Alex Bleeker is best known as the personable bassist on the rising indie-psych band Real Estate. Bleeker is also a trained actor, who studied the performing arts for years as an undergraduate student at Vermont’s Bennington College. While at home in Brooklyn while Real Estate works on its sophomore studio album, Bleeker combined his two loves by composing the score for a Manhattan theatrical presentation of The Assassins Chase Pinocchio. Along with Woods keyboardist G. Lucas Crane, Bleeker not only worked on a score that nodded to his background in improvisation but also his roots in the improvisational jamband world. On the eve of the play’s opening Bleeker discussed the making of Assassins Chase of Pinocchio, the new Real Estate album and his formative experiences at Phish shows.
Can you talk about your background in theatre and how you became involved with Assassins Chase of Pinocchio ?
I’ve been doing theater and theater-related projects for a long time. I started as an actor and I actually went to college to study theater. And then while I was in college I got into more avant-garde, experimental theatre and stuff that involved multimedia projections and sound and video type stuff that was incorporated into live performance. So I got really into that kind of stuff and started doing some of it in New York when I graduated college. That was right around the time that Real Estate was getting started.
I always played music and I always played in a band, but I never studied it academically. Theater was the art form that I was pursuing more actively at the time. I’ve always had sort of, no pun intended, a nose for theater, I guess. But then the band started to take off and it was with my best friends and definitely another dream and an artistic pursuit of mine. So I just started following that one with more intention these days.
And then I met Max and the rest of the company at Immediate Medium—who’s putting on the production—sort of randomly, actually. I went back to my high school to do a reading for charity with all of these different alumni who are all involved in the theatre and the arts today. And one of the guys who was in the reading with me—his girlfriend—is a member of this company that I’m working with now.
She and I got to talking afterwards at a bar and realized that we have similar avant-garde experimental theatre ideas. She invited me to work on this one project—that I didn’t end up working on—and I met Max through that. He worked for some PR company or something and he was interested in music and heard I was in Real estate and was interested in that. So we kept up a relationship and when he needed music for this play he asked me. So that’s basically how it happened. And I brought Lucas from Woods into it.
What was your approach in crafting the score?
They would give us vague, general sort of visual guidelines, which is cool because you don’t often think of plays as having a score unless it’s a musical. So I kind of feel like the work that we did was more similar to a movie score where they need the music to invoke a certain theme or to invoke a type of imagery that goes along with something that’s happening cinematically within the play.
They gave us a bunch of source material saying “we like stuff like this,” but they were also like, “we need music for running.” And so Lucas and I would be like “Let’s do a running jam. What does running sound like to us?” And it turned into this appreciated synth, Miami-vice chase scene kind of vibe, but fucked with a little bit. So it was that kind of thing. We’d jam “running” for 20 minutes and then decided “this works, this doesn’t work…etc”
Is it a prerecorded score or will you be performing it live?
For most of the performances it’s going to be stuff that we have prerecorded. Then Lucas and I have plans to cut up pieces of our favorite stuff from the score that we made and put it out on a record. So we’ll be using those recordings that we did. But we are talking about getting together for two or three special performances where we perform live.
Did you bring similar influences to this project as you do your with own bands?
Yeah, I think Lucas and I both did. There were essentially two components they were looking for. One was really abstract, weird, folky experimental noisy kind of stuff and then they need a couple of songs, or more formal compositions. Lucas particularly is really good at the ambient noise thing and I think both of our inclinations are to the experimental, psychedelic side of things. So more of the compositions and songs would begin with me and then more of the ambient abstract stuff would begin with Lucas. And then both of us would meet in the middle.
I brought the pop sensibility of stuff that I do in Real Estate and my solo work to the project, and also that psych-pop, weird alternative folky type-thing. And then Lucas helped to make it all the more deranged.
What were some specific influences that played a part in creating this music?
For this one a lot of it came from us, and a lot of it came from stuff that they gave us that they were interested in. But there was this early analog-synthy thing that we were influenced by. There’s a lot of John Hammer in there and then there’s a guy named Bruce Haack. It’s kind of intended for children, so Bruce Haack really fits into that mold. He did a lot of really early electronic music with a lot of synth and instruments and drum machines and programs he created when it was really new technology. So it all has this air of [robot voice] “Welcome to the Future.” Kind of cheesy, but it’s really cool. He actually wound up doing a lot of children’s scores. He had this nutty-professor children’s persona, but it was kind of dark and sexual and bizarre. So that was a cool starting point for us because we wanted to look at both sides of the coin of what could be a weird kids show with weird kids music.
What can people expect going into this non-traditional take on a classic children’s performance?
I think people can expect a stream of self-consciousness Pinocchio, because Pinocchio was very free-flowing and dreamlike. There are some parts of your self-conscious that are very pleasant and ethereal and then some parts that are a bit scary. I’d call it almost a dream-state Pinocchio. There are live projections and live-sound beyond the music we made to enhance the entire performance.
Let’s turn the dial toward your other projects. Has Real Estate been in the studio as of late?
Yeah, we’re almost done with our second full-length studio record. Most of the tracking is done and next week we’re probably going to get into mixing it. We recorded it at Marcata Studio, which is in this really awesome, old converted barn up in New Paltz. It used to be the home of The Walkmen, and the studio was located way up in Harlem. And since then The Walkmen are no longer involved, but it’s the same engineer that ran their studio and a lot of the same old gear. There’s a big 22 track tape machine, so we’re still getting to do analog stuff, which is sort of like the next level up and very cool for us.
