Interview: LA noise rockers HEALTH

One of the most exciting bands to emerge from the scene around Downtown L.A. DIY punk venue The Smell, HEALTH has had a strong sense of purpose from the very start. The quartet recorded their first album in the morning at the venue while it was empty, taking advantage of the space’s unique acoustics. Aiming for the loudest walls of sound, the most danceable remix tracks and the prettiest t-shirts around, they haven’t scaled down their ambitions since.

Their second album, Get Color was released in 2009, showcasing impressive musicianship, skilled songwriting and an unrelenting sense of urgency. Since then, the quartet have gone on to soundtrack the video game Max Payne 3 and – after a lengthy recording process – arrived at a new album, Death Magic. Released August 7, 2015, it takes their unique mix of stacked synths and electronic noise into more pop-leaning and darkly mysterious terrain.

In this excerpt from their recent RBMA Radio interview with Vivian Host, the quartet talks about noise, detesting the ride cymbal and accidentally hitting the brown note.

What did HEALTH first sound like?

Jake Duzsik, Singer/Guitarist

When Jupiter and I started playing music together, we were listening to a lot of post punk. Television, Gang of Four – very jangly, angular kind of guitar interplay. Then when John joined, we started trying to make it sound newer.

John Famiglietti, Bass

Well, when I met these guys, I was pretty obsessed with Ex Models, Liars, a lot of New York experimental bands. I really wanted to be in a noise band in LA, and play at The Smell.

Jake Duzsik

We didn’t have a direct road map, where we knew exactly what kind of band we wanted to be. We’ve kind of continually been evolving the entire time, rather than having our sound already figured out.

What was the thing from a technical or equipment perspective that you feel like was crucial in shaping the HEALTH sound?

John Famiglietti

We all put microphones into our guitar amps, just to make more feedback, and we just starting integrating that more and more.

Jake Duzsik

John bought an incredible amount of pedals. He had this huge pedal board. One day, we discovered that John actually had this huge range of really interesting sounds that we hadn’t heard before. That completely changed how we approached songs.

Benjamin Jared Miller, Drums

Also, these guys personally don’t like ride cymbals, so I had to think of what could go over there on the set. That became the trashy set-up thing.

Jake Duzsik

That’s true. It was a no-ride-cymbal zone.

What’s wrong with the ride cymbal?

Jake Duzsik

We were trying to go for a more minimal drum set up. We didn’t want a bunch of tuned rack toms and additional cymbals, because we were coming from that post-punk aesthetic, too. Which is more stripped down.

Jupiter Keyes, Guitar / Precussion

The ride cymbal sets off John’s jazz alarm.

Benjamin Jared Miller

If you really want to know what’s wrong with the ride cymbal, listen to Smashing Pumpkins. He’s a crazy good drummer, and then he’ll get on the ride cymbal.

John Famiglietti

With our extremely short amount of time before BJ, we had another drummer. It didn’t work. He was riding that ride the whole time. That’s where we developed such an aggressive policy.

Jake Duzsik

I was like, “Hey, could you not even play that ride cymbal at all?” He was like, “That’s like me asking you to take the fucking D string off your guitar.” I was like, “Well, okay, not really.” He didn’t really want to be in the band, though.

Was wanting to play at The Smell a crucial part of the early days of Health?

John Famiglietti

Yeah. I was in San Diego, and I would come up to go to shows at The Smell. It was like, “Ah man, we got to make a cool band. Break into the scene.” We couldn’t get a show there forever. We actually started at this place called Il Corral, which was a similar scene to The Smell. Shows there got really violent and really rowdy. We just started playing there every month. Like constantly. That’s where we built a fan base.

For those not familiar, can you explain what The Smell is?

Jake Duzsik

The Smell is essentially a DIY venue in downtown Los Angeles that’s been there now for over a decade. It’s very supportive to young bands. It’s all ages, kind of like this community space. It’s not run for profit. Shows are still five dollars. For us, and for a lot of bands starting, it’s like another support system for people who care about music where you don’t have to go do a pay-to-play thing in Hollywood or get a booking agent. It’s all run on its own steam.

Benjamin Jared Miller

There’s no alcohol there, too, so it’s really serious.

Jake Duzsik

That’s what has allowed it to remain open for so long. They are very rigorous about making sure that it’s a community space maintained for kids, so they can keep going there.

John Famiglietti

Our whole first album was us trying to write songs that would kill The Smell or destroy Il Corral.

How did you choose the name HEALTH?

Jake Duzsik

Like I said before, we were listening to a lot of post-punk, and I think we were really interested in the idea of a name like Television or Magazine, where it’s a common word that you see all the time. Originally I think we wanted to be called Medicine. It turned out there was already a shoegaze band from the ’90s called that. I was working at a doctor’s office at the time, and health and medicine are two words that you see often used together. Health is not a great name to say to someone, because it’s book-ended by two soft sounds, consonants. If it’s noisy at all, you’ll think they said “elf.” It’s also the worst possible name for Google. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot with that.

Do you guys make rules when you go into make a record?

