James Krivchenia is a multifaceted artist who, whether you realize it or not, has made his way onto your playlist at some point From his session work with pop sensations like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, to drumming and producing for Grammy-nominated folk titans Big Thief, Krivchenia has his hands in many pots, none of which can prepare you for his phenomenally complex solo material. On May 2, Krivchenia releases Performing Belief, his daring, abstract solo LP that shimmers and pulses with electronic blips, atmospheric field recordings, and raw percussion prowess.
The spiritually fulfilling and oddly danceable eight song LP is a labor of love dedicated to the artist’s tirelessly free approach to dance music. On his first project since 2022, Krivchenia teams up with fellow genre-benders Sam Wilkes and Joshua Abrams for an onslaught of left-field melodies taken straight from the fields the artist records in. Highlights like the bubbly opening track, “Undesigned,” to the crawling simplicity of “Filling In The Swamp,” Krivchenia takes his solo spotlight and makes it a vibrant portrait of rhythmic bliss.
Glide had the pleasure of conducting an age-old digital sit-down with Krivchenia to discuss the moments leading up to the release of Performing Belief, the record itself, and how the artist’s approach to music has evolved over the years. Performing Belief is out now, and you can learn more about the fantastic LP during our conversation below.
You’ve grown into a multi-instrumentalist and producer, but everything I’ve read about you says you’re a drummer first. Was that your first instrument, and what drew you to percussion in the first place?
Drums were my first thing. I started when I was around nine or ten, I guess it was in fourth grade when you had to choose an instrument for the school band. I easily chose drums, but what really kicked it off was that I started taking lessons from this high schooler at my church. When you’re nine or ten, a high schooler seems crazy mature. He would teach me the drum parts of songs I liked, and he showed me a bunch of music. That’s what really lit me up and made me start a band with my neighbors on my block in Chicago. We had a band in fourth grade all the way through high school.
What music did your drum teacher show you? What sort of music was playing around your house as a kid?
Growing up, it ran the gamut. When I was really young, it was the normal classic rock stuff. My drum teacher was showing me Primus and Rage Against The Machine, stuff like that, when I was in middle school. I was like, “Whoa, this is so cool.” I just loved playing drums and jamming with my friends. We would make little albums that my uncle would record for us on his minidisc player and a mixer. He was a recording hobbyist, and his Christmas present to me every year was to make an album of all my friends and me. They were hilariously raw and pre-influence almost. We were just banging and making noise in a beautiful way.
In high school, I found the jazz world, which is a route I feel like is a rite of passage. If you’re serious about music and love it, you come upon jazz and are like, “Whoa, these people are deadly serious about this music.” It was really inspiring to see the kind of artistry in that stuff. That was sort of a chapter to the next level of study. I listened to all sorts of stuff, though. I was a big Neil Young head; he was my guy on the rock side. It was a lot of jazz, though, like Ed Blackwell and all the Charles Mingus records. I was coming at it from a lot of different angles.
With your uncle being a recording hobbyist, was the rest of your family musical as well? Did anyone else have an influence on you like that?
Not really, not within my family. None of my parents played instruments, and my mom didn’t even listen to much music around the house. It was this other world that felt very much mine; I wasn’t even rebelling against stuff they liked because I wasn’t aware of it. It wasn’t a super musical house; my older sister played the clarinet, but I was the first rocker making noise in the house.
You grew up in Chicago, a city renowned for its vibrant art scene. Were you involved or aware of any of that at a young age?
I was born in Minneapolis and moved to Chicago when I was about six or seven years old. I was in it a little bit; I moved out when I finished high school. I didn’t fully appreciate it until I was gone in a sense. I was aware of Thrill Jockey and the Chicago scene; Tortoise were big homegrown heroes there. I was into that stuff, but once I left, I got turned on to even more stuff like the Chicago underground scene. That’s how I became a fan of Joshua Abrams, who plays on Performing Belief. He’s a Chicago guy who’s played on all sorts of records, like his own stuff, but he’s played on Bonnie “Prince” Billy records as well. There’s a lot of really cool cross-genre collaboration in the city; things are a little less siloed there. Everyone plays shows with each other, the noise people play shows with the folk people, it’s like “Oh, everyone’s just trying to put on a good bill.”
You attended Berklee College of Music, which I would imagine has a pretty straightforward approach to song craft and music theory. How, if at all, did your time there influence the abstractness of your solo material?
I feel like it definitely turned me on to a lot of different kinds of music, especially a lot of different kinds of people playing music. All of your friends are amazing musicians in their own right, so it was competitive and nasty at times. The music school clichés are totally true, they give you a number and you just have to be like “Oh, I’m a seven,” like what the fuck does that mean? Everyone got into music and enjoyed playing music for the exact opposite reason; it’s not supposed to feel like you’re playing a sport. Once you can figure out how to navigate through that and not have it crush your self-esteem, I feel like I got a lot out of it.
