INSERT INTO `wp_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES (13223,1,'2015-12-09 11:15:56','2015-12-09 03:15:56','[et_pb_section][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>Discography</h1>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2015\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2015</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"white guilt\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/crisis-actors/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-13203 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/CA-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Crisis Actors - White Guilt, White Heat EP\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nCrisis Actors\r\n<em>White Guilt, White Heat</em> (2015)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"long range\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://hiddenshoal.bandcamp.com/album/long-range-transmissions\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-13139 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Long-Range-Transmissions-300.jpg\" alt=\"Long Range Transmissions\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nVarious Artists\r\n<em>Long Range Transmissions</em> (2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"forets\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kramies/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-13061 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/forêts-antiques-cover-art-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"forêts antiques\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nKramies\r\n<em>forêts antiques </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Palm\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-13050\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/In-The-Palm-of-Your-Hand-Remix-EP-Artwork-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"In The Palm of Your Hand - The Remix EP\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMarkus Mehr\r\n<em>In The Palm of Your Hand - The Remix EP </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"AWMA\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-13036 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/AWMA-1000-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA EP\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nAWMA\r\n<em>AWMA </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Extent\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/battlestations/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12955 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-Extent-of-Damage-Cover-1200px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Extent of Damage\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nBattlestations\r\n<em>The Extent of Damage </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"New York\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/medard-fischer/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12847\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Cover-art-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Four Songs for the City of New York\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMedard Fischer\r\n<em>Four Songs for the City of New York </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Troubled Mystic\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/liminal-drifter/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12861 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Troubled-Mystic-Album-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Liminal Drifter - Troubled Mystic\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nLiminal Drifter\r\n<em>Troubled Mystic </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Olive Skinned\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/rew/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12249 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Olive-Skinned-Cover-1400x1400-pxl-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Olive Skinned, Silver Tongued Sirens Sing Swan Songs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nREW&lt;&lt;\r\n<em>Olive Skinned, Silver Tongued Sirens Sing Swan Songs </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Pea Green\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-star-department/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12312 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Pea-Green-Boat-Cover-Art-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Pea Green Boat\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nThe Star Department\r\n<em>The Pea Green Boat </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Hearing Things\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/erik-nilsson/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12629\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Hearing-Things-Front-Cover-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Erik Nilsson - Hearing Things\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nErik Nilsson\r\n<em>Hearing Things </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Rough\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/hc-b/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12669\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Rough-Cover-Art-1400px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Rough\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHC-B\r\n<em>Rough </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Tristes\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/todd-tobias/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12367 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Tristes-Tropiques-Cover-300px.jpg\" alt=\"Todd Tobias - Tristes Tropiques\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTodd Tobias\r\n<em>Tristes Tropiques </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"les limbes\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/les-limbes/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12271 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Les-Limbes-EP-Cover-300px.jpg\" alt=\"Les Limbes EP\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nLes Limbes\r\n<em>Les Limbes </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"axis swim\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/october-solution/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12242 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/artwork_album_axis_1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The October Solution - Axis Swim Scar\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nThe October Solution\r\n<em>Axis Swim Scar</em> (2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"fate\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kramies/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12109 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Kramies-The-Fate-300px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kramies \'The Fate That Never Favored Us\'\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nKramies\r\n<em>The Fate That Never Favored Us</em> (2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"river fire\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/chloe-march/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12036 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/To-Set-The-River-On-Fire-300px.jpg\" alt=\"To-Set-The-River-On-Fire-300px\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nChloe March vs. Markus Mehr\r\n<em>To Set The River on Fire </em>(2015)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2014\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2014</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"dusk recital\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/slow-dancing-society/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-11402 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/duskrecital_300.jpg\" alt=\"The Dusk Recital\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSlow Dancing Society\r\n<em>The Dusk Recital</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"makee\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/makee/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-11088 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Makee-EP-300px.jpg\" alt=\"Makee EP\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nmakee\r\n<em>makee</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Nights Bright Days\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/chloe-march/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-11189 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Nights-Bright-Days-Cover-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Nights Bright Days\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nChloë March\r\n<em>Nights bright Days</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Under The Day\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/chloe-march/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11191\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UnderTheDayCov350-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Under The Day\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nChloe March\r\n<em>Under The Day</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Enchanting Gaze\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/elisa-luu/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-11190 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Enchanting-Gaze-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Enchanting Gaze\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nElisa Luu\r\n<em>Enchanting Gaze</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Impossible Cities\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/todd-tobias/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-10601\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Impossible-Cities-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Impossible Cities\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTodd Tobias\r\n<em>Impossible Cities</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Impossible Cities 2\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/todd-tobias/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-11192 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Impossible-Cites-2-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Impossible Cites 2\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTodd Tobias\r\n<em>Impossible Cities 2</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Binary Rooms\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-10985 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Markus-Mehr-Binary-Rooms-Cover-300px.