Milwaukee's Mark G.E. and Kansas City's Jim Skeel have been making music for years and as the electronic / ambient / experimental rock duo Cyberchump, the pair has issued at least eight discs of explorational, genre-defying music.
Often instrumental, sometimes not, often with dance-y beats, sometimes not, Cyberchump is the poppiest experimental group you're likely to find. But it's also among one of the most "out-there" rock outfits you'll hear, too. This led legendary U.K. rock critic Paul Morley to tab the band in one of his books as a must-hear act.
The group's latest disc, "Our Wizards of Earth," is the perfect example of Cyberchump's ever-evolving style and on the occasion of its release, we asked Skeel and G.E. about Cyberchump's process and its philosophy.
OnMilwaukee.com: Can you give us some insight into your process? How do you write and record a Cyberchump record?
Jim Skeel: We coined a term, "Aural Sculpture," to describe the Cyberchump recording process. We both do a lot of the editing and tweaking and consider the studio to be our main instrument. We like to manipulate the recorded sound in various ways such as slowing a recorded part down or having the computer play the sound many octaves lower than it was originally recorded. We tend to start out with many layers of music and then take parts out until we have the musical form we want.
Mark GE: We each play a number of instruments and we overlap a lot. Over the years, we have melded what we do to the point that we find it hard to remember who played what. In general, Jim tends to play the guitar and I tend to play bass and keyboards but that seems to be drifting to where one might take the part of the other.
Jim lives in Kansas City and I live in Milwaukee. Because of this we have two ways of working. When we work separately, which is most of the time, one of us will start by creating an interesting keyboard or guitar part and set up a groove to send to the other. We ping-pong the files back and forth through the internet, adding, manipulating, tweaking, eliminating, until we feel that we have the final form for the song. The one issue we are continually wrestling with is trying not to have too much going on in the first pass so as to leave plenty of space for the other to complete the process.
We also get together once or twice a year. During these five-day visits, we lock ourselves in the studio during the day. Over the years these sessions have changed as to how we approach the recording process. Currently we will set up a group of possible effects. Jim might set up a chain of effects for the guitar that will allow him to loop, delay and control numerous sonic options. I might midi-connect a drum machine to trip a keyboard and then go through a chain of effects boxes in order to create an odd rhythm or set up a keyboard with numerous delays and distortions. We then set up a groove. It may be a repeater sound or a drum loop.
Each of us will start playing around with sounds and melodic phrasing. When we find something interesting to work with, we hit record. We like to jam for about 10 minutes to give plenty of time for ideas to surface. Later, we will edit the tracks down to a more cohesive piece. We have received a lot of nice surprises from this process. These in-person sessions have yielded the basis for songs such as New Skin and Storm's A Comin'.
JS: On "Our Wizards of Earth" We wanted the album to have a live band feel, which we felt would be an interesting mash up with the electronica and down tempo chill we have been doing. We actually started the jamming process a full year before we started the "Sankhara" CD but our overall goals were different between "Sankhara" and "Our Wizards."
We used some jams as a starting point for Sankhara but the end goal was not to have a live feel for the songs so much as to have a basis for a song itself. We deconstructed these jams to their ambient parts to suggest a starting point.
With "Our Wizards" we took jamming in a different direction, actually attempting to have the end product sound live. This process was realized by leaving the jams pretty much intact but sculpted then down to the essence of the final arrangement; our goal in this case was to keep the natural spontaneous interplay between us intact.
In some cases we felt that we needed real drums to create a live feel, so we asked Tim Higgins to add parts to some of the songs. To confuse the issue further, Mark realized that a track of Jason Loveall's Violin (The Danglers) from an earlier recording seem to work with the "Sometimes Cool" Guitar part. He laid it into the song and sent it on. I then "Sculpted" the arrangement of the violin to give it a jammed out feel, playing it off of the guitar riff.
MGE: In the end, the mixing process is as important to the Cyberchump sound as the recording process itself. We spend about as much time mixing a release as we do recording the music. Jim starts the process and I add my ears and it goes back and forth until we feel it is as good as it is going to get.
OMC: Does Cyberchump live kind of on the boundaries of genres? "Our
Wizards" is as traditional rock / pop as any ambient or electronic
outfit I've heard. Yet, it's definitely not traditional rock / pop.