Mostly, it was meeting the students and other cool musicians. You go into that part of your life like an open book. You think, “Oh, maybe I’ll be a sick jazz drummer or something,” and then you realize “Oh, I’m not going to be the best jazz drummer because there are other kids who are fucking incredible and coming at it from a deeper place.” It forces you to learn what your actual passion is and find your voice in a cool way. You also learn your limitations, realizing, “I’m not going to practice for four hours a day and be the best at this, but what’s the thing that brought me here in the first place?” In a weird way, being around all the noise and bullshit of “You’re not good enough” forces you to find it in yourself. You start to dial into what you’re good at and what feels good, if you can make it through the junk.
Is this around the time you started experimenting with the sound that we associate with you today?
Totally, that was when I first started dabbling with computer music. I feel like I got a janky version of Ableton 4, and it honestly came from a little bit of burnout from playing and not being able to figure out what I wanted to do. I figured, “Oh, I can mess around on this thing.” During that time, I got into using the computer as an instrument and figuring out how to combine that with my stuff. The sound I have now took a while to develop; it was a combination of doing a lot of field recordings and performing, trying to find my rhythm outside the context of a drum set. It was like “Okay, if I’m sitting by a creek with some cool sounding rocks, what do I sound like then?” It’s not a drum set that comes with all this baggage of history, so I was doing that for years, not really knowing what I was collecting these recordings for. In messing with those, that’s when this album started to take place, when I brought everything to the computer. I was like, “Okay, it’s not that interesting to just listen to these. I like them, but it’s not something I’d share with the world.” In trying to bring these field recordings into a different context that I found exciting, which was this electronic music and editing this perfect, strange world.
Performing Belief is your first solo album since 2022. Why did now feel like the right time to return to this world you’re building? Is it more about having inspiration strike or working around your other projects?
It’s a combination of both. I have a whole back catalog of things I’m trying, and sometimes they go nowhere, and it’s more about exploring those sounds. When it has legs, I just always end up coming back to those ideas, and I think this album is one of those ideas. It hit at a time when Big Thief was taking some time off touring, and I had more time to focus and finish it. I was opening it up to collaboration, but the band always has these little personal worlds going simultaneously, and we’re bringing inspiration from that back into the band. Also, it’s a release valve for things that don’t really fit in the band right now. So it’s about trying to honor that and not lose sight of it.
You mentioned Joshua Abrams before. He and Sam Wilkes played a significant role in Performing Belief. How did these relationships start? Did you come into these collaborations with the blueprints for the songs already in place?
The genesis of it was that I had gotten to a point in the record where I felt like I had it. I had ten or eleven sketches that I had been working on that were great, but I was leaving the low-end empty on purpose, thinking, “What’s going to go here?” Am I going to figure out what my version of low-end should be? And every time I tried stuff, it felt flat. That’s when the obvious hit, it’s collaboration time. Get it out of your own head; I had gotten it to a point where I was creatively stuck, and I’ve been leaving this space open, so I figured, “What if I opened it up?”
I didn’t have anything planned for Abrams or Wilkes, I just had loose ideas of where to go. They mainly just jammed over what I had. I was in the room, giving cues and trying to direct a bit, but they mostly improvised. I took that material and formed the songs. It revitalized and brought home the last bit of the process. Once I heard them on the songs and directions they were heading, it made things a lot clearer.
Do you have to go through a mental transition when jumping between working on solo material and your producing and session musician work?
There is a transition period when bouncing between different bands or roles. The first couple of days, you’re trying to redefine your role and figure out what I’m bringing to the project. If I’m producing, I’m still thinking about rhythms, but there is also making sure everyone is happy; there is almost a caretaking element to that. I think it’s helpful to go between those different roles; it makes you more flexible and less tunnel-visioned. It is weird to transition, though; everything feels different. Even being on tour or being in the studio feels like a different energy. One, if you’re touring, you’re just saving up energy all day for the show, and doing weird, random things to make yourself feel good in five hours.
I am very comfortable making music on my own. I’ve always done a lot of that. It is like a sort of joyful going-back-to-the-bedroom feeling when I’m working on something on my own. It feels like the old days, I’m in my room, time doesn’t matter, and I can just do whatever I want. It is very freeing.
Is it more challenging to transition from solo work to a collaborative setting, or vice versa?
Transitioning into a live setting is the hardest. There is that element of the audience where you’re worried about how you’re going to sound, and you’re hoping the audience shows up; you have these things going through your mind that are not really music-related. Live sort of taps into fears that musicians have in general, and sometimes it takes a lot of energy to be on stage. That’s the trickiest one, the first couple of live shows of a tour, you almost blackout, and then they get more comfortable. You forget what it feels like to perform in front of an audience.
You talk about falling into a caretaking role when producing, do you feel the same when producing your own work? What sort of environment do you try to foster on your own, and what was the environment like when you were working on Performing Belief?
When I’m doing solo stuff, especially for this record, I really wanted to foster a spiritual, rhythmic energy. It didn’t lend itself to much, so I wouldn’t say, “Oh, I’ll work on it for a few minutes here and there.” I wanted to be in a more focused, holy headspace. I was constantly checking in with that deeper part. I was continually checking in with myself, asking questions like, “What do I really want to hear?” or if I’m going to perform something, I’ll take a minute to breathe and get in the zone, rather than being haphazard.
