TreasureTunes.com interview with West Thordson of A Whisper in the Noise
March 23 2006
West Thordson is leader and frontman for Minnesota's bastardized orchestral rock band A Whisper in the Noise. We chatted with him at Hollywood's Knitting Factory after the first show of their tour as openers for Arab Strap. The tour will take them from LA to the East Coast during March and Arpil 2006. That is unless Arab Strap decides to run Thordson's Winnebago off the road for stealing all their whiskey.
Olivier Forget: How do you feel after the first night of your tour?
West Thordson: Great! We're playing with a band called His Name is Alive. They are really an amazing group I think. I like the guitar playing that they do, and they've been around for a long time. And then Arab Strap. Arab Strap reminds me of Guided by Voices blended with Mogwai, Scottish style with a lot of whiskey... which I am drinking right now as a result of Arab Strap. Any group from Glasgow is a cool group, but I'm a big fan of Mogwai.
You actually toured with Mogwai for a little bit?
Yeah for a little tiny bit because of Steve Albini.
How did you meet Steve Albini?
The drummer in Shellac, Todd Trainer is a good freind of mine. He'd be one of the people I'd go to Coffee with, or whatever.
So he's from your home area?
Yeah, from Minneapolis.
And you live in ...?
Right now I live in a town called Hanska in Minnesota which I enjoy immensely. I live in a town of 365 people, in my old elementary school. I amazingly live in a castle. Except it's an elementary school and a high school, but it's quite amazing I think.
I read on your new label's website that it is an abandoned elementary school which closed in the 90s, and the high school was actually closed in the 60s. That makes it sound really desolate...
It is! Well it's like, um, it's destroyed. Like the entire thing's been vandalized because nobody's lived in it. I got it because this guy from london named Mark Monroe purchased it for 17,000 dollars and he didn't really know what to do. He just thought: if you can buy a school for 17,000 dollars why not buy a school? It's like this gigantic building. And I asked Mark if I could live in it and I've been living in it for quite a few months now. I thought it was really cool that I went to the school. I guess you could say it's sad because the area that I grew up in was so depressingly desolate that they can't keep a school going. So I guess I could say that I grew up in a ghost town basically. But I really enjoy that. My girlfriend and I also rent an apartment in Harlem, NY so I go from that to the small town in the middle of nowhere. But I definitely prefer the small town in the middle of nowhere. It's where I like to be.
And it's killer jam-space right?
Oh! Entirely!
So now you've got As the Bluebird Sings coming out...
Yeah, that's probably the first A Whisper in the Noise record to come out.
You don't consider Through the Ides of March to be your first record?
Well it was music that I was trying to write but it wasn't really together or as cohesive as I would like it to be. We weren't a group that was going out and playing music live at that point. Right now we're a group that has written music and has played live. And now we consider ourselves a band that's making music. So As the Bluebird Sings is like our first statement as far as a band is concerned.
You did say in 2004 that the band was in training mode...
Yeah. It's no longer the case. At this point we're actually a group that's actually making music so we're good... and we're really terrible at the same time [laughs]. But I actually say that because it has the right sarcasm to it. At this point I've learned what making music is about. I am not taking it as seriously as I many times should perhaps, but I think we're understanding what making music is about. So at this point I feel comfortable saying that we're on the record. And anything that I say within the music that I've been saying is on the record but people have to understand a lot of it is very sarcastic.
You said that Through the Ides of March was an emotionally conceptual album. Do you have a one-phrase description of As the Bluebird Sings?
Actually as the Bluebird Sings is a really sarcsastic way of naming a record. I chose this cover off this friend who found a polaroid in his basement of this kid. It made no sense whatsoever. And I thought: why don't we just title our record As the Bluebird Sings? It's a quote from a Bukowski poem called Dinasorio Be(?). This is directly where the album title comes from: "As the Bluebird Sings Lies Within It." Bukowski also wrote a poem called Bluebird about how he's hiding from his melancholy side. If you would mix the song As the Bluebird Sings with Bluebird from Charles Bukowski you would understand why I named it that.
We'll work on that...
How long did it take for you to record As the Bluebird Sings? The Ides of March were recorded in a ridiculous amount of time, like 2 days.
We spent about four days recording the majority of As the Bluebird Sings, and then we added little bits and pieces. The sad thing is we finished it quite a while ago, but we've never had very much luck finding a label that wants to release our music. Because they felt like it doensn't fit in with other styles of music. So we finished this record last summer and we decided rather than to release it by ourselves we would shop it to a bunch of labels. We found a label, but even though we finished the record this past summer the label wanted to situate everything for the release, retain a publicist, put us on a tour with a band, which is what I guess we're on right now. It took an extra 8 months or something like that. So the record if we were to release it by ourselves would have been available last summer but because they had to put everything together it took a bit longer.
So how did you connect with that label?
It's actually somebody that's been talking to us for a long time. It seems that with our group we have people who really really enjoy us. Greg Caputo, who is the part owner of Megaforce records, likes us. He formed this new label called 2-3 Recordings, which is part of Transdreamer Recordings which is releasing Arab Strap.
I'd like to finish off by asking you about a few websites that a few people use. I'd like to know about your perspective, as a band.
Excellent
We talked a bit earlier about Myspace.com. That's the home for your actual band website. Is that for sheer convenience?
It's for our convenience purely. Though it's owned by Rupert Murdoch, um so it's a ridiculous website. I have no respect for it whatsoever. It's being used purely for convenience like mp3.com that we used three years ago, and I wish it would fail. But we're too lazy to probably implement another website like we'd put effort into like the last one. So at this point it works just fine. It provides for everything that we'd like to do with a website and sadly people go to it. To be quite honest, as far as the world wide web is concerned I put as little work into as possible. And that's why we use Myspace. I consider myself computer savvy when it comes to things that pertain to making music, but when it comes to the administrative aspects of music... that's why we used myspace because it's ridiculously populated and people go to it.
Do you think people have found you just because of myspace?
Sadly, yes. That's pretty sad actually. [laughs]
Where are you off to next?
San Francisco. We have two days in SF, and then a day to go to Portland so it'll be nice. It's going to be beautiful. Normally days aren't like this for me. Normally days are like me by myself in my room and fantasizing about days where we get to do things like this. But now I'm here. Right now I'm living it. But it's like two days among 3000. It's really nice right now but I know it's going to go away. Unless people actually listen to our music, but I'm not counting on that.
A Whisper in the Noise showcase on TreasureTunes.com
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