JS: We probably don't fit in any genre. We always have tried to avoid consciously playing to a genre with the exception of the "Abstract Air" and "Sankhara" CDs. Those two albums are essentially beatless and are truly ambient in their presentation.
MGE: "Our Wizards of Earth" debuted in the top 25 on the New Age charts, but it is hard to see how what we are doing on this disc has anything to do with new age. I think that atmospheric instrumentals might just get lumped into that category.
We suspect if you like Brian Eno, David Sylvain, or one of the three heads --Talking Heads, Portishead or Radiohead -- you might like what we do. As far as helping garner attention, the boundary area probably is a strange way to get people to listen to our music. In the end though, we are uncertain whether working the boundaries of song style is a help or a hindrance for acceptance with a wider audience.
JS: We definitely see each record as a further exploration. Viewing all of our output through "Our Wizards," it seems we have created a body of work that is recognizably "Cyberchump" and yet each recording is an exploration of different musical terrain. As for a logical progression, however, there may be no logic to it at all.
MGE: Perhaps our genre-tripping comes from our own broad range of musical influences, musical ADD, and setting up our instruments and studio differently each time we record.
JS: New toys add another dimension to the end product as these also seem to bring out the child in us. In addition, both of us come from a different listening experience. We don't always appreciate a lot of same music. Again we meet at the boundaries. Over time we have found our tastes change and have broadened towards each other's perspective.
MGE: I tend to be more conceptual while Jim always gets to that point where he says, enough is enough, "shut up and play." I am a planner and Jim is a jammer, but then again Jim is the one that had the starting concept for the current CD. "Our Wizards" was decidedly going to be more psychedelic and rock oriented. Jim has a great affinity for that music from the ‘60s but you can also hear my love for German synth music that kept creeping in.
OMC: Now that the disc has been out there a little while, what's the
response been like?
MGE: The response has been great. To us, it is surprising that a number of DJs that like instrumental music have championed us over the years. We have been getting a lot of airplay on college stations throughout the U.S. and in Europe. There are a number of national NPR shows like "Echoes" and "Music from the Hearts of Space" that regularly play our work. Also, being on iTunes, Amazon and Pandora allows us to reach a lot of people, giving them direct access to our music on line.
We have been lucky enough to get on high profile compilations by labels like OM Records and Spiralight. That has brought attention our way. Also, we have been asked to be a part of remix projects for other artists. This has gotten our sound heard by these artist's fans. We have a few more remix projects in the works.
In the end though, it is a mystery to us. We seemed to have to set ourselves up for failure. Making fun of the very electronic genre we come from by calling ourselves Cyberchump, putting out albums filled with unexpected turns, refusing to stick to a genre, stubbornly following our muse all seem like a recipe for obscurity. We want to be able to continue to do our art, unencumbered by expectation. The fact that people have taken a liking to it is like the cherry on top.
You know, when Paul Morley, music writer and founder of the band Art of Noise listed us in his book "Words and Music" as one of 88 bands you should hear, we both looked at each other in surprise and disbelief.
OMC: And similarly, now that you've got some distance, what do you think
of the new record? Do you feel differently about it now than you did, say when you were shipping the master off to the plant? Or do you not really go back and listen once a record is done?
JS: To be honest, it is difficult to listen to "Our Wizards" because we have heard it so many times already. The reality is that an artist can never listen to a recording "for the first time." We have heard the songs being formed and the final product is certainly not a surprise. In a year or two you can put it in perspective and sort of get that sense of the new and decide how you feel about it.
OMC: What are you working on now?
MGE: We have about eight new songs that at this moment appear to be more minimalistic and might be sonically akin to a desolate future dystopian landscape of electronica. But then once we say things like that we tend to react against it and veer in another direction. Over the last couple albums we are trying to have fewer layers. We tend to coat our songs with layers of instruments. Most songs have over 20 tracks. We are trying to hold back and subtract a bit more but in the end we to let the recording process lead us.
In addition, we are remixing a number of artists, Janzyk is remixing our first two albums and we are exploring with a couple labels to do vinyl releases.
After seven releases since 2000, we just keep playing and recording. It is hard to predict where the road leads, but as my son Alex says, "It's going to be fantastic!"
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