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr - \" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMarkus Mehr\r\n<em>Binary Rooms</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Deconstruction Manual\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/deconstruction-manual-hidden-shoal-remix-ep-featuring-antonymes-and-slow-dancing-society/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-10803 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Deconstruction-Manual-Cover-Art-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Deconstruction Manual\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nVarious Artists\r\n<em>Deconstruction Manual</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"In Between\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kryshe/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-10470 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/In-Between-Cover-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kryshe - In Between\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nKryshe\r\n<em>In Between</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Revolving Maze\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/involved/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-10715 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Revolving-Maze-Front-Cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Revolving Maze\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nInvolved\r\n<em>Revolving Maze</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Positive Haywires\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/brother-earth/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-10728\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Positive-Haywires-Front-Cover-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Positive Haywires\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nBrother Earth\r\n<em>Positive Haywires</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Under Songs\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/draliensmith/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-10373 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UnderSongsCoverArt-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Under Songs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nDrAlienSmith\r\n<em>Under Songs</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Cogent\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/slow-dancing-society/\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-9391\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cogent_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Slow Dancing Society - \" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSlow Dancing Society\r\n<em>The Cogent Sea</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Growing\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kryshe/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-11052 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Growing-Cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Growing\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nKryshe\r\n<em>Growing</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Folklore\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kramies/\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-9393\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/folklore_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Kramies - \" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nKramies\r\n<em> The Folklore Sessions</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Dystopia\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/perth/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-9399 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/dystopia_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"perth - \" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nperth\r\nWhere\'s Utopia (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Smooth Sea\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Gilded\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/gilded/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-9408 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/smoothsea_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"A Smooth Sea Never Made A Skilful Sailor\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nGilded\r\n<em>A Smooth Sea Never Made A Skilful Sailor</em> (2014)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2013\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2013</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Utopia\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"perth\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/perth/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9415\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/WYU_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"What’s Your Utopia?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nperth\r\n<em>What’s Your Utopia?</em> (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"No True Beauty\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/antonymes/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11491\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/NO-TRUE-BEAUTY-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"There Can Be True Beauty Without Decay\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nAntonymes\r\n<em><em>There Can Be No True Beauty Without Decay </em></em>(2013)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"voices\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"The Caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9417\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/voices-album_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Voices Out There\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\n[The] Caseworker\r\n<em>Voices Out There</em> (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"wooden heart\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Kramies\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kramies/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9419\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/wooden-ep_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"The Wooden Heart\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nKramies\r\n<em>The Wooden Heart</em> (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"bari\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9421\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/bari_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Live in Bari\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMarkus Mehr\r\n<em>Live in Bari</em> (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"adjourn\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Tangled Star\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/tangled-star/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9423\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/adjourn_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Let\'s Adjourn To The Garden\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTangled Star\r\n<em>Let\'s Adjourn To The Garden</em> (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Cinemascope III\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Jumpel\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/jumpel/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12430 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Cinemacope-III-cover-CMYK-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Cinemacope III\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHotels\r\n<em>Cinemascope III</em> (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"I Razor\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Todd Tobias\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/todd-tobias/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9425\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/irazor_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"I Razor\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTodd Tobias &amp; Circus Devils\r\n<em>I Razor </em>(2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Momentary Mask\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/city-of-satellites/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-10374 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/The-Momentary-Mask-Cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Momentary Mask\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nCity of Satellites\r\n<em>The Momentary Mask </em>(2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Quarrels\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Apricot Rail\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/apricot-rail/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9429\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Quarrels_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"Quarrels\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nApricot Rail\r\n<em>Quarrels</em> (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"OFF\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9428\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/off_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Off\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMarkus Mehr\r\n<em>Off</em> (2013)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2012\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2012</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"monument\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-9426\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/East-of-Monument-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"East of Monument\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHalf Film\r\n<em>East of Monument </em>Re-Issue (2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"crater\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-9427\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/The-Road-To-The-Crater-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Road To The Crater\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHalf Film\r\n<em>The Road To The Crater </em>Re-Issue (2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Cinemascope II\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12434 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cover1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Cinemascope II\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHotels\r\n<em>Cinemascope II</em> (2012)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Terrane\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Gilded\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/gilded/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9430\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/terrane_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Terrane\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nGilded\r\n<em>Terrane </em>(2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Laterna\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Slow Dancing Society\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/slow-dancing-society/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9432\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/laterna_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Laterna Magica\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSlow Dancing Society\r\n<em>Laterna Magica</em> (2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"On\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9433\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/on_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"On\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMarkus Mehr\r\n<em>On</em> (2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Un Giorno Sospeso\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Elisa Luu\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/elisa-luu/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9434\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sospeso_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Un Giorno Sospeso\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nElisa Luu\r\n<em>Un Giorno Sospeso</em> (2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Dreamland\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kryshe/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11309\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Dreamland-Artwork-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dreamland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nKryshe\r\n<em>Dreamland </em>(2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Cinemascope