An interview that ran in TAPE OP: ROBERT POSS (inteview by Heather Mount)

I briefly met Robert Poss back in the fall of 1993 when Band of Susans performed in Bratislava at the U Club, an amazing underground bunker that had once been used as a bomb shelter by the local Slovak powers. I next caught up with him in the fall of 1996, at a Lincoln Center performance of works by Nicolas Collins and Alvin Lucier. My first impressions were that this was a guy both whip smart and off the wall. He skated saucily through life's mires, taking jovial punches at politics (sexual and otherwise), the state of music appreciation and depreciation, and the pitfalls of what he likes to call showbiz. A that time, Robert was threatening to leave music for a career with the U.S. Postal Service. (Glad he didn't make that choice!) It became clear that underneath the unpretentious, playful chat, this was a guy who really knew music. Getting to know Robert could not happen without also getting to know his music. Robert began playing electric bass as a young lad of 12 and soon drifted over to blues/rock guitar, continuing through college (at Wesleyan). He was in some blues bands early on, and later embraced the punk and post-punk aesthetic in bands like Tot Rocket and Western Eyes. He then cofounded Band of Susans, an influential art-rock/guitar wall band that cut its teeth in the mid '80s. Although outnumbered by splendiferous Susans in the band, Robert was the driving force of the guitar-writing, with other cofounder Susan Stenger sharing the singing, songwriting, and the all-over sound and fury of the band. Band of Susans developed quite a name for themselves, and put records out on such labels as Blast First, Rough Trade Germany and Restless. Disbanding due to basic life stuff, Susan and Robert continue to collaborate on projects both here in NYC and in England. Robert Poss' interest in recording goes way back into his teens growing up, and through the days with BoS. Gleaning techniques from various engineers with whom BoS worked during the '80s, Robert learned what he liked and what he didn't like. He produced all of Band of Susans releases except for their Peel Sessions. In 1995, he started acquiring gear for serious home recording. Since then, the obsession and fascination with recording has grown as has his studio and its potential; Robert has begun recording various indie bands (Nickel Hex, Combine, the Croutons, Skulpey, Tone), and recently teamed with ex-BoS member Page Hamilton (Helmet) to do a major label remix for the infamous Skeleton Key. Poss has been impressing audiences with his live solo shows. He is working on a variety of new material, embracing his own brand of electronica, fractured rock and densely textured guitar minimalism.

In 1996 I spent quite a bit of time in the Netherlands, working on solo guitar and electronics material in Amsterdam at the STEIM music think-tank, performing a few solo shows, working with Nicolas Collins, and also working in an ensemble with composer David Dramm. David, myself, and two wonderful Dutch percussionists had a residency in Utrecht, working on David's song cycle, "All Lit Up." I did the live electronic processing -- with distortion, resonant filters, various kinds of delays. I did things like put heavily gated contact mics on the vibes and hi hats, and run them through heavy distortion, or have them key-trigger gates on other instruments. I got a great deal of use out of my Peavey Spectrum Analog Filter. In the fall of 1996 I went to London and performed at the South Bank Centre as part of The Brood -- a group comprised of Susan Stenger (from Band of Susans), Justine Frischmann from Elastica, Sonic Boom from Spaceman Three, Robert Grey (Gotobed) from Wire, and me. We performed pieces by LaMonte Young, Phill Niblock and Rhys Chatham. Panasonic also performed; they're really fine. BoS did a cool show with them at the Knitting Factory in '95. The Aphex Twin, Bruce Gilbert (from Wire) and Caspar Brotzmann/F.M. Enheit were also on the bill. In 1996, Susan Stenger, Bruce Gilbert and I also performed in London and Manchester as a trio, so-called GilbertPossStenger. I had a solo show at Roulette in 1997, and did some record engineering/producing: Tone (for Dischord/Independent Project), Seth Josel (for O.O. Disk), local bands the Negatones, and Nickel Hex, another called Mold, and Skulpey. Several months ago I did a remix in my home studio of a Skeleton Key song with Page Hamilton. That was cool, because we ended up working with only 8 tracks out of a 48 (two slaved 2-inches), and I did things like run the percussion track through a Rat and a Dunlop tremelo pedal, and looping one measure of the bass guitar track on the hard drive and running it through two cascading digital delays -- a Korg SDD-2000 and the ultra wacky Ursa Major MSP-126 -- to make a rhythmic overlay. We did that remix on my Akai DR4d's. I guess I also worked a bit with composer Phill Niblock -- recording Jim O'Rourke and David First for him -- and performed his guitar piece a number of times. The rest of the time I've been getting my home studio together and doing day job work (I do location video sound for television, mostly for the BBC). The thing I'm just finally getting to now is recording some new material on my own. I've been in foreplay mode on that for almost three years, it seems. I just hope I won't hate myself in the morning.

You really seek the cutting edge in the equipment aspect of studio recording, obviously committed to constantly improving your studio's production capacity. As you have tried out tons of different models, what are some pieces of outboard effectry that you have found less satisfying than their reputation would have them seem?

Some of the real low budget stuff that is cheap, you expect it to be halfway decent, but it is absolute crap. I put the Alesis 3630 compressor in this category, as well as some of the current cheaper DBX stuff. Yuck! For under $200, you can go out and buy an RN1773 (the Really Nice Compressor) from a guy in Texas, I have two of them, and you get an astonishingly good piece of gear. There are times when the RNC sounds better on a given instrument or pair of tracks than my Joe Meek optical compressor, which is a unit that costs ten times as much. The AKG C3000 microphone has been a disappointment to me. I used it one night on my guitar amp in Germany in '95, and was very impressed. I bought one when they became available in the US and haven't ended up using it very much at all. I guess I should have known better, since I've never really liked the AKG 414, which is the mic that the C3000 is ostensibly patterned after. Now that they've cut its list price in half, the C3000 isn't such a bad deal, though.

