Ryan Dembinsky, Author at Glide Magazine

HT Interview: Freekbass Keeps It Honest

Ryan Dembinsky July 14, 2011 No Comments

“You got that Freekbass thing going!” Many years ago during one of their first encounters, Bootsy Collins said this to a young bass player then known by the name of Chris Sherman. Sherman and Collins we’re working together in a Cincinnati studio when the bassist plugged in and started playing through an assortment of Bootsy’s effects. The engineer picked up on it, followed by everyone around the studio beginning to call Sherman by his new handle. Before long, even his mom started calling him Freekbass. “That’s when I knew I was in trouble,” Freekbass remembers. “It was one of those crazy names that stuck, and seemed to fit with my unconventional style of playing.”

Now, the name is all but written in stone as Freekbass has been turning heads for years with his unconventional approach, winning awards for his bass playing and being a musician’s musician so-to-speak. Over the past two months in particular, things have truly taken off. Freekbass just played to huge receptive crowds at both Electric Forest and Camp Bisco, and recently released an absolute monster of an album (free to download) called Concentrate.

We caught up with Freekbass via telephone on his way home from Camp Bisco to discuss the new album, his approach to synthesizing his love of both funk bass and DJ culture, his upcoming instructional bass video and his fanaticism for Reds baseball.

Hidden Track: To get started, if you could give a bit of background on how your sound came to be? It’s definitely different than anything I’ve really ever heard. How did the combination of your musical studies and playing bass merge with the electronic elements?

Freekbass: It’s funny, because as much as I play live and am known as a live type musician, I actually started out as a studio rat. I was living and hanging around in studios. There is a popular drum machine sequencer called the MPC2000 and at the same time I was developing my bass skills, I was also learning how to use that machine as well.

I’ve always been immersed in DJ/Hip Hop culture and funk is a big influence of mine. As you know, growing up in Cincinnati, there has always been a strong funk culture there. The only difference was that my friends who were doing DJ stuff were using turntables, whereas I always had a bass in my hands.

Also, I’ve always been drawn to really bass-heavy, sonic-oriented music and groove-oriented music as well. As far as this record which was just released, I wanted to try to take all those things I just mentioned and bridge the gaps on one record. READ ON for more of Ryan’s chat with Freekbass…

Audio: We Were Promised Jetpacks – Act on Impulse

Ryan Dembinsky July 13, 2011 No Comments

Edinburgh’s We Were Promised Jetpacks became immediate HT favorites back when they released their debut album, These Four Walls, as around that time the Scottish indie scene seemed to explode

Interview: Tea Leaf Green Reignites the Fire

Ryan Dembinsky July 6, 2011 5 Comments

Over the past couple of years, Tea Leaf Green pressed on through some major obstacles from losing a founding member in bassist Ben Chambers to Scott Rager seriously injuring his ankle three days before a CD release show, but with the release of Radio Tragedy!, they are not only confident the band is at its all-time best, but they’re pissed off, fed up with the industry and ready to kick ass on their own terms.

Radio Tragedy! lays it all right out there: the music industry, the crap on the radio and the celebrity culture in the music business, it’s all bullshit. They are tired of being pigeonholed as generic jamband fodder and having doors closed because of the preconceived notions that come with being part of this scene. In speaking with Josh Clark about the album, he really opens up about the frustrations the band faces in dealing with, as he calls it, the “death label” that is the jamband. Perhaps most ironic though is that the album is radio friendly, song-oriented and without question the band’s best studio effort yet, by far.

Hidden Track: I didn’t see too much written about the new album yet. Would you mind just starting with the basic background on the process in terms of where you recorded, who produced it, and over what time-frame?

Josh Clark: It started with the making of our last record, Looking West, which was over a year ago. We recorded it in Oakland where a couple of our friends run Coyote Hearing Studios. It’s actually Cochrane’s studio, our latest addition to the band on drums. He’s part owner. Also, Jeremy Black the drummer for Apollo Sunshine, who ended up producing Radio Tragedy! is part owner.

We never really have a plan when we go into the studio. We have songs, lots of them! In fact, we laid down more songs than we can fit on one record. We basically made a double album. So a lot of the songs off Radio Tragedy! were first conjured in those Looking West sessions. Those are the newer songs, the stuff people hadn’t really heard yet. We ended up selecting the stuff that had been part of the repertoire for years for Looking West and saving the new stuff, because we wanted to focus and really push the Radio Tragedy! record. So, a few songs on this record are from those sessions, some songs we came up with later in the process that are way brand new, and some we kind of rerecorded.

We actually worked on this record longer than we’ve ever worked on any record before, because we really wanted to make it something special. It wasn’t a case of “we need to get this out by this date” or a case of money being involved, it was really our record. So, we took our time with it to make the record we wanted to make. In the past, there has always been something that has kind of inhibited that, whether it’s trying to get something out because you’re you’re “hot right now” or whatever, but we really had the opportunity to make a great piece of art. Every single person had to be satisfied with this. The other records were some sort of compromise, you know, “Okay, whatever, we have to get this out.” So, there are elements on the other ones that are hard to listen to. This one, I love this record. I’m super proud of it. We’re all really proud of it.

