Thela

Thela sprung to prominence quite suddenly in 1995. Part of a then-burgeoning Auckland free scene - which has now, apparently, completely evaporated - comprising RST, Empirical and Pit Viper, they released a limited cassette, a limited Geraldine 12", and a limited Geraldine triple 8". Apart from the cassette, these recordings were made by the duo of Dean Roberts and Dion Workman, both on guitar, while regular drummer and third third of the trio Paul Douglas was away working in the UK. Thela (the name comes from a King Crimson song title, by the way - I only point this out because in a recent interview in Popwatch, Dean Roberts refused to disclose the true source) earned themselves widespread jealousy when Thurston Moore agreed to put out their debut CD on his Ecstatic Peace imprint. It emerged in mid-1995, and the jealousy was spread even wider when the trio wangled themselves an American tour in early 1996 supporting the Moore/Surgal duo. While they were there, they recorded their second album, Argentina, also released by Ecstatic Peace, in about mid-1996. Unfortunately, friction between members began to develop, and on return to New Zealand, Thela unofficially disbanded. For the last 15 months they seem to have been in a state of semi-non-existence, playing and rehearsing very irregularly. It can now probably be said that they no longer exist, though the milieu within which they operate is so nebulous that nothing can ever really be said for sure. Roberts has a side project called White-Winged Moth, under which moniker an album, I Can See Inside Your House, was released on Poon Village in mid-1996. Since then, Dion Workman has gone on to some acclaim as a neo-minimalist artist, Roberts has started a mailorder service, Formacentric (contact P.O. Box 46251 Auckland 1002, New Zealand) and has released another White-Winged Moth LP, this time a Geraldine pressing, as well as a Geraldine LP of collaborations with Opprobrium contributor and general man about town Guy Treadgold. Also of note is a 7" recorded by the quartet of Roberts/Workman, Marcel Bear of Empirical and Andrew Moon of RST - this was released on Moon's Imperial Recordings label a while back, and is now out of print, but Fisheye have vaguely promised to reissue it on 10". This interview with Roberts and Workman was conducted in September 1995 (ie. while Paul Douglas was away working in the UK and before the American tour), by me (Nick Cain) in Auckland at the former Thela practice room.

O: When did you two meet up?

Dion: About three years ago, I shifted into the place Dean was living at, and we started playing together. This was about early 1992.

Dean: This is the first band I've actually been in, apart from fucking around with people. I've been playing a fair bit for around five years with different people. then we sort of met, and it was basically Dion and I trying to get a drummer. We were writing stuff and trying to convince drummers to join, and then we met Paul.

O: I've heard that you didn't start out as the kings of Auckland drone that you are now.

Dean: No, we started out as the kings of Auckland prog. [laughter] No, we weren't the kings, but we were pretty rock and roll. We were writing a lot of fairly complex riffs and sticking them together. We had a lot of ideas about what we wanted to do and Paul was helping us to put them together, because we really didn't know.

O: What had Paul been doing before?

Dean: He had been in Wellington, he was in a couple of bands there - Codhaven, then I think he was in Amazing Broccoli, he may have been in that band for a while, or Clay. [All three rather terrible Bailter Space copyists from the nation's capital - Ed] we'd been fucking round doing things, and then we met Paul, the band kind of started. This was September '92.

O: What sort of things were you fucking round doing when you were fucking round doing things?

Dean: We were getting as many inept guitar players as possible into one room, and basically doing what we do now, just improvising and making lots of racket. We made a tape of about eight guitars, which we lost. It was quite good. At this stage we were more into writing songs that were left open for improvisation, and a lot of the ideas for the parts of the songs came from improvisation.

Dion: We had a bit of difficulty writing songs - we would write three songs and put them all together, and it would go all over the place and have quick time changes.

Dean: We wanted them to change dramatically, into untypical time signatures. But we didn't really know what we were doing - we'd make up a part, then we'd make up another part, and we'd stick them together and learn how to change from one to the other. It was like Bastro in a way - disjointed and pasted together, really segmented. It was intricate like that, but much crazier and looser. We did some recordings around that time, but we were never really happy with the way they came out.

