Dal Niente violist Ammie Brod sat down with LJ White to talk about his piece We Don’t Eat Dead Things, which was commissioned for Dal Niente in 2017. We Don’t Eat Dead Things will be released as as a single on February 16, 2022 and as part of object/animal, out March 25 on Sideband Records. Listen to the single here.
So I know this piece had an interesting starting point, can you tell me a little more about that?
Totally, sure. This piece came out of a commission through the Des Moines Civic Music Association, to be performed during a Dal Niente residency there. They wanted a piece that had some connection to the music of a local artist, Christopher the Conquered. I’ve worked with non-classical music as source material in the past, with pieces like my string quartet Zin Zin Zin Zin, as well as a recent project I did with Sleeping Giant where we wrote a group piece based on Elliot Smith’s music. For that project my contribution was mostly sub-lingual - I took a bunch of small melismas that I’d found in the vocal lines of his songs and worked them into the fabric of the music I wrote for the singers.
For We Don’t Eat Dead Things, I instead focused on Christopher the Conquered’s lyrics, because they were one of the things that immediately struck me about his music. In a lot of his songs he has these moments where he just suddenly says something really out there and unexpected, with these weird and totally out of the blue sentiments, like, what did he just say? And it’s really evocative and dystopian and cool. I used a lot of those phrases - “don’t make me take off my shame jacket” is one, or “400,000 ants on a shaky leaf”. You can hear another example in one of Carrie’s lines: “Everyone will hate me”. That line is from a song called “I’m Not That Famous Yet” which I also used as inspiration to think about the structure of my piece. It has this repetitive strophic structure that feels like a slow processional, and I wanted to make something that had a similar feel but in my own style. I repeated and recycled material through the piece in different ways: using different instruments, playing it upside down, putting it through temporal shifts. It’s all really one line that gets inverted and reversed and expanded and contracted over and over.
I began with words and fragments of lyrics from all throughout his work, but by the end of the piece I started drawing more on complete lines and phrases from single songs. For both this and the Sleeping Giant project, I made huge charts of lyrics and gestures that I heard in the music and then tried to match things up with the line I was writing, looking at structural stuff like how many syllables I needed to see what fit and whether it worked. Then I started pulling fragments and phrases and fitting them into what was happening musically.
That reminds me a bit of what it’s like to learn a tricky piece of music as a performer. I start by just kind of assembling my tools, going through gestures slowly and out of time, and then I start pulling in the other details until each part works together inside of my desired framework. But eventually all of those bits come together and hey! It’s a piece.
I wouldn’t have thought of that! That’s an interesting connection.
So did you ever meet Christopher the Conquered?
Yes! He and his mom actually came to the premiere in Des Moines. He seemed into it, although apparently his mom heard one of his lyrics (“honey, I stole these earrings for you”) and gave him a hard time about it.
That is excellent.
Can you talk a bit about the sounds you used in this piece? There are some unusual techniques here. Cough cough beer can cough…
Ha, yes. I stuck with the idea of taking things out of context, doing that instrumentally as well as with the lyrics. I wanted to take a bunch of discrete musical objects and put them together in different ways in this slow fake-solemn content, and just like with the lyrics some of those objects are funny or don’t usually go together, or they’re like sonic events from other musical worlds (or just another part of this musical world). So there’s a flexatone, an ebow, muted guitar strumming, a vocal imitation of the guitar-strum sound, these cello quadruple-stops that are kind of like an Elgar sample… And there’s the beer can. I wanted a crinkling, crushing sound from the harp strings and foil and parchment weren’t working - I wanted the sound to be long enough to have a “tail” at the end that could change. I wanted it to be different every time, and crushing a beer can against the strings ended up being a great way to get the sound quality that I wanted and also have more control over things like pitch, duration, and oscillation.
I appreciated that Ben used a Goose Island 312 can at the Chicago premiere - that’s just such a Chicago beer.
I’m pretty sure Matt was using a Dal Niente shirt to mute his horn, too! That’s an interesting thing to bring up, though. Ultimately, I wanted it to be an isolated sound, an artifact from somewhere else, and a beer can has such an informal and casual place in regular nonmusical day-to-day life that it sort of comes from outside of what you expect to be happening. One of the things I wanted to incorporate about were things that would seem comically, awkwardly out of place in this context: a beer can, loud sax multiphonics, a vibraslap, and also little sounds to articulate a sense of the beat in a really skeletal way.
Well, I did jump at those sax multiphonics, so I think you succeeded. Another thing that’s pretty noticeable in this piece is that there’s a definite vibe going on. Let’s talk about that a little.
Honestly, the hardest thing to figure out in our initial rehearsals was how to sell the piece visually, to figure out a character for it. Carrie and Amanda ultimately went with a kind of zombie stare/deer in the headlights thing, and I think that even without the visuals you can still hear that in the recording. We decided to go for this intense sincerity, like when someone *really* believes what they’re saying. You know, slightly menacing, that kind of zealous enthusiasm of somebody who’s overly into things that maybe you don’t think warrant it.
The title, We Don’t Eat Dead Things, really brought me back to college, becoming a staunch vegetarian and getting involved with campus activism. Don’t get me wrong, I sincerely think that both of those things are great, but I often felt some amount of that intense unswerving dedication around me and it could be a bit unnerving, even if it was for a good cause.
Yeah, I can see that. I like the title because at first it seems sort of straightforward, like yeah, something an animal rights activist would say. But then I started thinking about it more and it was like, wait, what do we eat that isn’t dead? Are vegetables dead? Then I had to really think about it. And it becomes something that’s actually sort of sinister.
Dude, you just blew my mind.