DB Pedersen: A transcendent prankster hits the road

When DB Pedersen leaves Madison for the Bay Area this fall after 13 years in town, he'll leave behind not just his solo recordings and memories of his inimitable vocals—a combination of melodic, poly-toned Tuvan throat-singing and eerily accurate nature sounds, often looped over simple basslines or flute melodies—but also a mischievous trail that twists through the fragments of Madison music and arts in the most unlikely combinations. Pedersen and his loop pedal nurtured their playful improvisation with help from Madison's somewhat insular community of experimental musicians, but he's also shared bills with more straight-ahead rock bands; he's lent vocal sound effects to plays by local theater group Mercury Players Theatre, and was going to make his actual stage debut in a currently on-hold production of Shakespeare's Troilus And Cressida; he's cooked in local restaurants from Lazy Jane's to L'Etoile; and he's probably one of the few Madison musicians who'll admit to being influenced by prog-rock band Yes and one-man vocal orchestra Bobby McFerrin. He may also be the only person on earth who says he'd like to be in "a Sleepytime Gorilla Museum-type band." But that's the kind of spirit Pedersen has: He's an outsider who's wandered through music like a hippie prankster, full of smart-assery and optimism. Pedersen sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about farming sheep, the new album he's working on, and his short stint as a paramedic in Oakland.

The A.V. Club: How does a song like "Effed Up Cows," which is basically just loops of animal sounds, come about?

DB Pedersen: That's completely improvised. They come from the ability to disconnect from standard thoughts about music, I guess. I don't really know, because I'm not a trained musician. I'm self-trained. I can get into formless and be comfortable with it.

AVC: Well, self-trained is one thing, but it's like you're totally removed from the whole track of learning your craft by playing in a lot of bands and writing songs in a certain way.

DBP: The voice is from playing the didgeridoo for a few years and then figuring out that I could do that on my own. And I hadn't heard Tuvan throat singing before. I happened to be farming sheep, came up with it, and people were like, "Yeah, people farm sheep on the other side of the world and they do this singing."

AVC: You're part of this underground music community here, and a big part of that is collaboration and improvisation. How do you go about adapting to different collaborators?

DBP: I really lucked out. I got really great teachers when I came here and became a musician. I wasn't a musician before I came here. I did choirs and stuff as a kid. I basically sang in the shower until I was 35. I got out here and started really opening up, and doing interesting-enough things with my voice that I got people's attention and they're like, "Okay, let's collaborate with that guy." And they taught me how to collaborate, which is, "Okay, we're gonna go in, here's a basic idea for a structure, we don't have to repeat that structure when we perform it, but let's do something based on that." The hardest thing for me to do—I only Gomeroke'd for the first time two nights ago. I did Steely Dan's "Reelin' In The Years," and I actually made it through the song. Everybody was like, "Well, that was excellently creepy." So I put my bells and whistles on it.

AVC: You've performed for kids before, right?

DBP: Yeah, in Tomahawk, Wis. That was the in-service day, when they hired musicians around to come up and entertain the kids, and it was me in the gymnasium and the singing lumberjack in the auditorium. I had two groups of 350 kids, and it was a blast. I just put on one of those cordless mics and just made up stories—the non-edgier stories of my life—talked about sheep farming and didgeridoo playing and this and that. It kind of broke down into "Do SpongeBob! Do SpongeBob!" I shoulda done my homework the night before and really nailed SpongeBob, but what can you do? They'll never call me back, but it wasn't a bad experience.

AVC: How will the vocal style on your new songs be different?

DBP: I would say that it goes toward a more melodic, Tom Waits-y kind of feel to it. I don't think that's selling myself out in any way. It's just that that's what it's going toward. It's been really hard to screw things down and put myself first and show up and be the vocalist. For years, why I have all these obtuse, weird recordings is I've been hiding behind bands and making little things to increase the weirdness of it. Just adding to the overall texture of things, instead of being a more forward instrument. Or if I'm the forward instrument, I just kind of play horn with my face. That's decreasing. I hope that's still available, but I would like to work the poetry angle of it. Oh, fuck, I said it. [Laughs.]

AVC: What are the most challenging sounds you've attempted to make with your voice?

DBP: Usually horses or elephants. They just require a tonality that I haven't found yet. But throat singing was really tough, and a lot of people told me not to do it, because it was painful for the first year. I got a teacher afterwards, who was like, "Yeah, you're doing these things wrong and you're doing these things right, but don't do it when it hurts. You gotta back off."

AVC: You'll get into some pretty personal stories in live performances. What makes you want to share all that with an audience?

DBP: My stories are what have formed me. For example, in the brief time that I was a paramedic, I delivered six babies. They were all perfect. They were all A-number-one okay babies. And I'd get off work and see the guys from other ambulances and they were like, "God dammit, if I deliver another fuckin' crack baby again...." There was like this really weird gift in which I got away with always getting to see the more beautiful side of things. It wasn't just blood and guts. There was a lot of that, but I lucked out. I want to share those stories, because there's a reason that I get to see things. Sometimes I know what that is, and sometimes, if the timing is just right, it comes out in performance.... I would like that to be how I make a living, and it's hard to do in Madison. When I go to New York and step off the subway and start throat-singing, people are like, "Oh, you're a Tuvan throat-singer." Here, it's like, "What have you got in your mouth?"