"..The adequate amount of IDM sounds are blaringly present, yet somehow washed away underneath an ocean of gazey/triumphant euphoria. Nice package of noise if you ask me.."
(Photo Credit: Drew Dolan)
The Delta Mirror
Mechanized Nu-Gazers
The Delta Mirror Bio:
The delta mirror is Craig Gordon and Letdown aka David Bolt. The two started out as a hip hop duet in the early 90’s and have been making music in some form ever since. With the addition of Karrie K on bass, their sound has progressed to an ambient mix of Shoegazey guitar and Gothic vocals, but their production has held onto the same boom bap button pushing they started with. "Machines That Listen" is The Delta Mirror’s debut long play. Each song on this 9 track collection is a story that takes place in a different room in a hospital.
Hello, how are you?
Craig: Coolin.
David: Hecka good.
What are you currently listening to?
Craig: I've been on a listening to nothing but my friends bands kick for a while. A lot of VoicesVoices, Healamonster & Tarsier, Borneo, Odd Nosdam, and The Mathematicians, but my favorite band right now is our friends The Shimmies from Chico, CA. Chico is the next Omaha. A lot of incredible music is happening there right now.
David: Lately I've been getting really into minimal, ambient techno. There's this really great German producer called Pantha Du Prince who makes amazing "techno" music. The only thing that would make me classify it as techno is it's 4 on the floor drum beats, but the rhythms and melodies he makes are really textural and ethereal. Amazing stuff. Also Gui Boratto. Similar vibe and feel. Mix that in with a steady regimen of Elliott Smith, Sigur Ros, and Radiohead, and that's where I'm at. Shit, and Lykke Li, the Fuck Buttons, Stars of the Lid...I could go on and on. So much great music out there.
You guys were doing Hip Hop before you started The Delta Mirror right? What made you change genres?
David: Well it was actually a really natural progression for me. I used to be a 100% hip hop/scratch DJ. That's all I listened to, and all I played. It was pretty wack actually. Haha. I was a pretty closed minded dude. The only reason I started producing was to make beats to scratch to and have Craig and my friends rap over. As I started producing more, I started DJing less, and also started listening to lots of other music. Bjork, Radiohead, Boards of Canada...stuff that was pretty "out there" for me at the time. That was the shift for me right there. I started making more electronic, ambient stuff, but still tried to retain some of that hip hop aesthetic, drums that made your head break. During that time I was working on a solo project called letdown. The hip hop stuff that Craig and I were doing had been over and done with for a few years. I just kept crunching away at making my solo stuff, and every so often I'd send music to my friends to check out. Then one day Craig was listening to my newer music and thought, "heeeeey...maybe I could write to this," and so the Delta Mirror was born.
What’s the story behind the band name?
Craig: Dave and I were going back and forth with band names for a while. I don't know why it was so hard. At least once a day in conversation I find myself hearing an interesting word combination and thinking "hey that would be a cool band name," but for some reason coming up with a name for our band was impossible. I was trying to think of times that I had heard good band name candidates before and remembered a long time ago reading Aldous Huxly's A Brave New World and finding a pretty good band name. I couldn't really remember what it was though, so I had to read it again. It was in the part about the weekly print publications for each cast. The Alphas had a very sophisticated Wall Street Journal type of paper, the Betas had a trashy celebrity gossip type magazine, and the delta's had one page with a few monosyllabic words called The Delta Mirror. It turned out to be smack in the middle of the book, so I just went ahead and finished it. After doing all that work to find the name it didn't matter to me that people would probably think we were a blues band because of it, or that a Delta Mirror is an actual type of mirror. That was our name.
What exactly do you mean by "Machines That Listen"?
Craig: Well the songs on the record are all stories told about someone in a hospital, and our music is mostly made by machines, so it's like the machines listened to these people and wrote songs about what they heard. Also it sounds cool.
How did you come up with the theme for the album?
Craig: Dave and I had put a couple songs together and they both turned out to be about someone in a hospital. Until then it was a coincidence, but then I remembered that I had a song about someone identifying a body in a morgue (He was Worse than the Needle he Gave You) So I thought we should go with it. We even made one about someone in a waiting room (A Room for Waiting). I like that they all can be mistaken for love songs if you don't listen close.