At what point did you really dig in to furnishing your own equipped home studio?

I never really wanted to have a home studio, because I felt that I had been "spoiled" by working with all of the great gear at places like Baby Monster. I always wrote and demoed songs on four-track cassette, and loved the sound of it. In fact, I still think some of the four track demos have better guitar sounds in places than some of the BoS records we released. Maybe it has something to do with the in-line impedance transformers I used, and the input stages of the Tascam or Fostex. I loved to pack the level on. Meters be damned! It had long occurred to me that it would be wonderful to do stuff in my apartment that was spontaneous but a bit higher fidelity than the 4-track cassette stuff. In 1995, I started getting more interested in getting a home studio together. I bought two Akai DR4d's (stand alone hard drive machine) because I had heard such horror stories about ADAT transports. The first things that were done at the studio, that were released, were the last BoS tracks we ever recorded, two cuts for two Wire tribute CDs. Part of what made the studio possible was that I was given some fine equipment from my brother-in-law, who had decided to dismantle his own home multimedia studio. So I ended up with wonderful stuff I never could have afforded: a Bryston 4B power amp, two Westlake BBSM-6 monitors, a Lexicon PCM-70.... It snowballed from there, and I realized that my pathological equipment lust had a purpose. I could learn a lot by actually owning the gear because I would have time to experiment and really learn the engineering stuff that I had never had a chance to learn while we were paying by the hour.

What are some of the main things that you have learned in general about the recording process? What advice would you give to recordees, as they approach the notion of recording music in a studio?

A studio makes most musicians self-conscious. The easiest parts and riffs suddenly seem difficult, the grooves that were so effortlessly attained in rehearsal seem stiff and stilted. The problem is that in the studio, most people think too much and concentrate too hard. And there's time pressure and money pressure and a sense that the work is going to be permanent -- a statement of sorts. Ideally, one should book enough time so that there's time to get acclimated, to make mistakes, to fool around a little without losing focus. In my best recording situations, that nervousness and sense of expectation was channeled into an intensity, an urgency that meant that the performances were one of a kind. I seem to recall vodka and whiskey also playing a role here. I guess a certain amount of preparation is important, if you do music that requires such things. With BoS, basic parts had to be learned and perfected beforehand, because our sound relied on a great deal of precision. I would also spend a great deal of time in the session auditioning and choosing guitars, and various permutations of amps, speaker and mics. I was very hands-on when it came to mixing those BoS records; the engineer would usually leave the room for awhile and just let me do my thing, and then return and be horrified by how upfront the guitars were. Don't always settle for the speaker close-mic'ed with a Shure 57. Experiment, but always have a sonic goal in mind. Otherwise it can become aimless, self-indulgent and costly. I've always thought that live performances and studio recordings were ocmpletely different types of events. A gig is like a play. Making a record is like shooting a film. There's a level of artifice and manipulation permissible in a session that is analogous to the way a film narrative is structured through direction and editing. A play or concert on the other hand, exists in real time and has a whole different sort of aura. So, I've never been obsessed with things being "live" in the studio.

What has become of BoS recordings? Any thoughts on remixes?

I still have all of the the 2" masters. We've always owned our own publishing, and I think the rights to our recording have reverted or are in the process of reverting back to us. It's a little complicated, since we were on Restless in the US, Rough Trade Germany World Service in Europe, and Blast First in the UK. I sometimes think about dumping some 2" masters down to 16 tracks of ADAT (sacrificing some of the tracks, in other words) and doing some remixes in my apartment. It would be great fun, and I know so much more about engineering than I did when I did those records. On the other hand, the mixes on those records are very extreme, and when I go back and listen to them I find flaws, but I also marvel at how gutsy we were to have the guitars so loud. At the time, everyone seemed to be in a "guitar band," but most of those bands had very loud vocals and drums. We were truly guitar heavy, and we were involved with approaches to overtones and textures and drones that only became popular in the last few years. In the late '80s we used to talk to writers from Melody Maker and Spin about LaMonte Young and ALvin Lucier and Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad and they didn't know who the hell we were talking about.

You now play and record your own solo works, which generally involve multiple guitars, and amplifiers ranging in power from 1 to 200 watts -- your sound is a rich, loud swirl... how do you plan to record this stuff?

The core of my live sound is a signal chain that I devised early on, I guess in 1986 and 1987. You take a G&L SC-1 -- the world's finest guitar with the world's finest guitar pickup -- and run it through a Tube Screamer, a Rat, a DBX 463x noise gate, an original Yamaha SPX-90 (used primarily for gain stages) and then into a clean, high-powered Park or Marshall tube amp. With BoS live I would run a 100-watt non-master volume tube Park head and a 100-watt Marshall Dual Reverb head through the four twelves in my Marshall (or later Laney) speaker cab. Of course, the Park had to be green and the Marshall had to be purple. Since the cab was stereo, I could use one bottom with two heads. The Park took the processed signal, and the Marshall took the straight guitar signal. I would also usually run another small combo amp across the other side of the stage for stereo dispersion. The gain out of my system was so high, that even playing outside of the Roskilde festival in Denmark, I never ran the Park head volume more than about 2 out of 10. It all has to do with cascading gain stages, and being able to control feedback so that a shift in position will cause precise overtones to sound. I generally used MesaBoogie tubes in my amps, even though I hate the sound of their guitar amps generally. Of course now with my solo stuff, and playing in small clubs, I use multiple small amps -- Fender, Laney, Ampeg, Crate, Traynor -- and split the signal in various ways. I also make use of a Gibson ES-135 hollow body, a Yamaha hollow body with Gretsch Filtertron pickups, a Fender Stratocaster 12-string that I have in a bizarre tuning with metal koto-like bridges placed under the strings along the neck, and my other old standbys, two aluminum-bodied semi-hollow Tokai Talbo Blazing Fire guitars in various odd tunings I've devised. I use two Lexicon JamMans and a Boomerang for live looping. Of course BoS started back in 1986 with me using three old digital delays to do looping, so I'm pretty familiar with all that stuff. Playing in a band is great but it has all the blessings and curses of being in a cult. But after all the intensity of collaboration, I'm finding it liberating to be on my own just now. No band meetings, no arguments, no explanations. Just me and my big fat ego. I've also been getting back into pure electronic music which is something I've been involved with since the mid-1970s, using oscillators and filters and those sorts of things. I'd like to release a solo record or two, maybe something like BoS with a beat and something also purely electronic/noise.

