Cinema Cinema is a Brooklyn-based experimental Metal and Punk-influenced duo founded in 2008 and comprised of cousins Ev Gold (vocalist/guitarist) and Paul Claro (drummer). For their first album, they worked with Don Zientara at the storied Inner Ear Studios in Virginia (Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Fugazi), and for their current album, as well as on two other albums, they worked with the Noise Producer Martin Bisi at the equally hallowed BC Studio in Brooklyn (Sonic Youth, John Zorn, Boredoms). They had the good fortune to not only attract the percussionist Thor Harris’ (Swans, Angels of Light, Shearwater) interest in working on something new together, but to capture those sessions before the pandemic period. The result is out on July 14th as Mjölnir, derived from three sessions together, and studiously built into eight final songs over a period of many months. Today Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the album.
Gold and Claro had previously collaborated with a Jazz artist Matt Darriau (The Klezmatics), for an entire album titled CCXMD, and the sessions for that album eventually spawned a second collection. This marked a period of even deeper investigation of improvisation for Cinema Cinema, even though they are already known for dabbling in improv for their albums and making it a significant part of their live performances. This opened the door for an even bigger leap of faith when it came to working with Thor Harris. In these improv songwriting sessions, they composed together live with very little roadmap to follow. I talked with Ev Gold and Paul Claro about this leap and its fascinating results.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I understand that the music we encounter on Mjölnir had a studio date that was before the pandemic. Do you see the music in new ways now, given the passage of time?
Ev Gold: In 2021, CCXMD II was released, the sequel to our Jazz album, and I think that if the pandemic hadn’t stopped things, we might have put this album out then. When we did the session in June of 2019, it specifically had a very positive overall experience to it. What stays with me most is what Thor brought along and the difference in his approach. The calm that surrounds that man is hard to explain. It was the mix between him coming into our world, and our world cohabitating with Martin Bisi’s world.
Martin Bisi is a Noise Rock Producer who’s been working at BC Studio in Brooklyn for about 40 years. We came into his orbit about ten years ago when Hurricane Sandy destroyed all our gear. We met on the day that we were picking our gear apart from our studio on 9th street in Gowanus, and Martin was walking by. We’re crazy fans of his, as well as being musicians, so I called out to him to come over. Things started then and we’ve toured with him and made a bunch of records with him. Thor already knew Martin, since they’d worked together in the past, so it was a really positive synergy. The attachment that we have to the album is very positive.
Paul Claro: As for how I feel about the record now, since it was recorded four years ago, I feel very positive about it since it takes me to a very positive place. But also, four years is a lot of playing and a lot of musicianship that’s happened since then. It’s interesting to listen back and hear certain things that we were doing then that have since become part of our live show, since we play a lot of improv live. I can hear tricks we were doing back then in the live shows that turn up on the record and things that have happened since then. 2019 was a happier time in some ways. [Laughs] We didn’t see anything coming, like the pandemic. We were humming as a band. We were just coming off the heels of playing gigs in the UK and California.
HMS: How did you come to work with Thor Harris?
Ev: Well, it goes back to early 2010, when we’d been a band for about two years. We made a demo of new songs and I looked up the e-mail address for Don Zientara at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Virginia. Listening to In on the Kill Taker by Fugazi as a teenager had knocked me into another zone musically. The genre-less-ness of it and the use of multiple voices was everything that I had never heard before and it really opened me up. I memorized everything on that album and the liner notes, which listed Inner Ear Studios.
By the time I started playing with Paul, I had been in several bands, and we were playing a large number of shows starting out. Don Zientara listened to our demo and amazingly, he got back to us and let us in. We went there for a week, and got to sleep there for a week. It was a revelatory experience. But to bridge to how Thor comes into it, at the end of that session, creating a 13 song album, Don asked what we were going to do with the album and how he could help. He suggested we should work with a publicist, his good friend who played in a band called Underheaven with him, Howard Wuelfing.
We started to release some of that music and working with Howard in 2011. He’s been involved as a guide for us on every release. He works with some mind-blowing people and you feel lucky to be involved. He’s worked with Swans and other people. Around 2017, without us knowing, Howard passed some of our music to Thor. He got in touch with us and was excited about it. Paul and I tend to follow the path wherever it leads, and it led eventually to BC Studio in June of 2019 to cut this record. We hadn’t met him in person before that. We had discussed being as free as possible in our recording approach.
HMS: Was there any particular discussion ahead of time about what you’d be working on together, or was it entirely free-flowing?
Paul: Me and Ev had some discussions, I think, about ideas that we might present to Thor, but once we got together, I don’t think any of that even came to fruition. We did three thirty-minute jam sessions and made it all up on the spot. Maybe some of the discussions that me and Ev had and ideas that we bandied about might have popped up, like thematic threads, to guide us through a little bit. But once we got into the studio and Thor showed up, without any instruments, we got going.
