In certain ways, one can track the Disco Biscuits evolution by looking back at its annual multi-day festival, Camp Bisco. Since its humble beginnings in the late 1990s, Camp Bisco has blossomed into one of the Northeast’s preeminent electronic music festivals. In the past four years, especially, the event has helped foster the band’s relationship with British psy-trance superstar Simon Posford and his Twisted Records ensemble: in 2005 Posford brought his Hallucinogen and Younger Brothers DJs project to the festival; in 2006 he performed on his own and sat in with the Disco Biscuits and by 2007 the groundwork had already been laid for a new band featuring members of the Disco Biscuits and the Twisted Records family (this year will see a return performance by the Younger Brother live band boasting Psford, Marc Brownstein, Tom Hamilton, Joe Russo and others). Camp Bisco has also served as original drummer Sam Altman’s swan song, a testing ground for new Disco Biscuits songs and an annual destination for the group’s national fanbase.
This year the band will arrive in Mariaville, NY shortly before the release of its new studio album (the disc is tentatively due out this fall). Below, guitarist Jon Gutwillig discusses the new album, how the Disco Biscuits got James Murphy to curate a night of music and why he needs an intern to keep him focused.
If you look at the Camp Bisco schedule, it says that each night one tent is going to be curated by a different label or group like STS9, Twisted Records and DFA. Can you tell us a little bit about what we can expect from those late nights and how you came up with that concept?
One night is the DFA crew which is really LCD Soundsystem’s other name. James Murphy is the leader of that group, and he basically has carte blanche. He’s going to get up there, and he has all night to do whatever he wants in the tent. It’s hard to get James Murphy to do a concert right now because they are not coming out with the next LCD Soundsystem album for a while.
They are the type of band that is allowed to disappear for three years and then come back with another album.
Exactly. But we call them up and we’re like, “Dude, what’s you problem man? You’ve got to play a concert, bro.” And he’s like, “Well, I can’t do LCD Soundsytem because we don’t have an album out.” And we’re like, “Why don’t you just come and play, just do whatever you want—we don’t care what you do, just do something.” I mean, the guy is very good at everything that he does. So we’re just excited about that. We went back and forth with him about that on a personal level, not on a business level, and he finally was like, “Alright, well if you give me my own stage, I’ll do it.” And so that was how the whole curator thing happened—James Murphy sort of invented the concept of the curator tent because that’s what he wanted.
So then we took that idea and were like well if we are going to give James a stage and all the DFA guys a creative outlet, then there are some other guys that are of that extremely high caliber that would also do really well under that situation. So we gave Simon Posford, Benji Vaughan and the whole Twisted Crew a night and then we gave the Sound Tribe guys a night as well because they have a lot of musical incarnations, and we thought it would be interesting to see what they came up with in a similar situation. So that’s basically how that all happened, and then we just splurged and bought another tent for these curated evenings.
In addition to multiple straight-ahead Disco Biscuits sets, the band is also playing a set billed as Tractorbeam vs. Perfume. Can you explain to readers both what that set will entail and how you come up with those alter egos?
They are both little interesting ideas. The Perfume is a Disco Biscuits cover band with all the members of the Disco Biscuits in it. We play Biscuits songs but we play them all totally differently—we might do one song country or another song like a U2 rock song— everything is done in a totally different genre, but the lyrics are the same and the vibe is the same. You know, we have been doing that for years, we just decided that for one of our sets we would do a project where all the songs were like that. So that’s what The Perfume is. Tractorbeam is the DB if they were just strictly a techno band. There are no lyrics—we don’t even set up vocal mics.
The first time you played under the name The Perfume was at the Wetlands, correct?
Yeah, it was something special to do for the Wetlands when they were closing down [in 2001]. [Author’s note: the original Perfume gig at Wetlands was just a stealth Disco Biscuits show; shortly after the group came up with the cover song concept]. We did it a couple of times after that because the fans really liked it, and, artistically, we were into how can we play our songs differently. So we just got into it for a couple months and did a bunch of different songs that way. And then we just sort of buried it and then a year or two later we came up with a different concept which is Tractorbeam which is basically the Biscuits as an all techno band.
An interesting thing is we don’t have jamband song transitions. We actually change the way that we strategically look at music and playing. We play all of our own songs but we do instrumental versions of all of them. Also, all our transitions are more rooted in dance music transitions than standard jamband transitions. We pull those out. It’s like a basketball team that just goes out with a different strategy. The first time we did that was, I believe, in Chicago and then we did it a few other times. But that first Chicago show and one Tractorbeam show we did in Lancaster, PA are the two that I felt were most authentic. We did it once or twice more but those two were like, we rehearsed as Tractorbeam for those and I thought we did a really good job of staying authentic to what Tractorbeam is supposed to be. Sometimes we get jamband-y on everything
So at Camp Bisco there is going to be a set that mixes both those ideas together?
