With TV On The Radio, you were in a band where the producer, Dave Sitek, was one of the members of the band. How did that effect your approach to recording?
TV On The Radio started pretty shortly after I met Dave. We met because I was living in Brooklyn in an old cheesecake factory that – after having been abandoned for 75 years – was turned into artist lofts. It was 2,600 square feet – bare, raw space, and I was among the first residents there. It didn't have a bathroom and barely had lights. There was plywood on the windows. I and a few other artist friends moved in there; ten of us moved in and made these rooms, and the rent was a $100 a month. It was like a shantytown; it had rotating roommates and one of the people who came in – about two years after I moved there – was Dave. He was a musician and had a recorded a few bands. Dave and I started hanging out because one day I walked past this room, and inside Dave's room was a bunch of acrylic paint tubes, packs and packs of cigarettes, a 4-track that had a bunch of cassette tapes stacked all around it, and a few keyboards, a guitar, and a sampler. The reason I stopped and stared for a bit was because, "Oh, that looks like my room." [laughter] I also had the 4-track Tascam, a bunch of instruments – noisemakers, samplers, and some toy instruments – and I was also surrounded by paints. We started hanging out, making art together, and trading 4-track tapes that we had. That's where our camaraderie started, as far as music making goes. The first thing that we ever put out was a compilation of songs from those 4-tracks called OK Calculator, a weird, silly homage to Radiohead's OK Computer. It was this compilation of the 4-track tapes that we traded before there was even an idea of becoming a "band" or whatever. David is more a musician – more of an instrumentalist – than I am. We went from trading tapes to developing songs, where Dave would take a song that I had written – with whatever rudimentary keyboard on it – and then he would flesh it out. That's how it would go; I would record on a 4-track and leave it to my instrumentalist friends to bring it around into being a song that other people would want to listen to, as opposed to just me. [laughter]
When you were recording on Tascam 4-tracks they were already "vintage." Most people had moved onto [Alesis] ADATs and other developing digital formats.
It's funny, because I started recording on Tascam 4-tracks as a result of being into the whole system of indie recording, where people were tracking in their bedrooms. I came to that in 1994 and 1995, in the punk tradition of, "Anyone can do this. You don't have to know an instrument. You can do whatever." So, I did a bunch of a cappella or beatboxing. I was not a technical person back then at all. I'm barely a technical person now! [laughs] But something that recorded individual tracks on a cassette tape, that was something that worked for my brain.
You were influenced by artists like Sebadoh and early Liz Phair?
Yeah, exactly. Eric's Trip and a lot of K Records artists.
You started as an illustrator and ended-up sonically building montages. I wonder how the visual played into that approach of recording?
I feel it's always been soundtrack-y sci-fi. That's the way that I've always seen it. When we started doing it, we recorded our EP Young Liars in 2002. This is after 9/11, after Y2K, and all of that shit. It was really fucking disturbing; especially that winter and into the next year. Listening to those songs on Young Liars now, it's a vast, dystopian, science fiction soundtrack to me. It's like the process of laying out a frame for an expansive outer space scene in a science fiction movie. You have the first sketch on a notepad, which is a demo. You take that sketch in and start layering washes of color on it, making the stars shine a little more; but I'm also adding layers onto this to turn it into an engaging panorama. It's all come from that single idea, but the more you layer on it – just like with painting – it becomes more and more expansive and more immersive.
I visited Chalice Recording in Hollywood with Kyp Malone [TV On The Radio co-singer, guitarist, and songwriter] when Dear Science was being mixed. Dave was showing how many of the songs had over a hundred tracks.