It’s much more of a hi-fi record than the first one, but it’s not like a glossy chromed-out studio. It’s definitely a professional studio with nice mics and nice gear, and a pro engineer. But it’s not L.A. super glossy, super clean kind of studio. So it’s a perfect marriage for us. It’s a pro studio but a homemade pro studio in this weird way—it’s up in a barn in the middle of the woods.
I think it’s a very comfortable place for us to be in because we definitely didn’t want to abandon that homemade feel. That being said, we wanted to see what we could do in a proper studio. So it’s definitely going to have a much cleaner studio sound, but it’s us creating the Real Estate sound in that kind of studio.
In your opinion, what is the main difference between this album and the last one?
On this record I have a song that I wrote, which I’m very excited about. I actually do the lead vocal on it. That’s probably the biggest difference in terms of me, personally. Martin is still the chief songwriter on this record. It’s not all that different from the first one. The very first batch of songs we ever learned together as Real Estate is what made up the first record. Obviously, this is the sophomore album and some of these new songs we had a good opportunity to play live before recording them.
So now that we’re recording them, even though they’re new recorded songs they feel like old songs because they’ve been in the live repertoire for six months or some of them almost a year. So that’s cool in a way, and then there’s also some brand new stuff. Like maybe fragments of songs that we got to finish in the studio, which was definitely a new approach for us. We’re hoping for a release in early fall, like September or October.
Real Estate has been together a few years now, and the live shows have really improved during that time. What role does improvisation play in your live performances?
I think, very simply, it’s more fun for us to play live shows if the songs aren’t exactly the same all the time. So as musicians and friends I think if we’re having a better time on stage then the audience is having a better time watching us. We’re definitely not a classic jamband. We don’t have too many jams, but there are certain songs that lend themselves to improvisation or even just slight differences throughout them, so we can keep it interesting for ourselves.
Then there’s a couple of songs that we just leave room, there’s no “we end it after this many times, etc.” We always just feel it out. I always feel like at our best shows someone will do something that spins us in a completely new direction that we haven’t done live and we’ll all get really excited and some great jam will come out of that.
When we started the band that was one of the major components we wanted to go after—the jammy idea where songs could morph and change and wouldn’t always be the same. Then somewhere we just started playing a ton of shows, around the time when the record came out. We were on tour and playing on a slightly larger stage and, for a little while, the jammy thing took a bit of a backseat.
That’s part of the reason we haven’t been on tour since November—when you’re playing the same 12 songs over and over they can get really mechanical. So now we have all these new live songs in our repertoire, and actually the last show we played we opened with a jam we’d never played before and then we jammed into “Suburban Beverage” out of that. A bunch of other songs ended with jams and we just made this effort to open up to improvising. I think it was my favorite show that was played in a while and we had fun. So I think you can expect some more of that.
Would you be willing to allow tapers to record your shows?
Yeah, totally. I would love to allow taping at all of our shows. We’ve had no problem with it and I’m super into it. If we were ever in a position where we had to designate special taper sections or seats, I would do that in a heartbeat. I’ve always respected that Grateful Dead live bootleg, tape trading culture, I’ve always been really into it. If that were to ever happen to us I think we’d be really psyched.
Have tapers approached you about recording in the past?
Yeah, there are a fair amount of our shows up on NYC Taper’s site. We really like him and he does a good job. People tend to ask if they can do it just out of respect, but I don’t think we’ve ever said no. It would be cool if someone would make them into actual cassette tapes. I haven’t seen a Real Estate bootleg yet, but that would be awesome.
We’ll let our readers know. What’s happening with your solo project Alex Bleeker and the Freaks?
I have a new album’s worth of material all demoed out. I think I’m going to start recording it properly once we wrap up this Real Estate album.
There’s a song on the last Freaks album called “Dead On,” which sounds exactly like a Grateful Dead jam. Was that intentional?
Yeah, the reason it’s called “Dead On” is totally a reference to the Grateful Dead. And what that is, actually, that was when we were testing the levels. That record is recorded live and then I put the vocals on top of it. So we were testing the levels of the eight-track machine that we were using and we were just jamming and then I heard it and I was just like, “this sounds great.” So we pulled out that little segment and put in on the record as a little homage to the Dead.
Do you bring more of your jam influences to your side project?
I think I’m the member of Real Estate that has the biggest jam background. So probably my side project, just by nature of the fact that I’m the lead songwriter, is going to be the most jammy, in a way. But Matt’s [Mondanile] early stuff [with Ducktails] is really improvisational which is like a flip side of the jam coin. Not like jamband jambands, but stuff like krautrock that is highly improvisational has a big influence on his music.
I’ve said in multiple other interviews that some of the first psychedelic and most experimental music I’ve ever heard were spacey jams at live Phish shows that taught me to open my ears and be patient and listen to music like that.
Is there a specific Phish show that influenced you?
I never saw them pre-hiatus. I only saw them post-hiatus and then recently. I was at the show at Nassau Coliseum in February of 2003 when they did the 30 minute “Tweezer” to open the second set—the one where they played “Destiny Unbound.” That was probably the best Phish show I’ve ever seen. Just the feeling of that show was amazing.
I first got into Phish when they were still together and then six months later they broke up, so I never got to see them until after the hiatus. I started going to shows afterwards and there’s this whole culture of being talked down to, “Oh, they used to be so much better…” But I had nothing to compare it to and I just thought it was awesome. I just loved every show I saw.
Then I saw that one, and it’s similar to what I was talking about before. If the crowd’s having a good time and we’re having a good time, then it’s going to be a better show for everyone and they just feed into each other. I really saw how that worked because they were playing super well and the crowd got really psyched. I’m sure that just made them want to play so much better. You really felt that indescribable energy of a really, really good show that everyone was unanimously agreeing upon. That was the first time it happened for me.
