Bryce Dessner sure knows how to stay busy. Last year, he helped his twin brother stage the massive Dark Was the Night concert at Radio City Music Hall and put together his own multi-night multi-media work, The Long Count, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition he’s collaborated with Brooklyn neighbors like Sufjan Stevens and helped Bonnaroo co-founder Ashley Capps curate the second annual Big Ears Music Festival in Knoxville, TN. Throughout all this, the guitarist found time to record two full-length albums: one with his noted indie band The National ( High Violet ) and another his longtime avant-garde-classical project Clogs ( The Creatures In The Garden of Lady Walton ). Formed at Yale in the 1990s, the genre-jumping art band Clogs finds the guitarist exploring sonic territory with the likes of Padma Newsome (viola, violin), Rachael Elliott (bassoon, melodica) and Thomas Kozumplik (percussion). In the past decade the musicians have referenced everything from medieval folk to improvisational jazz, and The Creatures In The Garden of Lady Walton. During a rare moment of downtime between photo shoots, Dessner discusses Clogs’ evolution, his love of improvisation and why you might see him playing in a Grateful Dead cover band sometime soon.
Though many Relix and Jambands.com readers first heard of you through the National, Clogs has actually been around for over a decade. I believe the group first came together when you were a student at Yale—before the National officially formed, correct?
We were all there in music school for various reasons and so we kind of came together the summer after when we all finished in ‘99. At first it was really just an open ended question: we wanted to do some new type of group or band, and we all shared a similar classical background. We all also had an interest in composing and doing something more improvised, so that was the beginning. It took a while to figure out what that would be. Clogs’ sound has evolved in different ways over the years. Our first record [ 2001’s Thom’s Night Out ] was really full of simple melodies and folk chords, and the second one [ 2003’s Lullaby for Sue ] was much more experimental in tone, composition wise. And our third record [ 2004’s Stick Music ] had a lot of extended techniques and improvisation. The more recent record Lantern combined a lot of those ideas. I would say [2010’s] The Creatures In The Garden of Lady Walton has the richest sound because it’s really referencing a lot of different aspects of the music we’ve made together over the years.
Clogs has covered a lot of sonic territory over the years. What would you say has been the largest catalyst for this change in sound?
I think it’s just purely where are interests are. During the period we made Lantern both Padma and I were really interested in medieval music and renaissance music. There are a fair amount of contemporary composers who have that interest because it was before the rule book was written so there were all sorts of weird interesting themes happening. All that harmonically and rhythmically-based music has a really rich base that you can reference in a free way.
Part of our dynamic is that with four musicians, and we’ve always had the same four instruments. To keep it interesting for ourselves we had vary what we do with them. We always flirted early on—I spent a lot of time playing in a rock band [The National] and was we came more popular and had fans coming we were limited as to what we could do. I think early on with Clogs we had the idea that we could play this classically-based music in rock clubs, which we do still, but I think we also quickly figured out it would be more rewarding for us to keep things completely open terms of the sounds we make. On some level its kind of a laboratory for sound and composition and pretty free interesting environment to work in, you know? There’s no pressure from the label and there’s very little expectation. If anything I think the only expectation is that people like being surprised.
Given that the band is really defined by its four personalities, do you feel that Clogs’ evolution is really dictated and defined by its albums?
Yeah, I think so. In 2004 we made that record Stick Music, and I’m really proud of it. I think it’s possibly one of the best we’ve done. It was really esoteric live—we did a cult tour and people were really scratching their heads. It’s just very slow burn, very experimental, and I think that gave way to our Lantern period, which is sort of our punchiest and most accessible kind of record. I think that was partly because we were playing shows, and we needed to develop music people could get into and that happened that way. It’s probably a conscious choice on whoever’s composing the music. This record was conceived by Padma. It really hangs together like through his ideas—both in the lyrics and musically. It is kind of its own universe, and Clogs is nice because it can kind of adapt to that and molded into whatever way you choose.
When did you guys start working on Lady Walton?
It took forever! A couple of the pieces we toured, actually. We played “To Hugo,” and I used to do two of them that we could play live, and we really worked those out together. Others, like “Adages,” which is a big kind of modernist one, is a really hard piece of music, so it took awhile to get it right and learn it. I think the composition of it probably started in 2005 even before Lantern was released.
You mentioned that Clogs is rooted in classical composition and freeform improvisation, phrases that don’t normally go hand-in-hand. How would you say you balance those approaches?
