Ativin by Aaron Poehler

"Ativin" by Aaron Poehler (copyright 1997, originally published--in butchered form--in the fortunately deceased Out 'N About Magazine. Sounds like a gay rights publication rather than a music 'zine, doesn't it? Well, it's gone, so don't sweat it. It sucked anyway, and they tried to rip me off)

A little bit of history... Ativin, a band from Bloomington, IN, consists of three components: Chris Carothers (from Nashville, TN) on electric guitar, Dan Burton (from just above Louisville) on electric guitar, and Rory Leitch (from Lafayette) on acoustic drumset--that’s right, no bassist. Ativin is a predominantly instrumental group interested in pushing the boundaries of dynamic songwriting and performance; the music is at times delicately brooding, immersing the listener with complexely interwoven and beautiful sounding guitar; at other times, the music gains volume, sometimes in the form of momentum, and pushes the limits of instrumentation. The music defies simple categories, but is influenced by many genres: the Chicago sound (Shellac, Gastr del Sol, etc...), Louisville bands such as Rodan & Slint, and other more easily recognizable categories such as Classical music (Stravinsky, Orff, Schoenberg, and Barber to name just a few) and in a more indirect fashion, instrumental jazz. The CD EP "pills vs. planes" (5 songs) is now available on Polyvinyl records. The first four tracks on the CD were recorded with Steve Albini (you know Steve...guitar player/vocalist for Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac, recordist extraordinaire for about a million rock bands like, um, the Pixies, the Jesus Lizard, Silkworm, the Breeders, and some guys called Nirvana. Oh yeah, and Bush too--remember them?), and track 5 was recorded in by former Pencil guitarist Carl Saff. In addition to the CD, Ativin has just released a two-song 7" on Secretly Canadian records (Modern Gang Reader b/w Larkin). Ativin also has a song on the Ooh do I love you compilation. Call one of these numbers for more information: Chris: 812.331.1621, Dan and Rory: 812.336.2658 or you technophiles can check out their homepage at http://ezinfo.ucs.indiana.edu/~rleitch/ativin.html (most of this introductory info came from it, so you might as well get it straight from the source). I recently sat down with Dan and Rory at Mother Bear’s Pizza to discuss current matters, future plans, and past history--oh yeah, and Steve Albini.

AARON: One thing I was wondering about was the fact that you don’t have a bass player in the band. Did you originally just not find one and decide to do without it?

Rory: Well, that’s really strange, because originally what happened was Chris and I met in the dorms and I looked at his CD collection and he looked at mine, and we were like “Ah!”. It was like that, and...

Dan: Except for the Big Wheel CD. The infamous Big Wheel.

Rory: Except for the Big Wheel CD. I noticed he had a guitar and I was like, “So, you play guitar?” And I had just started learning how to play guitar--really bad at it, I’m still not good at it--but I was like, “You mind if I fool around?” He’s like, “Oh, you play guitar?” and I was like, “No, not really, but I play drums, I’ve been playing drums for awhile.” He was like, “Oh, man, it’d be cool if we could get together and play, “ and I didn’t have my drums there, I was in the dorms, you know. But I brought them up with me and we rented this practice space and started playing and we were like, “Man, this is really cool.” Y’know, writing some songs and stuff. Then we were just gonna be kind of a guitar-and-drums [duo], then we were like, “Okay, this obviously has some serious limitations,” and just through luck we met Dan through a friend of ours and he started playing guitar with us. I think it’s really strange how things come together and work out like that. If you think about it, if we didn’t know the people that we knew, and maybe even if we didn’t have certain conversations at a certain point in time, it wouldn’t have happened. I just happened to be mentioning through our mutual friend that Chris and I had started a band, and she said, “Oh, I have this friend who is really into the kind of music that you’re into, and he plays guitar too, and he would like to play, and...”

Dan: And she was hardly a friend. I mean, she is now, but at that point she worked at a movie theater, the Von Lee, and I was just wearing a t-shirt of a band I liked that struck up a conversation between us, and at the end of the conversation I was like, “If you know anyone who’d like to start a band and, y’know, isn’t gonna do Pearl Jam covers at the Bluebird...”

Rory: Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s just not our thing.

Dan: Heh-heh, exactly. For me it’s a cynical thing.

Rory: We had talked about getting a bassist, but we just liked the formula so much. The three of us, when we play we really seem to have this...what’s the word I’m looking for...formula’s one way to put it...

Dan: Chemistry.

Rory: Chemistry’s another way to put it.

