I once described Cryptacize's debut album Dig That Treasure as sounding like pop/rock as personified by a slinky: a bit aloof, falling down in a progressive rhythm at its own pace or at an acceleration (or velocity) determined by some other invisible force. Words like “clankety, sparse, jittery” bounded up in my description – but there was also an undeniable dreaminess, the kind found often in brazenly cheesy Broadway revivalism, yet simultaneously endearing with an ear-bending weirdness. It would figure, since the quartet is spearheaded by the classically trained, theatre-friendly Nedelle Torrissi (singer/songwriter and dabbler in ornate, delicate folk sensibilities) and the inventive riff deconstructionist Chris Cohen (a true finder of beauty in noise and former guitarist from Deerfhoof's prime Milk Man-era). Their 2008 debut was recorded before they started playing live; hence, the duo, with drummer Michael Carreira, presented a unique, softly-stomped aerodynamic style that just barely fit into rock clubs (but would have felt better in idyllic new age coffee joints). Mythomania, 2009's follow-up, adds a thicker sound, with more intricate instrumentation that has required the addition of a bass player, Aaron Olsen.
Here, Chris Cohen chats with TMT about pissing off his reactionary neighbor, songs for off-Broadway stages, and pitches for a potential slot on a Spielberg soundtrack.
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One of Dig That Treasure's and, to an extent, Mythomania's defining characteristics is their sparse or skeletal song-structures (or a minimalist approach). Two guitars and a modest drum kit splotching together notes, giving the listener just enough water for their ears to perk up and bloom, their head to barely bop, their toe to tap to invisible beats…
Nothing interests me in sparseness anymore than fullness. I think that was just one answer to the ongoing problem of how you want to structure your music. It seemed to me like that was just natural for us. For Dig That Treasure, I think our M.O. was always to just do what's necessary and not bury ideas – we're not into tons of window-dressing obviously. Dig That Treasure has a lot less sound, but for us both albums have just enough and no more sound than is just right to our ears. It seemed like since we didn't have our songs written before we started recording Mythomoania, it would have seemed weird to just stop it, like, okay just do a guitar track and a drum track and a vocal track and stop. Unless those pieces were totally fulfilling on their own.
Right then – can you talk about the veritable ‘beef up' in instrumentation on Mythomania?
Yeah. We made Mythomania without [Olson], and when we finished it, we hadn't really decided that we were gonna add somebody, but we realized we had to. The songs themselves, they have a couple layers to them. So, having the other person in the band has kind of changed a lot for how we play. We switch a lot of parts, we don't play exactly the same parts on the same instruments all the time. Over the course of a year, as we're playing a certain song, we'll try out a lot of different arrangements, so we're still finding arrangements that will work. We're still doing that with our older material too. We didn't play any bass on Dig That Treasure because we kinda already made up the music…to play live. So we just have basically documented what we did, what we were already doing, and then Mythomania -- we hadn't really been playing the songs live yet, so we sort of created a different kind of music and then tried to create the live band around that...
I'm wondering, then, how touring after Treasure effected writing for Myth…
It did have a big effect. I think that when we made Dig That Treasure, we weren't necessarily thinking about playing in rock clubs. We probably should have guessed that was where we would end up. But, we actually were just making the music that was appropriate to, probably, more the way we practiced – which is just in our [Oakland] house [with Torrissi]. When we would practice, we had to practice so quiet. It was ridiculous. We had this neighbor downstairs, she would just come up and bang down our door, like furious with us, if we were even above the volume of a TV set. We had to practice really quiet. So, we went around touring and playing in these rock clubs, we started to realize that what we were doing maybe isn't going to suit our purposes in the future so much. This new batch of songs, I think, definitely came from some lessons learned playing in clubs. And also feedback from a lot of people, they want to hear songs with continuous beats and that was something that we had to consciously... I don't know, we just had to make a different kind of music. It's not like we prefer one over the other, it was like, ‘huh – that's cool, let's have some beats.' Obviously, not the most revolutionary idea; that's what every other band in the world does. We just wanted to communicate to the people that we are performing in front of…
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"I think that when we made Dig That Treasure, we weren't necessarily thinking about playing in rock clubs. We probably should have guessed that was where we would end up."
