Ahead of his long-awaited debut album, Without Your Love, dropping next week, Alex Cull caught up with San Francisco’s king of dark electronica, Christoper Dexter Greenspan – aka oOoOO. Meeting in a bustling Shoreditch club house, the two sat down to chat about Greenspan’s newly-founded imprint, Nihjgt Feelings, his forthcoming full-length and the legacy of witch house.
Prime Planet: You’re releasing Without Your Love on your own label, Nihjgt Feelings. What made you want to move away from Tri Angle and self-release it?
Christopher Greenspan: Well, I had an offer to do the label through Kompakt. They were doing the original distribution for Tri Angle, they did Young Turks and Modern Love too, so some pretty reputable labels, and they offered me the opportunity to start my own label. It was something I’d wanted to do for a long time but had just thought I’d never do it. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d have the time to do it, but when the offer came I knew I had to try it by putting out my first LP on it and seeing how it goes. It’s actually a lot more work than I thought.
PP: Have you got many plans for it going forward? Do you think you’ll release anyone else’s music on it?
CG: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t have anyone lined up or confirmed for the roster as of yet, but there are a handful of people I’m thinking of working with. I kind of have anxiety about it because I’m afraid someone’s going to snatch them up before I have a chance to do it. Right now, the LP’s going to be out in June and then I’ll be touring a lot for it, and I really won’t have time to think about other releases until the end of the summer. Hopefully, a few of these people will still be around and looking for a label at that time.
PP: I guess it’s trickier these days as acts seem to get snapped up as soon as there’s any hype around them. Moving on to the album, something I found quite interesting was how the second and penultimate tracks are titled ‘3:51AM’ and ‘5:51AM’. What was the thought process behind naming those tracks as times two hours apart?
CG: [laughs] I could make something up about that, but it would just be made up to be honest. A lot of stuff like naming tracks, and the way I order them, it’s all a subconscious process and I don’t know why I do it. Afterwards, I can go back and look and make up a narrative that fits it, but I’d be lying if I said there was a thought out reason for it.
PP: My theory on it was that it was the time period you should listen to the album in.
CG: I mean definitely in that I think one characteristic of these songs is that ‘3:51AM’ still has some energy, it’s still cooking, whereas ‘5:51AM’ is just completely falling apart. It’s probably asleep; it’s more like a dream. Again, that wasn’t my intention, or maybe it was but I didn’t know.
PP: While we’re on the subject of music for certain times of day or night, are there any particular records that you like to put on late at night or first thing in the morning?
CG: Most of the music I listen to, whether it’s on in the morning or on at night, is probably meant to be listened to at night: My day starts with night music. It’s all pretty much night music, even if I listen to music in the day – which actually I don’t do that much, I pretty much only listen to music at night, but then again it’s probably because I don’t usually wake up until 4 or 5PM.
PP: Looking back on the whole witch house movement now, which you were largely lumped in with, how did you feel about all that?
CG: At first, I didn’t mind at all because it got me a lot of attention. I’d just released a few tracks on MySpace and I really didn’t expect anything to happen with it, and within a couple of months of putting them up I had two or three tracks on the front page of Pitchfork at the same time. They did a feature on it, and I wasn’t expecting anything like that. I had never really thought of myself as being a part of a movement, and definitely not that particular movement, but if people are going to pay attention to you, I’m not going to question why it is.
It did start to get annoying, though; even now I’m surprised that several years later I’m still making music and people still throw the word around. It doesn’t really annoy me that much, people can call it whatever they want, but…
PP: Nobody wants to be labeled…
CG: Exactly.
PP: Of those bands and producers that came around at the time (Salem, Balam Acab, White Ring), were there any that you felt a particular affinity towards?
CG: I liked all of those bands; I still like them. I’m looking forward to whatever new music they put out. I’d even go so far as to say that all of them were directly inspirational and had an effect on what I was making at the time.
PP: That Balam Acab LP, Wander/Wonder, was something else. Going back to Without Your Love slightly, is it Laura Clock doing the female vocals?
CG: No, it’s actually not, it’s a friend of mine from San Francisco who did vocals on all my earlier tracks, like ‘Burnout Eyess’ or ‘Hearts’.
PP: But you use Laura Clock sometimes in the live shows, right?
CG: Sometimes, yeah. We’ve worked together on a lot of stuff in the past and the second EP I put out on Tri Angle, which came out last year, Laura was doing vocals on a couple of those tracks.
PP: This friend of yours, I was curious as to what it is about her voice that you feel makes her work well with your music?
CG: I think I like it because the music is so synthetic and artificial, and there’s something really simple or almost folkie and childlike about her voice: It gives a really good contrast. In the production process, I do tend to make it sound pretty synthetic to fit the music a bit better, but there’s just a certain folkie simplicity in it that I like.
PP: I think the damaged sweetness to her voice, like you say, really does contrast very well. With Laura Clock, what is it that you like about collaborating with her?
CG: Well, we started working together just because I’d heard some of her music on the Internet and we just started emailing back and forth as I was looking for someone to do some shows with and maybe record with. When we met we hit it off so well and became good friends. It’s really hard for me to work with people that I’m not good friends with. I liked her voice and the music that she was making, so it was an obvious choice I suppose.
PP: In an interview of yours I read a while back, you spoke of disrupting your daily routine in various ways – perhaps eating certain things or sleeping at different times – for the sake of seeing how your music turned out as a result. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever done to get an interesting artistic result?
CG: That’s a good question, I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s probably not that interesting to be honest. It probably has something to do with drinking coffee at three in the morning or something ridiculous like that.
PP: With this album, particularly on ‘Sirens//Stay Here’ or ‘Without Your Love’, the lyrics are starting to appear more prominently in the mix. What was the thought process behind that?
CG: To be honest, it wasn’t so much that I was trying to make the lyrics indecipherable in the past, but that I just wasn’t as good of a producer; meaning that when I brought them up in the mix, it sounded shit. Now, I’m getting better at it so I can confidently bring the vocals up more and it sounds decent.
There was also a conscious decision to move away from the idea that I’m purposefully trying to be mysterious or obtuse. I wanted to bring things into the front more; it was partially conscious in that respect.
PP: With the scene in San Francisco being dominated by garage and psych-rock revival bands, would you say the music you produce is in any way a reaction to that or are you not really concerned with it?
CG: It’s not really a reaction. Before I was doing this project, I always played in other people’s bands and I’d never really wanted to be up at the front. After living in San Francisco for a couple of years, though, and looking for somebody else’s project to be part of that I couldn’t find, I was just like ‘fuck, I’ll do it myself’. I guess in a way it was a response to the fact there was nothing I was interested in being part of when living in San Francisco.
PP: Finally, outside of the album and the label both kicking off over the coming months, have you got anything non-musical planned for the rest of the year that you’re looking forward to?
CG: No, I have the next few months mapped out, but after that I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have so many details to take care of that I haven’t worked out yet so I’m just trying to not look too far ahead right now.
– Alex Cull
Without Your Love is available on Nihjgt Feelings from June 24.