I\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kryshe/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Cinemascope-I-Cover-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Cinemascope I\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHotels\r\n<em>Cinemascope I</em> (2012)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Medicine Show\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Todd Tobias\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/todd-tobias/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9435\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MedicineShow_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Medicine Show\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTodd Tobias\r\n<em>Medicine Show </em>(2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Light Dispersed\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/antonymes/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11492\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/LIGHT-DISPERSED-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Light Dispersed\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nAntonymes\r\n<em>Light Dispersed </em>(2012)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"IN\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9438\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/in_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"In\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMarkus Mehr\r\n<em>In</em> (2012)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2011\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2011</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"European\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Kramies\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/kramies/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9439\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/europeancd_01_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"The European\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nKramies\r\n<em>The European</em> (2011)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"CoS Remixed\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"City of Satellites\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/city-of-satellites/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9440\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/remixed_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"Remixed\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nCity of Satellites\r\n<em>Remixed</em> (2011)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Look Back\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Antonymes\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/antonymes/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9441\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/WDLBFVLCD_03_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"We Don’t Look Back For Very Long\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nAntonymes meets Slow Dancing Society\r\n<em><em>We Don’t Look Back For Very Long</em> </em>(2011)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"letters\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"The Caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9456\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/coast_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Letters From The Coast\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\n[The] Caseworker\r\n<em>Letters From The Coast </em>(2011)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Hong Kong\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/willem-gator/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12038 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Hong-Kong-Express-Cover-Art-1400px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Hong Kong Express\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nWillem Gator\r\n<em>Hong Kong Express </em>(2011)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Like Rumours\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/antonymes/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11493\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/LIKE-RUMOURS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Like Rumours Of Hushed Thunder\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nAntonymes\r\n<em>Like Rumours Of Hushed Thunder</em> (2011)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"frame\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Salli Lunn\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/salli-lunn/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9458\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/frame_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"frame_LRG\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSalli Lunn\r\n<em>A Frame of Reference</em> (2011)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"casino\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Umpire\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/umpire/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12431 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/On-The-Casino-Floor-Cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"On The Casino Floor\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHotels\r\n<em>On The Casino Floor</em> (2011)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"active\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Umpire\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/umpire/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9463\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/active_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Now We\'re Active\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nUmpire\r\n<em>Now We\'re Active</em> (2011)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"waves of light\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Antonymes\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/antonymes/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9464\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/lost_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Lost in Waves of Light\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nAntonymes\r\n<em><em>Lost in Waves of Light </em></em>(2011)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"licence\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Antonymes\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/antonymes/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9465\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/licence_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"The Licence To Interpret Dreams\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nAntonymes\r\n<em>The Licence To Interpret Dreams </em>(2011)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"rabbits\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Toby Richardson\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/toby-richardson/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9467\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/stones_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"The Stones And The Rabbits\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nToby Richardson\r\n<em>The Stones And The Rabbits</em> (2010)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"hears like a bat\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Jumpel\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/jumpel/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12428 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/The-Heart-That-Hears-Like-A-Bat-Cover-Art-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Heart That Hears Like A Bat\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHotels\r\n<em>The Heart That Hears Like A Bat</em> (2010)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2010\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2010</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"sodium\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Slow Dancing Society\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/slow-dancing-society/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9470\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/undersodium_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Under The Sodium Lights\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSlow Dancing Society\r\n<em><em>Under The Sodium Lights </em></em>(2010)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"lava\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9473\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/lava_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Lava\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMarkus Mehr\r\n<em>Lava </em>(2010)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"heresy\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Salli Lunn\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/salli-lunn/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9474\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/heresy_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Heresy and Rite\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSalli Lunn\r\n<em>Heresy and Rite</em> (2010)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Before The Light Fails\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/antonymes/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11494\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/BEFORE-THE-LIGHT-FAILS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"31: Before The Light Fails\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nAntonymes\r\n<em>31: Before The Light Fails</em> (2010)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"machine\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"City of Satellites\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/city-of-satellites/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9475\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/machine_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"Machine Is My Animal\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nCity of Satellites\r\n<em>Machine Is My Animal </em>(2010)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2009\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2009</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"unknown\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Mukaizake\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/mukaizake/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9476\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/unknownknowns_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Unknown Knowns\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMukaizake\r\n<em><em>Unknown Knowns </em></em>(2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"got it in me\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"My Majestic Star\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/my-majestic-star/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9478\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mms_havent_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"I Haven’t Got It In Me\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMy Majestic Star\r\n<em>I Haven’t Got It In Me</em> (2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"soundcheck\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/hc-b/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12040\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Soundcheck_Mp3-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Soundcheck For A Missing Movie\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHC-B\r\n<em>Soundcheck For