Interview: Randall Dunn on Producing Marissa Nadler, Eyvind Kang and Master Musicians Of Bukkake

For the past decade, Seattle resident Randall Dunn has engineered and produced some of the most adventurous music to lurch out of rock’s murkier corners, from the metallic drone of Sunn O))) to the striking minimalism of Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi. He’s also founded the Pacific Northwest’s own mystick arkestra, Master Musicians Of Bukkake, with members of Earth, Grails and Asva.

In addition to an already lengthy list of production and engineering credits, Randall Dunn was instrumental in the creation of two of 2013’s most impressive albums. Master Musicians Of Bukkake’s Far West was a panoramic survey of America’s West Coast with a sprawling sound palette to match. Midday Veil’s The Current, meanwhile, administered a combined shot of adrenalin and ingenuity to psychedelic rock. Both bear the Dunn signature of depth and texture – they’re virtual worlds to get deliriously lost in.

“Randall has such effortless mastery of the studio environment and the sonic field,” enthuses Midday Veil co-founder David Golightly. “He’s able to sculpt really specific sonic relationships between the parts so that this totality emerges that is much greater than the sum of the parts. I feel like in many ways the sound emerges from the working relationship he has with the musicians in the group – he’s able to get sounds out of people that really push things to the next level.”

The early months of 2014 have already seen the release of avant-folk artist Marissa Nadler’s July, and black metal duo Wolves In The Throne Room’s upcoming Celestite promises a radical re-envisioning of their sound, closer to Vangelis than Mayhem. Later this year, we’ll see a quadrophonic companion album to Master Musicians’ Far West and a collaborative album with Oren Ambarchi and Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley entitled Shade Themes from Kairos.

How did you end up on this career path?

I’ve always been interested in music, since I was really young. But the thing that really started it was when I moved to Seattle [from Michigan]. I came out here to do sound for film because I was always really interested in either film soundtracks or the actual foley. Like in a David Lynch film, you know how loud it is? The secondary sound and stuff. So, I’d developed this preoccupation with sound in general, related to imagery in films. I came out to do that, and then got kinda wrapped up in the music scene here. Which was pretty incredible at the time. That was in the early ’90s.

I met all of these amazing musicians, jazz musicians mostly, through the school that I was going to [the Art Institute of Seattle] and started doing sessions ‘cause I ended up learning really fast on all the equipment. So I started to record people for free when I liked their music. That just kind of kept going and the next thing you know I’m doing whole records, getting an inkling for producing and working with artists in a more direct, collaborative way, and somehow it’s turned into a job. [laughs]

Do you remember the first session you worked on?

I can remember the first session that I remember. [laughs] It’s a strange one because it actually changed the course of my life in so many ways. There’s a guy named Wayne Horvitz who was the keyboard player in Naked City with John Zorn. He lives here in Seattle and I remember calling him up. The gall of me, I looked him up in the phone book actually. I’d just moved here, I was so young and such a huge Naked City fan. So I said, “Hey, I’m working at this school and we get free studio time,” and he was like, “Sure, that sounds great.”

He was a little freaked out that I had his number. But he called me closer to the session and told me, “Well, I can’t use this studio time, but I think my friend Eyvind could probably use some help with something. You should call him.” So I met Eyvind Kang and did a session with him, and it was this sort of Albert Ayler/Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time-sounding band that was really super cool. The rest of that has been this long friendship with him. I’ve learned so much from him and have met all these musicians as a result.

What factors influence your decision to work with a particular artist or group?

That’s a good question. There’s something I read when I was younger that [Brian] Eno said, that he tries to find a space in the music and then inhabit it. Like, he looks at things from the inside out. So when people send me music and they want me to produce rather than engineer – which is a very different job, most of the time these days I’m producing and engineering – I like for people to send the roughest demos possible rather than more elaborate ones. And I try to see if it’s music that I – or my aesthetics – can work with. Like, with their vision, and the end goal. I just try to get a feeling of, “Do I enjoy this?”

And then the people themselves are a really big thing for me. I like to talk to the people about what they’re doing conceptually and get to the bottom of things, find out what’s worked for them on past recordings and what hasn’t. Get an idea of what they wanna do, or what they wanted to do that they haven’t been able to do, because either someone didn’t know how to do it or it’s just different aesthetics. Producers all hear differently, so you could have six songs recorded by six different people and they would sound totally different. So I just try to find people that you can spend ten days with in a small room, still enjoy each other’s music and company, and be collaborative.

What are the ideal conditions for a recording session?