Jake Duzsik

Not expressly. We don’t have a stone tablet. We are very decisive about what we feel fits the aesthetic. That’s always an evolving thing. Sometimes we try things that seem a little bit out of our comfort zone. Usually if something doesn’t fit, everyone kind of knows immediately.

John Famiglietti

Our goal was to not sound too much like other music. We tried to not be referential.

Jake Duzsik

Like if you have a guitar, it really shouldn’t sound like a guitar. We actually had rules on the first record. We did a lot of really, really ridiculous stuff. We had to make our own first record, because we didn’t have a label or any money. We were really obsessed with ’60s record production and Steve Albini. There were just certain things that we didn’t want to do, like artificial reverb. We said the only reverb that was going to be on the vocals was going to be from the room that we were in, which is actually a terrible idea. It gave the album a very unique sound. I think it was also because we literally didn’t know. We had to discover how to make the record.

John Famiglietti

Yeah, we had incredibly hardcore opinions about everything, but didn’t know how to do a lot of stuff. It was kind of insane.

Jake Duzsik

We were actually able to record it in The Smell for free, which was amazing.

Jupiter Keyes

We had to get up at five in the morning, and get there before any shows would be happen. Later on, it was a fucking miserable process. We’d load in all the gear at five in the morning and then work until like 8 PM or something.

John Famiglietti

No, it would only last until 4 PM, because the bar next door would start blasting reggaeton. You couldn’t record anything.

Jake Duzsik

You could do guitars, but no vocals. Anything that had sensitive mics. Actually looking back on it, we were out of our minds. We were working so hard on it. Also, that space is not pleasant to be in. We were working there during the summer. That was still a part of Skid Row at the time, so every morning there’d be a bum that had taken a shit on the door that you had to roll up. We had these padlocks, and one time some prankster bum took a big wad of shit and put it on the backside of the lock. When I went to unlock the door, it just got all over my hand.

It was like a storefront. You’d roll up this big metal door, but once that was open, there was no way to lock the double doors. The whole day we’d be in there, and totally insane people would just come in. We had the most ghetto security ever. We’d put an empty beer can on the door. If we heard the beer can hit the ground, we’d all be like, “Oh shit, there’s another crazy guy here.”

John Famiglietti

There was always rats in there, too. They were so huge, and they weren’t scared of you. They’d come at you, and you’d have to just jump out of the way.

Benjamin Jared Miller

The room was also very cavernous. Concrete, brick, that’s it.

Jake Duzsik

It’s like a 20+ foot high ceiling with exposed brick and a concrete floor. So if you hit a snare drum or play a guitar chord in there, it just rings out. We were writing music for those spaces. Some bands would come in and be like, “It sounds like shit in here.” Since we were doing all these tribal, heavy percussive songs that were pretty much atonal at that point, we were like, “What are you talking about? This room sounds awesome.”

Tell me about when Rockstar Games came calling for you to contribue to the Max Payne 3 soundtrack.

Jake Duzsik

That was very unexpected. We thought they probably wanted one song or something. Initially, they didn’t ask us to score an entire game. They already had a score. They wanted us to bolster parts of the game, because it’s a very intense and dark shooter – it’s a violent game. I think that the music supervisor had been listening to Get Color. He felt like the parts of the game that get more menacing or really intense would work well with our type of music. We started out trying to just aid the existing score, but we found that it didn’t really work with us adding to someone else’s music. We very ambitiously scored a whole level and sent it off. The response was really good, so little by little we started. After five months it was pretty clear we were doing the whole thing, and it was going to take a long time.

What was the most unusual part of that experience? I don’t really know how it works. You have to do all these different sounds and themes, and they layer on top of each other while you’re going through the game, right?

John Famiglietti

Yes. It’s interactive. It’s a program looping stems of layers of the music that have to be recombined to make more music. Someone may take five minutes to get to some part of the game, while someone might take an hour, so the music has to go forever and change with what’s happening.

Jupiter Keyes

The craziest thing is the sheer volume of music we had to make.

John Famiglietti

It was 15 levels.

Jupiter Keyes

And, within each level, there are six layers of music. Then, on top of that, we probably scored the game twice because there’s this whole process where you have to go through ten people to get the music approved.

John Famiglietti

You would slave all night, send it in the morning. And then Greg from accounting thinks it sounds lame.

Jake Duzsik

They would take it back and put it into the game, and replay it with testers. And then they’d come back and say, “I’m running around here, there’s twenty people trying to kill me. It needs to get more intense.” That’s the note: More intense. So you have to figure out what the hell that means. They’re obsessive about trying to make it as good as possible. They don’t really care about how much time it takes.

John Famiglietti

That was actually incredibly inspiring to see. When you’re at that level of power, they don’t have to fucking move for anybody. They’re like, “All right, we’re delaying the game. It’s not good enough.” It’s kind of awesome.

Did doing all this stuff for Max Payne 3 influence your new record?

Jake Duzsik

Absolutely. You can’t work on something for that long, and generate that amount of music, and not have it affect what you’re going to do next.

