New Jersey-bred guitarist Julian Lynch is living a double life. Known in the experimental folk world for his psychedelic-influenced DIY recordings, Lynch spends his days teaching in Madison, WI while persuing a Ph.D. in anthropology and ethnomusicology. Though he’s at the center of a rising scene of improvisational indie rockers like Woods and Real Estate—who originally came together as his live band—Lynch rarely tours yet has traveled the world exploring different types of music. Between his teaching, studying and the stray live date, he has also released a steady stream of home-recordings—often recorded at a whisper as to not annoy his neighbor. Shortly before the release of his latest and most accessible recording, Lines, Lynch discussed his person journey from the world of lo-fi recordings to high-brow academia.
Let’s start by talking about your new album Lines. Between your Ph.D. and teaching you are juggling a lot of work. When did you start working on the album?
JL: I started working on it immediately after I finished working on Terra, the last record I put out—that’s usually how I operate. Before an album’s even out I’m working on the next one. So that’s kind of been in the works for a while. I think it’s the longest I’ve ever spent on an album. It’s been a couple years in the making, and it’s been kind of a stop and go process. I was out of the country for a little bit so I didn’t really work on it, and I had to take care of business at school for a while so I wasn’t working on it for long periods of time. But I’m happy that I spaced things out and took my time with it, and revisited things, and I kind of like that process so I may continue working like that in the future.
When did you start your graduate program? Were you already working as a solo artist when you decided to return to school?
JL: I’ve been a grad student for exactly the same amount of time that I’ve been recording under my own name, so since fall 2008. That’s when I first started doing this CD-R thing and just kind of releasing them so that my friends could hear what I was working on initially. Then [the labels] Spelling Bee and Underwater People started putting out records for me in 2009. But yeah I’ve been making music alongside the stuff I’ve been doing here. I started out doing a masters in ethnomusicology, and a master’s in anthropology, and now I’m working on a Ph.D. in the two disciplines, anthropology and ethnomusicology. I’m in classes this semester and I’m teaching this semester too, and I’m studying for my prelim exams probably beginning in April, so I’ve got a busy semester right now. There’s not a whole lot of music making to be expected in the next few months, just some scattered shows in the Midwest. But I probably won’t be getting any recording done until May, which is kind of a shame, but that’s all right.
Most of your recordings have been true solo recordings where you played all the instruments. Can you talk about your recording approach and how this album fits with your recent work?
JL: Thus far all the records have just been me. Which is not a rule or anything like that, I’m open to the possibility of collaborating someday with someone else on a joint record. But at the present, now, it’s all just me recording. And I guess the process is…I’ve kind of designed it as being something that I’d do by myself, for myself, in my free time without really expectations of anyone ever hearing any of it. And that’s sort of the attitude I went in with when I started the CD-R stuff I was doing in 2008. I made records before that, but at that point I’d given up on the idea of doing music full time and it became just sort of a hobby for myself.
Ironically, that’s when people started paying attention. When I moved out here I brought with me a four-track set recorder and that’s what I recorded my CD-R series with and also my first record. I upgraded to an 8-track with it and recorded Mare and part of Terra with that one. Then I got a new 8-track set and recorded the rest of Terra and then this new record Lines. So there’s been sort of a technological continuity since the beginning of recording on cassettes, but then again it’s not a rule or anything like that. Again, I’m open to the possibility of doing other stuff in the future too. I probably will actually because I will be doing some international traveling for my Ph.D. and it’s kind of…carrying around an 8-track is a pretty bulky item so it would be hard for me to justify bringing something like that with me on a plane. I’ll probably figure out some more compact way of recording stuff in the future. But for now I’ll keep using the 8-track.
Tying the two things we’ve talked about thus far together, how have you felt that your studies have affected your solo work? You have a very distinct, psychedelic but lo-fi style that’s carried through your work as you’ve studied world music culture. Do you see certain areas where your studies have influenced your recording approach?
JL: Not directly, actually. People have been surprised to learn that the stuff I do—studying the ethnomusicology stuff—rarely has to do with any musical material. So I’m not actually super hands on with music in my academic life. Any interests I’ve pursued have been on my own time and treated as influences outside of academia. I guess in terms of practical and logistical stuff, my studies have really strongly influenced my music making in terms of the fact that I can approach music making a lot differently from other people.
I think if I were a full time touring act or something like that, there would also be the potential for record advances and to do studio work or something, which doesn’t really interest me anyways because my process now and my schedule is kind of dominated by school. My process is like this: I record when I can, and it’s not like I have a few weeks or a chunk of time when I can go into the studio and finish a record like that. It’s sort of just, “Oh, I happen to have some time this Sunday so I’ll happen to record a little bit then and maybe I’ll return to that track next month or something like that.”
When you do perform the songs live—either around New York, Madison or the other cities you play in—do you still perform solo or do you bring a live band?
JL: I used to perform solo, for kind of awhile actually. This was starting back in 2009. I would either perform solo or I’d perform with other people doing improv sets, and slowly that kind of evolved to me playing with a group of people doing improv sets and then ultimately a group of people doing more structured, song-based sets. And so that’s what I do when I perform in New York now, probably in the last 3 years at least, I’ve just done solo band sets playing songs on the record, but playing them in a heavily adapted way, in a way that fits the stage a bit more and not to sound like the record in terms of expectations. But I do the same in Madison. So I play with a group of musicians that live in New York when I’m back there, and then when I’m here, I know a different set of people, some of them full time musicians here, some of them who have other jobs, and they help me out whenever I’m in the Midwest.