Well, the studio where I work at in Seattle, Avast, is really amazing, I’ve been there for three years now. It’s a real incubator for being creative and working fluidly and things sounding great. I love working there. They have the gear that I find helpful for what I do. A lot of old plate reverbs and vintage equipment. So that’s one thing. I think trying to go to rehearsals is really helpful for me, trying to be in a room with people and see how they’re making music. That’s so informative and a step that a lot of younger producers and engineers just don’t even bother with.

Then I try to think of a way to set it up in the studio so that the music is fluid and the emphasis is on people creating together in a room, rather than trying to create too much of an artificial environment that later ends up sounding clinical or what we would call digital. I’m really lucky, when I started learning I grew up on the cusp of things switching to solely digital, so I learned from a lot of what I would consider old school producers who were still engaged in analogue equipment and the process of making an analogue record. Which is highly different than the sort of idiosyncratic sound sculptures people make these days, when they’re one person with layers.

Both are amazing but it’s kind of nice to get people out of that zone and to this older way of making records, which isn’t even that old. People in the room, full tape-to-tape. I’m finding more and more that I’m going back to this. There’s no Pro Tools, no computers involved. The music resonates in a much, much different way, and the attentiveness of the people creating it is much higher as well. So as far as conditions, more and more, those kind of factors are what I’m trying to implement in the sessions.

You produced Marissa Nadler’s July, an intense, atmospheric and cinematic album. What were the sessions like?

That record was pretty fun. She’s an incredible singer. I attribute most of why that record is so amazing – and the atmosphere is so heavy – to her. The songs that she came in with resonated with me in a very deep way, I could understand the sort of stories she was talking about, the experience, so we related very heavily on that. And I think it created a kind of mutual trust.

Her voice is pretty otherworldly. We were talking about doing the vocals and the guitars separate, and I was like, “We should try to do as many of these as possible as one take and then build around it, increase this thing that revolves around your guitar and voice.” So everything just happened really organically. Going into it when I heard the demos, I was like, “Oh yeah, Eyvind can do something here,” this and that. It all just kind of happened. It wasn’t very stressful at all. And her aesthetics and mine as far as the mix were just like, we didn’t even have to talk. I think the most stressful thing was, “What are we gonna eat today for lunch?”

You worked on Midday Veil’s The Current. They’re a unique band who seem to be coming into their own at the moment. What drew you to the group?

I’ve known them in Seattle for years. We’ve all been kinda in the same scene. David [Golightly, synths/piano] and Emily [Pothast, vocals/synth] are both really amazing, peculiar people. In a good way. [laughs] Both of them, the breadth of what they’re inspired by, conceptually, creatively and artistically, it doesn’t stop at music, it goes visual and in all these different ways, like mathematics for David, for example. These days, one thing I’m really into is an intersectionality of concepts. That’s always inspiring.

We were approaching it like we were making almost a proper ’70s recording – which I feel a lot of people are trying to do, but are just missing something. With this thought of, “Let’s set up a scenario where we have to do this with some of the limitations of that actual time period,” you end up creating a hybrid of modern and old.

Regarding the “intersectionality of concepts” you mention, do your philosophical interests inform and influence what you do in the studio?

I think my study of Buddhism and psychology, for sure, that’s something I can’t remove from my consciousness. That’s something that intersects all the time. Like non-attachment, a sense of “Let’s rearrange the song” or “Let’s not be attached to the sound.” I try to look at things in a way that’s fluid and changing, because that’s what music is. It’s kind of like trying to learn the ineffable, it’s hard to explain.

These days I’m really trying not to make statements that are solid, or can be taken as solid, when I’m making a record. I can say, “I think this is like this and this is why” and I can have that opinion, but I’m trying to be more open. “Well, that’s my opinion, but we can look at it from another angle or a different way.” You can see the music or hear the music in a different way all the time, while you’re creating it. Instead of it just being an execution or an assembly line of ideas. It can be this thing that becomes something greater than the artists knew, or even the music had thought it was.

Working with someone like Emily from Midday Veil or Eyvind – Faith Coloccia from Mammifer is another really great example – you can get into these conversations about traditionalism or metaphysics or feminism, that I find to be really incredible. Something I’m becoming more conscious of is gender in the studio. When you’re in my position as a male producer, being aware of what that position is, who you’re working with and those connotations. It’s a male-dominated field, unfortunately. It just is that way. So I’m really thinking about, this next year, trying to study what that means and educate myself more about that.

Also I’ve had a pretty intense couple of years of learning more about feminism and things related to that. That’s something I’m really interested in, in the studio, as I work with more women. The thought process and what I’ve also encountered talking to women artists and how they feel working in the studio with men. None of it’s negative, it’s all very positive, but I don’t think it’s necessarily always thought about or talked about. I feel really blessed to have known many amazing women artists who have radicalised my thoughts about that.

