TUNE-YARDS and DIRTY PROJECTORS at the Opera House (735 Queen East), Saturday (November 14). $16. 416-870-8000.
Despite her best efforts at commercial self-sabotage, Merrill Garbus’s tUnE-yArDs solo project is about to get the attention it deserves. After circulating for a year and a half on cassette (yes, really), vinyl and an extremely limited hand-screenprinted CD run, her debut album, BiRd-BrAiNs, is getting a proper release through iconic UK indie label 4AD. Which means she’s had to re-evaluate some of her oddball ideas.
[rssbreak]
“It’s been an interesting year for me because I’ve had to let go of a lot of things I’d been clinging to,” Garbus says from California, where she just moved after years of living in Montreal. “The new CDs look really good, but I just don’t see that as a medium with a long life. There are enough pieces of plastic in the world.”
Her anti-mass-production leanings don’t only come down to environmental impact. Selling the album on cassette was also about forcing people to take their time with it instead of cherry-picking tracks for iTunes playlists. Similarly, her obnoxious use of upper and lower case is meant to force people to slow down (at least when it comes to typing out her band name).
Even Garbus’s recording choices are a reaction against the fast-food approach to making music. Using only a cheap digital voice recorder and free software to assemble it, BiRd-BrAiNs is decidedly lo-fi. That’s partly an homage to the immediacy and intimacy of primitive field recordings, but also a comment on the financial implications of modern studio conventions.
“I know so many musicians who have no money yet will spend tens of thousands of dollars to make an album. We live in a culture of debt, but I just don’t believe it’s necessary to do that.”
As strong as BiRd-BrAiNs is, tUnE-YaRdS really comes alive when performing. Mostly it’s just Garbus using a looping pedal to layer herself playing drums and ukulele, which serve as the perfect bed for her spine-tingling voice. Not the most marketable concept, but very effective.
In fact, the only aspect of tUnE-YaRdS that does seem sellable is the African pop influences found in her songs. Derived in part from the time Garbus spent living in Kenya, they make for easy (albeit lazy) comparisons to hot indie acts like tour mates Dirty Projectors. But she definitely doesn’t take issues of appropriation lightly, and feels a responsibility to speak about the politics of artistic borrowing.
“My music talks about the world and about me in that world. There is African influence, but also Broadway and hip-hop and a slew of other sounds that have become part of me. I could try, musically, just to be a white upper-middle-class woman, but that’s not what intrigues me.
“After I came back from Africa, I hated myself for being American. It took a long time to stop being paralyzed by that self-hatred and to turn it into something creative that might be useful to other people.”
Interview Clips
Merrill Garbus discusses her love of lo-fi
Garbus discusses the problems of pop musicians appropriating African music
Garbus talks about the role living in Montreal had on the development of tUnE-yArDs
benjaminb@nowtoronto.com