Altered Zones

By Emilie Friedlander

Last September, the six members of Brooklyn experimental electronic unit Excepter were running late on an 8-hour drive from New York to Oberlin, OH. They were scheduled to headline a show at Oberlin College with the popular indie rock band Woods that night, and were fairly confident that they would make it there before 11. When an impatient booking agent called to inform them that the entire show actually had to be over at that time, as the college was hosting a pizza party in the concert space, frontman John Fell Ryan still wasn’t fazed. “We didn’t take it seriously, but they took it so seriously. We were done playing, and they pretty much just loaded our equipment into the parking lot. And they’re like, ‘Here’s your check. See ya.’”

When he returned to the building, John Fell Ryan was frustrated to discover only two or three students at the function that had forced them to cut short their set-- generally at least an hour in length, though Excepter have been known to play anywhere from six to seventeen over their seven years of existence. Like Woods, they had only a half-hour slot; but instead of a string of five-minute songs, their set took the form of one, long improvisation. Unlike Woods, the band received hate mail for playing too long.

Pizza party or no, Excepter always seem to be running up against the same complaints. But for the band and their fans, the half-hour mark is often where things start getting interesting.

The first track on their forthcoming Late EP on Woodsist, a Brooklyn-based label founded by Woods singer Jeremy Earl, is adapted from a recording of the first few minutes of their set that night, cut off when band member Jon "Porkchop" Nicholson’s mini-disc recorder ran out of batteries. Back in his home-studio, JFR took the fragment, reversed it, played it forwards and backwards simultaneously, and combined it with another relic of life on the road: a field recording of highway sounds from the band’s hotel room in Vacaville, CA, played back (and recorded over again) in another hotel room near the Chicago O’Hare International airport, then recorded once more inside the car during the drive home from Indiana. Given “OBOH”’s backstory, its plodding, polyrhythmic swagger, the title of the band’s new four-song release is almost comically on-point. Whatever the band’s destination-- geographical or artistic-- Excepter’s music is mostly about what happens on the way.

Formerly a member of electro-acoustic improv collective the No Neck Blues Band, the 38-year-old JFR looks unusually dapper for an out-of-work stock film footage archivist when he shows up at the Garden Grill in East Williamsburg on a Saturday afternoon. His outfit today-- a navy blazer and a tilted straw fedora-- recalls the performance persona he has been cultivating since his No Neck days, except for the signature Wayfarer-style sunglasses, which unsettle his ‘40s noir attire with a touch of mass-produced counter-culture. Over a Turkey Plate-- basically a full Thanksgiving dinner-- JFR locates the beginning of the Excepter story just a ten-minute walk away, at a Polish Bar called Level X (now Zablozki’s), where he hosted a chronically under-attended DJ night back 2002.

After departing from No Neck in January 2000, JFR left the New York DIY rock scene altogether and dove headfirst into electronic music and its niche collector culture, spinning ‘80s house, ‘90s techno, and contemporary dance-rock at bars and loft parties throughout the city. Genius Club, the bi-weekly soirée he hosted at Level X, was the kind of place where “if you showed up enough, you got to DJ,” JFR says. When he started passing a radio mic around the room, what was essentially a weekly listening party among friends evolved into an early incarnation of Excepter with Calder Martin, Daniel Hougland,  Macrae Semans and Caitlin Cook. (These four bandmates were eventually succeeded by the current line-up of Nathan Corbin, Nicholson, Lala Ryan, now JFR's wife, and Clare Amory, though Hougland did not leave the band until this year). Pushing this hybrid of DJing and real-time performance even further, the trio began passing synthesizers and looped sound samples through the mixing board, and billing themselves as a live band in clubs on the Lower East Side-- then, still the locus of underground nightlife, even if the majority of its actors had already relocated to Brooklyn and Queens.

“It was definitely the collapse of the rave economy that created Excepter’s sound,” JFR recalls. He is referring to the ever-evolving array of vintage synthesizers, drum machines, and effects pedals that make Excepter’s music sometimes seem like a taxonomy of electronic music history-- one that thrives on the nostalgic thrill of returning to that history’s material sources, and reclaiming them for the present. “That kind of gear isn’t really available in most cities,” says video artist Jon Williams, who frequently contributes visuals to Excepter’s live performances. “You really need to be in New York to be picking up that kind of gear on the used market.” Excepter’s arrival on the downtown scene also coincided with the rise of electroclash, a hybrid of art music and dance rock honed by groups like Adult and A.R.E. Weapons. Nearly a quarter century after early electronic duo Suicide fused synthesizers and drum machines with the critical disobedience of punk, electronic music was making a comeback in New York as the province of the artistic underground.

As bass-heavy and beat-driven as it is, Excepter’s music remains a lot harder to dance to than the majority of the acts they were originally billed with-- though its rhythms are usually too infectious to prevent at least a few audience members from trying. Their performances combine the repetition and long duration of the work of New York minimalist composers like La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine with an emphasis on music-making as a physical spectacle-- an interest that has remained with JFR since his No Neck days, and which sometimes makes Excepter’s live set feel like an extended Manson Family ritual.

“I would show up on stage only dressed in cut-offs and I would play pieces of wood and tackle people," JFR says, remembering No Neck. "I would be beating drum sticks, playing instruments until they break.” Even with drum machines to carry the beat, JFR and his wife Lala (who joined Excepter in 2006) can often be seeing attaching rocks, knives, and other small objects to contact mics and hitting them repeatedly against the surfaces of the concert space. As with the Excepter experience as a whole, the musical impact is just as important as the visual one: “Just by changing where you put your hand on the stick, you can produce a different sound,” says JFR, banging a fork over and over again on the diner table as proof. “It’s about all the changes that happen in repetition.”

Excepter made the cover of The Wire last May, and could be said to have laid the foundation for an entire generation of millennial artists eager to mine the history of electronic music and its instrumentation-- most notably, Oneohtrix Point Never, Stellar Om Source, Teengirl Fantasy, Blondes, and Gatekeeper. Though they have endured long enough to produce 23 album releases and 71 downloadable podcasts, Excepter’s music seems to resist its own co-optation by an internet hype cycle that exalts and discards artists like old synthesizers on Craiglist.

“We’re not about getting to control crowds of people with tried-and-true ways of getting people to pay attention,” says JFR, referring to the verse-chorus-verse-chorus formula that still characterizes the majority of indie blog tracks. So how, after seven years of mining the same improvisational vein, does Excepter still keep people listening? “Through hypnosis, through a more visionary approach,” says JFR, picking unhurriedly at his plate. “Through making music that’s about travel.”

Late EP is out now via Woodsist. A new cassette release, Maze of Death, will be released on Dog Daze Tapes on Black Friday this month (November 26). Photo by Frank Macias