We could do a whole interview based on the wonders of different kinds of mics, and mic techniques. Which of the mics that you use these days do you find to be high both in performance and versatility? What are your picks for vocals and snare?

Even though most engineers obsess over the snare, I generally just stick a 57 on it and vary the timbre by mic positioning and adjusting/tuning the snare itself. Then a whole range of stuff can be done with it in mixdown. For kick, the important thing is distance and placement, determined as always by educated guesses and refined by trial and error. Electro-Voice RE-20's and the standard Beyer or AKG kick mics tend to work well. For guitars, I use a wide variety of mics. I very much like the Audix D3. I like the SM-58 rather than the 57. I'm fond of the Sennheiser 441 (one of my favorite dynamic mics) and of course the Coles 4038, a mic that I fell in love with when I first used one in London in 1988. I like using the Langevin CR3A, sometimes placing it behind and above the speaker cabinet to get resonance and bass. I think omnidirectional dynamic mics are great, like the EV-635. And I've used Beyer ribbon mics (the M260) since 1989. I have a pair on semipermanent loan from Nicolas Collins and recently had them re-ribboned at Beyer. I have a few other old ribbon and dynamic mics kicing around as well.... And a few oddball condensers, though I can't afford the old classic ones. For vocals, almost anything will work. It depends on the situation, and what sort of timbre and response you're looking for. I'm partial to the Shure SM-7, the RE-20, the CR3A, the AudioTechnica C-87 MKII, and the 441.

The issue of tubes came up the other day, and you led me to check out out a cool book on the history of tubes and tube amplifiers called THE TUBE AMP BOOK, written by Aspen Pittman of Groove Tubes fame. What tubes do you use in your mics and amps?

I grew up in the era of monophonic sound and of tubes. When we would go to the record store, the records came in two flavors, stereo and mono. My earliest musical memories are of listening to music through a mono tube hi-fi set played through a 15-inch JBL D-130 speaker that my father had rigged for the living room using the basement staircase as a infinite reflex speaker cabinet; he cut a hole in the wall, in other words. A well-designed tube circuit with the proper transformers and plate voltages sounds fabulous. A well designed discrete Class A solid state circuit (like API) can sound just as good. Luckily the fad (which became a movement) for vintage and tube recording gear has meant that more companies are making tubes, and tube-based equipment. Some of the circuits sound terrible, but some sound just great. There's also some great solid state stuff out there. I love the EL-8 Distressor.

We were getting some buzz the other day, which occurred on the bass track of the recording that we were working on. You were quiet for a couple of minutes, they jumped up, started to wire up your Stro-Lion to sample the buzz, and to create a phase shift great enough to cancel most of the buzz. We were very impressed. What other noise reducing tricks have you found to work?

The Roland SN-550 and SN-770 do an amazing job on hum and hiss reduction in real time. They're very sophisticated, and somewhat expensive. The Stro-Lion n'hummer can sometimes work wonders by nulling the hum through adjustable phase cancellation in the sidechain. Downward expansion gates, like the 463x, can also work wonders. I never understand why so many guitarists settle for loud hum in the spaces between their playing. Gating is so simple, and something like the Behringer Intelligate, which can be made frequency selective, is quite fast, cheap, and simple to use. If it's done right, gating can be totally invisible and unobtrusive.

Tell us about that beautiful purple-knobbed Avalon monotrack processor....

I like the Avalon, Joe Meek, and API stuff that is currently being made quite a bit, and some of the TL Audio stuff (even if it's not purist tube stuff) can be useful. The Avalon VT-737 (which is a bit extravagant, I know) will probably hold its value for a long time. It is very well made, and very highly thought of. So, when I need to sell it, I'll get a fair amount of money. A lot of midrange equipment has virtually no resale value, so it often pays to buy very cheap or reasonably expensive stuff, and avoid the midrange stuff for the long haul. By the same token, I'm always on the lookout for old, cheap stuff made by companies like Altec. Of course, room mikes can still be squashed effectively with a $70 Alesis MicroLimiter, and I love doing perverse things like using an old multiband passive architectural EQ made by Altec to process bass guitar, or using dirty White 4001 room EQ's -- highly resonant -- on kick and snare. I love the response and ballistics of old VU meters, and classic old equipment just looks so fine. It instills confidence even when it's broken. Of course, as we all know, the most important thing in audio is how the equipment looks. The rest is easy.

