Voguing to Danzig: How and when did you guys start playing together as Sightings?
Mark Morgan: Around March or April '97, I put up fliers at record stores around New York stating that I was looking to start a band. After getting a few rather disheartening phone calls ("the only band that has really influenced me is Babe the Blue Ox"), Jon gave me a ring and after talking a for a few minutes, we decided to meet up. Over the next year and half, we screwed around with a few different bass players who either couldn't commit or didn't share our "vision". Doubt began to set in after awhile as to whether we would ever get this thing going and then finally we met Richard in the Fall of '98 (also through a flyer). We had our first jam in November of that year but didn't start regularly practicing till January '99.
VTD: Babe the Blue Ox? Ouch.
Richard Hoffman: Did you ever see BTBO? That woman plays a mean bass.
VTD: How does the Sightings songwriting process work? Are songs conceived from jam sessions or do you each bring in separate ideas?
RH: We generate some ideas on our own but everything comes together in jamming. I might play a bass line on my own and try to work it into a Sightings jam, but we never do the "I got this song for you guys to learn" thing.
VTD: Mark, what can you tell me about Maude? Is that a going thing? I read a thing or two about it on the TLASILA blog but have come up short looking for more info. (Note: Mark is also a member of To Live & Shave in L.A.)
MM: Maude is very much a non-going thing. It would be the type of deal where I would want to practice and try to write songs with Tom but us living so far apart puts the kibosh on any notions of having band at the moment. Also, dealing with NYC rent and bills kind of hinders my movements.
VTD: What other bands are you guys in? Do you think of Sightings as your main project?
MM: I'm also in a band called Key To Shame which is with my friend Pat Murano of No Neck/Malkuth. Just two guys fumbling around with pedals, occasionally playing their guitars. We've done some recording, played two shows and hope to continue doing it. I sometimes play with An Alien Heat which is basically Northampton Wools with myself thrown in the mix adding another layer of racket. Just three guys fumbling with pedals, occasionally playing their guitars. While I generally prefer playing with groups that have some kind of strong plan/structure ideas, there is something to be said for getting up there to disperse tuneless guitar hell for half an hour.
RH: Sightings has been our main project regardless of how we think about it. I have played with Brian Sullivan of Mouthus since the late '90's when we both lived in Providence. We have kept our project--Chaw Mank--going on some level all along and lately seem to be picking up some more steam. I am also playing recently with my wife and Carbon from Metalux in a project that may be called Body Types, although I am expecting to hear any day that there are five bands called that.
VTD: I stole this question from an old Doonesbury cartoon: how are you able to keep body and soul together?
RH: I have no soul.
VTD: Do you guys have day jobs?
RH: Ha-ha…do you?
VTD: Good point, and fair enough. What do you do for day jobs? Personally, I'm a technical writer for a huge corporation. If wishes were horses, I'd just blog about music and books and politics and culture all day for more money than I make day-jobbing and freelance writing.
MM: I work at the office of a construction company that guts and remodels high-end apartments. The typical customer is usually a hedge fund manager who has more in the bank than half of the countries in Africa. My day usually consists of staring at Excel spread sheets (more exciting than you could possibly imagine) and scheduling plumbers, electricians, painters, etc. In summary, work sucks and are there any potential patrons out there who could release us from the bonds of our labors?
RH: I do a few things. Art handling, work at a junk shop.
VTD: I'm curious about your influences, musical and otherwise. No-wave is what comes across most strongly, to me, in your stuff, but also the Dead C. - in the sense that sometimes, and I'm thinking of Absolutes and End Times specifically, it can be hard to tell what instrument is causing what sound. It's like a big fused-together jumble of parts with no purpose but to annihilate everything on a sonic level - and I mean that in a very, very good way.
RH: Can't say I have ever consciously listened to much No-Wave, maybe The Ex qualifies? Influential for me is more early Industrial (Einsturzende, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire), Kraut (Faust!), some '90's stuff like Jesus Lizard and US Maple, and of course SST stuff like Black Flag and Minutemen. I think when the band started, Kollaps was probably my main reference point for the sound of the records. Joy Division was my favorite band in high school.