A Missing Movie</em> (2009)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Umpire\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/umpire/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11478\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Umpire-EP-Cover-Art-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Umpire\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nUmpire\r\n<em>Umpire</em> (2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"chromatic\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Elisa Luu\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/elisa-luu/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9479\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/chromaticsigh_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Chromatic Sigh\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nElisa Luu\r\n<em>Chromatic Sigh</em> (2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"from here\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Down Review\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/down-review/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9480\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/down_review_ep_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"From Here, For Anyone\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nDown Review\r\n<em>From Here, For Anyone</em> (2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"apricot\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Apricot Rail\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/apricot-rail/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9481\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/apricotrailalbum_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"Apricot Rail\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nApricot Rail\r\n<em><em>Apricot Rail </em></em>(2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"that time\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Tangled Star\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/tangled-star/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9484\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/that_time_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"That Time\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTangled Star\r\n<em>That Time</em> (2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"cradlesongs\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Sleeping Me\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/sleeping-me/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9483\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Cradlesongs_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Cradlesongs \" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSleeping Me\r\n<em>Cradlesongs</em> (2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Hearts\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Jumpel\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/hotels/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12426 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Where-Hearts-Go-Broke-mp3-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Where Hearts Go Broke\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHotels\r\n<em>Where Hearts Go Broke</em>  (2009)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2008\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2008</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"spook\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"City of Satellites\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/city-of-satellites/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9486\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cosSpook_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"The Spook\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nCity of Satellites\r\n<em><em>The Spook </em></em>(2008)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"too late\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"My Majestic Star\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/my-majestic-star/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9487\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MMS_Too_Late_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Too Late, The Day\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMy Majestic Star\r\n<em>Too Late, The Day</em> (2008)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"touch me\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/willem-gator/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12039\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Touch-Me-Cover-Art-1400px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Touch me and i will save you\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nWillem Gator\r\nTouch me and i will save you (2008)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"priest lake\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Slow Dancing Society\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/slow-dancing-society/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9488\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/priest_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Priest Lake Circa \'88\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSlow Dancing Society\r\n<em>Priest Lake Circa \'88 </em>(2008)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Earth Moves\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"The Slow Beings\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-slow-beings/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9489\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/earthmoves_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"We Know Why The Earth Moves\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nThe Slow Beings\r\n<em>We Know Why The Earth Moves</em>  (2008)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"evergreen\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Toby Richardson\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/toby-richardson/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9490\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/evergreen_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Evergreen\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nToby Richardson\r\n<em><em>Evergreen </em></em>(2008)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Eden Hill\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Tangled Star\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/tangled-star/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9491\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/our_man_in_eden_hill_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Our Man in Eden Hill \" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTangled Star\r\n<em>Our Man in Eden Hill</em> (2008)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2007\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2007</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"september 16th\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Glassacre\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/glassacre/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9493\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/september16th_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"September 16th\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nGlassacre\r\n<em>September 16th </em>(2007)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Winter\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Slow Dancing Society\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/slow-dancing-society/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9494\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/winter_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"The Slow And Steady Winter \" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSlow Dancing Society\r\n<em>The Slow And Steady Winter</em>  (2007)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Yesterday\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Cheekbone\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/cheekbone/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9495\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/yesterday_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"Yesterday\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nCheekbone\r\n<em><em>Yesterday </em></em>(2007)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"restless\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Chris Mason\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/chris-mason/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9498\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/restless_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"Restless\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nChris Mason\r\n<em>Restless </em>(2007)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Fining\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"My Majestic Star\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/my-majestic-star/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9499\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mmsfining_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Fining\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMy Majestic Star\r\n<em>Fining</em>  (2007)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Now or Later\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Tangled Star\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/tangled-star/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9500\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/tstar_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"It\'s Now Or Later\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nTangled Star\r\n<em><em>It\'s Now Or Later </em></em>(2007)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Lights When Dim\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Slow Dancing Society\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/slow-dancing-society/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9501\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sds_lights_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"The Sound Of Lights When Dim\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nSlow Dancing Society\r\n<em>The Sound Of Lights When Dim</em> (2007)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Lakes &amp; Ponds\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"The Hero Cycle\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-hero-cycle/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9502\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/lakesponds_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Lakes and Ponds\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nThe Hero Cycle\r\n<em>Lakes and Ponds </em>(2007)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2006\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2006</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Golden Days\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Toby Richardson\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/toby-richardson/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9503\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/goldendays_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Golden Days\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nToby Richardson\r\n<em>Golden Days </em>(2006)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"UFO\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Enargeia\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/enargeia/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9504\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ufo_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"UFO: Stryker Force\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nEnargeia\r\n<em><em>UFO: Stryker Force </em></em>(2006)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Motor Eye\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Motor Eye\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/motor-eye/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9506\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/motor_eye_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Motor Eye\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMotor Eye\r\n<em>Motor Eye </em>(2006)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Slow Attack\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Glassacre\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/glassacre/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9505\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/glassacre-slow_attack_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Slow Attack\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nGlassacre\r\n<em>Slow Attack</em> (2006)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Up Down Up\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Chris Mason\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/chris-mason/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9507\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/updownup_LRG1.jpg\" alt=\"Up Down Up\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nChris Mason\r\n<em>Up Down Up </em>(2006)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Ideas\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"My Majestic Star\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/my-majestic-star/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9508\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mms_ideas_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Ideas Are The Answer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMy Majestic Star\r\n<em><em>Ideas Are The Answer </em></em>(2006)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Aerospace\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Wayne Harriss\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/wayne-harriss/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9509\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aerospace_LRG.jpg\" alt=\"Aerospace\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nWayne Harriss\r\n<em>Aerospace</em> (2006)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2005\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2005</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Thank You For Choosing\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/mukaizake/\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-12424 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Thank You For Choosing...\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nHotels\r\n<em>Thank You For Choosing</em> (2005)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"2003\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h3>2003</h3>\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Mapping the static\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/mukaizake/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11477\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Mapping-The-Static-Cover-Art-1000px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Mapping The Static\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nMukaizake\r\n<em>Mapping The Static</em> (2003)\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]','Discography','','inherit','closed','closed','','8417-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 11:15:56','2015-12-09 03:15:56','',8417,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/8417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13224,1,'2015-12-09 11:16:51','2015-12-09 03:16:51','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>AWMA</h1>\r\n<img class=\"alignleft wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"222\" height=\"222\" />AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins. The band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed. This melodically charged music exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\n<strong><a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/awmaband\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>      </strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\r\n<h3>Discography</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4> AWMA</h4>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 274px;\" src=\"https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1200096778/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://awma.bandcamp.com/album/awma\">AWMA by AWMA</a></iframe>\r\nOctober 2015\r\n\r\nThe band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together as <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> has been elegantly renewed on their self-titled EP. This melodically charged music, akin to the early pastoral side of Pink Floyd, exudes intensity and emotional resonance. The EP features the single ‘Broadcast History’, which prowls relentlessly around a circular guitar refrain, gradually building in intensity as Jason Lakis’s expansive guitar effects and Conor Devlin’s incantatory vocal colour the stereo field with portent. AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of Half Film, and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nAWMA (A Woman My Age) is a new trio made up of ex-members of the San Francisco-based band Half Film: Conor Devlin (vocals, guitar), Eimer Devlin (bass) and Jason Lakis (drums). Half Film recorded and toured from 1998 to 2001, before splitting off into [the] caseworker (Conor and Eimer) and The Red Thread/Mist and Mast (Jason) from 2003 to 2013. AWMA was conceived in 2014 and recording took place in early 2015. This EP represents the first recordings of the trio, who are an active band again after 15 years. A short European tour to support the EP will take place early 2016, with an album to follow later in the year. Jason and Eimer continue to live in the Bay Area, while Conor lives in Switzerland.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=awma-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=awma-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title][/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\n<a title=\"AWMA EP Press Release\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/publicity/AWMA/AWMA-AWMA-Press_Release.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">AWMA s/t EP Press Release</a>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"12932\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\r\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\nNo music videos yet, sorry.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nAWMA\'s music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','AWMA','','inherit','closed','closed','','12836-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 11:16:51','2015-12-09 03:16:51','',12836,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12836-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13276,1,'2015-12-18 10:06:11','2015-12-18 02:06:11','Santa has come early people. Check out the stunning 2015 Christmas EP from <a class=\"profileLink\" title=\"Antonymes\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/antonymes/\" data-hovercard=\"/ajax/hovercard/page.php?id=108567235841143\">Antonymes</a>, <a title=\"At This Time of Year\" href=\"https://antonymes.bandcamp.com/album/at-this-time-of-year\" target=\"_blank\"><em>At This Time Of Year</em></a>. The EP is available via <a title=\"BandCamp\" href=\"https://antonymes.bandcamp.com/album/at-this-time-of-year\" target=\"_blank\">BandCamp</a> and you can check out the video for the EP track \'Sleep\' below or via <a title=\"Antonymes \'Sleep\' Music Video\" href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30vhiiWtcYw\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube</a>.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/30vhiiWtcYw?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Antonymes Christmas EP, \"At This Time Of Year\"','','publish','closed','closed','','antonymes-christmas-ep-at-this-time-of-year','','','2016-08-23 17:37:10','2016-08-23 09:37:10','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=13276',0,'post','',0),(13226,1,'2015-12-10 09:00:02','2015-12-10 01:00:02','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"257\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"257\" height=\"322\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"330\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"330\" height=\"186\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with the robustness and density of the low-end in our mixes. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a title=\"Strange Weather Records\" href=\"http://www.strangeweatherrecords.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Strange Weather Records</a> and <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','publish','closed','closed','','make-like-an-interview-with-roommates-kent-lambert','','','2015-12-23 08:31:20','2015-12-23 00:31:20','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=13226',0,'post','',0),(13227,1,'2015-12-09 12:32:17','2015-12-09 04:32:17','<b><i>Roommate interview</i></b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Chicago band </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Roommate</b></a><b>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> on review site </b><a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\"><b>Coke Machine Glow</b></a><b>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\"><b>extensive review</b></a><b> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image of Kent Lambert]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nKL: I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[</b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>cover art]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nFrom 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image of Roommate]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image: Nick Broste]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sWkFqdkvPY\"><b>[add video for ‘SECRET CLAW’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘SECRET CLAW’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\nI don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_1moCJ2wA\"><b>[add video for ‘WILDERNESS’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘WILDERNESS’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Bandcamp</b></a><b>.</b>','Interview with Roommate','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 12:32:17','2015-12-09 04:32:17','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13228,1,'2015-12-09 12:33:16','2015-12-09 04:33:16','<b><i>Roommate interview</i></b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Chicago band </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Roommate</b></a><b>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> on review site </b><a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\"><b>Coke Machine Glow</b></a><b>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\"><b>extensive review</b></a><b> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image of Kent Lambert]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nKL: I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[</b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>cover art]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nFrom 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image of Roommate]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image: Nick Broste]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sWkFqdkvPY\"><b>[add video for ‘SECRET CLAW’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘SECRET CLAW’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\nI don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_1moCJ2wA\"><b>[add video for ‘WILDERNESS’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘WILDERNESS’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Bandcamp</b></a><b>.