Variations On A Theme: An Interview With The Confusions

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NOTE: THIS BLOG HAS BEEN DEFUNCT SINCE 2020. THE ABOUT PAGE AND ALL PREVIOUS POSTS WILL BE LEFT AS THEY ARE FOR ARCHIVAL PURPOSES.

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The first stage of Sing The Nation Electric lasted long enough to produce two artist interviews: one with Broward County, FL’s iconoclastic rap duo Nobodies, and one with New Jersey’s Iceberg Theory, a devoted rapper, producer, and student of Abrahamic spiritual tradition.

Those conversations were the highlight of that first stage, which is why we are so excited to introduce Sing The Nation Electric’s first interview of its second stage.

Today, we are chatting with Ben Turner and Brendan Youngquist, the creative minds who converged on the pop album “Grounds”. Ben composed and performed the project as The Confusions, and Brendan recorded, co-produced, and mastered it. Additionally, Brian Rogers designed the hazy artwork, and Dorian Gehring mixed it with Brendan’s assistance at Foxhall Studio in Chicago. The fruits of their labor had a digital release in March 2019.

It’s been a frequent listen at Sing The Nation Electric. From the opening thrum of “We Were Programmed To Fall In Love”, to the finishing breeze of “Footprints”, it’s a wonderful summertime pop album with the wit and warmth to carry one’s heart into the fall and winter. It’s also an ambitious recording– just check out this artistic statement…

Grounds creates a symbiotic relationship between hi-fi and lo-fi textures, an approach Youngquist envisioned throughout the production process. This is similar to the cover art, in that it explores two realities.

Multi-track recordings were re-amped, primarily through effects on a Roland SP-404 sampler. This tool intrigued Youngquist and Turner, as it shaped the characteristic lo-fi sound of live performances and earlier demo recordings throughout the writing process.

Fascinated by this process, we got in touch.

SNE: What led you to selecting Brendan Youngquist for the recording of “Grounds”? Have you guys worked together in the past?

Ben Turner: I met him in college. Brendan and our friend Warner Brownfield were heavily involved in the College of Wooster’s radio station at the time. They organized a concert for College Radio Day and I performed a set of my songs there. I was inspired by videos I had been watching of the artist Grimes. I was intrigued by her ability as a solo artist to employ samples, loops, and live vocalizations simultaneously.

My set involved lo-fi samples of harmonic textures I had prerecorded, and I played a drum set to these and sang. Brendan and Warner were really receptive to the aesthetic, and we soon found ourselves collaborating at house shows and mak[ing] shift studios on campus.

Brendan and I also played in a percussion ensemble together. We got into a process of recording improvisations on various percussion instruments, and sampling those recordings, with the end goal of remixing these artifacts into songs. We created one called “Almond Milk Puddles” with Warner, that you can check out here.

Having worked together before, Brendan was the first person to come to mind as a producer. We share similarities in our processes. We’re both perfectionists at times and have a lot of fun getting lost in tracking. I am grateful for Warner’s process too. His approach is based more on accepting a musical utterance for what it is in the moment, rather than tinkering with it too much.

He hung out with us during many of our recording and reamping sessions in Chicago. He seemed to rescue us at times when we became restricted by our perfectionist tendencies. If we were living in a piece of literature, Warner would be the spiritual guide, re-orienting us to fundamental truths and reminding us to have fun with the process.

SNE: Did anything surprise you when you brought the songs you had written and started recording them for the first time?

Ben: A friend is someone that believes in your potential. A great friend is someone that is patient with you as you learn to believe in your potential too. I didn’t know Brendan and I would become such close buds in the process of working together. That was a cool, serendipitous surprise.

When we did the initial recording sessions, I had one week off of work. I remember having high hopes that we would get all the tracking done before I went back. I was naive about how long recording an album as a solo artist would take.

I thought anything we did would be better than my demos. In some ways I had settled for that idea, and held onto it too tightly at first. In hindsight, I see how this made me dismiss a lot of the creativity of my early demos. I learned to appreciate and replicate this later on, because the vitality of the record depended on it.

SNE: How long has this project been in the works? Was it always your goal to explore a relationship between realities, as your artistic statement describes?

Ben Turner: The recording process for Grounds started about 3 years ago. I was writing and recording demos, intermittently, for about 3 years prior to that.

“Footprints,” the last track on the album, is even older though. It was initially a folk song, with acoustic guitar accompaniment. I wrote it 10 years ago, when I was 17, then revived it for thematic reasons. The soundscape for the track matured in the production process. Brendan Youngquist and I decided to ditch the guitar, and use an organ setting on a microkorg synthesizer. I reamped the heck out of it, and fed it through a cassette recorder, to warm it up. I left the lyrics unchanged though. We wanted to end the record with something vulnerable.