One of the finest (and LOUDEST) bands ever to emerge from the NYC "artrock" scene, the Band of Susans came together in 1986 with Robert Poss on guitar, Ron Spitzer on drums, and the three Susans (Stenger, Lyall, and Tallman, on bass and guitars) -- and proceeded to reinvent the entire concept of sound on sound recording. Robert Poss has played with Rhys Chatham's guitar orchestra and Susan Stenger, a classically-trained flutist, was a regular fixture on the NYC avant-garde scene before joining the band, playing with the likes of John Cage and other respected avant figures. From their original Trace Elements ep BLESSING AND CURSE to their latest Restless release HERE COMES SUCCESS, regardless of numerous lineup changes (including, at one point, current Helmet guitarist Page Hamilton), they have remained firmly devoted to exploring the endless rhythmic possibilities of interlocking guitars set on overdrive. Their sound has evolved from minimalistic riffing (at a time when, at the band's formation, several of the members had actually never played guitars before) to highly complex tracks resembling cathedrals of sheer excessive sound, and still they continue to move forward. Guitarist Robert Poss tells us all about it:

LIKE WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS:
QUESTIONS WITHIN QUESTIONS FOR THE BAND OF SUSANS

DA: How did the auditions from hell go (for new players to head out on tour)? Who's in the lineup now?

RP: We actually succeeded in getting two new players through word-of-mouth and did not have to resort to a Village Voice ad and the usual parade of fumbling sociopaths. Kelly Burns will be playing drums on tour (in for Ron Spitzer), and Jason Braun will be playing guitar (in for Mark Lonergan). Mark and Ron played on HERE COMES SUCCESS by the way.

DA: Are you and Susan the only two original members at this point?

RP: The original band had me, Ron Spitzer, Susan Stenger along with Susan Lyall (now Jodie Foster's costume designer) and Susan Tallman (a writer now living in Amsterdam). So, in our touring lineup, the other veteran, Anne Husick, has been in the band since 1990.

DA: Speaking of getting new players, are you still in the habit of picking players who've never actually played guitar before?

RP: Actually, only Susans Lyall and Tallman were total novices when we formed the band. It's true, Susan Stenger learned how to play bass on the job as well. Anne Husick (despite some false reports) had been playing for quite some time prior to joining. Sometimes novice musicians are great; they don't have a whole host of bad habits and cliches to unlearn, and their approach to their instrument can often be inventive. (Like what they said about a Woody Allen character and the cello he played in a marching band: He had no sense of the instrument. He was BLOWING into it.)

DA: So what's up with new album? How has the BOS sound shifted this time?

RP: From what I've read, the songs on HCS are a bit longer, a bit more like we sound live, there s a bit more variety stylistically, and perhaps more definition in the production style. It s easier to see these things in retrospect. We did decide to not let radio play or convention govern song length at all this time. The result is that the average length of songs is around 7 minutes. A bunch of people have told us it s our best record yet, and that sounds fine to us.

DA: One thing i've always liked about BOS is that the band sounds ANGRY, but it's an icy, cerebral kind of rage that most people miss entirely. Is that intentional, or just a byproduct of the way you guys write/think?

RP: We re often angry or despondent or just plain gloomy, and lyrics to our songs and the way there are sung reflect that. People are finally starting to check out our lyrics more and they ve found some pretty odd stuff going on under that deep shag carpet of guitars.

DA: I know you and susan have been known to wander off and play one-off type things (like the performance with bagpipe/flutist Yoshi Wada a few years ago) -- are you still doing that kind of thing? Incidentally, did Susan ever actually follow through on picking up the bagpipes? :)

RP: We were going to use bagpipes on HCS, but never got around to it. Susan and I have continued doing other musical projects. Susan has long worked with composer Phill Niblock, and he recently recorded some of my guitar tones for one of his pieces. Susan and I did an odd sort of collage/remix on a limited edition CD (called DECONSTRUCT) that Blast First and The Wire magazine put out as part of a celebration of the Blast First label's 10th anniversary. In June I'm going back to Amsterdam to work with Nicolas Collins and on my own solo guitar and electronics stuff. The long-promised Poss/Stenger/Bruce Gilbert (from Wire the band) project will get done in 1995 I hope.

DA: So what kind of unusual projects have you been involved with lately outside of BOS?

RP: [see above]

DA: How are things going with your own label Trace Elements? Any new stuff?

RP: Trace Elements has been pretty dormant lately (except as the Provisional Information Wing of the B.O.S. Army) but I'm hoping to put out another Nicolas Collins CD at some point, and possibly some oddball solo thing of mine, time and money permitting.

DA: How's the WIRED FOR SOUND compilation doing overseas? I seem to remember there was an interesting concept behind the sequencing....

RP: WIRED FOR SOUND has just been released. The reviews so far have been great. People seem to like the way it's broken down -- one CD of Songs With Words and one Songs Without Words (i.e., instrumentals, mostly.) It's really pretty amazing to see so many of our songs collected in one place. It s a beautiful package, too.

DA: Is the music press finally starting to catch up with the band? it's always irritated me that a lot of newer bands (Helmet, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, etc. have been credited with originating a sound that the BOS was actually doing years before.

RP: MBV have been contemporaries of ours, and we played shows with them in Europe and in the U.S. in 1989. I did find it strange to see the artwork for LOVELESS (which came out several months AFTER THE WORD AND THE FLESH) looking so much like ours. I saw Page Hamilton [cw: currently of Helmet] today, and presented him with a copy of WIRED FOR SOUND. Of course Page is the first to admit that being in Band Of Susans rocked his world, and set him on the path to stardom. As far as getting credit for what we ve done, we're hoping we'll be rewarded in the afterlife.

DA: With the loud, hypnotic/trance-rock thing becoming more popular in the past couple of years with bands like MBV, Godflesh, etc., have the BOS started gaining a bigger audience? I can remember when it seemed like I was the only one outside of NYC who had heard of you, and now you seem to have at least achieved a certain level of "visibility"....

