Fog began as a solo project for Minnesota-based turntablist and hip-hop/electronica artist Andrew Broder, but the group has recently undergone a major evolution. Broder left the turntables by the wayside and re-imagined Fog as something like a classic power trio, with bassist Mark Erickson and drummer Tim Glenn as permanent members. Fog remains too idiosyncratic and experimental to be pigeonholed, but the new approach paid off with Broder's boldest and most viscerally approachable album yet—the new, ironically titled Ditherer, which includes guest work from Low, Andrew Bird, Why?, and Dosh. The A.V. Club recently talked with Broder and Erickson about Fog's relationship with Tom Petty and black metal.
The A.V. Club: You've always collaborated with others in Fog, but the permanent trio is a new thing. What led to that change?
Andrew Broder: Fog always was a kind of floaty thing where it was me doing most of the stuff, but needing other people to help out. Each successive Fog record has had more input from others, but it's always been vague, in a way, whether that's just me being noncommittal, or not having the confidence in myself to orchestrate a band full-time. I held onto that one-man bedroom-music aesthetic for a while—probably too long—and then after 10th Avenue Freakout came out, I arrived at a point where I was like, "I don't want to make music entirely on my own any more." That whole feeling the music had, where you could really tell that it was mostly coming from one person, I just felt like I had taken that as far as I could, and it wasn't satisfying me any more, musically. That's the whole impetus for recording Ditherer the way that we did, and whittling everything down to this essential group of three.
AVC: How did you arrive at this particular three?
AB: Mark's been in the band since the beginning. Tim and I have been playing improvised music together for three or four years. The lineup for Fog has shifted around. It's been more based on availability than anything, but I reached a point where I was like, "I have to do this full-time, and have to have a band that can treat it full-time." Mark and Tim were the only ones out of everyone involved I knew could make the dive into committing to Fog as the full-time thing. Everyone else that has been involved is active in doing different things, which is great, but we needed a core that could move forward with greater momentum, and stay organized and focused.
AVC: Ditherer seems like a large evolution from your previous disc, Loss Leader. Did it feel that way to you when you were putting the record together?
Mark Erickson: For me, definitely, because I was very uninvolved with Loss Leader. I wasn't there through most of the recording, and I didn't hear most of the songs until they were already mixed. For this operation, we just decided that we wanted to do it all at the same time—for 95 percent of the record, all three of us were there. If you hear a difference, that's the difference right there.
AB: The shifts in aesthetic from record to record feel pretty natural for me, because that's just how I operate as far as seeking out new sounds. I kind of explore and dive into it, and I never want to hesitate about that, for fear that it would alienate a certain group of listeners, which hasn't always been the best move for Fog. [Laughs.] But that's just a natural extension of my musical personality. And there was a period between 10th Avenue Freakout and now when I definitely didn't know what I was doing, and I had to totally rethink how I wanted to write songs and work with people and everything. I knew this record had to be radically different from the other stuff that I had done. Also, there's the departure of the turntables.
AVC: Which seems like a huge shift.
AB: It is, but it's been happening gradually. I think if you listen to all the records in a row, you can hear it dissipating as time goes on. It was a conscious decision for this record, to have it be guitar-centric, but that was just where my personal tastes are at this moment.
ME: I think if there are things that can be defined as unifying over Fog's career, they've been, number one, not to repeat ourselves, ever, and number two, to try as hard as we can to not sound like anything else. So it's not that the choice is made whether we're going to make a rhythm-heavy album, or a melody-heavy album, or a samba-heavy album. It's the choice to just try to make music that means something to us. And once you do that, the record hopefully won't sound like anything else, because otherwise, you're failing at it.
AB: I always like to be surprised when I hear things, rather than knowing exactly what I'm going to be getting into with somebody's new record. The element of surprise is the one that I value.
ME: A lot of bands lock themselves into a genre and they're proud of it, and that's fine. You have mystery writers that are worthwhile, just like there are plenty of rock groups and hip-hop groups that are worthwhile, but then there are other artists that respect genre and try to work with genre, but intentionally try to undermine it or subvert it.
AVC: That's the common element among the Anticon bands that you're most commonly associated with.
AB: In a sense, yeah. Although in a way, I think that has become its own little ghetto for people to think about. Even with this record, that association was in my mind. There's been a tendency, because of friends or people we've worked with in the past, to think about us as having to do with indie hip-hop or electronica or something like that. I wanted to get away from that, because I think it definitely limited people's willingness to check us out. I think people have a lot of preconceived ideas, even working within micro-microgenres like that. That can be its own thing that you can get pigeonholed in, so we don't have any kind of religious adherence to a way of categorizing ourselves. That definitely hasn't always helped our career as a band, but it keeps things fresh musically.
AVC: With Ditherer, you've stated that you wanted to try something more visceral and heavy.
AB: I started out writing songs for this record trying to be very deliberate about writing differently than what I had written before. So Mark would come over to the house, and I'd play him songs I had written that were stories or narratives about a character—I don't know what the fuck I was trying to write, like a Tom Petty song. And they were terrible.
ME: Did we end up using any of those?
AB: No, we didn't, thankfully. But I definitely wanted to write differently. The writing on Ditherer was less about me, and that was a very conscious decision. As far as the heavy aspect, I think that has more to do with what we collectively were listening to at the time.
AVC: Like what?
AB: I got pretty deep into listening to a lot of metal in the last year or two. Our record, obviously, doesn't sound like a metal record, but I wanted to have more of that visceral, dark approach. One of the things that really appealed to me about a lot of the real intense insane suicidal black metal I've been listening to is that sense of staring this kind of dark, cruel reality, whatever you're dealing with, in the face and accepting it, and having it be a thing of beauty rather than avoiding difficult subject matter. The term "heavy music" stems from my way of categorizing music like that as separate from music that can be casual and come and go and not make an impact on your life.
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