Altered Zones

[Left to right: Mike Sneeringer, Kiel Everett, and Mike Polizze of Purling Hiss at the Solid Sound Festival at Mass MOCA, June 2011; photo by Tim Bugbee]

By Max Burke

MP3: Purling Hiss: "Voices"

MP3: Purling Hiss: "The Hoodoo"

Purling Hiss is an umbrella moniker for guitarist Mike Polizze's home recorded projects. He's been stockpiling solo tapes for years, and since 2009, a steady stream of Purling Hiss material has appeared on underground labels like Woodsist and Permanent. Polizze's recordings don't have the flow of typical home-recorded lo-fi rock. Songs stop and start haphazardly; sequencing seems arbitrary, with the albums unfolding more like candid snapshots than cohesive statements. This casual, tossed-off quality is part of the band's charm.

In the past year, Polizze has recruited a live band consisting of fellow Philadelphia rock veterans Mike Sneeringer, on drums, and Kiel Everett, on bass. The trio expands the tinny sound of Purling Hiss' records considerably, resulting in workmanlike, head-bopping anthems that set Polizze's guitar pyrotechnics front and center. Last month, the band's overdriven, maximal rock sound led off the Wilco-curated Solid Sound Festival at Mass MOCA in North Adams. I caught up with the group after their set to discuss future full-band recording plans, the origin of the Purling Hiss project, and the perils of border crossings.

AZ: Are you working on a full band album?

Mike P.: Yeah, I have new songs that I'm writing and demo-ing. We're gonna record together; that's the next thing. I did a lot of recordings by myself, and I actually still have a lot of backlog. I've been recording on my four-track for 12 years, so it's just going with the flow. Now that I'm playing with these guys, I'm going in the direction of the live band.

AZ: Mike P., You're also a member of Birds of Maya. How did you end up accumulating so much solo material?

Mike P.: Yeah, I've been with them for seven and a half years. We're just best friends who hang out and play when we can, but we don't use it as a vehicle to move forward with touring or making a career out of it. It's always been for fun and to just play and record stuff at home. I bought a four-track when I turned 18-- the floor model at Sam Ash. I remember trying to learn how to balance tracks and I never did it right, and I always blamed it on the floor model. I always meant to return it, but maybe it was me who did it wrong. I would always fill up the four tracks and dump them on whatever program I had on the computer and maybe dump them back on the four-track. Every time would be different. That's why [all the recordings] sound a little different: because I would do experiments. All the recordings I ended up putting out were never me saying, "I'm gonna record this and put it out out." It was just me documenting ideas; some of them are complete ideas, and some of them aren't. That's why-- and people have said this before-- some of the albums feel like they're stream-of-consciousness. There are ideas there but they're not complete ideas. My answer to that, especially with Public Service Announcement, was the conscious decision to put those incomplete ideas together as a whole, in a cohesive way. The process-- it comes together like a diary. It's just me documenting what I was doing at that time in my life, or during that year.

AZ: Public Service Announcement is the most recent full-length to come out, but it contains the earliest material.

Mike P.: That's true, but we just released an EP on Mexican Summer.

AZ: Does that represent your most recent material?

Mike P.: Yeah, I recorded that not this past February, but the one before that. I had separated my shoulder-- fell off a wall and landed on my shoulder.

AZ: Was alcohol involved?

Mike P.: Maybe. [Laughter]

AZ: No comment?

Mike P.: Yeah, yeah it was. [Laughter] The funny thing was, I recorded that on a little Peavey Backstage Plus, a little practice amp. So it's compressed in the same way-- physically-- that Public Service Announcement is, but it's got more cohesive, complete rock songs. Kind of like, the wild, unhinged stuff meets the mellower stuff.

AZ: Your releases thus far have sounded pretty stream-of-consciousness. With the live band, do you find that the songs are more defined?

Mike P.: I feel like that's a direction we're gonna head toward. In the past, I've recorded everything and I have ideas that I've written, that I've demo-ed, that I'm gonna introduce and we're gonna work on. We're gonna figure out where we're gonna record it; I'm excited for that.

AZ: Kiel and Mike S., what other groups have you been in?

Kiel: I play in a band called Tin Horses. It's my band in Philly.

Mike S.: I play in a couple bands. I toured in a band called The Loved Ones for a while that was definitely a different genre, and I'm also in a band called Puerto Rico Flowers; it's really somebody's solo project but a bunch of different musicians play with them. I also play with a band called Title Tracks. I’ve been touring with bands for about ten years.