What tends to be forgotten is that a big part of the producer’s role is working with people.

Totally. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the most important aspect. You can’t dictate process. You can’t dictate aesthetics. You also have no control over someone changing their mind when you’re in a session. But what you can do is be aware of the engagement and behaviour and how you’re contributing as a producer. So you can make all of those things easier and fluid and you can help with the artist to make the environment better for creativity. You can make an environment that’s about much more than just, like, “We’re making this record.”

I think a lot of young engineers start out thinking it’s more about how fast you are on Pro Tools, how quickly you can set up drums, how your drums sound. That’s the biggest one: Engineers tend to fetishise their drum sounds. But nobody ever talks about the psychological aspects of making records. I think the environment in which you do something is just as important as how you do it or what you choose to do it with.

Do you feel that the role of the producer – specifically at the rock end of the spectrum – has become devalued over the past couple of decades?

Sure, sure. Well, I think in all categories. It’s not that the producer has been undervalued, it’s that people don’t know what it is. They don’t know why they would need someone like that. They think that because you can represent something that you did musically on a screen with a picture, a soundwave – that somehow that equates to what I or another engineer does, and it’s just not that simple. So I think a lot of people, because they can create music in their home or think that they don’t need one, they think that a producer is meddling. Or just not really needed.

And unfortunately I hear some of those records and I think the opposite. [laughs] That somebody should have censored them or helped them. Or just made decisions with sounds. I mean, Billy Anderson or Eno, these people who have been making records for 20, 30 years, you can’t quantify their knowledge of making records. It’s different. Why you would choose a microphone, why you would choose a compressor, why you would put somebody in a dead room. The emotive aspect of the recording is directly related in a syncretic way to how they’re hearing the music, and the choices you make as an engineer should back up everything that the record’s trying to say emotionally. It takes anyone a very long time to get the colour right, and you don’t always get it right either. I just think there’s an expertise there and an artisanship, so to speak, that is lacking in a lot of modern music.

And I hear a lot of modern music just sound more like “Okay, what reverb patch is everyone using this year? Oh, that one? Okay I’m gonna use that one.” Everyone’s trying to sound similar to everyone else. Or to do things that are like everyone else. So the idioms of music production fly through faster. You just hear these brackets every two years of “What sounds cool now?” I’m just obsessed with people like Daniel Lanois, who make these timeless records. You might hear some dated stuff – they’re not all good – but they’re an experience. They’re pieces of art. I’ve just always been trying to do that. Or to continue that legacy with artists.

Contemporary rock music doesn’t tend to have the enveloping sonic warmth that it did in the 1970s.

It’s interesting. A large part of what I think is missing from modern music is approach. They created a different way of doing things. I’ll get tracks that I haven’t recorded to mix for people and they’re so edited and so sliced up… you would never hear that on an older record. You would hear, “Okay, let’s do this again.” There’ll be maybe three, four punches.

Now I don’t know if that is something that is more of a commentary on the performance or the ability of the musicians or if it’s on the producer and the way they decided to do things – you never know. But I hear that stuff all the time in music, and it just sounds like somebody trying to get it done. As fast as possible. We all remember when Photoshop came out and how annoying it was to see that stuff everywhere. Like, the same 25 manipulations of a photo. And for me, when I hear Pro Tools records, it’s the same thing. Everybody’s using the same bright yellow and brown, trying to paint different pictures. I think there’s several media of art that are suffering. People just take the synthetic thing and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s great.” But then there’s the real thing and they’re, “That’s the same.” No, y’know?

Are you happy with the balance you’ve struck between production work and your own music?

I think Master Musicians Of Bukkake is definitely a way to escape how I make music in the studio when I’m doing records for people. It’s kind of like a lab for me. I tend to try things that are ridiculously creative and way too ambitious and frustrate the people around me. [laughs] Like the new record we’re going to release is quadrophonic and you can play it at the same time as Far West. It completely syncs up. That was just basically like, “Okay, technically and artistically, what can we do with this?” And that was the answer. You’d never do that with certain records, to think deconstructively like that.

So as a musician, I guess I definitely think as an arranger in the studio. I learned a lot of that from Eyvind, working with him on his music or in different capacities. You have to think several steps ahead as a musician – tuning, performance, rhythm – you have to think about all these layers of how sounds work. I think a lot of times these days people think of things sort of vertically – like, “Oh yeah, we’re just stacking things up” – and they don’t think of the horizon. Of things being behind things. Why does that thing have reverb? Why record that with the room sound, but not that? I think that’s a big thing I’ve been trying to work on, the perspective of sound within the stereo field. Because you have this still limited, primitive stereo field we’re working in, and have done since the ’50s. You have to create this world in that.