One concrete exploration of realities was the fact that we were tracking my songs as a solo artist, with an end goal to trick the listener into thinking they were hearing an actual band.

I tend to turn to music and lyric composition to cope, through the emotional processing and self-reflection it gives me. On the other hand, I turn to recording to escape for a while. Teaming up with Brendan deepened my exploration of these processes and created new realities all together. These are some of the greatest benefits of creating music. It can validate an experience in one reality, and also affords us the opportunity to dream up totally different ones.

My artist statement on Bandcamp mentions the relationship of lo-fi and hi-fi “realities.” This developed over the course of the project. In the early stages, I didn’t know that we would venture into this blend so intentionally. That was Brendan’s vision from the beginning though. He was intrigued by the lo-fi nature of my demos and live shows. Together, we learned how to employ the viscera and spirit of the lo-fi material, while delivering a professional, more listenable, quality in the final recordings.

Brian Rogers: For the cover I was thinking of mixing old and new, so those are the two realities I had in mind when making it. I wanted the music to be the focus so I tried to keep it as simple and weathered looking as possible, like actual ancient ruins. While it was coming together I thought it looked like early 3D graphics which are also eerily smooth and simple, so it kind of became a mix of past and future the more I worked on it. It ended up being simple, but not empty. That reminded me of how it feels to look at artifacts and ruins. I can tell there used to be something there but it’s so far removed from my life that it feels alien.

SNE: Did you know at the very beginning of the recording process that you wanted to blend recording styles? What is it about re-amping the recordings that created the effect you were looking for?

Brendan Youngquist: When we first started, Ben was going for something more stripped down. At that time, in his mind, the project was mostly an effort to document some of the songs in his backlog. And meanwhile on my end, I had been listening to his early demos to get ready for the sessions. The effects on those demos were screwed up and unkempt. You couldn’t hear everything he was doing and saying——so his musicianship was buried. But those recordings sounded extremely expressive. There was a lot of character and personality to them. So as Ben and I began tracking, I started to get this inkling that some of that raw, psychedelic energy (and the humor) would eventually need to find its way back into the project.

From there we got excited about the idea of re-amping: by recording everything really crisp and clear first, and then passing each track through selected lo-fi effects, we were able to re-introduce a raw, imaginative dimension to all of these hi-fi images, and kind of get the best of both worlds. We could dial in exactly how much of the effected sound we wanted versus the un-effected. In some cases the re-amping phase was about listening to Ben’s demos and trying to recreate that energy———in other cases it was about creating a similar or corollary energy, for a track which had never been thought about in that way. We re-amped almost everything. These little changes add up to what you hear in the end product.

I think a lot of modern bands try, even on their proper releases, to hide behind the effects they’re using. On this project, though, I wanted people to be able to hear all the parts clearly, while still achieving that expression of character and taste——while not sounding sterile. I think this approach succeeded in that Ben’s personality, lyricism, and musicianship are all quite present. Ben’s voice ended up sounding pretty vulnerable. And this set of songs is astronomically more cohesive than it was when we began——they all came from very different aesthetics, and had to be reeled in. Re-amping was a big part of that, in conjunction with rearrangement and re-written lyrics, which was in some cases pretty heavy-handed.

SNE: What was your favorite thing about the Roland SP-404 sampler used in the recording process?

Brendan: That’s what Ben used on his early demos, so it was the natural choice. The SP-404’s delay, reverb, and vinyl-sim effects kind of defined the gritty, psychedelic character of Ben’s early recordings. We used other effect units, too. We’d sometimes use a Walrus Janus fuzz/tremolo pedal on vocals (we did this on Half-Life’s second verse). There were a number of reverb and ring mod pedals involved. But the SP-404 was definitely the central inspiration——we deviated when it couldn’t deliver on a particular section.

Ben: The Roland SP-404 has its own natural compression that I admire. As a machine, it feels very analog to me, and can be played like a percussion instrument, with infinite temporal possibilities. I love how ergonomic it is, with its hands on nature. It’s fine motor, but not as fine as working with computer software. Those technologies have afforded artists to express themselves and connect in very moving ways, but I feel less drawn to using them as tools in the way I can use the SP-404.

It allowed me to take tracks of organic instruments we recorded, and make them even more expressive. Again, a lot of artists do that very successfully with a good combination of plugins in a recording software, but the onboard effects on the 404 were just more appealing to me. I could contribute to the production processes in ways that felt much more instrumental and performed, rather than applied.

SNE: The audio samples are fantastic. Who picked them? Where they selected with particular songs in mind? “Grounds” would not be the same album without them.