Jupiter Keyes

It opened us up in a lot of ways that we really needed a push. When you have to generate that much music, you have to let go of some of your preciousness. That was one of the big steps that we took. It also made us more comfortable with using computers in the writing process. That had a really big effect on Death Magic.

John Famiglietti

It’s crazy how many times Jake recorded the vocals.

Jake Duzsik

There were eight separate full-on sessions of more than one day doing the vocals. We’d make progress on a song, and then it’d be like, “I kind of think you’ve got to re-record the vocals.” I was like “Goddamn it!”

John Famiglietti

That day I told you had to re-record one song again, you had to leave the room. You knocked over a chair.

Jake Duzsik

Recording vocals isn’t fun. By the time we got to working with Lars [Stalfors], it was going pretty quick. Actually, at that point, the last re-recording was a relief. Because it was like, “These sound good.” It wasn’t like, “Hey, you re-recorded the vocals and they still don’t sound very good.”

Walk me through the process of making your new record.

Jake Duzsik

Originally, we were supposed to record it years ago at the same studio where we did the final mixdowns for Max Payne. That fell through, and we kind of freaked out. At that point, we were three years between records. By the time we got to five years, though, we were like “Who gives a shit? Take another year.” Finally, at a certain point, we realized we should stop taking people’s advice about working with old rock dudes. That’s how we started looking at producers that do hip hop and stuff like that. That was the turning point.

John Famiglietti

That was hard too. We tried to work with actual electronic producers because it was like, “Hey, we love how your stuff sounds.” A lot of those guys are not record producers, so they only know how to do their thing. It was trying to find a producer who understood the band, got the music and could bridge the gap. That’s how we ended up working with Andrew Dawson.

Jake Duzsik

We thought we’d get it done in a month. Then it was like... I don’t even know how much longer it was.

John Famiglietti

It was like a year.

Jake Duzsik

It was a long process. I’m fucking tired just thinking about it right now. By the time we got to the end, and we started working with Lars Stalfors, it clicked. We’ll make another record with him. We’ve developed a shorthand. It just took us a really long time to get there.

Jupiter Keyes

Just talking about the process of making Death Magic, I realize I think I have PTSD. I started to get a lot of anxiety as you went through the timeline of everything we went through.

What were the biggest things that you learned from working with Andrew and Lars?

John Famiglietti

Less is more. Concentrating on one thing at a time lets everything sound bigger.

Jake Duzsik

Letting go of sentimentality with relation to a certain part of a song. I think it’s very common for musicians to have a section of song that you wrote a long time ago and you are attached to. You might not know where the song is going awry or not really working but if you try something more than six times and it’s not working, it’s probably because the part isn’t good. You shouldn’t waste days trying to layer. Just cut it out and write a new thing. A big part of a producer’s value is not having that emotional relationship to the material. They’re listening to and thinking about it in a more objective way.

It’s so interesting to me how you guys went from playing noise shows and having a strict DIY mentality to now being perfectionists and saying stuff like “less is more.”

Jake Duzsik

It’s been a journey.

Tell me a funny story about touring with Nine Inch Nails.

John Famiglietti

We had never played in an arena before. You’d think it’d be so big, you can’t hear someone yell at you but you totally can. If someone hates you, you can see that guy looking right at you, clear as day.

Jake Duzsik

We were playing Jacksonville, Florida, and there was a really intense hick dude with a NASCAR hat and a handlebar mustache, yelling homophobic epithets at us. You’re like, “I can see that guy. He’s looking right at me.” This guy was flipping us the double bird, but with his arms all the way up. We had to play for 45 minutes. I’m watching this guy, and he did that without stopping for 45 minutes straight. Which is really hard to do! It’s like a stress pose.

John Famiglietti

One time we were opening for Nine Inch Nails, and we’re like two songs in, and this horrendous shit smell hit my face. Immediately, I was mad at the band. I’m like, “Which one of you shit their pants?”

Jake Duzsik

I was like, “Seriously? Second song in and someone ripped the worst fart that’s ever happened?”

John Famiglietti

And then there was a commotion in the crowd. We’re like, “What the hell is going on? Can they smell this? Is this fart so bad the crowd’s mad?” Then suddenly I see this poor girl, unconscious, being crowd surfed. She’s wearing daisy dukes, the brown spewing out.

Jake Duzsik

She’s just shitting down her bare legs.

John Famiglietti

My immediate thought was, “Yeah, we rocked so hard, she just fucking shat her pants!”

Jake Duzsik

You couldn’t not think, “Man, we must be really fucking rocking right now.”

Did you hit the brown note?

Jake Duzsik

That’s what we were all thinking. We’ve never repeated it. Well, I don’t know. No one’s come forward. We can do a tweet about that. Have you ever shit at one of our shows? Be honest. [laughter]

John Famiglietti

Actually I’m surprised I haven’t. It’s a fluke.

Jake Duzsik

We’ve all shit our pants on tour. Never on stage. But, yeah, you eat a lot of weird food, you’re drinking a lot, traveling. Those mishaps are bound to happen.