Dan: I think we’ve been playing with this lineup so long that it would be hard to adapt if someone else came along.

Rory: We’ve talked about it every once in a while. We’ll get fed up.

Dan: We’re like, “Man, let’s get a bassist!”

AARON: What bands and CDs did you have in common that you liked?

Rory: Oh, god.

Dan: Heh-heh-heh, they’re infamous. I’m sure our readers would know. (laughs)

Rory: It all comes back to the, I think the two CDs that we saw...

Dan: I wouldn’t print this. (laughs)

AARON: Hey, if you want to say “off the record”, it’s fine with me, I don’t care.

Rory: No no no, that’s fine, it’s just one of those things that I think people tend to just, or they just want to pigeonhole us for one thing. I tend to think that we’re not necessarily the newest band on the planet, but what’s distinctive about us is that we’ve managed to pull together a few different influences, a few different strands, and it’s come to combine in a new way, and that’s kind of what our style is. There’s sort of a style that we have.

Dan: Oh yeah, definitely.

Rory: But the CDs I saw in Chris’ collection that really struck my eye were Slint “Spiderland” and Rodan’s Rusty.

Dan: That genre of music is really compelling to us. [When] I was in high school, I used to go see those bands play and I really enjoyed them. I have no desire to emulate them in any way, but at the same time I really enjoy that genre of music.

Rory: Our early stuff really tended to sound a lot like Slint for some reason, but the stuff that we did on the 7-inch and the stuff that we’re gonna do in the future, it’s gonna get really far away from Slint “Spiderland” .

Dan: I think at this point it is very far away.

Rory: But you can hear elements of it, especially the thing with the dynamics. That was one of the beauties of Slint, the fact that they did some dynamic stuff at a time when rock & roll was just kind of like, seemed to me like it was all the same, kind of ‘balls to the wall’, there wasn’t much dynamic. I was playing in a band where everything was the exact same volume, y’know, turn on the distortion pedal and have a go at it. But Slint was doing something more sophisticated.

AARON: Do you do any EQ or anything to make up for the lack of a bass player?

Rory: We do minimal EQ.

Dan: Mostly we just crank the bass up in our instrument [amplifiers] and use really low-gauge strings.

Rory: They use, like, .54 gauge strings for the bottom E-strings, it’s like massive. [Dan] plays through an Orange head, which has some bottom, and then Chris got this Russian Red Bear amp, which I swear to god it’s a bass amp, it’s not a guitar amp. It sounds so low. It’s so low that it has like a bass amp resonance, kind of like this unidirectional “whoomm” like that rap bass kind of like, it’s so low that it resonates. It’s not just low like it’s got good low tone, it’s like sub-bass almost. It’s really been years of experimenting. It’s taken us a long time.

Dan: Our demos were brittle, there was no low end. Chris got really low-end pickups put in his guitar, and I have a Gibson guitar and it always has a lot more low end. I don’t know what the hell Chris has, what guitar is that?

Rory: He plays an old Univox. To enhance the low end he put in the most magnetic pickup I’ve ever seen. If you get anything metal within like ten feet of it it’s like “ch-ching” on the pickup. It’s like a Seymour Duncan Distortion II or something like that. It’s so low end, it’s ridiculous. If he had a regular humbucker in there, it wouldn’t sound anything like it does. Dan: About every month, Chris has to rescrew the screws on the back of his cabinet.

Rory: Yeah, because it literally rattles the cabinet so much that the back starts to come loose.

Dan: I think it’s kind of unfortunate that we’re totally overdriving our equipment, ruining it, but it sounds good.

Rory: Yeah, we have a tendency to push our sound pretty hard.

Dan: We’ve been kicked out of like four practice spaces, and I think we have neighbors that don’t like us in our new one.

AARON: How did you hook up with Polyvinyl, the label that put out your CD? Did you just make up a demo tape and send it to them?

Dan: Well, we recorded the record first [with our own money] before we had anybody backing it, which is kind of stupid, but we were just anxious to get a really good recording of us. We had recorded at so many different places and were very unhappy with the results.

AARON: I noticed there’s the one track Carl Saff recorded.

