Altered Zones

By Jheri Evans

MP3: Dylan Ettinger: "Rico's Pawn Shop"

MP3: Dylan Ettinger: "Squares"

Dylan Ettinger resides in Bloomington, IN, where he spends a fair amount of his time trying to decide whether to buy more equipment for music or save up to move elsewhere. His New Age Outlaws LP on Not Not Fun was one of my favorite pieces of music from last year, and I'm consistently impressed with his ability to conjure up hypothetical future worlds through sound-- along with the human narratives that crisscross inside them. On tracks like "Rico's Pawn Shop," he unleashes scores of syruppy synths, layering into a wall of sound as a garbled pulse just chugs along. "Penguin Point" catches Ettinger probing even deeper into the space-scapes he creates, allowing the synths to roam a bit more freely as he brings out a complex machinery of tinny samples. Whatever direction he decides to explore, it's his melodic sensiblity that keeps me hooked from track to track. On Easter Sunday, Dylan and I had a little chat about his side projects, professional wrestling, and what's next.

AZ: You've said that New Age Outlaws tells the story of Gordon, a recently fired police officer battling a corrupt government in a futuristic dystopia. Do you intend to continue the Gordon narrative in your newer material?

Dylan: The narrative aspect of New Age Outlaws and some of my other recordings is still present to a degree, but scaled back significantly. While working on NAO, I had developed a plot that ran parallel to the album. I came up with certain characters and settings that I used as a guide for what I wanted the songs to sound like. I wanted the record to be like a soundtrack to an imaginary film or novel that I wanted listeners to then create using the music I had written and the characters and settings I had hinted at in the titles of the tracks. The new material I have been working on is far more personal, so Gordon is gone for now. Most of the songs I have been writing recently are love songs.

AZ: That's an interesting shift, to go from sci-fi stories to love songs. Is this true of Pattern Recursion, your upcoming tape with Moon Glyph?

Dylan: Pattern Recursion is actually a reaction to me writing more personal, traditional "pop" songs. The goal for the material on that tape was to display as little personality as possible. I wanted to let the equipment do the talking. As a result of that, it sounds a lot more cold and mechanical and far less spacious than a lot of my other music. It is definitely synthesizer music in its most basic form, with lots of bleeps and bloops. I tried to restrict myself to using only square waves, but I think some other waveforms may have sneaked in at a few points. Pattern Recursion is about technology-- specifically my gear, and how I interact with it.

AZ: Speaking of your poppier material, you recently let me hear some material from your new project, Dry Socket. What's influencing that off-kilter, industrial electronica?

Dylan: Dry Socket is a project that my friend Drekka and I started very recently. We have been talking about starting a band for years and when we finally decided to collaborate, making classic industrial music was an obvious choice of direction. We're really paying tribute to some of our favorite bands like Psychic TV, Cabaret Voltaire, and Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft. I don't really know how long this project will last though, because the nature of the group is very intense and fleeting. 

AZ: Would you say it's more about just having fun?

Dylan: I don't know if fun is necessarily the intention. It's a way for me to just kind of explore and experiment without worrying so much about the finished product. Dry Socket is about spontaneity. The intent behind this group is to make solid electronic industrial music that is a bit unnerving and subversive, like a lot of the early Industrial Records stuff.  We played our first show without having ever practiced or played together in the same room. It has been fun to work on some stuff that isn't as rehearsed or meticulous as the material for my solo project has been recently. Its nice to cut loose and just rip it up and make crazy loud noises. 

AZ:  So at SXSW, I attempted to catch you live three separate times and never managed to make that happen. Your music is extremely atmospheric. How do you translate that to a live experience?

Dylan: Well, I write all of my music so it can be played live before I record it, so it usually translates pretty well. I do a lot of live looping, so I'm able to get a dense, layered sound when I want to. I've actually been playing "Shandor's Dream" live since before New Age Outlaws even came out, and I've been able to recreate it pretty precisely. There are certain small parts of songs that I'll change in order to make them easier to perform, but overall they remain the same. At SXSW, and at recent shows, I've been playing more new songs, so I have a bit more freedom with how they're played, since nobody has really heard them yet.

AZ: It's cool that you write the songs with live performance in mind. With a lot of bedroom acts it tends to go the other way.

Dylan: Yeah, and I think that shows a lot of the time. It's easy to tell when a song is prepared during the recording process instead of written first, then recorded. When music is written while recording I think at times it has a tendency to meander and go on a bit too long. The artist is often exploring a little and that exploration is what is being caught on tape. One of my goals now is to be more concise with my music; writing the songs knowing that I'll be playing them live helps to keep me in check. There's a sense of urgency that comes with playing live that I want to represent in my songwriting now.  In a live setting, I have a very finite amount of time to get a point across, and I want to be able to make as much of an impact as possible within that time frame. I want my next record to be much more precise.

AZ: Do you think that sense of urgency has fueled the shift toward more pop-oriented tracks?

Dylan: Yeah, definitely, one reason of many. In the past, I maybe let certain things go on longer than they should have in an effort to try to get more mileage out of a certain idea-- or because I was kind of letting myself explore a certain sound. Now I'm trying not to repeat myself more than necessary. I want to be more economic in my writing.

AZ: Ok, one last question. We're both unabashed, longtime fans of professional wrestling. Who is gonna win, The Rock or John Cena? Who do you want to win? Is booking a match a year in advance kinda lame?

Dylan: I don't see the WWE putting Rocky over Cena. He's already an established legend and isn't even really a part of the active roster. Cena has much more to gain by winning. It will also be nice to (hopefully) have a WWE title match without Cena at Wrestlemania. Booking a match like this a year in advance makes sense when you consider the importance of these two squaring off. Its a passing-of-the-torch type situation.

New Age Outlaws is available via Not Not Fun, along with his new "Lion of Judah" 7". Pattern Recursion cassette is out soon via Moon Glyph