Where did the title, Performing Belief, come from?
It came towards the end of the project. As I was going in and out of working on the project, I would go back and play what I had and dance to it. I would try to feel the spirit of it and go “Oh shit, that was really working,” or “That section was amazing, that should go on longer.” When I was moving to it, I would just want to stay in it. I was really trying to make little ceremonies for myself, what does my own little dance music that speaks to me sound like? Performing Belief also comes from acknowledging that it’s still just a performance for me in some way when I’m in those moments. I’m not actually doing some sort of super investigative, spiritual thing, and I’m still just performing the idea of it. Faking it until I make it, in some ways, I’m grasping for something, but it still feels like a performance. I wanted to acknowledge that in the title.
What was it like sequencing this album? How many songs did you record for it, and how did you cut it down to what we’re hearing?
I probably had about eleven or twelve songs I was working on for Performing Belief, up until pretty late. At a certain point, and it’s similar to how I record with bands, I always want to have extra. Inevitably, something will be good, but you start to notice the songs you never want to open or show people, you can’t really explain why. I’d be showing people the record, but not everything I recorded; I had more material than I needed. I cut a few songs through that process.
Sequencing is such a strange art. It’s so important, but it can go so many different ways. I feel like this one took a while, and by the time I was sequencing, I knew I was going to release it with Planet Mu, so I had some feedback from the label. Getting some perspective from someone who hasn’t heard it a thousand times is crucial.
What made you go with Planet Mu for the release of Performing Belief?
I was super stoked that they wanted to put it out. I’ve been a big fan of the label for a long time, dating back to the early footwork compilations they released; those really blew my mind. I’m also a big RP Boo and Jlin fan. My friend sent the record over to them, and when Mike Paradinas got back and said they wanted to release it, I thought this was perfect. This is a label that has dived into a lot of genres, but always has this rhythmic sensibility at its core. I’m honored to be on this roster.
How long did it take to finish the record?
There was the gathering of all the field recording material, which I was doing for about two years, and that was just in my spare time. I’d go through certain periods where I’m doing that a lot. There was that gathering period, and once I actually sat down and started to find things, I would go, “Oh, this is a good one, this could be a record.” That portion probably took another year and a half to two years.
Do you notice a difference in the field recordings you collect when you go out looking for them versus when you’re just out and they stumble across you?
It’s interesting, part of what I love about field recordings is that, if you’re in the mindset of you’re going out to do some recording, you’re just listening so much differently. Which is cool; there were definitely times when I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go out and find some sounds,” so I’d just wander around and flick through bushes. I’m experimenting more and listening to the sounds around me, so it’s a different mindset. Stuff does catch you sometimes, like when you’re just walking and stomping on mossy earth and you notice that it sounds pretty cool. Those are some of the more powerful ones, too; they cut through your malaise, and you’re like “Oh, actually, this sounds really cool.” It’s a combination.
You’re doing your first solo live show in support of the album. How are you feeling going into it? Is there a song on the record you’re particularly excited to perform live?
It’s a real puzzle to figure out how to translate stuff that’s organic into a live show. There are so many organic elements, but at the same time, there is so much editing, and it’s such a made-on-the-computer album at the end of the day. I’ve been mulling over how to make it compelling and feel like we’re actually playing music and not just following a script, which is often the danger of live electronic performance. It’s not really fun if you’re having to remember too many moments that aren’t musical. I’m excited, and very nervous, but super stoked. Sam Wilkes will be on the show, and these two other drummers, Michael Patrick Avery and Caleb Michael, will be playing the percussive parts with me. I’ll be doing a combination of that and electronic stuff that’s more grounded in a big sound, and more open-ended, so we can improvise and have some freedom, and if some section is sounding awesome, we can just play that for ten minutes.
It’s about learning how to give the performance some flexibility and the opportunity for it to be different night to night, but still getting a big sound and not letting it become some dinky drum circle.
How are you feeling heading into the release of Performing Belief? What do you hope people take away from the record?
I’m feeling good, I’m a little nervous, so I’m putting blinders on in a sense. Whenever I release music, there’s a weird combination. On the one hand, I’ve kind of moved on from the project since I’ve heard it so much through doing the mixing and mastering. So to me it’s like “Oh, the album’s done.” On the other hand, there’s the feeling of “Oh, no one has heard it, and I hope they like it when they do.” No one had really heard the record outside of a few close friends, like there were people in my life who didn’t even know I made a record, and that’s kind of cool. It’s a jumble of emotions, but I’m excited. It feels like a weight is lifted when something is finally released, and I can move on to other stuff.
I’m mostly a “move on to the next project” type of person. When you’re working on multiple projects simultaneously, you learn not to get too caught up in release schedules. It’s going to come out when it comes out, and that could take a year. Sometimes you can release stuff right away, but I’ve also let go of that. If you try your best, it’ll sound good in nine months and it’ll sound good a year from now. I try to move on, but there is a subconscious relief when you’re actually holding the record.
