Tucker Martine: Full Speed Quiet

The Stranger June 1998 Trey Hatch There is a very small point where jazz, ambient music, honky-tonk, free-improv, trip-hop, sound art, and ethnomusicology meet. That point happens to be in Seattle at present, and is currently known as Mount Analog. Drawing upon so many musical influences and musical forms at once could be a disaster for many projects, as pretentiousness, trendiness, or incompetence could doom them from the start. The band's creator and leader, the 26 year old Tucker Martine, dispels the first two demons upon first contact. He comes off as a young, lanky misfit who speaks earnestly yet modestly about his own strange undertakings, and spends more time listening to 50 year old archival recordings than following current pop music trends. As for competence, his credits and reputation as a sound engineer for country, rock, jazz, and experimental music projects speak almost as loudly as the music he recorded for Mount Analog, a largely solo record which he released last fall to rave reviews from around the country. Mount Analog, the record, was made in Martine's basement, a legendary swamp of snaking wires, strange old electronic gadgets and recording equipment, a familiar haven for local musicians. Most of its pieces started out as music that Martine had composed for Butoh dance performances, specifically for the Seattle troupe Dappon Butoh. It's not difficult to imagine a slow, disguising expressive Butoh dance occurring as one listens to Mount Analog's debut. Slowed-down heartbeats, locomotives passing in the distance, Moroccan field recordings, violins, electronic drones, and plucked banjos drift amid one another, intermingling, separating, and disappearing like ghostly dancers on a darkened stage. The music on Mount Analog is not merely interesting, but compelling. The different moods- all of them quiet- are powerful; the music does not blend into bland or repetitive sonic wallpaper, and neither does it sound excessively experimental or self-indulgent. "A lot of times you come home after spending a day in this noisy-ass world, and the last thing you want to do is put on a bunch of guys bashing on their drums and symbols and cranking on their distorted guitar and yelling- which I love at the right time, but I just keep finding that some of the time I couldn't find anything that wasn't going to be obtrusive to my ears to listen to. That was in mind when I was compiling this, too."Martine keeps things very subtle, deliberately. "Whether it demands your attention or not is less important to me, on this record, than if the state of mind that you're in while it's on is an inspired one," he says. Mount Analog, the band is another matter. Live, the band plays interpretations of music from the disc and a number of new pieces, mostly more upbeat, which they have generated since first coming together last winter. Martine plays drums and man's his electronic gadgets, through which he carries out real-time manipulation of the music created by his bandmates, often creating wholly new sounds that can't be explained or easily traced. "I'll do a lot of deconstructing of something that's been played," he says, "I'll take a phrase and then present it in a form that's unrecognizable- not necessarily reminding you of something you just heard but only slightly tweaked. What might start as a little trombone run could come back sounding like a dinosaur trampling a city or something." The members of Mount Analog were gathered from far-off, seemingly distant musical lands, which Martine has traveled as a sound engineer for everything from alternative country to free-improv bands. Trombonist and keyboardist Steve Moore has long been a force to be reckoned with in the local avant-jazz scene; pedal-steel guitarist Jon Hyde is most often heard in pop and country music settings. Bruce Wirth, who toured and played with the Walkabouts in years past, contributes harmonium and violin. Bassist Layng Martine, Tucker's brother, worked as assistant engineer for producer and bassist Bill Laswell in New York, and made several solo recordings in New York under the name Corporal Blossom before moving to Seattle. Lately, the band has been rehearsing with Lori Carson, formerly of the Golden Palominos, who will contribute live vocals to the band's upcoming Arts Edge performance. The band has played live only three time to date- twice at the Tractor Tavern, and once at the recent Tonehole festival of new music. Its performances are unlike any other, due to both the music it performs and the method it uses to do so. "When the group was conceived," Martine says, "I was kind of assigning parts. I had people come in with these conventional instruments and try to recreate a lot of sounds that weren't made on the record by intsruments- they were field recordings, or whatever. Most of what we're doing right now has been from the record, but it's changing quickly...now that it's become a band, it's a different sound."