RP: The kind of stuff that we ve been doing since 1986 has become rather popular in the last few years. People thought our approach was odd and difficult when we first came on the scene. People's minds are much more open now, which is great. And when we mention Phill Niblock or LaMonte Young or Rhys Chatham in an interview, people now actually know who we re talking about sometimes.

DA: So what the plans for touring behind this one? Are you doing any videos this time?

RP: We re doing a short East Coast/Midwest tour in late March into April. In May we re going to do about 5 weeks in Europe and in August, we re going to England to be part of the Blast First 10th Anniversary shows with our ex- labelmates Sonic Youth, etc.

There is a new video that a filmmaker named Leah Singer made recently. It's for "The Last Temptation of Susan" (from VEIL). It's pretty cool. That may get sent around to various cable shows some time soon.

DA: Any big, specific plans for the band in the future, or do you intend to just keep doing what you're doing and see what happens?

RP: I would like to see my dream of imbedding subliminal advertising in aluminum siding come to fruition. I'm also hoping for peace on earth. As far as B.O.S. is concerned, we just keep plugged in and plug away.

DA: This has nothing do with anything (except personal curiosity), but you toured the UK at one point with the Throwing Muses -- what do you make of the unexpected success of Kristen Hersh's HIPS AND MAKERS? I'm just curious here....

RP: Well, it's no wonder in certain respects that dividing Throwing Muses into Belly and Kristen's unit causes each one to find their own partisan audience. Collaboration usually involves compromise. I really enjoyed touring with Throwing Muses (this was in 1989, with their original line-up). A lot of people actually got turned on to B.O.S. by that tour.

DA: And finally -- does the band still swear by those G&L guitars?

RP: Page told me today how much he loves the G&L SC-1 guitar I sold to him a few months ago. G&Ls are gifts from God. They are simply divine. The company is becoming more popular all the time. Even their current models are worth checking out, though I'm partial to the ones they made in the early 1980's. Leo Fender needs a postage stamp. Actually, he needs to be on ALL postage stamps.

An interview that ran in ALTERNATIVE PRESS: Band of Susans: ALMOST ALCHEMY

Thinner, better looking and more fashionable? Band of Susans would disagree on what constitutes success in music.

"My life is lived between the polarities of would-be cult leader and would-be cult member," says Band of Susans' guitarist and co-founder Robert Poss. "I'm not sure if I'm a sheep or shepherd. I know nothing of religion but there is a spiritual element to loud guitars and feedback."

Undetoured by lack of commercial success while former band members (in this case, Page Hamilton of Helmet) have gone on to sell half a million records, New York's Band of Susans pursue their music with a singleminded, almost Pentecostal fervor that has resulted in four albums and a handful of EPs and singles.

Taking a simple idea: a loud and noisy three-guitar frontline that relies on counterpoint, minimalism and stark melodicism placed over a precise rhythm section, Band of Susans create a blaring hypnotic trance that resembles the otherworldly feeling of prolonged sex.

"I don't separate the religious from the erotic," says co-founder, bassist, and deeply brown-eyed Susan Stenger. "Thinking about sex or music is equally erotic. Playing an E-chord over and over can be a powerful, spiritual, physical thing. You don't divide them into separate spheres. What our music gives us is a gut level, really neurotic experience. It's not cold composing."

With the new album VEIL on the Restless label, Band of Susans distills many strains and influences into their most satisfying release yet. Critics often carp on about the band's ties to avant-garde and minimalist composers (most of the band has worked with Rhys Chatham; Susan with Phill Niblock, Christian Wolff, and many times with the late John Cage) but that connection is largely cerebral. VEIL, like its previous Susan-tized efforts, is about hunkering, caustic, repetitive, noisy, brutal, mesmerized, melodic, Orwellian guitar domination.

As the trio of guitars -- Anne Husick, Mark Lonergan, and Poss -- take different positions within the mix of a song like "Pearls of Wisdom" from VEIL, overtones, and weird, unintended harmonies can be heard. The guitars rise like a prayer, swirling. No one solos per se, it's more like a momentary nervous cackling over the already buried vocals of Stenger or Poss. It's the blues, Iron Butterfly and Sonic Youth all rolled up into one.

"When a tune works well," says Poss over tonic water in the bar of the Knitting Factory, "it's almost like alchemy in the sense that we're taking simple parts and combing them into something complex and, we think, rich and beautiful. That's so different from the '70s retro, hair-swinging tradition of playing a big power chord and a big solo. It's a different aesthetic."

Poss, who came up with the three-guitar lineup, can trace his influences from early blues slingers through tenure with '70s cover bands to treasured if unprofitable downtown noise status. It's all full circle now.

"I was originally a serious blues guitarist," he says. "I can still play all those Albert King solos. I was into it in the '70s before it was retro. There was a very narcissistic, guitarist-as-athlete thing -- then punk totally blew that out of the water. You had Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols and the Clash and Johnny Thunders playing these very sparse, simple solos that mad more in Lightnin' Hopkins than Duane Allman. The less-is-more school is something I really embrace. We never wanted a band with three guitarists so we could have three people wanking off on their instruments."

Unlike many groups that change musical identities with the winds of fashion, Band of Susans have plotted a direct course through their eight-year career, veering slightly to add drone here or a little commercialism there. That's what makes a Band of Susans song like "Mood Swing" (from VEIL) so good. Stenger's bass is riveting and drummer Ron Spitzer supplies lock-step, unfunky support under the droning guitars while the melody (over Poss' Joe Strummerish vocals) recalls the Clash, the headiness of early Genesis or King Crimson and the dirty butt-rubbing of STICKY FINGERS-era Stones. Other songs, like "Following My Heart" and "Trouble Spot," sport Byrds-ish guitars or teetering Charlie Watts drum grooves. It's all subliminal to be sure, but these are people in their 30's, children of the '70s filtering their love of guitar chaos in the '90s.

