“Record Everything”: Excepter

Excepter release 'Presidence' on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks records this month. A piece of starry electronica; brimming with glitches, prolonged jams and rattling drum machines, it's just a snippet of the Brooklyn bands huge output. We caught up with John from the band to find out about how the band's recordings have changed, their Lovecraft inspired art and some top tips for forming a similar improv group.

How are you all [or one of you] today?
Feeling alright.

The new record is released this month. How do you decide what day you're going to record the record. Do you just wake up one Monday and have a good feeling?
We record everything we do. Sometimes we’ll take a holiday weekend and rent some studio time, but mostly we just keep the minidisc running at our live shows. We all have jobs and work all the time, so groovy feelings come second to showing up and putting the effort in.

Do you see your other recordings as just as important as the Paw Tracks stuff?

Live shows are meant for the public, so we use technology to share with those who can’t make it in person. It’s hard for us to tour, so we try to get out there with other means. Listening to the STREAMS – you get out of it what you put into it; it can be like research. The records have a different dynamic; they are more like objects, designed to be played again and again. If the STREAMS are lines, the records are circles.

Are you just constantly playing? Had any good jam sessions recently?
We play live about once a month, with breaks here and there to get the records and our lives together. The band is tight … we’ve been really into what we’ve been doing on stage these days. Now is best time to see us in our career.

And still getting complaints from the neighbours?
We stopped having band practice years ago, so now we get the chance to complain about our neighbours’ … smoking habits.

How do you pick the artworks for those? Is it up to one person?
Excepter is under a benign dictatorship in the art department, but then again, I do the layout and everything. There’s a bit of collaboration with some of the photography. Nathan Corbin has been taking the landscape shots in the past few releases. I don’t really show the band the record cover until they are all printed.

Last record you made a film of some outdoor performances. Do you enjoy working with film? Got any planned for this record?
Oh yeah we have fun with video; it’s another avenue for performance, so we take it. (Actually, the only dictum for the Black Beach video was NOT to perform.) We collaborated again with Harrison Owen to make a video for “Teleportation: KAL.” It features the band chewing on charcoal capsules under police lights and me creeping around buildings you’re not supposed to photograph. Here it is on youtube:



A man known as Witchbeam of Telecult Powers is working on a Lovecraft-inspired Flash animation to go with “Leng” off the album. You can see his work here: http://witchbeam.com/ Also our current live video projection artist Jon Williams is working on a weather channel-themed computer graphics video for the track “Anti-Noah.” You can see his work here:
http://wizardishungry.com/media.html

And what about live shows this summer?
We’re not much of a “festival” band so we’ll probably be laying low during the hotter months. We do like to have a sprawling “Dog Days” performance sometime late summer when all the assholes clear out of NYC. That’s when a good part of Presidence was recorded.

You've all been playing for ages. If somebody wants to start their own improv group what would be your top 3 tips...
1. Switch to an instrument with which you are not familiar. If you don’t even know how to play an instrument at all, this is to your advantage. If people tell you “you have to learn the rules before your break them,” stare at them blankly like the flat-earthers they are.

2. Accept public embarrassment as your birthright. Don’t get comfortable. Stay hungry. It’s better to play with strangers and become friends over time than to play with friends and lose them to the music.

3. Record everything and listen back to everything.

-John Fell Ryan, Excepter, NYC 03-03-10

Buy 'Presidence' in the UK on 15th March or pre-order from a friendly local record shop, now.

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