Dan: Yeah, and Carl’s stuff is, uh, we’re all very happy with Carl’s stuff. We’re not happy with, well, for instance there was this one guy that had this label up in Chicago. We sent him a tape, and he asked us to come up and record. He would record us and he would put the record out himself. He had put out this other band that we really loved, and we loved the recording that he did, so we figured it’d be a no-lose situation, great opportunity. It was the first time we ever went to Chicago, and we drove up there all excited about it, woke up the next morning, all had coffee, set up our stuff, y’know, we’re ready to go. Started to record, and we recorded one song and we were like, “Well, can we hear it?” And he was like, “Oh, don’t worry about it, it sounds fine. I think it’s be better since you’re all geared up there and everything to just go through all your stuff.” So we proceeded to record like three more songs, then we went in the control room and listened to it, and it sounded so bad. The drums just sounded like... like there was no drum sound, y’know, any kind of real sound was completely lost. It was just, he had this carpeted basement, it was just absorbing the sound.

Rory: The problem was...

Dan: That room, man.

Rory: Yeah, for us to sound good we have to have a ridiculously ‘live’ room. I mean, it’s got to be made of stone, hard wood or something. And his studio was a great studio, it’s probably one of the nicest home studios I’ve ever seen, but he’s got all kinds of sound absorption. He’s got sound absorption panels on the ceiling, plus all the walls and the floors. The carpet soaks up all the sound. So when we played, everything was just dead and it’s like, man, we have never sounded good in dead studios. We recorded in the MAC, oh man, the drums sounded like this: Dum. Thut. Some of the best recordings we’ve had have been the DAT recordings from Second Story and stuff. Those are really good recordings. When we play in the studio, we just stick the mics up and slam the levels on the tape and hope to god it sounds good, the room sounds good, ‘cause if the room doesn’t sound good then we don’t sound good. It’s that simple. We don’t use any effects or anything, we just go straight to tape.

AARON: So obviously you decided to record with Albini largely because of his skills, and I’m sure the cost had something to do with it?

Dan: Um, I said earlier that he’s pretty expensive...

AARON: But he’s cheap relative to his level of experience...

Dan: Yeah, and so much of it was tape cost. He records onto two-inch twenty-four track analog reels and then he mixes down from that to half-inch tape, and that starts to add up to a lot of money. There was about $400 in reels.

Rory: Just for Steve to be the engineer we ended up paying only about $200. But then everything else costed so much.

Dan: Like we had a DAT tape of it, separate cassettes of it...

Rory: He charges separately for him and the studio, but to use his studio for the whole day cost us $200, so if you figure we went for over ten hours that’s not bad.

Dan: We did intensive working from like 9:30 in the morning to 9:30 that night. We didn’t stop. [Albini] didn’t eat the whole time.

Rory: Yeah, he didn’t eat, and we just picked up McDonald’s one time, it took us about twenty minutes.

Dan: I was so exhausted at the end of the day. Mixdown and everything was just going so fast. That was a day.

Rory: [Albini]’s a workaholic. He’s a nut. He doesn’t ever go outside. If you look at him he’s real sickly and pale, real skinny. He’s a really weird character.

Dan: He looks like a heroin addict. He doesn’t eat anything. I mean, I appreciate the fact that he devoted so much time and effort to our project, but he can’t keep that pace up or he’s gonna die.

Rory: It was such a great experience. I think that the reason that compelled us to go to Steve was listening to his recordings like Jesus Lizard’s Goat and, um, some of the other stuff he’s done is so amazing, the drum sounds... A few days before we went into the studio we were listening to the Breeders’ Pod. The drums on that record are just, like, huge. The drums sound like angels, it’s music for my ears. Steve knows what he’s doing, it was so ridiculous. It’s to the point where he’s so efficient that it almost seems like it’s cold. Like he’s not willing to sit there and be like, “Let’s work on this EQ for 28 minutes,” he’ll just be like [Rory makes Albini face & adjusts a dozen imaginary knobs at once] and it’ll sound like you want it to sound.

Dan: Well, I think that’s another part of it, going to him. He specializes in one type of sound, to a certain degree. By the fact that you’re going to him, he’s knowing that you want his sound as opposed to like, “Let’s go for that 70’s disco vibe sound!”

Rory: He puts his signature on every recording, even when he doesn’t work on it for very long, like our recording just took us ten or twelve hours, you listen to it and you’re like, “That’s a Steve Albini recording.” Because you can hear it, especially with the drums. And the guitars, too.

Dan: It was crazy, too, because our guitars were so loud and...

Rory:...he had these huge Coles ribbon mics stuck like three inches from the speaker. He doesn’t even care. He’s like, “I’d rather blow a ribbon out and have it sound good than use some crappy-ass [Shure] SM-57 [mic] bullshit.” That’s his whole ethic is just to do it right, y’know? The ribbon mics have low bass response and a real smooth treble response, not that shrill, midrangey honky kind of SM-57 sound. You put an SM-57 in front of a cabinet and listen to the recording, it’s real throaty, real midrangey and high treble and when you use the ribbon mics everything’s kind of softened but still huge-sounding, and I think that’s a really good way to record guitars. And with condenser [mics] too, condensers work really well. But, y’know, how many people are willing to stick their AKG 414 in front of a full Marshall cabinet?