"We've tried to build something without any influences," says Susan, as if that were possible. "Our approach to writing and the guitar is political. We do away with the old-fashioned hierarchy of lead guitar and rhythm guitar. There are three guitars but at various points all the rules change. We upset the definitions."

"Though we're commercial," adds Robert, "we're still uncompromising and we have a weird, singular approach to rock and roll. When I was 21, I was thinner, better-looking and more fashionable and I was playing more derivative music. It took me a long time to absorb influences then put them aside. What am I gonna do that's original?"

Stenger, talking as easily about third-stream minimalism and her love for the work of Jasper Johns, to her fascination with her Catholic upbringing ("What's interesting is the whole neurotic sexual stuff about St. Theresa and St. Sebastian fasting and going crazy, being pierced with arrows"), to her contempt for misogynist labeling, joins a coterie of women drawn to the electric bass.

"It's a really powerful and appealing instrument. I know people will check out what I look like before they listen to my bass playing, but I've never tried to be the frontperson. I'm always happy when a band doesn't have the 'rock chick' up front. I'm interested in gender integration. ROck music is the folk music of our generation, why should it belong to one gender?"

Stenger's presence in Band of Susans (originally there were three Susans, but now there is only one) from timid player and infrequent composer to full co-writer and solid purveyor of creative, wiry bass work is a testament to her talent. Her bass often takes the lead role now, the band's true power-drive while Spitzer seems content to dryly subdivide or accent the beat.

It's hard to know who's wiritng what but Poss is the more visceral of the two, usually locking himself up and tossing off a song in an inspired vision. Susan is admittedly more analytical.

"Spiritually, I've always been interested in music that cuts away the bullshit," she says. "I work with simple things that interest me. That applies to all my tastes. Jasper Johns is one of my favorite painters, the way he'll take one image and make something very colorful and resonant with it. One idea can be layered until it's very dense."

Dense and colorful are constants in Band of Susans' music. From their praised debut, BLESSING AND CURSE (Trace Elements/Blast First) to LOVE AGENDA with Page Hamilton passing through (Blast First/Restless), to THE WORD AND THE FLESH and the cleaner, poppier NOW (Restless) to VEIL, there is a continuity to their work. They strip away and burnish the original intentions.

"VEIL is the most developed of our records," says Stenger, and she's right. The songs are melodic yet give up nothing. And, after eight years of writing, recording and touring together, Band of Susans is a tightly wound, exacting live unit.

Will all this translate into some long-awaited monetary success and widespread public acceptance?

"We couldn't ask for more success musically," says Poss. "People confer marketing success with musical success. That's why everyone formed independents. Bands were successful but the music was full of crap. We feel successful because we've explored different areas, we've done records we're proud of and we've toured with artists we respect.

"Commercial success may correspond with musical success but it has more to do with if you have a good photo or if you've slept with the right person or went to the right party. It's great to have success without selling out."

-- Ken Micallef

An interview that ran in FLAGPOLE: Robert Poss Sets The Record Straight: BAND OF SUSANS UNVEILED

The Band of Susans formed in 1986 in New York City. Born amidst the cacophony of the city's noise rock scene, which was, at the time, buzzing or howling with artists like Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Live Skull and Pussy Galore, the Susans, like their peers, have been consistently involved in reflecting NYC's urban squeal in their music.

The Susans have just released their seventh work, VEIL, to much critical brouhaha, especially in the U.K., which makes sense as early BOS efforts like 1987's HOPE AGAINST HOPE found the band gazing intently at their shoes years before shoegazing would become a British pop must. Although all of the BOS releases are different (the NOW ep covers the Stones' "Paint It Black," while THE WORD AND THE FLESH LP takes a shot at Rhys Chatham's avant-garde, one-chord "Guitar Trio"), the thread that runs through and unifies all of the Band of Susans' work is the overwhelming squalor of three guitars grating against one another.

The Band of Susans was originally the brainchild of guitarist Robert Poss. I talked to him last week by phone. From his New York apartment, he waxed poetic/historic on the origin of his band, the nature of art, and his childhood misunderstandings about electrical appliances. Study what follows carefully: The Band of Susans will be in town August 7 at the Shoebox.

The Beginning "Band of Susans came along at what I thought was going to be the end of my musical career; I was pretty disenchanted with the music industry and everything else. The way BOS started out was essentially me trying to strip away all of my influences, all of my history in rock and roll, 'cause I'd played in a lot of bands -- nothing too exciting -- sort of Clash-oriented, kinda punk bands, and before that I'd played in blues bands....

"Band of Susans started as an attempt for me to... do what it is that I really like about playing rock and roll, the stuff having nothing to do with the business angle... it's sort of like a fairy tale because in a certain sense the band that was closest to my heart and had no, no commercial incentive, no preconceptions of being successful, has been by far the most successful thing I've ever been involved with.

"I just got a bunch of friends together -- amateurs, basically. Two of them had really never played guitar -- women, these Susans, these good friends of mine, that sort of wanted to do something different and experimental. Then Susan Stenger, who I'd known since I was a teenager, who was a pretty prominent flutist, playing all sorts of experimental avant-garde stuff, working with people like John Cage -- she sort of picked up the bass guitar. I mean it was a real old-fashioned kind of pick-up rockin' kinda thing."