Brendan: I honestly don’t understand how Ben finds these things. He’s always fucking around with bizarre sound bytes and sending them to friends, or even acting them out and making characters out of them, like running jokes. In fact, a couple of the “samples” on the record are of Ben——he recorded himself, and we processed the recordings to sound similar to the samples from the radio mysteries. I wonder if folks can tell which ones are of him… so I agree that the samples are crucial to the record, because Ben’s sense of humor is crucial to who he is.

As far as matching samples to songs, the samples tended to fall into place very naturally. We’d hear one of thousands of these little jokes, and one of us would go, “that would be a great way to introduce (so and so song).” I think the samples tended to gravitate to positions where they augment the lyrical content of specific songs, and assist with the pacing of the record.

Oh, and I should take credit for that sample at the end of “Dusty Hissing Tunes”. That was me. Those radio mystery actors are terrible, and I did them a favor by editing around their words..

SNE: What was the biggest technical challenge in recording “Grounds”? Did anything want to make you just tear off your scalp?

Brendan: It took a while to figure out how to dial in many of the bass sounds. We were sometimes using up to five different bass sounds at once——we had amped basses, direct-input basses, and sometimes synth basses, all with different re-amped distortions, delays, etc——and we were trying to blend them together in a way that had the right expression for a given song. The bass is a key element of Ben’s sound, obviously, so we had to get it right. But I eventually worked it out, and then Dorian did magic with what I bought to him.

For the majority of the process, I was operating under the assumption that I would be mixing the whole project myself, to the end. I had my plate full helping Ben conceptualize the album, rearrange the songs, record it all, push him / act as a sounding board for lyrics, etc, so developing the mixes to completion just hung over my head and slowed me down. When I brought the project in to Dorian I knew we were in the clear. I had gotten all the sounds dialed in, but Dorian knew how to optimize everything. He’s got a great ear for compression. I still have my scalp because of it!

SNE: What was the hardest song to write lyrics for?

Ben: “I’ll Be Dogged” was the most challenging song, lyrically. It just wasn’t on par with the rest of the album, and was objectively cornballish at times. I rewrote those lyrics about 20 times, before finding something that felt right, and thematically aligned with everything else. Brendan encouraged me to focus more on phonetics for this song, rather than getting caught up in the exact meaning of the lyrics. That was a great call as a producer. Somewhat ironically, I drew new meaning from the lyrics after that exercise.

SNE: Is there any technique you used while recording “Grounds” that you would do differently on another Confusions recording session? Any ideas that came to you later?

Brendan: Now that we are fully on board with this re-amping process, I am looking forward to being more scientific about it in the future. That means recording in a space that’s a little more dead sounding (we recorded most of it in a concert hall). I’m also looking forward to recording a live band, rather than layering Ben over and over again (did anyone mention that everything on the record is him?). Layering Ben solo was really fun, but it will be exciting to do the re-amping thing with recordings of a very different kind of energy.

In general, I think Ben and I have both learned how to just trust our process and go for it. So we are going to start the next project not not afraid to go in, imagine something, and make it happen.

SNE: If you could record any other artist/band in the world with this approach to recording, who would you bring into the studio?

Brendan: HEALTH would be fun.

SNE: Do you listen to other artists and musicians when you write and create? If so, did anyone in particular inspire the vision and emotions that shaped “Grounds”?

Ben: I was pretty into the composer Schubert at the time of writing a lot of the initial tracks. The chord progressions and somewhat deceptive forms were definitely romantically inspired. When I’m asked what bands my music sounds like, I tend to say it’s like the Talking Heads and The Beach Boys had a kid.

Brian: I like listening to the radio show Cosmic Neighborhood hosted by Secret Circuit on dublab.com and Graph Paper hosted by Morpho on the same site. I usually like putting on a playlist or radio show like that while I’m creating, and old episodes of those shows are great for finding eclectic artists and songs from all over the world and different time periods. It’s really psychedelic stuff and that’s usually what I’m going for too.

SNE: You write lyrics that play with contrasts– contrasts in imagery (“Waves howled in a line / Softly through the sycamore”), contrasts between psychological and physical reflections (“It’s wearing you out / But without a doubt / Events persist in rain”). Do you want to highlight “The Confusions” between these things or the harmony between them?

Ben: I’m into a combination of imagery and direct lyrics. It helps me express myself in different ways and ideally gives the listener more opportunity to identify their own meanings. I have enjoyed seeing you create a connection between the band name “The Confusions” and possible intentions of drawing confusions in those contrasts. That’s not something I considered when selecting the band name.
There’s a tendency to associate most creativity in music with compositional domains. Lawrence English, a field recording artist, has been an inspiration to me in thinking of the act of listening, as a creative process itself too.

Just because I didn’t intend to explore those connections you asked about doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It seems as though they do because of your creativity as a listener.