Yeah, we are just going to do a little bit of both. We will have a Perfume styled song and then jam on the Tractorbeam style for a while and then go into another song and do it Perfume style and then go back and forth. People want to hear both so we just figured we’d mix them up.
Can you elaborate a little about how a Tractorbeam song transitions differs from normal Disco Biscuits transitions?
Well, a jamband transition is more of a flow thing. Like everybody is playing together and everybody is communicating into the jam and talking in the jam. An electronic transition is more based around a break and a pause in the energy and then a recreation of a new vibe and then a full introduction of the new vibe where they bring in the drums and the kick drums and everything. It’s more like a stop and start thing like a DJ would stop and start two songs next to each other. A DJ doesn’t have the ability to warp one song into another too much. He’s got to sort of match them up, make one drum, mute one drum, you know what I mean, just DJ. With Tractorbeam, we are going for more DJ transitions.
Speaking of new sounds, you recently debuted the new track “You and I” off your new studio album on the radio.
Yes, we played it on the radio in Colorado, and then we played it again instrumentally…and now obviously with the Internet everybody has the song already. It’s not like in the old days when you could do something on the radio and then release it later.
The second you do it, it’s released in this world so we decided to start playing it. We toyed with it once and then we played a full on Tractorbeam version of it and then last night we played a full on version of it.
For the most part, the songs off the new Disco Biscuits studio album have not been played live. One exception is Marc Brownstein’s “The City.” How does the studio version of that song compare with the live version most fans are familiar with?
“The City” was made sort of like old school hip-hop style. We made “The City” almost entirely out of samples. I don’t know if we are going to try to recreate the album version of “The City” live. I mean, it is just so interesting on the album. It’s so crazy and weird and it’s all made with samples and its nuts. And I don’t know if you know, it’s a totally different song really. But I think it is truer to the lyrics than what we do live but who knows.
What was it like making that into a live song? Because I heard a clip that was on line and thought it was such a studio song with your vocals and the beats and stuff like that. Was it an interesting process reinterpreting that for a live setting?
Well I mean, all the shit on the album is studio done and really “studio-d” up. We just really had fun with the studio and did a lot of stuff. Everybody wants it to be a live album but why, I don’t understand that because we have already released live albums. This is a studio album. So it’s all studio versions, there’s no qualms about it. And when it comes to retranslating it to live, I don’t know how much we want to, you know, be one of those bands that’s recreating things exactly. That’s a lot of work, you know. I’d rather us focus making the energy huge than focus on how to recreate something on an album. That’s for a different kind of band and bands that do that really well I like to go see but that’s not our band. It’s more of like a show less involved in improvisation. And if we were covering Daft Punk songs we wouldn’t try and do them exactly like Daft Punk, we’d get the gist of it and go from there. But Daft Punk, I like that they do it the way that they do it but we just wouldn’t do it that way.
In terms of the new album, the rest of the songs you will probably keep in the can until the album is released, right?
Well, we’ll start releasing them as the album is ready to be released. I mean, we are going to start releasing them and letting people copy them and move them around on the Internet and have fun with them. That’s what releasing an album is nowadays. We are going with the flow.
Strategic leaking as they say…
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don’t necessarily think that we are good at doing anything strategically. We don’t like to use that word [laughter].
In addition to having new songs on the album, and I’m sure that you’ll play a lot of new songs at Camp Bisco which are new but aren’t going to be on the album. Even though the album is almost done, are you still writing regularly at this point?
Well, we are having sort of a renaissance of songwriting. I think that undercurrent is sort of driving the band right now. We are playing really good shows, which for an improv band to have as a high a batting average as I feel like we have right now is really cool and it feels great. But, I think what a lot of it is based on, we have so many new songs and we have this whole album of new songs that we are not playing for you. And then we have nine or so new songs: We just released “Park Ave” as a remix so people can remix it themselves. That song is going over great live. So we’ll probably “studiofy” some of these new songs but, it’s just like, there is still a huge backlog of shit that we have not even got around to.
So it is going to be a good coming year for the Biscuits because there’s a lot of songs that are waiting to go into the set of all different types. They are all very electronic now. We seem to have just really been embracing, after being in the studio and working with a lot of electronic people and hip hop people, we seem to really be embracing those sounds, so most of the new stuff is that way. We played “You and I” for the first time yesterday, really, officially. “Minions” was re-worked as “Baby, I’m in Space,” which was put into rotation last week. “Mirrors” was put in a month before that. “M-80,” “Uber Glue,” I mean there is a whole list, “Tamarin Alley,” “Rivers,” there’s just a whole list of new songs that are going over awesome.
