Music-maker and Producer Mark Bingham is going to be releasing multiple volumes of his work via his friend Louis Michot’s label, Nouveau Electric, starting with two volumes arriving on November 18th. Those albums are titled Mushroom Crowd (2017), and Goo Seneck (2014), and today Glide is offering an exclusive listen to both albums. In total, 22 albums will be released that span over 50 years of creating music. Some of the material is being rereleased because it’s no longer available, and some of it has never been released commercially. What this whole body of work has in common is a great deal of collaboration with musicians from many traditions and an experimental approach to music that builds on elements of sound as “events” which can be assembled, much like some trends in modern art. In music, he was far ahead of his time when he applied these ideas to things like sampling, from a young age.
There would be few music fans who haven’t come across Mark Bingham’s work as a Producer already, from working with Punk bands to Cajun groups, to Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, to Jazz artists like John Scofield, Wycliffe Gordon and Nicholas Payton, to Pop artists like Marianne Faithfull, Dr. John, R.E.M. and Jon Batiste. What enabled him to work in this way across genres, and also to create his own music over the years, is a sense of the essential unity behind all music that grounds the choices you can make. I spoke with Mark Bingham about the first two albums coming up from Nouveau Electric and his view on making music.
Hannah Means-Shannon: How did the plan come together for the releases and rereleases with Louis Michot on Nouveau Electric?
Mark Bingham: About half of the material has never been released, though there are a lot of reissues. A lot of it has never come out in any form other than on a soundtrack or something like that. It just seemed like something to do. I continue to work on music and play shows, and it seemed like time to say, “Here’s what happened thus far.” You can spend your whole life making music, and making a living doing it, and still no one will know anything about what you’ve done! In this case, I figured, “Let’s throw some of this out there.” In this day and age, it’s hard to find anything. Who knows what will happen?
HMS: I’m aware, when I look at music, that documentation and forming connections between musical releases is pretty chaotic. Often outstanding musicians have never been reissued or we don’t know anything about them. It’s difficult for anyone who wants to understand the development of popular music.
MB: Well, for popular music, you have to go back a thousand years! It goes back to the shipping lanes and the spice trade, and why Indian and Irish music have the same curves. Blame it on the sailors. I do this all the time, too, following music around as it changes. Music picks up influences all the time and it’s still going on that way. I listen to the radio from Madagascar all the time, and that seems to have some of the most astounding popular music.
If you’re immersed in music, you’re not necessarily immersed in career-ism, and putting out music into the world in this day and age is something anyone can do. That’s a different animal than when I started making music. Back then, you had to have a trust in record labels, though by the late 70’s, it was all out the door. So that’s been a long time since the record business went to hell! [Laughs] It was a long time ago since the accountants took over.
HMS: Of course, back then people followed certain labels to curate music for them. I still do that a little bit with smaller indie labels or even ones that are getting bigger, like Kill Rock Stars, Sub Pop, or Third Man.
MB: Kill Rock Stars have been around forever. Even with Sub Pop, I was in a band that was featured in their fanzine days when they were starting to do music. They asked us to send them a song, so we sent them something really different. Then they said, “Can you send us something more like the other one?” I said, “No.” Were they going to censor us after telling us that we were wonderful? [Laughs] Even labels like that knew what they wanted.
HMS: When you were putting this stuff for release together, did you have to spend a period of time going through all your materials to organize it?
MB: Oh yes, I’m sure I spent hundreds of hours putting it all together, but it was during the pandemic. I spent hundreds of hours mixing the last live Henry Butler stuff. Without the pandemic, I don’t think I would’ve found the time to do it. But I have hard drives from when they started having hard drives instead of tapes. Most of the things I had on tape got transferred to digital format ages ago. It really wasn’t that big of a deal to put it all together. It was a matter of deciding what to put out where. It wasn’t strenuous. I got to remix some things. A piece of music is a living thing. When I go to play these songs six months from now, they are going to sound completely different from the way that they sound on the record, though. That’s just the way it goes.
HMS: Has it made you want to play these songs again?
MB: In some cases, yes, but in some cases I wonder, “What the hell was I thinking?” I’m 73 and there are songs on there from when I was 18, which is a very different mindset.
HMS: Do you hear them differently now?
MB: The music part is one thing. When I started out being a songwriter, I really didn’t like the whole idea of songwriting. I liked more constructed stuff. If you think of Joni Mitchell’s early work as an example of songs with ideas and very little repeating, I liked that. I wasn’t thinking about writing songs that would become hits. I was writing songs more in character. As a kid, I was around Jackson Browne and Crosby and Nash, and they were writing something very different. I had no particular feel for that kind of world. I think Jackson Browne’s stuff has held up for the last 60 years. James Taylor still kicks ass.
