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Le Loup: Paranoia Mixed With Joy

Sam, if you are ever to come across this interview, my apologies.

Posted 15th October 2009, 2:58pm in Interviews, by Willis Arnold
Le Loup When I found out that Le Loup had agreed to an interview with DIY, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Full disclosure: I’m a fan. I love the blend of digital sounds and organic instruments, the paranoia mixed with joy. I was on the edge of my proverbial seat with expectation at the thought of asking Sam Simkoff, founder of the band, about his musical process and motivations. In retrospect it was the sort of excitement that feeds on itself, growing, until it somehow wills itself into extinction. This is the story of my failed execution of interviewing Le Loup.

Originally Le Loup was a construct of Simkoff and his laptop, yet once signed to Hardly Art, the band grew in order to provide a more theatrical and experiential live show. Now it exists as a five-piece, drawing on shared experiences and varied backgrounds to inform their sound. In the bowels of Mercury Lounge, I was able to ask Sam about the group’s musical evolution as well as his approach to recording and songwriting. Excited as I was to interview the man behind the band, I was still surprised by how much thought he’s put into the creation of his pack.

I meet Sam at the door of Mercury Lounge, my week-old questions scribbled on a sheaf of papers, and crammed sacrilegiously into my back pocket. We exchange greetings, and head toward the venue floor, joking about the virginal interview (my first) and my bumbling abilities with the recording device I’ve brought in order to document our conversation.

Dressed in an old pink and white striped shirt, sneakers, and khakis, Sam Simkoff speaks with a relaxed demeanor subverted only by the occasional furtive glance toward passing tech crew. Sam speaks openly and honestly about the experiences of recording and forming a band, and with the care of someone who considers what it means to be in a band in the current musical environment. We begin our conversation in the space where the show will eventually take place, stopping only once (when pre-show music began to blast through the PA) to relocate to the scuffed and worn tile floor of a back hallway.

The following is only the beginning transcript of our fateful interview:

Your last album was a solo project, and your new album was recorded with a full band. Could you speak to how the musical process has changed now that you’re working with people?
Sam: "It’s obviously changed a lot. I think when I was working by myself it was much easier to translate directly what was in my head, the sounds, to what I was recording. That didn’t always happen, because I’m not too technically proficient as a programmer or in terms of programming. But more or less, I could basically think something up and put it down. Once you’ve introduced a bunch of different people into the mix, no matter how well you mesh in terms of personality wise or with musical tastes there’s always going to be a discrepancy between what you think and what something’s actually going to sound like after the thought has been processed by someone else.

Originally, when we first started it was a little more frustrating, just when we started first playing live shows. Trying to translate something that was already there, in recorded format into something we had to play. Eventually we stumbled into the process of not translating things so literally, not kicking ourselves so hard if it didn’t sound like the record, and so it became a new process. I would have the idea for a song, but would just keep it at the melody, or basically the melody and a very rudimentary chord progression. And then we’d bring it to the band, me or someone else who had a song, and we would just kind of jam on it for a bit. That was a really vital element, as it is in all live music, and we found that it’s a better way to go about making music in a group."

So you definitely don’t give instructions to the band members about how something is to sound? Like say, “I want this to sound like this, or change it so it sounds in this specific way?”
Sam: "No. Once you play something a specific way, interesting musical threads become apparent in the way people are playing. You’ll notice you like the sound of a specific instrument, or a specific tone, which you’ll incorporate into the song."

Here my recording peters out, lost in the electronic haze specific burbles and burps of audio recordings on the fritz. Eventually the recording looses its mischievous momentum of malfunction and disappears into just under a half hour of pure silence. Unfortunately, I chose to record the interview using fraudulent sound equipment. This is not the way one would want his first interview to be preserved in the echelons of rock criticism.

There is only one way to convey the despair that comes with discovering that a thirty five minutes of interview exists only in a truncated three minutes and forty second segment: Polar Bears should eat my face.

My first interview, and I blew it. Please, a moment of silence for the deceased.

I will now begin the most egregious task of attempting to recreate the remainder of the interview. Any following quotations are my attempts to recreate Simkoff’s exact words as best I can.

Settling our conversation on the hallway floor, I ask Sam if he could speak a little more to the pros and cons of working with people as opposed to remaining a solo artist. In retrospect the redundancy of this question is embarrassing, but Sam answers with admirable earnestness, speaking to the difficulties of trying to distill the essence of disparate influences into a coherent musical work, highlighting the joys of finding the exact right combination of ingredients to produce a song.

When asked how the band functions as a whole, Simkoff laughs and says, “Well.” He takes time to stress the necessity of different bodies and tastes for songwriting purposes, as well as for the creation of a live show. “There is a difference between listening to a record, and seeing a live show,” he says. “With a full band you can create the theatricality necessary for a real performance. We try to bring some of that theatricality to our live show.”

I'm unable to avoid approaching Le Loup’s two albums as a sort of dialectic; the first more processed, the second more naturalistic. I can’t keep from asking if this was an intentional shift. “It was intentional,” Sam responds, “I think that first album was suited to the time and place in which it was recorded. This is a new time and place.” He goes on to describe a change in the musical climate, and to point out what he perceives as a shift away from a more processed digital sound. If memory serves me well he relates that the band wished to expand their aesthetic, to be open to new influences and avoid recreating a style that (though in keeping with his previous album) did not represent the band as it exists in the here and now. “Music should have the ability to evoke a certain feeling, to move the listener in some way. That is what we are trying to do as a band, trying to create music has an effect. We may not have done it yet, but that’s what we try to do.”

With another set of apologies, I ask Simkoff what it was like operating without an external influence. His first album was named after an outsider art piece, entitled 'The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly' by James Hampton, and Simkoff has mentioned it as an inspiration for his first album. His latest album is devoid of any readily apparent references to other creative works. I'm afraid this line of questioning had been beat to death by previous inquirers.

In response to my question, Simkoff pauses then points out that there are always outside influences. 'Family' may not wear its influences on its cover but they do exist. “The other band members are influences, as well as influenced by things outside my knowledge. It is unlikely that a person can create without being influenced by the world around them,” seems to be the summation of his outlook.

This seems the perfect lead into my next question; what other musicians could have influenced him during the recording of 'Family'? “I’m always wary of this question,” he says. Silently I agree with his suspicion. The amount of comparisons between bands grows exponentially with every piece of music journalism that is published.

“On one hand, it’s impossible to avoid being influenced by lots of the bands out there, if you like their music, and there are some really great bands making music right now. But I’d like to think that we bring something new, a different feeling or sound, despite comparisons to our peers. We’re not trying to replicate anyone else’s sound or process, but are attempting to develop our own process, our own language of sounds and rhythms that speak to people. On the other hand, I don’t want to drop a bunch of obscure references, and seem like we’re being willfully esoteric. We happened to be listening to some South African and traditional choral arrangements during the time we were recording the album, but that’s because we just like that music.”

The rest of our interview is lost to the walls of that hallway and fall winds outside the emergency exit near where we sat.

I think, at some point, I asked what equipment Le Loup used live, and what programs they used to record, but trying to remember the response would likely give me a brain aneurism. I’m sure I asked Sam what venue he most enjoyed playing, but all I can dredge up is a half remembered story of playing a backyard in one of the Carolinas while someone was barbequing, and that the band and crowd threw themselves into the concert. In my mind there are the details of a stained picket fence, a certain mugginess, and Christmas lights, but that’s just the effects of an overactive imagination and the desire to have attended a great show. This is the remnants what is left of my best attempt to re-create an interview I failed to preserve.

And Sam, if you are ever to come across this interview, my apologies.
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