New York has magnificent eating available, both in restaurants and in the materials available to home cooks in the many specialty markets.
The only kind of restaurant I could imagine doing would be the extraordinarily snooty restaurant with three or four tables, and I would cook what I felt like cooking. And you could eat it or not.
I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it.
If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength.
I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse.
Many rock musicians are excellent cooks, I've found, and those that are prefer to eat their own cooking in the studio. I encourage this behavior as I also enjoy the benefits of fresh food.
Suicide was such a formative band for me, so influential in the development of my taste. They're one of those bands that operated in absolute isolation for so long that they developed a completely unique world view.
We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design.
Almost any decent cook will make food by eye and taste. Virtually all of my family cooked that way.
The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens.
In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.
I moved to Chicago in 1980 to go to college.
I don't think anyone has exhausted the range of sound possible in a conventional rock band, but people do become slaves to their own easiest techniques.
Find people who think like you and stick with them. Make only music you are passionate about. Work only with people you like and trust. Don't sign anything.
As a recording engineer - someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day - you see trends and fads run through the social organization of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school.
Shellac was asked to do a recreation of our first album, but we've always been a band that improvised our sets. That's critical to the way that we function on stage. Whatever the mood takes us on stage can vary from night to night with what you feel like playing.
You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look like an idiot. But when everyone is wearing them, it instantly makes them normal.
If I'm working as an engineer for another band, the responsibility for brilliance pretty much rests on their shoulders. I think I'm pretty good, but I'm not good enough to turn a trout into a sausage, or the other way around.
Harmonics are vibrations a fraction of the length of the vibrating string, which add higher-pitched and more complex content to the notes. With a dull instrument, the harmonics die out, but with a sustaining instrument, the harmonics continue to sound along with the fundamental note.
I have no problem with bands using participant financing schemes like Kickstarter and such. I've said many times that I think they're part of the new way bands and their audience interact and they can be a fantastic resource, enabling bands to do things essentially in cooperation with their audience. It's pretty amazing, actually.