O: How did things progress?

Dean: Fairly slowly. We practised a lot, and played a few gigs. It was pretty full-on, that summer we must have played about five times. Then we cut back and since then I think we've only really played live less than ten times. When we practised we mutated the songs and tried lots of things. The first thing we released was a cassette probably about this time last year, which was received positively, by the few people that got hold of it. There were 50, or something - they just vanished, I don't know anyone who's got one. At the end of '94, Dion and I did some recordings with two guitars, without Paul, because he was too busy. We didn't really intend for it to be released originally, but we liked it so much that we decided to put it out, so we made some Geraldine 12" records of that. Another guy, Simon Kay [of Auckland record store Crawlspace - Ed] offered to put out some stuff we'd done in the same situation on three Geraldine 8"s, he said he'd fund it, so we did 20. But we beat him to it, we put out the 12" and the 8"s came out shortly after that. This was early this year.

O: Did the progression from Thela being a rock band to Thela being a more improvised band happen gradually? When did it happen?

Dion: It was quite gradual. When we were in the practice room we'd often do a lot of really loose improvised stuff, and then we'd go out and play live and still play songs. More and more we got into fucking round and improvising, rather than practising songs, and then we started doing it live.

Dean: It was quite hard at first to just go and play live and do that kind of stuff, it's quite daunting.

Dion: It was quite hard, because we would get such a bad reception.

O: So when did the gradual change start?

Dean: During '94. Dion and I were doing stuff as a side-project, and then we brought that in because we really liked it, and then we wanted to introduce drums. It wasn't really that drastic a change - things just got longer and freer, so there was no context for songs any more.

Dion: It seemed like quite a natural progression because we didn't really talk about it a lot, it just happened. It seemed our practices were more and more improvising things, rather than playing what we had previously written. I got really sick of playing songs at practices and we'd always stray away from what we were doing.

O: Who was writing the songs?

Dean: It was a collective thing. I'd come up with riffs, and Paul, who was much more musical than either of us, would end up instructing us on what to do. He's a really proficient guitar and piano player, and drummer. Once we started playing things, they would take on another form - we'd have an idea, and by the time we started playing it, we would have added something to it and would bring other ideas into the song. The nature of our playing would then interfere with the general idea of what the song was going to be, it would develop in some way.

O: Would the song develop, or would it be distorted?

Dean: Be distorted, I guess. [laughs] Just the volume that we tended to play at, the feedback and overtones had a lot to do with it. It was really through that that we started to discover things about the instruments we were playing and other subtleties that we could use.

O: Was there a point where you consciously discarded the idea of writing songs?

Dean: I don't know. There's a song on the [debut] CD that was written.

Dion: That would have been the last thing we ever wrote.

Dean: An idea would form itself into a song, so we would keep it as a song, that kind of thing.

O: How were people reacting to all this when you played live?

Dean: [laughter] Pretty badly.

Dion: Our last gig at [Auckland venue] The Pod was pretty good, the barman was throwing ice at us while we were playing. He didn't like us. We have a really bad time with people that run venues, they really don't like us. We played at [Auckland venue] the Kurtz Lounge and they tried to turn us off. There's a small group of people that we know, less than ten probably, that really like us and give us good feedback, I don't think anyone else cares.

Dean: We're not really interested in playing live in Auckland any more. If something good comes alongÉ But it's also the other bands we're playing with, we can't attract people ourselves, so we always have to play with someone else. [laughter] It's not really that big a deal, playing live isn't that rewarding, we're concentrating more on recording.

O: How did the deal with Ecstatic Peace come about?