</b>','Sound and Scene with Kent Lambert of Roommate','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 12:33:16','2015-12-09 04:33:16','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13230,1,'2015-12-09 13:35:25','2015-12-09 05:35:25','','Kent Lambert','Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago','inherit','closed','closed','','kent-lambert','','','2015-12-09 14:10:47','2015-12-09 06:10:47','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(13229,1,'2015-12-09 13:33:11','2015-12-09 05:33:11','<b><i>Roommate interview</i></b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Chicago band </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Roommate</b></a><b>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> on review site </b><a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\"><b>Coke Machine Glow</b></a><b>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\"><b>extensive review</b></a><b> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image of Kent Lambert]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nKL: I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[</b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>cover art]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nFrom 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image of Roommate]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image: Nick Broste]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sWkFqdkvPY\"><b>[add video for ‘SECRET CLAW’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘SECRET CLAW’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\nI don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_1moCJ2wA\"><b>[add video for ‘WILDERNESS’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘WILDERNESS’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Bandcamp</b></a><b>.</b>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 13:33:11','2015-12-09 05:33:11','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13232,1,'2015-12-09 13:38:05','2015-12-09 05:38:05','','Roommate – MAKE LIKE','Roommate – MAKE LIKE','inherit','closed','closed','','make-like-album-cover','','','2015-12-09 13:38:16','2015-12-09 05:38:16','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(13231,1,'2015-12-09 13:36:21','2015-12-09 05:36:21','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"208\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13230 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"208\" height=\"208\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>Chicago band </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Roommate</b></a><b>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> on review site </b><a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\"><b>Coke Machine Glow</b></a><b>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\"><b>extensive review</b></a><b> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nKL: I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[</b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>cover art]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nFrom 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image of Roommate]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image: Nick Broste]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sWkFqdkvPY\"><b>[add video for ‘SECRET CLAW’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘SECRET CLAW’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\nI don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_1moCJ2wA\"><b>[add video for ‘WILDERNESS’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘WILDERNESS’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Bandcamp</b></a><b>.</b>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 13:36:21','2015-12-09 05:36:21','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13234,1,'2015-12-09 13:41:21','2015-12-09 05:41:21','','Roommate','Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster ','inherit','closed','closed','','roommate-band-shot','','','2015-12-09 13:41:44','2015-12-09 05:41:44','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(13233,1,'2015-12-09 13:39:38','2015-12-09 05:39:38','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"208\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13230 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"208\" height=\"208\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\nChicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"190\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13232\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"190\" height=\"190\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nFrom 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image of Roommate]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image: Nick Broste]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sWkFqdkvPY\"><b>[add video for ‘SECRET CLAW’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘SECRET CLAW’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\nI don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_1moCJ2wA\"><b>[add video for ‘WILDERNESS’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘WILDERNESS’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Bandcamp</b></a><b>.</b>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 13:39:38','2015-12-09 05:39:38','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13235,1,'2015-12-09 13:42:51','2015-12-09 05:42:51','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"208\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13230 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"208\" height=\"208\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\nChicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13232\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>[Image: Nick Broste]</b>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sWkFqdkvPY\"><b>[add video for ‘SECRET CLAW’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘SECRET CLAW’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\nI don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIt’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ_1moCJ2wA\"><b>[add video for ‘WILDERNESS’]</b></a>\r\n\r\n<b>Caption: Roommate – ‘WILDERNESS’</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via </b><a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\"><b>Bandcamp</b></a><b>.</b>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 13:42:51','2015-12-09 05:42:51','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13236,1,'2015-12-09 13:43:52','2015-12-09 05:43:52','','Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios','Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago','inherit','closed','closed','','nick-broste-at-soma-electronic-music-studios','','','2015-12-09 13:44:07','2015-12-09 05:44:07','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(13238,1,'2015-12-09 13:51:16','2015-12-09 05:51:16','Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"219\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13230 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"219\" height=\"219\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13232\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13236\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<b><i>TC: MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\nHidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 13:51:16','2015-12-09 05:51:16','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13237,1,'2015-12-09 13:48:47','2015-12-09 05:48:47','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"208\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13230 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"208\" height=\"208\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\nChicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13232\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13236\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b><i>TC: MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nHidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 13:48:47','2015-12-09 05:48:47','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13239,1,'2015-12-23 08:30:39','2015-12-23 00:30:39','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\n\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\n\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"257\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"257\" height=\"322\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\n\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"330\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"330\" height=\"186\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a title=\"Strange Weather Records\" href=\"http://www.strangeweatherrecords.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Strange Weather Records</a> and <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-autosave-v1','','','2015-12-23 08:30:39','2015-12-23 00:30:39','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-autosave-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13240,1,'2015-12-09 14:10:54','2015-12-09 06:10:54','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\nChicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13232\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13236\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\nWe’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<b><i>TC: MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\nHidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:10:54','2015-12-09 06:10:54','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13241,1,'2015-12-09 14:11:52','2015-12-09 06:11:52','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\nChicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13232\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n<b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13236\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\nHidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:11:52','2015-12-09 06:11:52','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13242,1,'2015-12-09 14:12:21','2015-12-09 06:12:21','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\nChicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13232\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n<b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13236\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\nHidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:12:21','2015-12-09 06:12:21','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13243,1,'2015-12-09 14:13:29','2015-12-09 06:13:29','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\nChicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:\r\n\r\n“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”\r\n\r\nA year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?\r\n\r\n<b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.\r\n\r\nSo I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.