*That reminds me of around the time They Missed the Perfume came out when you said to Jambands.com that you had enough unrecorded material to release eight or so new albums.
There’s just so many new songs. We are going to try and change our recording approach that now that we have our own studio—we are going to actually try and start recording. Our new album was an experiment with making an album without playing those songs first. We are in the studio so let’s create something.
With different producers, like Dirty Harry…
That’s the thing is, people are like “What are you doing? Where is the DB, blah blah, why are there all these other people on it?” We went into the studio with this sort of open door musician policy because our studio is huge. So people were like coming in and living there and moving in and moving out and we just decided that our policy about it would be to just let it happen. So if somebody wants to add a guitar line on a song they don’t need to call me. They just pick up the guitar and put it down. So that seems to be a lot of why this album is going to be different and interesting because there are a lot of different musicians in the Philly area that are on the album. Harry actually lived in the studio for a while and he’s a super fuckin’ talent
He actually won a Grammy at age 18.
Yeah, he won a Grammy at 18 or something. So he’s super talented and we love working with him because he’s real fast and you get a lot done with Harry. It’s great. Alex is very good—he plays every single instrument in the game. Then we worked with 2Face who is about to sign with Jimmy Iovine and do some R & B shit. 2Face is going to be at Camp Bisco. He’s a great up and coming artist. He did the Nokia on Saturday night, he did the Funkadelic song with us. We did some work with 2Face and his partner Ritz who is like, Ritz is like, you know how the Neptunes have Pharrell and then the other guy? Ritz is…
He’s the other guy.
Yeah, he’s “the other guy.” He’s very talented and a great dude so we like working with Ritz. We did a lot of beats with Tommy Hamilton, who had a lot to do with this album. There’s a lot of people who contributed. There’s some horn players and a lot of vocalists who contributed and I like it that way. I think there’s some Biscuit purists who are going to be like “I want a pure Biscuit album” and we’ll probably end up doing that next. But I like doing the, you know, community fair style like “Hey you!” Lets just make a song.” I like doing the studio albums that way, just to be honest with you know, we’re all writing Biscuits style music, I’m writing a lot of dub step music. And then we’re doing a lot of this Philadelphia community music. Like King Britt we worked with who is a real Philadelphia guy and he was a part of the album: He was at Camp Bisco. It’s fun to work with a lot of people. It’s fun to do it and it is exciting, musically.
Are you still working on a lot of Dub Step material?
Yeah, I work on Dub Step all the time, I don’t like to sit in the studio by myself, that sort of blows. We are doing the job because we like the job but sitting in a room for 8 hours by yourself is not as much fun. Like for me, I’m a real gregarious social person so I would rather have someone there, even if he doesn’t do anything, just sits there and smokes weed, which honestly, half the dudes in our studio that’s all they fuckin’ do but I’m fine with that. I would rather have them sitting there smoking weed. And like the Dub Step stuff I do with other people. I try and work with other people as much as possible. I have to do a lot of it myself because nobody is going to do my job except me. But if someone will sit there and smoke weed while I do it I’m happier. And I find it more productive because if somebody is not there you’ll go on your Facebook page and three hours will go by and you’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I was supposed to make that song!”
But if somebody is sitting there on the couch you can’t go on your Facebook page because then you look like a dork so you have to actually perform for them a little bit. I have an intern in Philadelphia and one of his jobs is to sit in the studio if nobody else is available to sit in the studio. If I go to the studio and there’s nobody there I call my intern and say, “Come over.” And he doesn’t smoke marijuana, so he just sits there. I try not to ask him his opinion because I don’t want him to be emotionally involved in the producing of the music because he’s not there for that. You know, we have been doing audience work our whole lives so you have to have a small audience at all points in time.
Jimi Hendrix was known to bring a crowd into the studio when he mixed Electric Ladyland and there are a lot of people who were critical of that because they were like, “Well, he was mixing for the audience.” So if some girl got up and danced when he mixed it a certain way he would be like, “OK that’s good” and they were critical of him for that. And I was like how could you possibly be critical of Electric Ladyland.
Especially since Jimi Hendrix was the king of taking the live feel and bringing it into the studio. It’s all loose and improv heavy. It wasn’t like, produced with tracks and everything like that.
And he was flying with it and I frankly think that if you have a girl in the studio and your making something and she gets up and dances, I say keep that part! Nix the part before that! The track right there, why parse it out a million ways, you know, you figured it out.
Camp Bisco will return to Mariaville, NY from July 16-18. The Disco Biscuits, Nas & Damian Marley, Chromeo, Younger Brother, Dr. Dog, STS9, Brothers Past and John Brown’s Body are among the acts scheduled to appear.