Dean: When the 12" was done, I sent a tape to Lee Ranaldo, and he sent us a postcard, saying he wanted to hear more stuff, so we sent him the 12". Meanwhile, we'd sent some cassettes to [Forced Exposure's] Jimmy Johnson, we were trying to get him to distribute our Geraldine records, if we could make enough - of course, he wasn't very interested in us trying to sell him 20 Geraldine records, or 75 or whatever. The quality isn't that hot on them, it was a bit difficult for them to want to stock it. Then Thurston Moore heard the 12" and he wanted to do a CD of it. He heard Lee Ranaldo's copy of the 12" and he liked it, he sent us a letter and said did we want to do a CD. It was a couple of months before we recorded it and got it to them, but it was incredibly fast. I heard from them in March and we recorded it in April.

Dion: I didn't know anything about it at all, then one day Dean just showed up with this fax from Ecstatic Peace with all the details of this CD deal, [laughs] that was the first I heard of it.

O: And now you have a solo CD coming out on Poon Village?

Dean: Yeah, it just happened through communicating with Kristin [Anderson, of Poon Village]. She had a tape I'd sent, and she just rang up one day and offered to do it. That was another thing that was kind of half-done, she had a cassette mix of it, so I had to mix it all again, master it, then I recorded some extra stuff.

O: When did you record it?

Dean: Between about September last year and May this year. I was living with a guy who had a four-track and I could do something every now and then. It wasn't all done in one big swoop, it wasn't a project that was planned and then out together within a day or two, it was over a long time, which allowed me to edit out lots of stuff, and record lots, and decide from there.

O: It has a feel of developing over a period of time. Where did you get the recordings of that guy talking from?

Dean: You can hear other sounds in the background, it's almost like a radio or something. I had this microphone going in my old house from the room through a distortion pedal into an amplifier with lots of reverb on, and another microphone in front of that going into the four-track in the other room. I just had lot of things going in the room, like the radio and stuff, I was playing my acoustic guitar, the TV was going - that's in the background. It has this voice that comes in loud - I put a lot of voices onto tapes, so none of the voices on the recordings are intentionally there. I also wanted to make some of it into songs, but most of it is improvisation, then just layering it, piano and acoustic guitar.

O: What do you like about drones?

Dean: Just the way they develop.

O: Do they develop themselves or do you develop them?

Dean: They develop with a bit of encouragement.

Dion: Quite often, it's letting it develop, and retaining some sort of control over it - you can take it in certain directions, but it can also take itself somewhere, you can let things really build up. It's really interesting to play that sort of thing because of that - you can control it, but you can leave it and let it go places you might not have intended it to. It's just that feeling of extracting these sounds out of the guitar and letting them get really huge and then getting them under control again, a really natural buildup.

O: But you don't like them to reach a climax?

Dion: We don't seem to, we're always quite restrained. It's something that surprises me.

Dean: A lot of it's not really drones, it's more like one tone or a group of strings changing in a certain way that are creating a big kind of field, which can be a combination of really high and really low tones as well, that's what I really like. There's also another thing of the overtones that you can get from your guitar just by doing different things. We're hoping to get into more percussive things, getting away from the drones a bit, create another sort of harmonic sound. We used to change our tunings around a bit, but now we set the tuning. On the recording we're changing the key a bit, just to get a bit of variation. Once you've amplified the guitar to a certain point, there's a lot of other sounds that come from it which you can use in another context but which at a low volume you don't hear. I think in some ways our recordings, someone who would work in a similar vein is Caspar Brotzmann - he's got more of a rock context, but he's also using a lot of strange sounds, like the first song on Koksofen, where he's just clicking the switch. He's playing so loud that you can hear all these other harmonics coming in, and the amp noise. He's someone who's using the more external sounds from the guitar, like feedback. We want to do things that are rhythmic, we're interested in rhythm, like two guitar parts that are clashing - not playing the same part, but they're working together, it's polyrhythmic or whatever.

Dion: We've actually been quite self-conscious about the drone thing, and talked about it quite a lot, about trying to get away from being too droney all the time.

O: Why?

Dion: I don't know, [laughs, to Dean] it's your idea, I don't have any objection to it.