It’s funny. Though history would make it seem differently, we’ve always been on that bench, part of our interest in renaissance music is that renaissance musicians are like the greatest improvisers. Only half the notes are actually written and most of what they actually play is ornamentation. So that kind of process of classical musicians being great improvisers was kind of lost. Many Bach fugues, he would actually improvise those, when he wrote those down they were just one version. Or Mozart … there’s a long tradition of that that’s kind of been lost, and in our own naïve way I guess I would like to think that somehow we’re tapping into that, even…hardly as our music isn’t a Bach fugue.
Do you feel the material on The Creatures In The Garden of Lady Walton works in a live setting?
We’re not doing that many shows because this new album has a lot of collaborators on it— my brother [Aaron] plays on it, Matt Berninger from The National sings on a track and Shara Warden, who is like a fifth member of Clogs, plays on it. So to get everybody together is not easy, but we’re doing a show in New York where we’ll present the whole album. And then we’re planning a few more over the year in between National tours and some other shows. We just did two shows in Minneapolis: one night we did old Clogs stuff, and then the second night we did all new stuff. It is nice to mix in a few of our older pieces or whatever, but the new stuff is different. It has its own special sonic thing about it. At the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville we’re also gonna be presenting all the music. It is this festival I am co-curating with Ashley Capps later this month. He is a really amazing guy and lived in downtown New York in the ‘70s, so he has a wide understanding of all sorts of music.
You have always balanced careers in rock and classical music. Which form did you study first?
I’ve been playing in rock bands with my brother since we were little and around the same time I started playing classical guitar. My initial interest in classical was that I became more and more interested in the guitar as an instrument and how to play these different techniques, though I was still playing rock music. That led to at a certain point where I got really interested in classical music and specifically Baroque music or Renaissance music. I still play a lot of contemporary music—people like Steve Rice and other contemporary composers. So it kind of started through the guitar and then it became something more about loving playing that instrument, and I ended up doing a master’s degree in classical guitar.
What was your main entry into the world of improvisation?
I originally got in to classical guitar because I love guitarists like John Fahey, and as kids my brother and I were definitely into the Grateful Dead. I’ve never been into jazz improvisation, really—I mean most of the jazz I like is more modal or drone based. There’s a great guitarist named Ralph Towner, but he pretty much plays a couple chords. I tend not to like jazz guitar and a lot of changes. I just find it kind of meandering. So I would say we’re more influenced by the economy of rock music more than jazz.
Do you find that your early love of the Grateful Dead still comes through in your guitar style?
On some level I’d say it does. It’s funny…you’d be surprised at how many bands are influenced by the Grateful Dead. We were joking with our friends in Grizzly Bear about starting a Dead cover band with them because they’re kind of obsessed with that music. I mean certainly some of the longer form improvisational stuff we’ve done over the years is influenced by the Grateful Dead, though I am a lightweight compared to many Dead fans. The full-on Deadhead in my community is National drummer Bryan Devendorf. The Dead and New Order are the two things that are essential for him.
I would say that everybody in Clogs is similar in that we all have more than one thing going on, and everyone has varied musical backgrounds. Padma Newsome was an amazing classical violist and played in great orchestras, and quartets and stuff, but then he got interested in Indian music and then he’s really a highly trained composer and writes for opera and large orchestras. And Rachael Elliott is the most classical by nature of her instrument, bassoon, but she also played jazz saxophone, as a kid. Thomas Kozumplik is similar—I think he played a fair amount of jazz and in rock bands and stuff. I would say I’m the most rock-oriented of the bunch—obviously I’m playing mostly in a rock band now. But I think that’s typical of musicians nowadays. Very few musicians just do one thing. For the last century or so it just seems like in popular music it seems the divisions of those things have disintegrated that it’s just hard to even classify. The other thing is that being a guitar player, the guitar is kind of the musical ambassador to every kind of music in the world. So you have to be very narrow minded not to be exposed to these different sounds these days.
How would you say your classically training his influenced your approach to rock music?
You don’t suddenly come to rock music and then learn how to turn an amplifier up loud—that’s something that the people who have been doing it well have been doing it for a long time, and it’s intuitive in some ways. I don’t play really loud or whatever like the way I did in The National, but I’m glad that I’ve had those experiences for a long time. I’ve experienced a lot of pressure to be one thing, even now, you get certain narrow minded people whether it be critics or presenters or whatever, saying you’re not allowed to do that or do that, but to me they’ve always co-existed and I need different sides of music in a way to really keep interested, and I think it’s really rewarding to have different experiences.