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But, sparseness of sound, the aesthetic – did that ever trump lyrics for you? I'm wondering about lyrical importance: Myth is filled with a searching montage, escapism, finding one's place, finding other people, other places…
We come from really different backgrounds. Nedelle's family, both of her parents were Catholic. Her dad was a priest and her mom was a nun; they met after both of them had left the church, but... her background is, I think very not-religious but spiritual I guess. And my parents are like old hippies; they learned transcendental meditation, they went to India, they brought me and my sister up with kind of a little bit more of a hippie Eastern philosophy-type thing. So, Nedelle and I, when we first got to know each other, I found myself in a little bit of a spiritual quandary. Nedelle, we had really different beliefs, neither of us are believers. This isn't something that, I don't know, maybe it's weird to talk about, but our label [Asthmatic Kitty] is run by people who are believers [Christians], and I felt like there was something that we could… some of these spiritual topics interested me and I knew [these topics] already interested Nedelle. I don't believe that the universe is run by a being, like some old man with a beard, but I do consider myself a spiritual person in some ways. I never even thought about this stuff that much; my parents were just not very dogmatic people. Nedelle was asking me, what do you believe? When we got to know each other some philosophical side came out of me that I think was already there for Nedelle in her music, and together that's just what we tend to write songs about so far...
The eerie/dreamy “Broadway” vibe is often noted by critics and listeners…
Nedelle is super-into Broadway stuff and I just dabble in it a little bit. I really like West Side Story; that's what we bonded over. Nedelle did a lot of musical theatre when she was growing up, and how she sings [isn't] like the contemporary style. Her training as a singer was in jazz and musical theater; she actually annunciates words and is much more melodic than maybe has been the trend in recent music. I just think her style is a bit old-fashioned, which I really love and I think that's maybe the Broadway thing that people are commenting on. My dad was a big show-tunes buff. When he was in college, he was a composition major, and as a student he wrote this musical with his friends, it was called Dig That Treasure, which is where we got the title.
My favorite song right now is “Galvanize.” Talk about a Broadway-vibe, I can almost picture Nedelle in some twinkly gown, under blue lights, over this synth, with this solemn apt first-act closer...
When we were doing [“Galvanize”], I was thinking... I was hoping that it would be in like a Steven Spielberg movie or something. So, I don't know if Steven Spielberg reads this interview... he can take that song
Going into movies, or anything else? What influences you outside of music?
I dunno, that's a good question. I never really thought about it. We're super music nerdy. I think we probably don't get outside of music for influences enough. I really like reading about science and nature and stuff. I like reading about fractals and stuff like that...and the fourth dimension.
And... I dunno its hard to write songs about science, but...
Unless your Thomas Dolby…
Yeah, exactly. I picked up this book at a flea market called The Fourth Dimension [by Rudy Rucker], and that just blew my mind. Some of the songs on Mythomania are inspired by those types of geometrical, philosophical books.
Can you expose the secret formula – of how you make disparate, potentially clashing musical elements to coalesce in your sound? Like on “What You Can't See Is,” this hurried, running drum beat over a swaying, slow vocal melody…
Well, this is probably going to disappoint you, but neither of those things probably would've occurred to us as being seemingly wrong to do. I think that we usually are almost overly analytical about our music at times, the things that your mentioning I think that we just didn't know otherwise, which hopefully will just remain blissfully ignorant to things like that and hopefully it'll work out. I'm sure sometimes they don't work out too.
What's next for Cryptacize?
We're really excited that we have a couple tours coming up. We're going to Europe first and then we do a U.S. tour in June. Going back to the musical thing, Nedelle was recently in this musical that our friend Nick wrote, and that's gonna be performed again this summer. I play in the pit band; I'm not really part of the play itself, but we're excited about that. Cryptacize and the musical will both be happening at What The Heck Fest in Anacortes Washington. It's definitely inspired by golden-age Broadway musicals. It's super corny, but I love it. Nedelle's a character; it's about these three women who work in a prison and these three inmates, and they fall in love and there's various hijinks. It's really funny.
[Photo: John Ringhofer]
