Rhythm & Booze

The Foscil interview takes place at the Rendezvous. This is relevant
for two reasons: Foscil’s members are infamous for their prodigious
alcohol consumption, and Foscil’s music is, according to the band’s
four members, “pure fucking Seattle,” much like the Belltown watering
hole in which we chat and quaff. Aptly, drummer/percussionist Tyler
Swan—who also plays in Linda and Ron’s Dad and
Flexions—makes a point to order another round of whiskeys before
the official questioning begins. The legend’s true.

Alert Seattle music observers know that three-fourths of
Foscil—Tyler, his keyboardist/guitarist brother Adam, and
keyboardist Ryan Trudell—also play in the more celebrated,
visually stimulating, electronic-oriented Truckasauras (horn specialist
Tony Moore rounds out Foscil’s lineup, and he’s prone to rolling his
eyes when the subject of Truck arises, as it inevitably does in Foscil
media coverage; sorry, Tony).

It seems germane to open the Q&A with an analysis of whiskey’s
importance to both Foscil’s and Truckasauras’s creative processes. “It
acts as a detriment to Foscil,” avers Trudell. But whiskey is like
Truck’s fuel, right? “Yeah,” Adam admits. “I think it fuels Foscil,
too.” “But if we overdo it with the Foscil music, it just becomes
mush,” Tyler says. “The Truck thing is a synchronized unit, but
Foscil’s totally live playing; it’s not like a machine.” “In reality,”
responsible family man Trudell concludes, “it probably speaks more to
our collective alcoholism than any creative process.” Later, Trudell
sums up the two units’ difference: “[Foscil is] more weed, less
alcohol.” Glad that’s cleared up.

All this booze talk may lead you to believe that Foscil’s new album,
Residential (due out in December as a triple 7-inch as well as
digitally via Byron Kalet’s Journal of Popular Noise zine), is
a boisterous party record or a tear-soaked Pogues-athon. Not so. Much
of the 12-track all-instrumental release evokes the bravura melancholy
of Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s Sketches of Spain, Tortoise’s
more languorous post-rock reveries (marimba figures prominently), and
Ennio Morricone’s sorrowful yet dulcet spaghetti-western scores. Other
diversions occur in “Latona,” which features a triumphant, Don
Cherry–esque trumpet fanfare, and “Roy the Barber,” whose
mesmerizing, ascending chord progression sounds like a gorgeous
paraphrase of a 17th-century classical-music piece, but which Adam
composed with crucial accompaniment from Moore. The all-analog studio
setup, along with editing and effects techniques influenced by Miles’s
studio wiz Teo Macero and Lee “Scratch” Perry, lends
Residential that trademark warmth that even today’s finest
computers can’t replicate.

The follow-up to 2005’s self-titled debut full-length,
Residential emerged from a six-month residency Foscil held at
BLVD Gallery, where they forced themselves to create new tracks every
month. “We were grinding on the Residential shit for a year,”
Tyler notes. “We put a lot of work in, coming up with new ways to do
the material each month and applying all that in the studio.”

As for Residential‘s songwriting process, Tyler says, “We
went into it with a bunch of songs that were evenly split up among all
of us. If someone had an idea, we’d develop it together. We had this
set of tunes, but instead of going straight to the studio with it, we
got this big idea to do this residency and call out how long it’s going
to be and make a conceptual thing out of it. It was pretty
self-indulgent in a way; it was us working on songs in front of people,
but it wasn’t like a fucking rehearsal. Having deadlines made us do the
work. So we exercised [the songs] in different ways each time.

“When we went to the studio, there was no shortage of ideas. I’m
really happy with how it went down. It was a really cool way to work
out material before recording it. There are ideas from every show
sprinkled throughout the album.”

The telepathic interplay Foscil demonstrate on Residential bespeaks the players’ incredibly tight bond; the Swan brothers have
played in groups with Trudell since grade school, and Moore’s been in
their circle for a decade (the fact that he’s a bartender is purely
coincidental, right?).

Ultimately, Foscil seem destined never to attain the same relatively
high profile that Truckasauras enjoy. I venture that they need a
gimmick, something to compete with Truck’s redneck-kitsch videos, Game
Boys, and American-flag capes.

“We need a super-hot female thereminist,” Trudell suggests.

“Your daughter needs to grow up fast,” Moore boldly asserts.

We’ll drink to that.