http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Dub+Trio/
Erin Broadley: How does “New Heavy” fit in with the band’s previous recordings and as a prelude to the direction you see your music taking in the future?
Joe Tomino: As far as our musical direction, we’re all session players from New York and play as much as possible. You’ve got to play as much as you can to survive in New York. It’s not romantic to starve, hoping to make it big with one band. As far as “New Heavy,” there’s a lot more punk, metal and a little hip-hop on it. The first record was pretty safe at its core with dub and reggae. It was a little edgy but didn’t break any boundaries. The music we’ve been listening to over the past year and a half, like Refused and Bad Brains, seeped its way into our writing and recording process. There are no boundaries on what we play or write. Dub is still at the core of what we do but this record has more balls to it—it’s a rock record. Hopefully people can hear that.
EB:
Your debut was recorded directly to tape. Was “New Heavy” done similarly? Many musicians don’t record to tape at all anymore. Obviously that’s a specific choice you guys made.
JT:
Our debut was recorded to tape with some over dubs and a few live tracks. “New Heavy” doesn’t have as much of a live feel as the first record. I wouldn’t say it sounds more produced but there are a lot more parts, like doubling guitar parts, that make it sound thicker. As far as we’re concerned, there’s no substitute for tape. We love the way tape feels. It has this warmer quality. It has a presence. You can cut and stretch tape. There’s a lot of hands-on experimentation involved. I love digital as well but it has its place. As far as this band is concerned, two-inch tape is going to be the first thing that’s laid down.
EB:
What is your live show like?
JT:
A Dub Trio live show is very visceral and interactive. I view the record like a snapshot—this picture in time of one week that we were in the studio. When you see a Dub Trio song performed live there’s room for interpretation, especially since there is no vocalist. Each performance is different. We can only do so much live based on how many limbs we have…and we definitely use all of our limbs. Everyone’s playing multiple instruments while tweaking pedals and doing things simultaneously. The audience gets to see us improvising on a form, basically. There’s open space within each song’s form for us to improvise using dub. It’s a different experience live but still fucking rocks.
EB:
What kind of relationship do you have with your audience?
JT:
We’ve only done two national tours. The first was last summer with Meat Beat Manifesto who are the godfathers of break-beat. We did another tour recently with Golgol Bordello. Our audience spans the gamut. We play music that we think is good and hopefully people dig it. I mean, they either do or they don’t. Our audience really respects us and we get a lot of surprised reactions from people that have never heard this kind of music before. We’re almost strictly instrumental but we fuse metal and dub which hasn’t really been done. We’re just trying to raise our own voice in this crazy game we’re in. Integrity is an important part of the process.
EB:
How was the tour with Golgol Bordello?
JT:
It was great! Shows averaged 600 people a night. The audience was mostly punk kids. Our earlier tours had more of a thirty-something, adult audience. With Bordello it was good to play for younger kids. We wanted the 16 to 21 demographic to really hear “New Heavy” because there aren’t many records like it that appeal to younger age groups. Teenagers were really feeling our music. I felt great about it. I was worried at first that kids wouldn’t understand because dub isn’t a household genre that people hear on the radio. It can be hard because, as an opening band, you’re not going to appeal to everybody. People are usually there to see the headlining act. We just do what we do and hopefully people dig it. And they did! I was happy.
EB:
How did the collaboration with Patton come about?
JT:
Funny, it was actually a cold call. Our label suggested we get a special guest on this record so we wrote down a list of people we wanted to collaborate with. We wrote a song, went through the names and Patton was the perfect choice. We emailed him and he got in touch with us and had already heard of our band. He was like, “Funny because I was going to contact you for a collaboration.” We thought that was fucking perfect! It was really magical. We sent Patton the song “Not Alone” and he laid down the melody and vocals. We didn’t give him any real direction. We just sent him the track, he killed it and sent it back, and we mixed it and put it on the record. Once in awhile Patton performs live with Rhazel in New York and he asked us to come play one of those shows with him last December or so. That was the first time we ever met him in person. We didn’t have time to rehearse so we got up on stage and played the song from the album cold and just killed it! People were ready to hear it. Working with him has been really easy and natural.
EB:
How did you integrate vocals considering Dub Trio has always been an instrumental band?
JT:
None of us sing and we’re not going to start singing. As far as the space in our music for vocals, because we’re all studio-based professional musicians, we can collaborate with anybody on a given track if they want to co-write with us. We can come up with melodies for someone else to sing. But in sticking to traditional dub form, I don’t think there’s going to be a singer suddenly on the next record. I feel like there are times to collaborate and I think we’ll do a lot of that in the future. But Dub Trio will always be an instrumental band. Some people don’t understand why there isn’t a vocalist, especially the younger kids who aren’t familiar with dub. I look forward to working with other artists. I’d love to do a whole record with Patton or a whole record with Eugene from Golgol Bordello or Roots Manuva. Manuva is great…he’s nasty! He also dabbles into dub and reggae and hip-hop. He’s a nasty cat.
EB:
What are your plans for the rest of the year?
JT:
We’ll do some national touring throughout the summer. We don’t tour the west coast that much but I think this record is really going to appeal to the west coast masses. We’ve been getting a lot of requests from people on the west coast through Myspace and also from people overseas. Germany is really feelin’ our new record! We don’t really have a booking agent—we’ve just done everything on our own with our manager. We’ve done a lot, whether its online or us playing one show here and there. Dub Trio is fresh music and I think people need to hear some fresh shit. We just want to keep writing and keep developing the concept. It’s never finished.
)