Mark Morgan: Around March or April '97, I put up fliers at record stores around New York stating that I was looking to start a band. After getting a few rather disheartening phone calls ("the only band that has really influenced me is Babe the Blue Ox"), Jon gave me a ring and after talking a for a few minutes, we decided to meet up. Over the next year and half, we screwed around with a few different bass players who either couldn't commit or didn't share our "vision". Doubt began to set in after awhile as to whether we would ever get this thing going and then finally we met Richard in the Fall of '98 (also through a flyer). We had our first jam in November of that year but didn't start regularly practicing till January '99.
VTD: Babe the Blue Ox? Ouch.
Richard Hoffman: Did you ever see BTBO? That woman plays a mean bass.
VTD: How does the Sightings songwriting process work? Are songs conceived from jam sessions or do you each bring in separate ideas?
RH: We generate some ideas on our own but everything comes together in jamming. I might play a bass line on my own and try to work it into a Sightings jam, but we never do the "I got this song for you guys to learn" thing.
VTD: Mark, what can you tell me about Maude? Is that a going thing? I read a thing or two about it on the TLASILA blog but have come up short looking for more info. (Note: Mark is also a member of To Live & Shave in L.A.)
MM: Maude is very much a non-going thing. It would be the type of deal where I would want to practice and try to write songs with Tom but us living so far apart puts the kibosh on any notions of having band at the moment. Also, dealing with NYC rent and bills kind of hinders my movements.
VTD: What other bands are you guys in? Do you think of Sightings as your main project?
MM: I'm also in a band called Key To Shame which is with my friend Pat Murano of No Neck/Malkuth. Just two guys fumbling around with pedals, occasionally playing their guitars. We've done some recording, played two shows and hope to continue doing it. I sometimes play with An Alien Heat which is basically Northampton Wools with myself thrown in the mix adding another layer of racket. Just three guys fumbling with pedals, occasionally playing their guitars. While I generally prefer playing with groups that have some kind of strong plan/structure ideas, there is something to be said for getting up there to disperse tuneless guitar hell for half an hour.
RH: Sightings has been our main project regardless of how we think about it. I have played with Brian Sullivan of Mouthus since the late '90's when we both lived in Providence. We have kept our project--Chaw Mank--going on some level all along and lately seem to be picking up some more steam. I am also playing recently with my wife and Carbon from Metalux in a project that may be called Body Types, although I am expecting to hear any day that there are five bands called that.
VTD: I stole this question from an old Doonesbury cartoon: how are you able to keep body and soul together?
RH: I have no soul.
VTD: Do you guys have day jobs?
RH: Ha-ha…do you?
VTD: Good point, and fair enough. What do you do for day jobs? Personally, I'm a technical writer for a huge corporation. If wishes were horses, I'd just blog about music and books and politics and culture all day for more money than I make day-jobbing and freelance writing.
MM: I work at the office of a construction company that guts and remodels high-end apartments. The typical customer is usually a hedge fund manager who has more in the bank than half of the countries in Africa. My day usually consists of staring at Excel spread sheets (more exciting than you could possibly imagine) and scheduling plumbers, electricians, painters, etc. In summary, work sucks and are there any potential patrons out there who could release us from the bonds of our labors?
RH: I do a few things. Art handling, work at a junk shop.
VTD: I'm curious about your influences, musical and otherwise. No-wave is what comes across most strongly, to me, in your stuff, but also the Dead C. - in the sense that sometimes, and I'm thinking of Absolutes and End Times specifically, it can be hard to tell what instrument is causing what sound. It's like a big fused-together jumble of parts with no purpose but to annihilate everything on a sonic level - and I mean that in a very, very good way.
RH: Can't say I have ever consciously listened to much No-Wave, maybe The Ex qualifies? Influential for me is more early Industrial (Einsturzende, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire), Kraut (Faust!), some '90's stuff like Jesus Lizard and US Maple, and of course SST stuff like Black Flag and Minutemen. I think when the band started, Kollaps was probably my main reference point for the sound of the records. Joy Division was my favorite band in high school.