AZ: So you guys just all knew each other from Philly?

Mike P.: It really came together. Like, I talked to Mike about doing something just "in the future," way in the past. Kurt Vile invited Purling Hiss-- whatever it was at the time-- to go on tour. I hadn't run into Kiel for a while. We used to live near each other. I was telling him about it and he was like, "How do you not have a band together?" I was like, "I don't really know." He's a guitar player, and he just picked up the bass and learned it really quickly for this.

[Purling Hiss at the Solid Sound Festival; photo by Tim Bugbee]

MP3: Purling Hiss: "Walking Down The Street"

AZ: How long does it take the average person to transpose the "p" and the "h" in "Purling Hiss?"

Mike S.: No time at all! [Laughter]

Mike P.: It's funny. It's one of those things where it has a double meaning, but that has nothing to do with the name. I realized that when I was coming up with the name, and it made me laugh. It's funny how people interpret it in different ways. I was recording the first album [for Permanent Records] at the time. And it was just another experiment; I was messing with tape noise, white noise, and gain. It was very loose and unstructured, and I was messing with the aesthetic and the name. I was researching how white noise occurs in nature, in music and even in [work environments], like office buildings. I was thinking about the songs and the structures. I was looking up names, having some wordplay with names synonymous with white noise, hiss, and purling; besides the stitching effect, ["purling"] also means the rippling effect of a stream. I like the juxtaposition.

Mike S.: Now it's demystified.

AZ: All of you have been playing in various projects for years now. The name Purling Hiss is out there and you've been putting out records steadily: is there a concerted effort to make this band your main project?

Mike S.: Absolutely.

AZ: Do you guys have an idea of who in Wilco was into you and wanted you to play the fest?

Mike P.: Yeah, it was Jeff Tweedy. We actually met him right before we walked up on stage yesterday, and he thanked us, and we were like "No, thank you."  I was actually wearing my Permanent Records Chicago t-shirt, and he was like, "I dunno if you heard, but we've been digging your records." We ran into him later and he has the first self-titled LP.

AZ: Is this the most high profile gig you've done?

Mike S.: Yes. The Bowery Ballroom show we did with Kurt was probably a close second. That was sold out, and there were a lot of people in the door by the time we played, which was really nice. The same with this-- the fact that we were kicking off the weekend and we had people's undivided attention. I was really happy with how many people watched us. Mike [P.] broke a string and everyone waited for him to replace it.

AZ: It was nice to see you guys and Sic Alps representing something a little different from what you'd expect from a Wilco festival. Were you surprised Jeff Tweedy was into it?

Mike P.: Yeah, one groggy morning like six months ago I got an email from their booking agent: "Hi, Wilco is moving forward with their second annual Solid Sound festival. Jeff Tweedy has a list of artists and you're on it. Would you be interested and available?"

Mike S.: Kiel thought he was fucking with him. He was like, "Will you send me the email? Will you forward it?”

Mike P.: He was being cool about it but I think he wanted proof.

Kiel: He wouldn't have fucked with me like that.

Mike S.: You have a good tour story right, Mike?

Mike P.: I drove through border patrol once. That's a good story. We were somewhere near the Mexican border-- not sure where, geography's not our strong suit. I failed at high school. My GPA was 1.6 so I started playing guitar and washing dishes. I'd never been to the West Coast before; we were just tired, driving in our red minivan. I started seeing cones and was like, "It's just construction." This all happened so fast, but at one point, I see two cars parked facing each other in the road, and Mike sat up and was like, "Dude, stop!" All these people were yelling "Stop!" They were freaking out really bad.

Mike S.: One guy screamed in the window, and everyone started running toward the vehicle. They were really angry. They were like, "We were gonna throw the spikes and take your tires out." So Kiel woke up. He had a huge beard and looked really sleepy, and the cop was like, "How much weed has this guy been smoking?" [Laughter]

Mike P: So they hassled us for a couple minutes. They took all our licenses. I'm in the driver's seat, and the guy peers in and he's like, "Michael Nicholas Polizzi..." And he just glared at me and deadpanned, "There's a warrant out for your arrest for statutory rape." And I was like, "What!?" And then his eyes started to smile. It was an intense 10 seconds though.

Mike S: Total super troopers moment. The guy was just messing with us.

Lounge Lizards EP is out now on Mexican Summer, and copies of Purling Hiss' recent split 12" with Puffy Areolas are still available from Permanent Records