.
AVC: Is that a usual part of your process, walking around with the demos for a while before you record?
JV: Definitely. If I'm getting into something, absolutely. I'm meeting John [Darnielle] tomorrow, so I wanted to listen to this record a good 15 times in a row to get up to speed.
Clipse, "Dirty Money"
JV: We have a dance party after every show, and we start it out with stuff from Nas' "Hip-Hop Is Dead" and then we go into Clipse. I don't think we actually play this song in our dance party, but we play "Hello New World" and the first song from Hell Hath No Fury. I'm definitely a big hip-hop guy too. For me, it's either hip-hop or classical when I'm driving. For night driving or morning driving—you can probably guess which is which. I just like that this Clipse album is completely obsessed with the mechanics of, like, selling crack. [Laughs.] I absolutely love its single-mindedness. And the production is sick on this thing. The Neptunes, man. It's insane, it sounds so good. It's one of my favorite records from the past year.
- Comments