Dan: And rightfully so, I mean, it’s different when you have a band in there every day.

Rory: He can afford to break a ribbon mic and get it reribboned for like $100.

AARON: Do you think you’re gonna work with him again?

Rory: Yeah, I think we are. We’ve discussed not going to him for awhile, but now I think we are going to go back to him because he’s built this new studio and he showed it to us the last time we were there in Chicago, and it’s gonna be incredible. He bought a warehouse and transformed it completely, gutted the whole inside, and now he’s built a total internal structure. All the walls are separated by, like, three inches of dead space.

Dan: And they’re all built of, like, adobe brick. Not only is it like a wonderful studio soundwise and all but it’s very cosmetically appealing. It’ s very slick-looking. I’m interested to hear the recordings that come out of there.

Rory: They’re gonna sound so good. Oh my god, when we walked in there I was clapping, and I was just like, “Oh god, listen to the reverb time in this room”, it was so nice. And I’m just guessing on why, but he laid the walls with these big adobe bricks and then he had mortar holding the bricks together but the mortar’s like spilling over the bricks and everything, so it diffuses the sound, it scatters the sound. And I was just looking at it, going, “Boy, that’s a really sloppy brick job,” and then I started to think about it in terms of sound and I’m like, “That’s a really fucking great idea.”

AARON: How have you done with selling the CD?

Dan: I have no idea.

Rory: I think, um, we’ve done pretty well, selling our copies.

Dan: They were selling really well around town for awhile there.

Rory: The person who released the CD is...(long pause)...let’s put it this way, he’s not the most competent person in the world. So, honestly, there’s no way for us to gauge how well our CD is doing. We’ve asked before, and we just can’t get that kind of information out of him. He’s not a very good business person. He’s a nice person, he’s a very nice person, not a good business person.

Dan: Exactly.

AARON: How long has Ativin been together?

Dan: About two years.

Rory: A little over two years. Two years and two months.

Dan: It hasn’t really seemed like it, though.

Rory: I know, it’s been a fast two years. I was just thinking about that the other day at graduation. I was like, “Four years? I’m done!? Four years went by like that, I can’t remember it!”

AARON: What’d you graduate in?

Rory: I got a bachelor’s in sociology and Germanic studies.

AARON: And Chris graduated too, right?

Rory: Yeah, psychology. Clinical psychology.

AARON: So what are your plans for the near future?

Rory: What we’re gonna do is, Chris got a job working at a care-givers home for autistic people, so he’s doing more of his applied clinical psychology, trying to get some experience. I really want to go to grad school for sociology. I love it, but I’m just not ready for it, because I just got done with school, y’know? I want to go, but not right now. I need to be more devoted, just more mature, because when you go to grad school you can kiss everything else goodbye because it takes everything you’ve got. You don’t have time to be a rock star or whatever. Basically you have to give your life up to school. So what I’m gonna do is just get some menial job and stay here and work because I really want to keep the band together for as long as we can--at least this next year. I’m really not going to be dedicated to my job, because I have no intentions of getting a job-job for the rest of my life. Like I said, I want to go back to school, so the job that I get will just be something that’ll pay the bills. I’m hoping that I can get a job where I just go in in the morning, leave in the night, and that’s all I have to think about, like I don’t have to take my work home with me and stuff like that.

AARON (to Dan): Now, are you still in school?

Dan: Yeah, I’m a junior right now, and I have another year and I’ll probably go another year after that.

AARON: Are you planning on doing a full-length album any time soon?

Dan: Yeah, the great thing is that there’s no rush so we can write as many songs, and then pick and choose what’s gonna complement each other on the record the best. There’s a very strong desire to do it right all along because I’ve seen so many bands do it wrong.

Rory: We’ve got a really good start. We’ve got like three or four songs that we definitely think we want to put on there. Now that two of us are out of school, we’re gonna have a lot more time to put into writing, because this last semester...

Dan: Well, we weren’t doing anything.

Rory: We basically put the band on hold for awhile because we had to get out of school.

Dan: Basically we just tried to get shows and play shows more than write music or anything like that.

Rory: We didn’t write or record anything, really.

AARON: You guys are getting ready to go out on the road, aren’t you?

