Give the Wonky Electronics Wiz Some

Tussle are misfits. They’re an instrumental band from San Francisco
who issue stripped-down funk and Krautrock-inflected releases on a
government-funded Norwegian label called Smalltown Supersound, which is
largely renowned for cosmic-disco artists like Lindstrøm and
Bjørn Torske. More anomalies: Tussle recorded their new album,
Cream Cuts, with producer Thom Monahan, who’s best known for his
work with freak-folk illuminati Devendra Banhart and Vetiver. And
Tussle don’t use vocals (yet, anyway), which is a well-known deterrent
to mass popularity, and though their music is eminently danceable, they
don’t get upset if you decide not to shake your moneymaker.

“Of course it’s nice [if people dance], but it’s like, do what you
want,” electronics savant Nathan Burazer reasons as he and fellow
Tusslers Jonathan Holland, Tomo Yasuda, and Warren Huegel transport
themselves from Baltimore to Chapel Hill in their van. “I’ve seen bands
get upset that people weren’t dancing, and it’s really immature.
Respond however you feel. If you need to go into your own brain and
process what’s going on, do that.”

Such an open-minded attitude makes sense when you immerse yourself
in Tussle’s three albums and assorted EPs and 12-inches. Early works
like the Don’t Stop and Disco D’Oro EPs and the Kling
Klang full-length clearly deserve quality time on more adventurous,
dance-oriented DJs’ decks (particularly Soft Pink Truth’s awesome remix
of “Windmill”), but Tussle’s mesmerizing, minimalist funk (think
A
Certain Ratio, ESG, and Can, as nearly every critic in the world has
noted) also provides especially savory brain food should you prefer to
space out horizontally.

“We just do what’s fun for us, the kind of music we want to hear in
the world, to do the best that we can do as individual players,”
Burazer observes. “But our main objective isn’t just to make dance
music. It’s to push the idea of music in general and see where it can
go that it hasn’t gone before.”

Tussle progress ever closer to that goal with their new album,
Cream Cuts. Fuller sounding than 2004’s Kling Klang and
2006’s Telescope Mind (their last recording with
drummer/
melodica player Alexis Georgopoulos, aka Arp), Cream
Cuts forgoes the previous discs’ sparse linearity for a more
dubbed-out, spacious sound and greater rhythmic variables. Tussle
retain the funk for which they’re celebrated (check out Tomo’s wicked
bass line and synth paraphrase of Roy Budd’s Get Carter theme on
“Third Party” and the sublime “Mother Sky” homage “Meh-Teh”), but it’s
now dispersed into a King Tubby/Harmonia–esque studio haze. In
this regard, the band can’t say enough nice things about Cream
Cuts producer Monahan.

Was there anything about working with Monahan that surprised Tussle
or enabled the group to surprise themselves? “He would do some
interesting things,” Burazer notes. “We were trying to get a good
kick-drum sound the first or second day we were [in his studio], and he
found a busted boom box and ripped the subwoofer out of it and turned
it into a kick-drum mic. You know on ‘Titan’ [a standout on Cream
Cuts] where it has all the drums at the end? We got pretty out
there while we were doing that. A lot of that, we couldn’t hear what we
were playing. That was his idea.

“At first we thought, ‘How do we approach this? Do we sculpt it into
some kind of composition, or do we go balls-out and have it be what it
is?’ So we ended up recording and not even listening to what we were
playing through the headphones, but hearing everything else and
blending that in together and adding more layers or taking layers
out.”

For their next album, Tussle wouldn’t mind enlisting Brian Eno to
work the boards, but he might be out of their price range. They may
have to “settle” for Monahan again. “Thom has a really good grasp of
what we’re doing and how we work,” Burazer says. “We’re talking about
experimenting with vocals and breaking all the rules. Again.”

That’s funny, because I was going to ask Tussle to explain their
sage decision not to use vocals. But Burazer allays fears that
singing will mar Tussle’s punchy instrumental attack: “It’s an idea,
like, what can we experiment with further? It wouldn’t be sing-songy.
It’ll be—I dunno… You’ll like it [laughs]. Maybe
breathing sounds, not so much vocals, but the human voice in some
way—cut up or chanting. It’s like a color we never used.”

Listening to Tussle, one surmises that these guys have awesome
record collections. Such musings make one wonder if they ever feel
conflicted by how their favorite music can exert an overwhelming
influence on their own sound. Do they have to fight the urge to emulate
their favorite artists?

Burazer admits to tussling with those urges and chuckles. “Anything
that comes up in writing and at practice, we ask ourselves if it sounds
too much like this or can we make it sound not so much like that? But
[our record collections are] like a guide to a certain place, to create
a new thing. You can’t be superconscious of not doing it or
doing it. You just have to let it flow out, and in the editing process
it gets cut or used. You can’t be too conscious of it or it can get in
the way of the creative process.”