I really love the electronics in your music, what kind of software do you use when creating it?
David: Actually I don't use a ton of software. I'm a hardware sort of guy through and through. I like that hands on approach to making music. Taking a keyboard, running it through some reverb, back through some shitty "no-fi" sampler, and seeing what I get. I know you can do that stuff with midi controllers and the like, but I just never got into that part. It always turned me off. I will say that I do use Reason quite a bit to get nice drums. There's this one plug-in Reason has called Scream that just covers anything you put through it with piss and grime and filth, just crunchy, dirty, disgusting, awesome drums. I use that a lot, usually making a drum sound and sampling it into my Akai, then banging out some drum patterns.
You recently covered TV On The Radio’s “Blind”, why did you choose to cover that track?
David: Well we're always bouncing ideas of each other for songs to cover. When I first heard TVOTR's Blind, I just KNEW I was going to cover it, so I started piecing the track together, laying out the foundation and what not. Craig heard it, wrote some killer guitar, and there it was. Down the road when Karrie came aboard her bass line really polished it up. I still love the original. It was a very hard song to sing because Tunde (of TVOTR) does some really amazing, but difficult, things with his voice in that song. It's just an incredible song.
You can only keep/listen to ONE album for the rest of your life ..which album would it be?
Craig: To All Beloved Enemies by The Shimmies, no question.
David: Most likely an Elliott Smith record.
Are you living your dream?
Craig: Absolutely! Sure I want a stable career in music and to be able to work exclusively on art, but things are still new right now. It's all just beginning. It wasn't that long ago I wasn't sure if anyone would ever hear our music, aside from those friends who are obligated to listen. There's also the possibility that our record will flop and we'll disappear into obscurity before we even get to record the next one, so I figure enjoy it because I doubt things will ever again be as exciting as they are right now.
David: Not quite yet. Still working a day job, and haven't traveled outside of the US at all yet. I really want to see the world a bit, and I'm hoping that this band is going to help that happen. We've been talking about touring around Europe which would be amazing. Maybe ask me again when that's happening.
Thanx Craig!
The Delta Mirror are currently touring here and there, let's hope they don't "disappear into obscurity" and that a new album could be on it's way...
(Photo Credit: Drew Dolan)The Delta Mirror
Mechanized Nu-Gazers
The Delta Mirror Bio:
The delta mirror is Craig Gordon and Letdown aka David Bolt. The two started out as a hip hop duet in the early 90’s and have been making music in some form ever since. With the addition of Karrie K on bass, their sound has progressed to an ambient mix of Shoegazey guitar and Gothic vocals, but their production has held onto the same boom bap button pushing they started with. "Machines That Listen" is The Delta Mirror’s debut long play. Each song on this 9 track collection is a story that takes place in a different room in a hospital.
Hello, how are you?
Craig: Coolin.
David: Hecka good.
What are you currently listening to?
Craig: I've been on a listening to nothing but my friends bands kick for a while. A lot of VoicesVoices, Healamonster & Tarsier, Borneo, Odd Nosdam, and The Mathematicians, but my favorite band right now is our friends The Shimmies from Chico, CA. Chico is the next Omaha. A lot of incredible music is happening there right now.
David: Lately I've been getting really into minimal, ambient techno. There's this really great German producer called Pantha Du Prince who makes amazing "techno" music. The only thing that would make me classify it as techno is it's 4 on the floor drum beats, but the rhythms and melodies he makes are really textural and ethereal. Amazing stuff. Also Gui Boratto. Similar vibe and feel. Mix that in with a steady regimen of Elliott Smith, Sigur Ros, and Radiohead, and that's where I'm at. Shit, and Lykke Li, the Fuck Buttons, Stars of the Lid...I could go on and on. So much great music out there.
You guys were doing Hip Hop before you started The Delta Mirror right? What made you change genres?