MM: All the no wave comparisons are probably my fault since I'm the unschooled, shrieking one of the band. Granted, Richard and Jon can also dump some of their own shriek but they can also play way more styles of music than I can. I think the guitar mangling of groups like Red Transistor or Mars are influential on me personally but that's only one chunk of my stylings (so says me) and taken as a whole, it becomes an even smaller part of the group aesthetic. I think the comparisons to the Dead C are only valid in terms recording technique. Record a band playing loud and vaguely off kilter on a shitty four track and you're going to get a semi undifferentiated whhooosssshhhh sound a fair amount of the time. Of course, we can hear the individual parts on the records you mentioned since uhh, we ourselves played on them but I can't necessarily fault someone for saying something like, "You can't tell what's going on."
VTD: Here's a two parter. What's the most surprising reaction to your music that you've ever received, and what’s the least surprising?
RH: Actually the constant reference to No-Wave is way up there for most surprising, but again, I never spent much time with that stuff.
MM: We've heard emo once or twice. Sure, it's emotional - isn't most of the best music emotional? - but emo as a music genre tag is utterly baffling but hey, is this really worth pondering?
VTD: You've been described as "the most dangerous band in America"; having trouble sourcing who said that. Is that a mantle you accept, reject, or dispute? If you dispute it, who would you say deserves that title?
Jon Lockie: The "most dangerous" tag came from an article written in a Cleveland paper and I believe the source is footnoted on the Wikipedia page.
RH: That's just utter fucking bullshit and I am not sure who wrote that or that Wikipedia entry. Harsh or weird music isn't dangerous since those who aren't interested simply tune it out. Bands pushing religion deserve to be called dangerous. We're not brainwashing anyone.
MM: Ditto.
VTD: Thanks to the miracle of discogs, I learned recently that Sightings issued a pair of early releases titled CD 1 and CD 2. Are there any plans to re-issue those?
JL: The two CDRs are 4-track recordings made around the time of the Arrived in Gold and End Times albums. "Failure of Words" from End Times first appeared on CD 2 here. Two other tracks are 4-track versions of songs on Arrived in Gold ("Odds On" and "Arrived in Gold, Arrived in Smoke"). The other 6 tunes don't appear anywhere else. They're just CDRs containing material that, at the time, had never made it on a record. I can always make more copies here but I usually only make them for tours.
MM: They are still available sporadically through Fusetron and at our merch table when we are on tour.
VTD: Mark, do you own a grandfather clock? See, "Brought a Grandfather Clock" has become one of my favorite Sightings songs, so much so that it's the first track on my current morning exercise iPod playlist. And it struck me, that titular phrase, as a killer line of throwaway dialogue for a low-budget slasher flick, for a scene before the bloodshed begins. Like, people are showing up at a house party and the guy manning the door is asking arriving guests what they have to share. One girl's got Mike's Hard Lemonade of Boone's Farm or whatever, one dude brought scotch, one dude brought weed, and then there's some dude who says, totally deadpan, "brought a grandfather clock."
MM: I can't remember what this song is about. Actually, it was probably about nothing.
VTD: What's the best album you've heard in the last, say, 72 hours that you really think I should buy?
RM: Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire.
JL: Cluster, "Sowiesoso" - just reissued on vinyl
MM: Mask of the Imperial Family "s/t" no longer available but can be downloaded from Mutant Sounds.
VTD: What's up next for Sightings? New album? A tour? Amused inner-band discussion of how inane my interview questions were?
RM: Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire.
JL: Cluster, "Sowiesoso" - just reissued on vinyl
MM: Mask of the Imperial Family "s/t" no longer available but can be downloaded from Mutant Sounds.
VTD: What's up next for Sightings? New album? A tour? Amused inner-band discussion of how inane my interview questions were?
RH: We're trying to figure out how to go back to the studio. Records cost money to make. Or we're trying to decide if another 4-track record a la End Times--which costs almost nothing to make--is something we're interested in. We're definitely due for a record, and we think our best is yet to come.
MM: At least you didn't ask what our favorite colors are.
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