It turned out, I was never really a songwriter. I was using this Pop music form to make these things that weren’t really songs but they had to be judged as songs. It was like “art-damaged” music. It shouldn’t be looked at in the same way. Even Taylor Swift is a great constructor of songs, but I don’t want to hear about her mansion and her boyfriend. Even when I was 18, I thought, “No one wants to know about my love life. No one cares what I think. Enough of this shit!” I was always moving ahead and slightly confused about what I was doing, but I was doing it.
HMS: Needless to say, that sort of approach is more typical of Punk and Underground types of music, but you preceded them. You mean constructing songs almost as an assemblage, like in art? Making something out of found objects?
MB: Yes. Right. I was doing samples in the 60s. [Laughs] Can you imagine? The first things I made had all kinds of found sound. My relationship to the “music business” has been more that I’ve been able to help other people to do their work, some of which became very successful. There were people in genre worlds, like Blues and Jazz, who made good records, and I helped them do that. But as far as my own stuff, it tends to be really confusing to people. That’s just the way it is. [Laughs]
HMS: When you’re working with other people in these more traditional genres, do you feel that those kinds of music are important to you also?
MB: It’s all out of the same tradition. That’s the joke. All of music comes from pretty much the source. It doesn’t matter if it’s Monte Verdi or Wu-Tang. To me, it’s all pretty much the same, which may be a weird outlook. How people pull that energy of music out, and spit it out as human beings, creates genres and then we have 82 sub-genres of dance music.
In terms of song tradition, the African influence is the most powerful influence on popular music, or African American influences. Then you have the ballad thing, that Bob Dylan has taken from largely. All fo this stuff exists and you’re always pulling from all these traditions. Music is actually a conservative art form. It’s higher, lower, faster, slower, or what flavor?
HMS: How did this mini-musical thing get into your system, like we see on Goo Seneck? Do you like musicals?
MB: Those are what I think of as “condensed musicals”. Why should I sit through two hours? Why not put it all into one five or six-minute thing? That’s my attention span for musicals. I think I was always more of a Rock ‘n Roll kid, and musicals were more like my parent’s generation. They got stuck in my head. That I could take, but when it came to stuff like Cats? I think if Andrew Lloyd Webber showed up in my driveway, I’d kill him, even if that meant I’d go to prison for the rest of my life! There’s so much I hate. Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar aren’t that bad. I can warm up to some of these things.
But I think it was just that I wanted to hear The Everly Brothers and Fats Domino growing up, and I really like Classical music when it came on, but when the Broadway stuff came on, I would say, “Ahhhh! Get it out of here!”
HMS: What about Opera? Is that palatable to you?
MB: I love Opera, but I was in Indiana, where the Indiana Opera had a practice building where you could walk around and hear every sound in the universe. It was ten stories. You heard every sound in the universe, with piano players doing Chopin and Liszt, sopranos busting it out, and hearing this all at once. It was really cool. I love The Magic Flute and there’s a lot of stuff I don’t go out of my way to listen to it, but I hear it on internet radio.
HMS: How did “The Long Hangover” on Goo Seneck come about?
MB: I had this idea of the “long hangover of history” which meant how long it takes anything to ever change. It takes forever for anything to change. In high school, I thought racial issues were going to leave us and it was all going to be good. Oh boy. I started putting this song together, one piece after another. It’s a story about a band who’s going to play at a wedding, cut into this, cut into that. It probably makes no sense, but you can follow it, and it’s like a little movie. It doesn’t have to make sense.
HMS: That sentiment reminds me of They Might Be Giants. Are you familiar with them?
MB: Oh, yes, I played with them for some anniversary. We might have played “Women and Men”. [Sings. Laughs.] I like those guys. Those guys are great.
HMS: They share some of your mentality, I think, and will chop together short songs. Their audience loves it.
MB: That goes back to Teenage Jesus and the Jerks when we were all playing downtown in [New York] in the late 70s and early 80s. None of their songs were longer than a minute. Even within a minute song, it would be chopped up into three sections. You’d hear a set, and it would just be a barrage of information that no one in their right mind would see as a collection of songs. It was just moments. Events. I’m always trying to get people to see that.
When I’m Producing, I say, “We need another event here.” They say, “What do you mean?” I say, “It’s all about events. It’s all about what comes next.” That’s the whole trick of being a frickin’ artist. If you don’t know what comes next, you might as well give up. Something has to be happening here. What comes next might be a solo, but it also could be a dump truck smashing into a container full of eggs. It could be anything.