Dean: For me, a droning sound has the connotation of being one-dimensional. It depends on what context you place it in, but the connotations for me of drones are a consistent sound that's droning on. [laughs] When we try to play, it doesn't strike me as particularly droney, it's got a lot more chopping and changing and lots more abrasive sounds, things always dissolving and mutating. I think a drone is more a repetition of one note or phrasing. There definitely are droning sounds happening there, but there's lots of other things happening, too.

Dion: I listen to a lot of droney music, I like drones, and I really like playing things that are based around droney sounds, but I don't know how interesting it's going to be for people who are buying records to hear drone after drone. [laughs] You know, ÒAnother fucking drone record." Dean: Percussion instantly puts another aspect on it which detracts away from the drone.

Dion: It diverts our attention away from it.

Dean: It makes us want to change and interact more.

O: The thing I like about drones is how much space they fill so easily.

Dion: Space is a really important element in what we do, we talk about it quite a lot, about really letting things settle down and just leaving a lot of areas that are minimal in what we play, and leaving a lot of space. But I don't think the recordings so far have reflected that too well. I think there's a tendency when we're recording to get on with it - the first records, the 8"s and the 12", were done in about three hours, and by the end of that, we were beginning to get the kinds of things we really wanted, just letting things slow right down and relaxing, nothing for long periods of time, without feeling like the piece has come to an end. But those things take quite a long time to evolve. For recording I like to spend a lot of time, going for hours, and just take out the best parts.

O: Do you see yourselves as clashing or working together?

Dion: When we play with no drummer we're watching each other really closely, really keeping an eye on what each other is doing, and it ties in well, the guitars work well together. When we do have a drummer, we pay less attention to each other and quite a bit to the drummer and it does get a bit more clashy because we get more into trying to be a bit more percussive and rhythmic - rather than droning together and letting the tunings we've preset work, we're actually playing more notes, and things get out a bit.

O: You like to 'play' your guitars with found objects?

Dion: Yeah, we'll be playing away and we'll spot something we could use to make a new sound. I mean, we have a pretty good idea of the sort of sounds we can get out of guitars when we play them with objects, we usually have a fairly good idea of how it will react. Except that's not always the case - one time I picked up a chisel and dropped it on the pickups and got this deep bassy humming sound, which I didn't realise was going to happen.

Dean: Different devices can create different tactics, so it's just a matter of trying different things.

Dion: Because we've been playing guitars like this for so long together, we generally know how they're going to react to certain things, but we don't just stick to that, we will chuck in certain other things, and we don't really know what the effect of that is going to be.

O: Do the knowing and the not knowing balance each other out?

Dean: Yeah, but ultimately, the idea is to be relatively proficient with these techniques, so that we are as familiar with a certain rattle as with a way of creating a certain harmonic and activating it, and to be proficient and familiar with whatever we're using, to know what ideas to apply.

Dion: The random aspects just make it a lot more interesting to play - you don't know how this is going to react, but try it anyway and hope that it works out. We're not retaining complete control - there is enough incidental stuff happening to make it really interesting.

O: What would be the ratio of randomness versus control?

Dion: It's really difficult to say.

Dean: Yeah, I can't really define what's random and what's controlled.

Dion: The sort of control we have over things is so abstract anyway that it's not a definite control. It's just to have a general idea of how to make a sound and control it or sustain it and kill it, then switch into it and start doing it, and then decide what you're going to do with it. Quite often my approach is to create a sound, see what happens, and then move on. I quite often build something up and let it go for ages. I'm always putting down the guitar and sitting there and letting something build by itself.

O: Do you like it to reach a climax?

Dion: Yeah, sometimes, but to me, our music is never really climactic. we don't build things up and really go for it that often. I'm saying this from spending the last few years practising - maybe we do a bit more on the CD and the records. It always seems to me that we don't really take it to where it was heading, we kind of divert things before they really climax.

Dean: Yeah, if there is anything that is climactic, it's more an interaction between the two or three instruments. It's not like one of us individually is necessarily going to solo, [laughs] or something. It's more of a synthesis.

Dion: Two people pick up on a sound that someone's making and get in with that.