The NY Scene: Myth and Fact "Yeah, it was all happening at the same time. When we were working in '86, I guess the Sonic Youth record that was current was SISTER. I know the guys in Live Skull, and we've worked with Rhys Chatham; so yeah, there were a bunch of people working -- not really influencing each other, or influenced by each other too much. You know, people might make that assumption, but it was just all of these people in New York sort of working on their own thing at the same time.

"The most striking and significant element in the evolution of Band of Susans is that when the band started, I was writing all of the material, I was doing all of the lead singing, and I produced the records. Now I produce the records, but both writing and lead singing are shared with Susan Stenger, the bass player. So now we have a whole other person's intellect, talent, brains and abilities as a musician involved in the writing and the singing, which is really significant. On that level, the band is less monolithic."

Evolution, Part II "We've totally maintained our focus. The set we played in London had a couple of songs from our very first record, as well as songs from our new record, and they all worked together. We have not made any grand stylistic changes; I think we've just gotten better -- a bit more diverse, a bit more confident. But we've never wanted to make the same two records back to back.

"It's hard coming up with new stuff; it's hard to keep everything fresh, but we manage to do it. We feel that even though we're on this lunatic fringe of the rock 'n roll world, we sort of feel limitless in certain ways."

The Question "Why?" "Personally, this is simply what I love to do. It's been a dream of mine to play in a rock band ever since I was a little kid -- we're talking... 1964. I was so young that I thought electric guitar you sort of plugged into the wall like an electric blender; I didn't realize there was an amplifier involved. I thought electric guitar was like an appliance.

"To answer your question: This is my life's work. I'm not gonna write the Great American Novel, and I'm probably not gonna deliver some nation from bondage. What I'm gonna do is make noisy guitar records with a bunch of people I like to work with.

"I guess the larger question is, 'Why am I driven to do something that is creative and artistic?' I guess it's because I'm a dysfunctional, emotionally troubled egomaniac."

Flagpole: I read a Lou Reed quote somewhere where he said (I think jokingly) that every time someone would play a blues riff in the Velvet Underground, he would fine them. With your background in playing in blues bands and more standard rock bands, do you find it kind of tough to deconstruct the guitar?

Robert Poss: "In a certain sense, what he's talking about is avoiding cliche. And Band of Susans sort of instinctively avoids what we think are cliches. There are noise rock cliches, and there are commercial rock cliches. We don't do really loud Neil Young songs with feedback, which is what a lot of bands do now. I'm not putting it down, I love that stuff, but it's not what we do."

The Band and the Blues "The blues thing for me is a very submerged influence. It's something I was doing in the '70s; I actually lived through the '70s. And I guess with the blues it's almost more of a philosophy. No one ever said about Muddy Waters, "Man that Muddy Waters plays the same fucking three chords, that same guitar slide riff.' If you really like blues you have to be into the subtleties of it. And in a certain sense the kind of music we play is almost like blues; it's very simple elements combined in new and different ways.

"The way a really good blues player doesn't just go through the motions -- a really good blues player remains immersed in the whole weird religious tribal emotional sexual complexities of the blues -- in a certain sense we have those feelings about our own music. It's hard to put into words."

-- Richard Fausset

"Band of Susans was born in the spirit of anti-technique," reminisces Susan Stenger, their bass player and sole surviving Susan. "Some of the people in the band couldn't even finger the guitar properly, but so what? We put their guitar in an open tuning so all they needed to do would be just to hit it. Technique is completely irrelevant."

"Sometimes," adds Robert Poss, lead guitarist and songwriter, "I think of us as a blues band. "Nobody said about Muddy Waters, 'Oh, he only played three chords.' There's something great about somebody working within their limitations. The musicians I admire are the ones who do one thing really well. To me, the others have less commitment and soul."

Band of Susans seem to have been around forever. Since 1986 the've been releasing records, usually every other year, initially for the seminal U.K. indie label Blast First, then for other labels. Though the lineup of the band has changed with virtually every release (Page Hamilton of Helmet was, for example, once a member), the five-piece have remained just that, a three-guitar, bass and drums rock and roll group.

Nor, really, has the approach, only that the songwriting has improved beyond measure. Which may at first seem odd, since many have written the group off as a fringe avant-gardist concern. But Band of Susans aren't progressive, they're AFFIRMATIVE. In an interview two years ago, at the time of the release of their previous album, THE WORD AND THE FLESH, Robert told me he saw no reason to suddenly switch tacks, no indeed, is there any. They're back with album number four, VEIL. This time around, it's beginning to seem as if someone's remembered them: "Oh, Band of Susans, weren't they on Blast First with Sonic Youth? They're playing tonight, let's go check them out." They're over in Europe to do press after what's probably been their most successful tour of the States yet, where they could even play the Spinal Tap-style barroom Friday night gigs and still get a whoop of response from entirely virgin audiences.

"If you put on HOPE AGAINST HOPE or LOVE AGENDA," says Robert, "it sounds current, and several people have said that to me. Some of the ideas we were exploring then are just starting to catch on now. We've noticed that our early records are starting to be recognized as classics or influential albums on some younger bands, who are forming bands with three guitars. And it makes us feel pretty good. We're still evolving. VEIL is the strongest record we've done to date, the one we're happiest with, and it may also start to make people go back and check out HOPE AGAINST HOPE and LOVE AGENDA."

"It does irritate me when a lot of the music press has a short memory," says Susan. "The same language in which they talked about us comes up about newer bands, almost exactly. Don't pretend it's new when it's not!"

"There seems to be always two roads to take," says Robert, "the default road, or the weird way to striking off on your own, which is what we did. Two years ago it seemed like every band sounded like Dinosaur Jr. meets someone else. That was the default mode."