\r\n\r\n<b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b>\r\n\r\n<strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\nHidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:13:29','2015-12-09 06:13:29','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13244,1,'2015-12-09 14:13:48','2015-12-09 06:13:48','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:13:48','2015-12-09 06:13:48','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13245,1,'2015-12-09 14:14:13','2015-12-09 06:14:13','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"314\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"314\" height=\"177\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:14:13','2015-12-09 06:14:13','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13246,1,'2015-12-09 14:16:27','2015-12-09 06:16:27','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"240\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"330\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"330\" height=\"186\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:16:27','2015-12-09 06:16:27','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13247,1,'2015-12-09 14:17:01','2015-12-09 06:17:01','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"249\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"249\" height=\"311\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"330\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"330\" height=\"186\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:17:01','2015-12-09 06:17:01','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13248,1,'2015-12-09 14:17:18','2015-12-09 06:17:18','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"233\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"233\" height=\"291\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"330\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"330\" height=\"186\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:17:18','2015-12-09 06:17:18','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13249,1,'2015-12-09 14:17:36','2015-12-09 06:17:36','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"227\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"227\" height=\"284\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"330\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"330\" height=\"186\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:17:36','2015-12-09 06:17:36','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13250,1,'2015-12-09 14:17:57','2015-12-09 06:17:57','[caption id=\"attachment_13230\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"184\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13230\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kent-Lambert-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Kent Lambert\" width=\"184\" height=\"184\" /></a> Kent Lambert during a recent interview on Radio One Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Chicago band <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Roommate</a>, led by Kent Lambert, came to our attention in the second half of 2015 thanks to a glowing review of their fourth album <i>MAKE LIKE</i> on review site <a href=\"http://cokemachineglow.com/records/roommate-makelike-2015/\">Coke Machine Glow</a>. Since then, it’s been blasted regularly in the Hidden Shoal offices, and has received an <a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/roommate-make-like.html\">extensive review</a> on the blog of Hidden Shoal’s Tim Clarke. After contacting Kent about the release, Tim conducted an illuminating interview with Kent via email.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: This year you released your fourth album as Roommate, </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>. Listening back to your discography, there’s a clear evolution away from electronic sounds towards a more sophisticated, full-band sound. How do you feel about the album now it’s been out for a while, and how do you see it sitting in relation to the rest of your releases?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’m going to quote from my application for the Illinois Arts Council grant that helped fund the album’s release. I wrote this text almost a year ago. Keep in mind that I was trying to convince strangers to give me money, so I come off as more grandiose and less humble than I otherwise might:</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">“I consider the album to be a pinnacle of my own career as songwriter and music producer, and a definitive representation of the band’s transformation from intimate, lo-fi, solo affair to cohesive, creatively ambitious, organically collaborative band… More than any past Roommate album, <i>MAKE LIKE</i> is the result of a collaborative decision-making process, and its songs were arranged for live shows before being translated into recordings. As with past Roommate albums, I wrote all of its songs in solitude. Unlike with past Roommate albums, all of its instrumental arrangements, recording processes and mixing decisions were conducted collectively. Though this album is ultimately a collection of my songs and its production was directed and managed by me, it is a document of a band, of multiple distinct sensibilities converging and diverging to untap and maximise the songs’ emotional, sonic and kinetic potential.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A year later, I’m going to quote from your review, it describes very well (and much more concisely) how I feel about the album: “a culmination of all that’s come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose.”</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Can you tell me a bit about your songwriting process, perhaps giving a couple of examples of how some of the songs on </b><b><i>Make Like </i></b><b>evolved.</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13232\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13232 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Make-Like-album-cover-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate – MAKE LIKE\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Roommate – MAKE LIKE[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> From 2000 to 2013, I continuously wrote material that eventually became songs on various Roommate albums. Some songs came together very quickly, others existed as pieces and parts, phrases and ideas, for months or even years before they cohered into a complete song. The process was basically me carrying these parts around, in notebooks or in my head, and filtering the stimuli of my daily life into parts that might lock together with pre-existing parts. For example, the line “lodgepoles are all getting eaten alive” in ‘RIOT SIZE’ was something my dad said on a camping trip in 2008 (he was pointing at and describing swaths of forest that had been destroyed by mountain pine beetles). I kept that little piece in my head, along with something about a tiger, and then in 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring and protests in Wisconsin over collective bargaining, the rest of that song came together within a few weeks, and those little lodgepole and tiger puzzle pieces found their place. By the time I wrote ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in January 2013, the rest of what would become <i>MAKE LIKE </i>had already been written, and I had a pretty good idea of how it would be sequenced, and of some of its overarching themes. I felt like there needed to be one more song. So I wrote most of ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS’ in one sitting. I think it came together so quickly because it had all of these other songs to support and inform it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: Your current line-up includes some pretty stellar players who also play in other Chicago bands. Do you have a clear idea of what you want the band to contribute to your songs, or do you let them create their own parts independently? </b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13234\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"231\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-13234\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Roommate-band-shot-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Roommate\" width=\"231\" height=\"289\" /></a> Roommate (L–R): Gillian Lisée, Seth Vanek, Kent Lambert, Sam Wagster[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It can vary from song to song, but our album arrangements are typically a mixture of parts I’ve come up with and parts that the other players figure out independently, or together as a band in rehearsals and recording sessions. The typical process is that I write the song and record a demo of it on my own, so that my bandmates can learn the song before we get together to arrange it for live shows. The demo will have placeholder drum, bass, synth and vocal parts, basically whatever comes to mind as I quickly try to sketch the song out. I am usually not attached to those parts and encourage my bandmates to replace them with new stuff, but in many cases they get very attached to the demos and sculpt their parts from those placeholder arrangements. On past albums, the demos would typically form the skeletons of the songs’ album versions, with my bandmates and I recording new parts around them (e.g. ‘MY BAD’ and ‘AUGUST SONG’ on <i>Guilty Rainbow</i>), but with <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, we arranged and played the songs live for a while before we worked on them in the studio. In the case of ‘OLD GOLDEN,’ the album arrangement is quite different from the original demo – that song evolved considerably through multiple live arrangements before settling into its album form. By contrast, ‘DANCER HOWL’ is much closer to the demo. The guitar figure that repeats through the verses and early ‘choruses’ is directly taken from the demo (although of course Sam fleshed it out with gorgeous tone and articulation) and we flew in the electronic drum parts from the demo and processed them through outboard gear.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: I find your lyrics and vocal delivery to be incredibly affecting. You manage to strike a difficult balance between the specific and the universal. I’m never exactly certain of what you’re singing about, but I understand what you mean – if that makes sense! At what point in the songwriting process do the lyrics take shape, and do you feel there are certain themes or ideas that recur in your songs?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s extremely gratifying to get that feedback! What you say makes perfect sense to me, and though I’ve never articulated it that way, I’d say that striking that balance (between the specific and the universal, between cerebral ambiguity and emotional clarity) has been an underlying goal of my songs in recent years. I’m not interested in or comfortable with writing literal, confessional songs, but I’m also not interested in escaping into a fantasy or musical genre-fetish persona… I suppose I write songs as some kind of self-therapy. I meditate on my personal world and the social communities around it – my own creative communities, the city of Chicago, and beyond. The lyrics pretty much always come first. I might have some chord fragments or keyboard riffs floating around, waiting for lyrics to bond with, but it’s the lyrics that drive the process and turn the fragments into songs. I try not to analyse my own songs too intensely, I leave that to people like you, but yes, there are definitely themes and ideas that recur. My songs tend to come directly out of my anxieties, and those anxieties certainly have recurring themes. A prominent theme would be my anxiety with my own tremendous, ridiculous privilege as a comfortably employed white American man in the 21st century. I feel a burning itch to reckon with that privilege, to scratch at it, question it and atone for it somehow, I suppose. Other themes that I consciously reflected on while writing <i>MAKE LIKE </i>involved the kind of identity slippage facilitated by social media and immersive video games, the ease with which we can ‘connect’ with childhood friends, casual acquaintances and strangers through status updates and 3D avatars in violent virtual spaces, the beauty and horror that can live on the surface of those experiences, and the loneliness that often lies at their core… Or something like that?