Rory: Yeah, we sure are, our first ever tour.

Dan: Our first ever like, more than a week.

AARON: Where are you going?

Dan: God, all over. We’re starting out in New Orleans on the 15th of June and that goes to like the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA, and then Chapel Hill, then up the coast to Baltimore, New York, DC...

Rory: ...and then we’re coming back here and doing the Midwest. We’re gonna do some shows in Ohio, one in Ann Arbor, one in Detroit, and then...

Dan: Kalamazoo! Heh-heh...

Rory:...two shows in Chicago.

Dan: We just got invited. There’s no way we could have set that tour up ourselves, I don’t think. We may have been able to. We played with this band from Seattle called Roadside Monument last fall and they really liked us and we really liked them. Doug from Roadside, he’s Mr. Contact Man. He knows all these people.

Rory: They’ve been on tour a few times, so they’ve met a lot of people. A lot of contacts.

Dan: They asked us to go on it with them, and all we had to do was say yes. And buy a van, which is our...struggling thing right now.

Rory: We’re going van-hunting this week. Van shopping.

Dan: I’m not real excited about that at all. Our next show [in Bloomington] is June 4 with Trans Am. That’s an essential show. They were one of the best bands I’ve seen in a long time. They made Shellac look like the sloppiest band on Earth. They’re so tight, it’s inhuman. They’re like machines.

AARON: Are you going to release your album through Polyvinyl?

Rory: No, no. No. We’re going to put it out locally.

Dan: Secretly Canadian, the same people who put out our 45, will probably put out that record. It’s a local label that started up maybe a year ago, and they have just done so well. They had our 7-inch out in a month. They’re completely serious, they have good distribution.

Rory: They’ve put out a few really good things. They’ve put out the Japonize Elephants CD--it’s really interesting--and some out-of-town bands, too.

Dan: They put out this band called Songs:Ohia, from Oberlin, Ohio. They’re really, really cool, very mellow, very well-written songs.

Rory: It’s kind of like a modern version of a mix of bluegrass and folk story-singing. He sings these songs that there’s a story to tell in each one.

Dan: They’re also putting out the Dave Fischoff book and cassette, both of which are interesting. Definitely different.

Rory: Just check out their web page. It’s really cool.

Dan: Sometimes I’m really happy with Bloomington, other times I’m not happy with it at all. I’m definitely shocked at our success locally, it’s blown me away. I’d no idea we’d be received so well.

Rory: Just the general curiosity that people have about the band. People will be willing to at least check us out.

Dan: It pretty much started last summer, when we started to play bars as opposed to parties all the time. Summer was really cool. Louisville, Kentucky is probably one of the most jaded, cynical places and they haven’t even hit any kind of success nationwide, I mean, a little bit. There’s this magazine called Burt, they have a bunch of them down at TD’s CDs and LPs, and that’s a good example of how Louisville does it. Totally cynical through the whole thing, but it’s very enjoyable. He takes it to extremes and he’s just basically an asshole and that’s his job, people think it’s funny, he writes bad things.

Rory: This guy doesn’t even listen to the music. He wrote a really shitty review of our record which basically busted on two separate things. Busted on the fact that we sounded just like Slint, amazingly, even though Slint barely used distortion and distortion’s all over our record--hello? Didn’t even listen to our CD. The second thing was, he busted on Steve, and if he has a beef with Steve that’s fine, but he didn’t say anything about the songs on the CD.

Dan: He made some reference that “If you like Don Caballero and Slint, you’ll like this band.” He isn’t playing that fair middle ground, he’s just taking cheap shots. Complete categories, labels for everything. I still read the magazine, I still enjoy it, I knew if we ever got reviewed in it that that’s exactly what we were gonna get. We had an article in Alternative Press, it was just about a 200-word article. It was in their ‘low profile’ section (laughs), y’know, like bands that you never hear about or whatever. It was really nice. Other than that I’ve yet to hear of any real reviews. I know of like two, maybe. Styzine did a review of it that was really cool. I just read this review on this new Jim O’Rourke record, it’s like one note through the whole record, and of course the review is like, “What a great idea! What a wonderful... y’know... it’s so stylistically... challenged!”

Rory: It’s been done before. Can you say John Cage?

Dan: John Fahey? But those are his influences so therefore it’s okay, so enough knocking of Jim O’Rourke.

Rory: This is probably the best interview we’ve ever had, just because it’s not like questions written down on a sheet of paper, it’s more like, “Let’s sit down, have lunch, ham it up...”

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00