He cobbled together what Martin had and I gave him some percussion instruments, and all of the sudden he had this amazing little set-up. We had no idea how our vibes would influence each other to make stuff happen, so we just kind of went into it with an open mind. It was, “Nice to meet you! Let’s play!” We were able to get the eight songs on the record just from that. We just went through the three 30-minute sessions later and picked out what seemed like songs, and went from there.
The majority of the thinking happened afterwards, shaping the music from these three monstrous pieces. Recording was trusting each other, and this new person, and being fearless. But the great thing about being in this band with my cousin is that we have a great musical connection and have been playing together so long that whenever we have jammed with a third person, the other person can just tap dance on top of whatever we are doing. We have a solid foundation for that if the person is open to going on the journey with us. It usually comes out as something special, creative, and unique.
HMS: What were some of your thoughts when carving out the songs for the album? Did you have to start thinking of them as distinctive “songs” versus recordings?
Ev: There are a handful of pieces that had no over-dubs at all and were just cut out of the jams. We had jammed with a Jazz horn player before, but we’d never done jam songwriting before. That came out of this. It’s hard for me to explain it. In my mind, in basic terms, it was like an improv songwriting thing. We’d get comfortable with an idea and we’d get into areas that were creating more melody via vocals, or more melody via synths, or different kinds of sway. We felt that we were getting somewhere and that grew into the album. We didn’t know that we’d get a whole album out of the jams. We were very fortunate that the sessions caught fire.
HMS: It seems like with collaborative songwriting, you would have to allow for certain transitional elements that are a bit more chaotic. Is that the sort of thing that was removed from the recordings to give them more separateness?
Ev: We definitely looked for the “indent” and “new paragraph” sections of the songs when we went through them. Paul and I left there with about 90 minutes of music feeling great about almost all of it. At first, you’re your own biggest fan, then you sleep on it. Listening 24 hours later, you can see the parts that feel perfect and the things that don’t. Paul and I spent the whole summer listening to the tapes and didn’t go back to Martin until September. Then it was the question, how will Martin help us carve these things out? This is the third album that we’ve worked on with Martin and the relationship there has grown a great deal. He’s earned our trust.
I’ve almost never seen someone work as hard on our music as he does, and I’ve also seen him do that for other musicians, which is admirable. He deserves plenty of credit for helping us get from the marble to the statue. We needed a really good editor to go from 90 minutes to 39 minutes and have something that could feel like it was pre-written and people aren’t sure. That also opened up a lot of fun new avenues and different perspectives, the strange beauty that came from those moments. That’s like real life, where every day is improv.
HMS: Ev, how did you handle vocals under these circumstances? Did you know what words you were going to sing before they came out of your mouth? Were you seeing imagery that helped you come up with your lyrics?
Ev: One song that’s an entire improv vocal from start to finish is “My Vision of the Future.” That was all scratch vocal. I can say that that phrase came out of my mouth and suddenly pushed me off on a journey where words followed. It all made sense as things that were growing inside of me and it became easy to rapid-fire sentences that seemed to have a connection without having them pre-written in my mind. I don’t think that’s all that common for me. But it was in the middle of a thirty-minute jam, and we were on fire. That enabled me to do it. Paul’s playing drove the whole vocal forward.
“Walk Into The Ocean” was another improvised vocal. I know that Paul and I did a photoshoot in 2019 at Coney Island where we walked into the ocean and towards the ocean. We got a photo we loved. That images conjures a lot of thoughts about life. That pulled a number of sentences out of my mind, though some repetition is involved with that one. It sounds comfortable, as if I know what I’m going to say next. I don’t know that I could do that just at any time.
HMS: I notice on “My Vision of the Future” that there are different, echoing vocal lines.
Ev: That’s Martin taking one of Bisi’s “special sauces” to it. Or sometimes we call them “Bisi droppings” since Paul and I have funny names for the things that Martin does as part of the mix. He takes a fine tooth comb and goes over every nook and cranny of every single piece. And you’re sitting on his couch that’s been in his studio for 40 years and you’re watching his back as he’s doing this. He stops, asks for input, and then goes back. He’s a man at sea. It’s hard to understand what’s going on. Paul, how would you describe working with Martin?
Paul: I would say that’s a good example. And it’s a good way of looking back at our history of working with Martin. That is one of the benefits of this being our third album with Martin. He knows our vibe, in general, and on every record that we’ve done, we’ve had one improv song. We call them “shiners”. We’ve had practice with Martin working on that way. He knew what we needed and what we were trying to get without even talking about.
Martin stepped in, as he always does, as kind of third member of the band, guiding us through the album process. That’s why we have this term, “Bisi droppings”, he’s done this on our other albums. When we have these big hunks of musical concrete that we need to chip away on, it’s second nature to Martin. He can do stuff without us even being there, because he knows that we will like what he’s doing.