O: Do you think of what you're doing as quote-unquote improvisation?

Dean: Improvisation is a really strange word, and I don't know if it's a very good one to apply to what we're doing. Improvising is like making the best use of what you've got, and I don't think that are resources are that meagre.

Dion: Do you think that improvisation implies meagre resources?

Dean: No, I think improvisation implies that you're using a format without any sense of direction, and I think that the word 'free' or 'open' is better, because we've got a context, our context is guitars and drums.

O: That sounds like a limited definition of improvisation - does it have to mean doing something to get out of a difficult situation? What if you're not in a difficult situation to begin with, and you're improvising from no background? It doesn't have to be a reaction to anything, it can grow out of itself.

Dean: Yeah, I don't know exactly why, but I don't like the connotations of the word. But maybe that's just my understanding of it. But it is definitely improvisation, in that it is improvisational music, we're playing music which is informal and spontaneous. Spontaneity applies to it being basically a matter of electricity and vibration, and just the spontaneity of that, and how we were saying before about playing the guitar and letting it do its own thing a lot of the time. Within the context of us and what we're doing, I like to think that it's not necessarily building a format either that way or the other way. I feel that we do have other aspects which come into what we're doing, so if we're going to create something, we get an idea of what we're going to create, then we attempt to do it, and don't try to redefine it, so the initial idea of what we were trying to do could happen in a certain way, and that might be through incredibly complex structure or preplanning. So we might know exactly where it's going to go, and then we just go for it and let it happen. I like to think that we're not necessarily an improvisation band, and that that's our format.

O: With Paul, are you going to keep on recording? Is he a pretty essential part of Thela?

Dion: The last interview we did we went on about how we wouldn't do anything else without him, but we've played three times since he's been gone, so we obviously can.

Dean: We might record something with Andrew [Moon, of RST].

O: I kind of prefer the duo stuff to what you did with Paul. Do you have a preference?

Dean: Not really.

Dion: I think when we did the CD recording, Dean and I were quite impressed at the time whit how the drums came out. Listening back to the other stuff, I don't really have a preference. I can see the drumming getting in the way sometimes.

O: His style is kind of big and rhythmic and it doesn't fit that well sometimes. But I still like the CD.

Dean: Yeah, we're pretty happy with it, our first proper recording. It was recorded in one day at [Auckland studio] Frisbee. We got David Coventry, a friend of ours, to engineer it. It took ten hours to record, it was all improvised.

Dion: The last track on the CD, we'd figured out a couple of riffs and come up with this mathematical way of putting them together, and we played that for a while.

O: Who did the artwork.

Dion: Dean took the photographs and I did the layout.

O: Is the photograph of the Auckland skyline meant as a joke?

Dion: It was kind of like, give them a photograph of what's really to blame for this. [laughter] We're definitely affected by living in Auckland, living in a place which is assumed to have no good bands. We thought it was quite funny to put a photograph of Auckland on the cover - it feels like we're really isolated here, when we play live not many people are interested, in general we're pretty badly received, and we didn't know anyone, we were doing out little thing all by ourselves. It's quite strange feeling isolated in the biggest city in the country.

Dean: Over that time we went out of our way to get hold of other music and hear of other people who were doing similar things, stuff like your magazine coming along [de/create, not Opprobrium - Ed], like being asked to be on Bruce's compilation - it's really nice to connect with people like that and get a bit of respect for our music. [laughs] It's quite alien, to think that there's people out there who actually like it. Up until this year, we knew what we wanted to do, and we knew we were going to do it, but we didn't have any idea of whether anyone would support it. Now, we've established ourselves with a group of people who are into supporting it, a small group of people around the world who are interested in listening to it.

Discography

• s/t cassette (no label)
• s/t 12" (no label)
• s/t triple 8" (Crawlspace)
• s/t CD (Ecstatic Peace)
• "Look Out - The Hot Fucking Jet!" on Le Jazz Non CD (Corpus Hermeticum)
• Argentina CD (Ecstatic Peace)