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: The production on </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> is incredibly deep and rich. Can you talk about your relationship with Nick Broste and how you approached production on the album?</b></p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_13236\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"330\"]<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-13236 \" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Nick-Broste-at-SOMA-Electronic-Music-Studios-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios\" width=\"330\" height=\"186\" /></a> Producer Nick Broste at SOMA Electronic Music Studios, Chicago[/caption]\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>We’d all known Nick for many years (he’s been a ubiquitous presence in Chicago’s music scene doing live sound and as a trombonist in Mucca Pazza and many other groups) but we’d never recorded with him. In 2012 we played a couple of shows at The Hideout for which he was running sound. We were very pleased with our stage mix and the feedback we got on how it sounded in the room. After one of those shows he told me that during ‘SECRET CLAW’ (a very new song at that point) he’d gotten very creative with the live mix, turning certain elements up and down and manipulating effects at various points in the song, and he sort of pitched the idea of helping us record a new album. We’d always self-produced with the incredible help of our good friend Gerard Barreto, but for a fourth album I was open to changing up the equation. I’d been fortunate enough to accumulate some complimentary recording days at John McEntire’s now-private SOMA Electronic Music Studios (my grandmother’s Mason &amp; Hamlin piano was housed there for a couple of years), so Nick and I made some plans to do a bunch of tracking there. I think Nick was accustomed to a more straightforward recording process, wherein a band more or less documents their live show in the studio, followed by overdubs and mixing. We did a version of that by tracking basic rhythm section parts first, but for us, tracking and mixing are intertwined throughout the entire production process. Our process relies heavily on intuition, experimentation, trial and error – we’d listen to the evolving mixes to try to divine what else needed to be added. Once Nick got used to this process, he dove in headfirst and became a sort of mad sorcerer mastermind. He’d conduct all sorts of experiments with various outboard gear at SOMA (while talking to himself in various Spinal Tap-esque characters), he’d send tracks to tape or through his Memory Man pedal, he’d come up with counter-melodies (the Stereolab-like Farfisa part on ‘OLD GOLDEN’ was his creation) and strange textures... he basically became another member of the band. There were countless hours of tracking and mixing that just involved Nick and me.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sWkFqdkvPY?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC:<i> MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was mastered by Rashad Becker, who’s pretty legendary among those in the know, and who seems to have an </b><a href=\"http://roberthenke.com/interviews/mastering.html\"><b>exhaustive understanding of audio</b></a><b>. How did you come to work with him? Have there been albums he’s worked on that you admire? What do you feel he brought to the album’s final incarnation?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL: </strong>I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the technical personnel on albums I love, I typically just let my friends and collaborators educate me on such details. So I hadn’t heard of Rashad Becker until a conversation with my friend Cooper Battersby (he’s in CAVE and Bitchin’ Bajas and is an accomplished sound engineer and producer in his own right) when <i>MAKE LIKE</i>’s final mixes were on the horizon. Nick and I were a bit concerned with how robust and dense the low-end of our mixes were. Cooper was thrilled with Rashad’s work mastering CAVE’s album <i>Threace, </i>and he was confident that Rashad’s work on so many incredible bass-heavy electronic music records more than qualified him to help preserve the clarity of our mixes. I looked him up and realised he’d mastered many, many albums I listened to heavily in the aughts (e.g. Lali Puna’s <i>Tridecoder</i> and <i>Scary World Theory</i>, Morr Music’s <i>Blue Skied An’ Clear</i> complilation) and more recently (Fennesz’s <i>Becs </i>and Pantha Du Prince’s <i>Black Noise</i>), so I was determined to work with him, or at least to have someone at Dubplates &amp; Mastering do the job. I think he did exactly what Cooper said he would – he applied a light but firm hand to the mixes, preserving and gently enhancing their clarity and dynamics. He kept the bass-y elements from becoming the muddy over-compressed mess that could have resulted from other engineers and facilities.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: When I first got in touch with you and asked about whether </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE </i></b><b>was going to be released on CD, this sparked a conversation about how frustrating it can be to continue making music when recouping costs has become close to impossible. How big a part does Roommate play in your life, and how do you see that changing in the future?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I’ve worked various part-time and full-time jobs in the 15 years that Roommate has been a thing, and I’ve been active as an experimental videomaker, and played in other bands (the most recent and active of them being <a href=\"https://thefathercostume.bandcamp.com/\">The Father Costume</a>), so Roommate is one of many projects I’ve juggled in that time. But in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional/psychic presence it’s held in my life, it’s often felt like the central activity of my life, and there have been sustained periods of months during which it has more or less been a second full-time job, particularly during album production, mixing/mastering, release and touring cycles. I stopped writing new material after ‘PEOPLE ON SCREENS,’ I think I wanted those cycles to stop, at least for a while. I wanted a clean break – a break from new material to obsess over, from the costs and logistical headaches of studio recording, from the infinite decisions and minutiae involved in recording, mixing and mastering, and especially from the label/publicist/promotion/business side of it. I didn’t and don’t want to end the band, but I did make a conscious choice to stop participating in the traditional (and seemingly outmoded?) album release model that we and so many of our peers have used for years. That doesn’t mean I won’t record music again, but I am definitely not generating songs the way I did for so many continuous years.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So I really don’t know what role Roommate will play in my life in the future, but I’m keeping an open mind about it. In June we had a residency at our favorite Chicago venue The Hideout, which entailed a different show every week for five weeks, with different musicians and songs in each installment, and in the lead up to and during that residency, Roommate felt like two or three full-time jobs. But it was an intensely rewarding experience. It made old songs feel new again, and it involved so many different collaborators: the four-piece at the core of <i>MAKE LIKE</i>, numerous ‘alumni’ from past incarnations of the band, and a few incredible musicians with whom I’d never performed before. There was a program of music videos (including an interactive art-game by Thorne Brandt that will presumably be made public in 2016), a live score to 16mm films performed by Sam Wagster and me, and chamber ensemble versions of a few songs. I came out of the experience with a renewed confidence in the depth of the catalogue, and in the potential for the project to continue to mutate and reincarnate, even if there are no more proper albums for a while, or ever.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: As far as I’m concerned, 2015 has been an absolutely stellar year for music – including outstanding releases by Jenny Hval, </b><a href=\"http://dots-and-loops.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/jim-orourke-simple-songs.html\"><b>Jim O’Rourke</b></a><b> and Björk to name a few – with Roommate’s </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b> as my favourite of them all. Which records have you held close this past year?</b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> It’s amazing to me that our record would be in the company of, let alone top, those records you mentioned! It does really seem to have been a stellar year for music. I find it difficult to keep up with and fully appreciate music during its initial release cycle. For example, I listened to Dirty Projectors’ <i>Swing Lo Magellan </i>in 2012–13, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I really, really got into it, and 2015 was also the second year in a row that I listened to MGMT’s 2010 album <i>Congratulations </i>semi-obsessively... But that said, in 2015 I spent much time with and got a great deal out of the latest albums by D’Angelo, Holly Herndon, Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Holter, Dungen, Sufjan Stevens and Flying Saucer Attack, as well as the Björk and Jim O’Rourke records you mentioned (Jenny Hval is on my radar but I haven’t dug into her music yet) and an amazing work from a large ensemble called Never Enough Hope (it includes Nick Broste and a couple other Roommate alumni, Amy Cimini and Erica Dicker). The composer and leader of the group is Toby Summerfield and the album is called <a href=\"https://tobysummerfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-gravity-of-our-commitment\"><i>The Gravity of Our Commitment</i></a>. It’s phenomenal.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>TC: And finally, what’s with the digital handclap sound that keeps cropping up in </b><b><i>MAKE LIKE</i></b><b>?! </b></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>KL:</strong> I don’t know, we got a Yamaha drum-pad at some point during the production of the album, and a couple of its clap samples became as crucial to us as a shaker or tambourine. I definitely felt a craving for sort of ’80s science fiction movie atmospheres and textures to be strongly represented on this record, and the handclap sort of encapsulated the fulfillment of that craving, particularly at the ending of ‘WILDERNESS.’ A digital clap through some precisely calibrated delay effects, at particular subdivisions of the beat, is an exquisite thing!</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZ_1moCJ2wA?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hidden Shoal would like to thank Kent for taking the time to chat with us. Roommate’s <i>MAKE LIKE </i>is available on vinyl, cassette and digital download via <a href=\"https://roommate.bandcamp.com/\">Bandcamp</a>.</p>','MAKE LIKE: An Interview with Roommate\'s Kent Lambert','','inherit','closed','closed','','13226-revision-v1','','','2015-12-09 14:17:57','2015-12-09 06:17:57','',13226,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13226-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),