Speaking of improvisation, what would you say was your gateway into the world of freeform composition. Was it some of the ‘60s psychedelic bands or another avenue?
JL: Jazz, actually, was probably the way I really learned how to play music, in a way that made me feel like I was producing something I was happy with. I played with jazz bands in high school and I kept playing in jazz bands in college too. And that’s where I started to feel comfortable with the idea of improvisation and learn what that really meant because before that I had no clue. I’d been playing clarinet in elementary school and middle school but it wasn’t until I joined a jazz band and was playing guitar primarily in that jazz band that I learned what it meant to improvise. I learned that it was something I shouldn’t be scared of. I guess I integrated that a little into the music I’d been making in high school and college, but less so. I really started to improvise more towards the last year I was in college, and then after I finished doing that and was out in the world working for a little bit. And then I moved here to Wisconsin.
But it’s not like improvisation didn’t play any role in that, too. That’s something I’ve always been interested in, and certainly when I was in college, and toward the end of college, it started to have more of an appeal to me in terms of what I could perform. I started to apply the same strategies of improvisation to work with a sonic palette outside of jazz—or outside of rock.
Given that, as you say, you’ve recorded by yourself, I would imagine that a lot of your material is recorded at home with different levels of layering and tweaking around of sound. How does improvisation affect that approach? Do you just kind of build the songs that way or is it more of a traditionally constructed song that you enhance with various elements of overdubs and improvisation and whatnot in that sense?
JL: Well actually I would say during the process of Orange You Glad? and Mare for sure, and to a lesser extent Terra, and to a lesser extent Lines. I used to really just lay down the base track of drums or whatever and everything else would just get layered on top, completely improvisational. And I had no clue going in what a song would come out sounding like, and I think that’s still the case…I’m trying to think of all the tracks online and see which ones that’s still true of. It’s maybe 40% true of the new record, where it used to be 100% true. I’m doing a lot more deliberate composing these days. Lines is probably the first time I ever went in with stuff written down—maybe with Terra I had some of that going on too—but with Lines definitely, more structured, more deliberate, but there’s still a good amount of improvisation going on. I guess I do lots of multi-tracking of bass and clarinets or something like that and usually the first track I lay down is the most structured and composed or whatever. The second one a little less so, and by the time I lay down a third clarinet track, that’s usually the one with significantly more improvisation, based on kind of what has just been laid down in the prior layers of clarinet. So it still plays a part in what I’m doing, that’s for sure. And I usually don’t have a melody or whatever at the forefront of a song. Usually I don’t have the vocal line worked out beforehand, so a lot of the other elements from the new record are more composed than they used to be.
And why do you think that is in this case? Was it just something you’ve been gravitating towards in your writing process or did you deliberately want to try to create a different approach for this album?
JL: I think there are a few different reasons. One of the reasons is mainly in part because large parts of the record were written during periods of time when I didn’t have access to a machine to record on, because usually a big part of my process is I’ll have this musical idea and then I’ll go on to record it, and then from there, I’ll improvise layers on top of it. Instead, for this record, I was out of the country for a few months and part of the record got recorded when I was outside of Wisconsin and didn’t have access to recording equipment. So I ended up writing down stuff and using that as material. And then also part of it was that Terra was sort of driven by a bizarre extreme where I wanted every track to rely on a very simple musical idea, kind of to the point of exhaustion. I think a lot of people found my last record boring because of that, but it was kind of deliberate. It’s kind of what I wanted with it, whereas with this record I kind of took a different approach, and kind of was more interested in writing parts that were interlocking and worked a little more like clockwork, which took a little more forethought to do. And there was still some room for improvisation and other fun, playful stuff on top of things, but it definitely demanded some planning.
Definitely and I think it’s kind of interesting to record in different ways. I mean as a musician, it’s something that kind of just inspires you to keep tweaking up the different stuff.
JL: Yeah.
You have a long history with the band Real Estate, whose core members grew up in your hometown of Ridgefield, NJ. In a recent Jambands.com interview, Alex Bleeker even mentioned that the band first played together as a unit as your backing band.
JL: The first time I ever played with Bleeker and Martin in a band was back in high school. We had a band called The Enormous Radio and that was me and Bleeker and [Real Estate frontman] Martin Courtney and a guy named Alec Strum played the trumpet and a guy named Dave Hancock played drums. And I played an organ. And that’s the first time when I played with those guys in a band.
But when I was in college, when we were all in college, I had this solo project going for awhile that was strictly a recording project and one year we decided we wanted to tour and make it more of a band. And that’s when any of us first went on a big tour. I had gone on a shorter tour in the UK before that with my friend Gary Caruth, but the first time I ever did like a long US tour within that band with those guys. And [Real Estate guitarist] Matt Mondanile joined us—he played bass, and then at the last minute whatever drummer we had never worked out and at the time Matt was playing in this band called Miami Heat in Massachusetts. And the drummer for that was this guy Etienne, and he was like, “This guy Etienne can play drums,” and we were like, “Ok,” so Etienne joined the band and we went on tour together, only a couple weeks after I’d met Etienne. And I went back down to D.C. where I was living at the time and all those guys ended up going to New York and they started Real Estate, the four of them.
R: In terms of live shows, do you have anything coming up in the New York area or Wisconsin you want to talk about? Like specific performances?
JL: I have a free show with [Matt Mondanile’s other band] Ducktails on April 1st, April Fools’ Day, in Madison at the student union that I’m psyched to play. I’m psyched to play all of them actually. So yeah, lots of shows coming up, but all in the Midwest.