“When we came up in the jamband scene, it was some of the most amazing, dynamic musicians I’d ever heard. It’s too bad it’s become this suffocating blanket term, because if you think back to ’97 or ’98, there was no Bonnaroo or cool hybrid festival, it was all jambands and it was thriving. Everything grew out of that, yet for some reason now, if you’re a jamband, you’re the kid picking your boogers and eating them on the playground.” – Josh Clark

READ ON for more of our chat with Josh Clark of Tea Leaf Green…

Video: Company of Thieves – Death of Communication

Ryan Dembinsky July 6, 2011 No Comments

The Chicago-based Company of Thieves keeps their momentum barrel rolling with a new video for Death of Communication, a song that pinpoints both the breakdown of face-to-face communication and the

What Did We Learn: Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

Ryan Dembinsky July 6, 2011 12 Comments

In his latest book, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, a coming-of-age teen memoir set to the music of Duran Duran, Human League, A Flock of Seagulls, Madonna, Lita Ford, other 80s staples, Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield takes readers through his formative years as a loyal devotee to all things New Wave.

In his acknowledgments, Sheffield mentions in passing, “Cheers to those who who remember it differently – as Paul Westerberg would say, your guess is more or less as bad as mine.” Well, herein lies the reason I had so much fun reading this book – which took all of about three days on vacation last week – I remember these things entirely differently. This is not to say I disagree with the viewpoints, but rather I was too young in the 1980s to really debate the merits or cool or lame, punk or new wave, poseur or not.

In fact, come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever even talked in any depth with someone who was really into ’80s music, seeing shows, and actually thinking critically about the genres. It’s relatively simple to stumble upon barstool conversations with hardcore fans of ’70s classic rock with epic sagas of seeing Zeppelin at the Garden, Genesis with Peter Gabriel, the original Wall tour, or infinity Dead shows, but what happened to all the die-hard ’80s music fans? I guess they probably all deny it. Well, Rob Sheffield is one of the few, the proud, the remaining and Talking to Girls about Duran Duran provides an often hilarious look at the ’80s from the perspective of a serious, active fan’s perspective with no shortage of self-deprecating humor.

READ ON for more on Rob Sheffield’s book…

Video: Jimkata – Feed

Ryan Dembinsky June 29, 2011 No Comments

Mixing footage from their New Years Eve performance at the Haunt in Ithaca, NY with footage of their recent Colorado spring tour, Jimkata put together this whimsical ride along their

Video: Frightened Rabbit – Swim Until You Can’t See Land / Scottish Wind

Ryan Dembinsky June 22, 2011 No Comments

At this year’s Rockness Festival in Northern Scotland, longtime HT favorite Frightened Rabbit (one of our very first in-person interviews) filmed a short acoustic set for the BBC, which included

Video: Explosions in the Sky – Only Moment We Were Alone

Ryan Dembinsky June 17, 2011 No Comments

Rounding out our Bonnaroo highlight reel this week, we have Explosions in the Sky in their four-Fender glory performing The Only Moment We’re Alone off their 2003 release, The Earth

Video: The White Buffalo – Damned

Ryan Dembinsky June 8, 2011 No Comments

This week’s videos feature bands you should check out at Bonnaroo… Every year in the NFL draft, the sports media bestows the honor of Mr. Irrelevant upon the last player

HT Interview: Turbine Propels Forward with Blue Light City

Ryan Dembinsky June 7, 2011 3 Comments

The back story of Brooklyn’s Turbine is a rather serendipitous one. When lead guitar player and vocalist Jeremy Hilliard moved to Manhattan from Virginia back in the late ’90s to study music and form a band, he happened to move in next door to guitarist and harmonica player Ryan Rightmire. The two musicians could literally hear each other playing music through the walls of their respective apartments, so ultimately they approached one another to jam. The pair quickly found that they shared a mutual affinity for jazz and Bob Dylan, particularly the stripped down singer/songwriter/harmonica tunes of his early career. So, they began writing tunes together and before long, they recorded their debut album as a duo in 2004.

Eventually, as the pair began exploring more improvisation and psychedelic channels, they decided to add a rhythm section and they found bassist Justin Kimmel, who literally showed up at their first audition. Shortly thereafter, Octavio Salman joined on drums, and the rest, as they say is history. Now, having two studio albums, a live release, and performances at Bonnaroo, Wakarusa, 10K Lakes, Gathering of the Vibes, and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival under their belts, the band hopes to take a big leap forward with their latest album, Blue Light City* (June 24th).

On the Feel of the Album

For the first time, the band worked closely with a professional producer in the studio setting with John Davis, who recorded The Black Keys’ Grammy winning song Tighten Up off their recent album, Brothers. Turbine felt that Davis’s gritty and psychedelic, yet modern approach was perfect for what they sought to accomplish on Blue Light City. “We had definitely never worked with a producer to this degree, and I think it’s by far the best our music has ever been presented,” Jeremy Hilliard explains. “John came to our rehearsals, so he knew the music going in, and he helped us with arrangements, the ordering of the songs, and some really key decisions to make the record sound like a whole. Take Eddy the Sea,” Hilliard continues, “the song itself is pretty rootsy, so you might think it should have some piano or something, but he chose to make it more ambient and psychedelic.”

Listen: Eddy the Sea

[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Eddy-the-Sea.mp3]

READ ON for more about Turbine’s new album…

Ryan Dembinsky

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