David: Well it was actually a really natural progression for me. I used to be a 100% hip hop/scratch DJ. That's all I listened to, and all I played. It was pretty wack actually. Haha. I was a pretty closed minded dude. The only reason I started producing was to make beats to scratch to and have Craig and my friends rap over. As I started producing more, I started DJing less, and also started listening to lots of other music. Bjork, Radiohead, Boards of Canada...stuff that was pretty "out there" for me at the time. That was the shift for me right there. I started making more electronic, ambient stuff, but still tried to retain some of that hip hop aesthetic, drums that made your head break. During that time I was working on a solo project called letdown. The hip hop stuff that Craig and I were doing had been over and done with for a few years. I just kept crunching away at making my solo stuff, and every so often I'd send music to my friends to check out. Then one day Craig was listening to my newer music and thought, "heeeeey...maybe I could write to this," and so the Delta Mirror was born.
What’s the story behind the band name?
Craig: Dave and I were going back and forth with band names for a while. I don't know why it was so hard. At least once a day in conversation I find myself hearing an interesting word combination and thinking "hey that would be a cool band name," but for some reason coming up with a name for our band was impossible. I was trying to think of times that I had heard good band name candidates before and remembered a long time ago reading Aldous Huxly's A Brave New World and finding a pretty good band name. I couldn't really remember what it was though, so I had to read it again. It was in the part about the weekly print publications for each cast. The Alphas had a very sophisticated Wall Street Journal type of paper, the Betas had a trashy celebrity gossip type magazine, and the delta's had one page with a few monosyllabic words called The Delta Mirror. It turned out to be smack in the middle of the book, so I just went ahead and finished it. After doing all that work to find the name it didn't matter to me that people would probably think we were a blues band because of it, or that a Delta Mirror is an actual type of mirror. That was our name.
What exactly do you mean by "Machines That Listen"?
Craig: Well the songs on the record are all stories told about someone in a hospital, and our music is mostly made by machines, so it's like the machines listened to these people and wrote songs about what they heard. Also it sounds cool.
How did you come up with the theme for the album?
Craig: Dave and I had put a couple songs together and they both turned out to be about someone in a hospital. Until then it was a coincidence, but then I remembered that I had a song about someone identifying a body in a morgue (He was Worse than the Needle he Gave You) So I thought we should go with it. We even made one about someone in a waiting room (A Room for Waiting). I like that they all can be mistaken for love songs if you don't listen close.
I really love the electronics in your music, what kind of software do you use when creating it?
David: Actually I don't use a ton of software. I'm a hardware sort of guy through and through. I like that hands on approach to making music. Taking a keyboard, running it through some reverb, back through some shitty "no-fi" sampler, and seeing what I get. I know you can do that stuff with midi controllers and the like, but I just never got into that part. It always turned me off. I will say that I do use Reason quite a bit to get nice drums. There's this one plug-in Reason has called Scream that just covers anything you put through it with piss and grime and filth, just crunchy, dirty, disgusting, awesome drums. I use that a lot, usually making a drum sound and sampling it into my Akai, then banging out some drum patterns.
You recently covered TV On The Radio’s “Blind”, why did you choose to cover that track?
David: Well we're always bouncing ideas of each other for songs to cover. When I first heard TVOTR's Blind, I just KNEW I was going to cover it, so I started piecing the track together, laying out the foundation and what not. Craig heard it, wrote some killer guitar, and there it was. Down the road when Karrie came aboard her bass line really polished it up. I still love the original. It was a very hard song to sing because Tunde (of TVOTR) does some really amazing, but difficult, things with his voice in that song. It's just an incredible song.
You can only keep/listen to ONE album for the rest of your life ..which album would it be?
Craig: To All Beloved Enemies by The Shimmies, no question.
David: Most likely an Elliott Smith record.
Are you living your dream?
Craig: Absolutely! Sure I want a stable career in music and to be able to work exclusively on art, but things are still new right now. It's all just beginning. It wasn't that long ago I wasn't sure if anyone would ever hear our music, aside from those friends who are obligated to listen. There's also the possibility that our record will flop and we'll disappear into obscurity before we even get to record the next one, so I figure enjoy it because I doubt things will ever again be as exciting as they are right now.
David: Not quite yet. Still working a day job, and haven't traveled outside of the US at all yet. I really want to see the world a bit, and I'm hoping that this band is going to help that happen. We've been talking about touring around Europe which would be amazing. Maybe ask me again when that's happening.
Thanx Craig!
The Delta Mirror are currently touring here and there, let's hope they don't "disappear into obscurity" and that a new album could be on it's way...
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