SNE: I reread your observation about “creativity as a listener” several times. It was a challenging read because it spoke to conflicting feelings within myself. I avoided writing about music for a long time because I was fiercely critical of A) what I had to offer as just another music writer and B) what gave me [the] right to presume to say things about something which I did not help create? The idea that a creator can create something unintentionally, something that resonates (and even originates) with the listener is a scary one.

Ben: I

totally hear you on the thought of creativity as a listener being a challenging read and that it speaks to conflicting feelings. That’s a lot to throw out there I imagine it is a difficult interest to pursue, writing about music. I bet there are all kinds of valid fears, rooted in pretty realistic situations, about how others are going to view what you say, but like the old adage, I
believe we are our own worst critics. […]

As a consumer, as an informed listener, as a human being with their own wealth of emotional
experiences, what kind of artist has the right to presume how their work affects your feelings? I’m not trying come off as someone that’s absolved of an ego, or trying to put thing in black and white categories. But,
I wouldn’t have responded with so much detail if I wasn’t a bit afraid of how I would come off too. I’d like to share something that I’m hoping can offer some identification and reassurance.

I had the most fun making this album when I had brief flashes, where I was acutely aware that I could
just listen to what it needed, and it felt like it started to construct itself. It was odd, now hard to
describe, and it was fleeting, but there was something there for me. It came in special moments, like tracking a drum fill with Brendan, hearing a texture become more expressive with re-amping, or capturing a vulnerable vocal take. To maximize my work with Brendan, sometimes I had to separate myself from it, and be outside of it.

I don’t mean for that to sound convoluted, but the more an artist rigidly clings
onto what their music means to them, without regard for other interpretations created by the listener, the more they’re going to feed their ego and ultimately disconnect from some beautiful possibilities. This is a process for me. I am deeply connected to my music, so much so that I feared at times, it was too personal and others might not be able to relate. But then I enjoyed a lot of moments of sincere receptivity.

Q: What led you to select “Grounds” as the album title? Does it have to do with the different uses of “grounds” (“tending the grounds”, “spill the glass / And look at the grounds left behind”) in the title track?

My partner’s family told me about a superstition in their culture, that you can see your future in your coffee grounds, when you get down to the bottom of your cup. I wrote the song “Grounds” when I was daydreaming about my future with her.

Like the lyrics to “I’ll Be Dogged” I came up with many drafts of the title for the album. However, I finally decided to go with Grounds, because I enjoyed the many ways it can be interpreted. Brendan and I also liked it because it operated as a title track that is, in a lot of ways, incongruent with the rest of the album. Any other track names would’ve felt cliché, but the Grounds is a slight diversion from the other tracks, so it works.

Q: “Hole In The Shade” is beautifully written. Are you comfortable with sharing a little more about Daniel Cain and the impact he made on yourself and your art?

Daniel Cain was the little known pen name of a family member. He and my father exposed me to improvisation at a young age, after my mother and father converted our basement into a space for listening to and playing music. There were a lot of good memories and points of connection in that room. I grappled with the fact that I’d never get to play music and laugh with Dan again after he died, so I did the next best thing I could, and tried to keep his memory alive in art.

Q: Columbus, OH has been the birthplace for other fantastic acts such as Twenty-One Pilots, Everyday Sunday, House of Heroes, Vesperteen, and other projects that have flirted with the aesthetic and structures of pop. Any Columbus artists, poppy or otherwise, that you recommend to our readers?

I got hip to this musician in Columbus named Hebdo, after hearing his song “Go Back Home” on a local radio station. It’s a really catchy single that you should check out.

Q: Any upcoming news about your new lineup that you’d like to share?

I recently met a drummer by chance, after searching high and low for months. We bonded over the band Black Moth Super Rainbow, talked about our projects, and decided to try working together. Check his stuff out at jakesummers.bandcamp.com. You should also check out this band he plays guitar in, called Happy Family.

Be on the lookout for Alex Criado’s projects too @froyonotfoyo. He’s playing bass with us and is a long time friend of Jake’s.

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Go give my new group @the_confusions_ a follow on insta and go check out our music on band camp if yous a true playa

A post shared by Alex Criado (@froyonotfoyo) on Aug 8, 2019 at 6:43am PDT

In general, I’m excited to work with these musicians. The vibe has been spot on and they have a deep appreciation for the record. They also enjoy a little absurdity, that we’re looking to visually incorporate into our sets, kind of like my goofy little music videos.

We’ve talked about working on another album that will be recorded as a live band, and they’ve brought great material to the table too that we have plans to start digging into and integrating. This is going to be a really fruitful year for The Confusions.

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We’d like to thank Ben, Brendan, and Brian for their time and their wealth of insight into an album that is rich with texture and heart. You can stream the whole thing below, and we highly recommend that you follow them on Instagram, too.