LOVE AGENDA, which Robert flippantly describes as "in use by rat catchers to clear a room of rats and mice -- supposedly the high-pitched frequencies stun them for a while or something," was perhaps the best showcase of their material up until now. Blessed with a production sound that made the stree strobing guitars seem as if they were generating blinding, incandescent white light, its simple bass lines and chord progressions were reduced almost to the status of rhythms rather than melodies, Susan's and Robert's vocals almost fading into nothingness against the sheet-aluminum of the guitars. If it shares anything in common with VEIL, though, it's in the lyrics -- a stream-of-consciousness internal monologue that, because mixed down so low, read almost better as poetry than they did as the occasional verse of lyric coming through the mix. You're never able to catch more than the odd few phrases, yet the subject matter suits this approach almost perfectly, with songs evoking almost Cold War paranoia on THE WORD AND THE FLESH (like "Tilt": They've mined the road we're on"), full of references to roadblocks, safe houses, spies and fear, Band of Susans are a band that do, for once, deserve the epithet spies in our house of love. VEIL's songs continue in the same vein, partly, or, like "Following My Heart," become simple, unforced, quiet pop songs about love.

If at times their music seems like the dictionary of guitar effects and sounds that the ill-fated shoegazer movement must have consulted, Band of Susans' own lack of apathy have never been in doubt.

"There's always a certain amount of rage on our records, which I can't believe nobody's really noticed. Just certain songs that are to us seething with emotion and passion... it's totally there, but just not Las Vegas style."

"It's not necessary to scream to express rage," says Susan.

"And by the same token, it's not necessary to whisper to be intimate. We don't use the common cliches as singers."

If there's a song on VEIL that illustrates these dictums best, it's the single "Mood Swing."

"It's about rape and revenge," she explains. "It's the most literal narrative I've written lately. I suppose it was originally inspired by the story of a woman arrested in Florida after killing a series of men, and there was a reaction of complete outrage at the fact that a woman had killed some men, when it's the most mundane thing in the world for women to be killed by men."

"The culture doesn't even seem to take note anymore," chips in Robert.

"And I saw an interview with her, and she spoke about her life, how she'd been abused over and over and had finally cracked, and to me, it seemed totally justified and understandable how that could lead her to murder."

"It's not only about rape, but about the treatment of rape victims," says Robert, "how they're victimized by the courts and society."

"There's been some big profile rape cases over in the U.S., in the last two years -- Mike Tyson, William Kennedy Smith -- and also the case of a New Jersey [woman] first getting with a broomstick by high school students. She was mentally retarded as well. And in every single case, the defense pounced on the woman's sexual life and how she'd brought it on herself because of her lifestyle. It can get really depressing -- seeing how many things have changed since the '60s for women because of feminism, yet things are still no better."

"The fundamental attitudes are still medieval," says Robert, "on the overall level of sexual politics, attitudes are Neanderthal. It seems as if the agenda is to say you can't expect men to be civilized...."

"Because they have unharnessable, uncontrolled desires, " adds Susan. "That's the subtext. That's people's attitude towards it.... Camille Paglia totally glorifies this as something that is fabulous and the essence of masculinity. She's often put forward as a feminist, but I think she's incredibly reactionary. She's this academic that doesn't believe that date rape exists, and that it's the woman's fault for not recognizing the man's uncontrollable urges. And she doesn't know shit about music, that's another thing. She believes this Oliver Stone version of Jim Morrison and the Sixties, she's so eager to become famous, wants to be like the Madonna of academe.... But basically, she's like Reagan, you could put a quote from her about free enterprises next to one of Reagan's and there'd be no difference. Or put a quote about rape victims and it sounds exactly the same as the most reactionary misogynist.

"The middle verse of 'Mood Swing' is an almost exact paraphrae of what she said in SPIN about rape. And people actually call her a feminist. Even people like Courtney Love have been telling interviewers that she's reading Camille Paglia and Susan Faludi (author of BACKLASH, and Paglia's bete noire among contemporary feminists) like they belong together. She should be exposed for what she is."

It'd be easy to make out like Band of Susans were some kind of proto-Riot Grrl band (along with every other mixed-sex or all-female gorup ever in the history of rock, of course), what with Susan saying that they were formed in the spirit of enthusiasm rather than any muso technique. But unusually right now, they have far more praise than blame to direct towards the movement.

"One of our guitarists overheard this conversation where this guy was saying that I was basically a hot babe and the girl he was with was furious, saying how I was the sole reason she had picked up the bass guitar, like I was a role model for her," says Susan. "A lot of Riot Grrl is not news at all, but it's vital 'cos it's happening again."

"The spirit's essential," says Robert. "You need that once in a while, just to shake things up to make people more into it again."

"It'll be revolutionary," says Susan, "to get to the point where girls can play guitar and badly and with spirit and get credit for it. When guys play guitar badly it's punk or cool or deliberate. We always said we were fighting for the freedom for girls to be bad and get the credit for expressing yourself. No one says about a male band, 'Hey, pretty good for guys,' do they?"

Yet theirs is a feminism that's entirely compatible with the base roots of rock and roll -- in sex. Band of Susans make a superbly androgynous sound, music, I once said about them, you can fuck to. What's more, they're perfectly happy to admit it, saying they often find themselves thinking of it when playing, Robert once told by a girlfriend that the expressions he makes on stage are the same he makes in bed! Robert, to tell the truth, is a clown, cracking jokes when he's not replying to a serious question. "Hey," he says, "have you heard about the new heavy metal supergroup? Coverdale/Page Hamilton!"

They may not be as big as Helmet, but they can sure tell a mean joke.

-- Miles Lebedev