Imagine getting a crew of friends, going up to a cabin in the woods, ingesting a bunch of narcotics, and jamming out on an array of synths, guitars, and the occasional ripping saxophone. Unsurprisingly, what you and your friends would come up with would surely sound incredible in the moment, but cringe-worthy, embarrassing, and unlistenable upon later, sober assessments. When the Night Court crew went into that very situation in 2013, their respective experience in various groups, solo projects, and sax greatness produced a cohesive LP, titled Law & Order. Combining tight synth grooves, crunchy guitar swells, and pirated audio from police and local news, Law & Order is an unexpectedly deep concept record, despite the humorous origins of both the group’s name and the album’s title.
The crew, made up of nine musicians and friends who have played a big role in some of Minneapolis’s best music (Food Pyramid, Daughters Of The Sun, 555, and Dreamweapon), “recorded the entire album in one day – every song in one take – and with very little post-production,” and then brought the resulting album to the attention of Not Not Fun, who caught on to its brilliance and jumped at the chance to release it. Thanks to the power of email and Google Drive, I got five of the Night Court participants to provide a brief oral history of this intriguing record.
How did this trip/jam session come together?
Jim Pfeffer: A biannual pilgrimage to a place where we all make things happen. Namekagon, Chequamegon, Marengo, Garmisch, The Marsh Bar. These are all sacred places to us.
Michael Wethington: Initially the idea was to mount 4 Korg MS-20 synthesizers to a lakeside deck overlooking a transitional temperate-boreal forest ecoscape. Night court sessions were intended to occur past 1am, ideally during an active northern lights occurrence. Each individual session was intended to last for a pre-determined and uninterrupted period of time.
Chris Hontos: It became clear that the mosquitos were too heavy on the deck so we resumed the recording session in the main room. At that point we had gone through a week of being at the cabin, we’d recorded tons of new material for another project and we were totally fried from the mushrooms and long days in the sun. Then Cole, Bennett, and Jason arrived and it rekindled the fire, both spiritually and sonically.
Jason Edmonds: Bennett and Cole rode up with me to the cabin. I remember being so excited to get there that I got pulled over for speeding somewhere in backwoods Wisconsin. I never paid the ticket.
A vibe sort of immediately developed and we departed from the initial “night court” idea, which itself had nothing at all to do with Law & Order or justice system-based television shows. We just went with it because it was a fucking great idea and couldn’t stop laughing about it.
There’s a group photo on the page for FACT’s premiere of “Indictment,” but could you elaborate on the setting? Was everything done in that one room?
Chris Farstad: Yes. It’s a weird old 70s lake cottage built from the blood, sweat, and tears of cocaine-addled doctors and lawyers.
MW: Everything was composed in a single room setting. The photo was taken by our spiritual and cultural advisor, Doc Ryan.
JP: 90% of the album was recorded live in single takes, everything as you see it in the photo, in that one (large) cabin over a period of 24 hours. The rest consists of studio outtakes from a few months before the cabin sessions and minimal overdubbing completed a few months after the cabin sessions.
Can you tell me the origins of the “Night Court” theme?
JP: Absolute lawlessness, corruption touching every level of government, a struggle to restore justice and order but in reality no future but total blackness. Basically like the beginning of Robocop 2 where the junkie teenage mothers are shooting up in the street when a car runs a red light and plows through an old lady’s shopping cart full of cans and a guy runs up to help but robs her instead and then he gets beat up by some hookers outside a porno theatre who rob him to buy drugs but first they have to run away from the exploding gun shop that’s about to be robbed.
CF: Have you ever seen the show? It fucking sucks. We made our own.
Given the varied musical directions of your respective projects, how did you decide on the sonic theme of Law & Order?
JP: Everything that was thematic came together in the moment.
MW: It happened naturally after recording the first two or three tracks. A vibe sort of immediately developed and we departed from the initial “night court” idea, which itself had nothing at all to do with Law & Order or justice system-based television shows. We just went with it because it was a fucking great idea and couldn’t stop laughing about it.
JE: The relaxed atmosphere of being in a chill setting allowed for the freedom of spontaneous expression without having this heavy pressure of expectations or a specific outcome. The details are hazy.
CF: Justice must be done. Humanity is a crime – we are the culprit and persecutor at one and the same time.
We were totally fried from the mushrooms and long days in the sun. Then Cole, Bennett, and Jason arrived and it rekindled the fire, both spiritually and sonically.
What was the recording process like? Can you give an idea of how a song was put together?
MW: Collective exploratory improvisation.
JP: We didn’t ever sit down and figure out a song structure or anything, that isn’t really how we work. Once you have things all figured out the inspiration is already gone and it feels stale. Sure we might agree on a key or a basic chord structure but beyond that it’s really just a bunch of giggling idiots saying, “Let’s do a fight song, like in that magnet prison from Face/Off!!!!”
JE: Pure exploratory improvisation. I can never really tell who is making which sounds when we play music together.
CF: Jam on it. Take a break. Eat something. Have fun. Structure? What structure? Once it was clear that the energy was flowin’ we had to put the pedal to tha metal.
The album was recorded a couple of years ago. At what point did you revisit the material and realize its potential?
MW: Relatively soon afterwards.
JP: It was never really a question of revisiting it, the album was in the can a few years ago. It was clear there was something special in the serendipitous way everything came together so quickly. It was really a question of finding someone who would distribute something so weird and one-off.
CH: Seriously big ups to Britt B[rown] from NNF for seeing the potential in the project. He was actually as excited as we were about the music. Before he heard it we were like trying to vibe out who would even put it out and thought, does NBC have a record label?
Once the material was revisited, whose job was it to condense a weekend’s worth of jams into an album?
CH: Cole and Jim and myself worked with the recordings to make them what they are now. But condensing them wasn’t that hard. We actually had a couple tracks that were left off. One of which was a 165 BPM footwork-styled track that Farstad was really into for a minute. Needless to say it didn’t really fit the vibe.
JP: Again the editing and overdubbing was very minimal, saxophones and a few guitars. The only somewhat intensive thing for my part was finding and inserting speech and samples. The album came together in a very idiomatic way.
Before he [Britt Brown] heard it we were like trying to vibe out who would even put it out and thought, does NBC have a record label?
At times the audio clips throughout the album are humorous, while others are more sinister. When did you decide to include those in the record?
CH: Since the recording was made, the climate of the American legal system has been pushed dramatically and tragically to the center of national discourse. Whether it’s the ever growing prison population, the death penalty, corruption, police brutality [or] race relations, the situation is dire. I see Night Court as a reflection of these times inasmuch as it’s reflected through the lives of we who made it. But we don’t have everyday struggles with police or judges or wardens or whatever. Not like the people of Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, Oakland, NYC, Charleston and so many more. We have the deepest respect and empathy for those who suffer injustice. The album is an impressionistic account – not a testimony.
JP: I recall a conversation where we said we wanted the album to sound like a PBS-type crime and punishment documentary from the 80s that never got released; that it should be a record with no history of the musicians, only musical context, and we thought the inclusion of sampling would help support that ambiance and give it the feel of an accompaniment to film or video. We dubbed the masters to VHS and back to digital again for the same reason.
CF: Intuition and happenstance. You can’t place a chronological positioning on it, it just emerges. Check out Ilya Prigogine.
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