I would imagine being in an instrumental rock band would be pretty difficult, because without a singer all the attention and concentration is on the musicianship and song structures. Seriously think about it, whenever you listen to a band with a vocalist no matter how much you want to vibe out on what the rest of the band is doing you always have the vocalist to come in and save the day or keep the song interesting if it starts to waiver. But with instrumental bands there’s no hiding behind a vocalist and you have to keep your songs, engaging, energetic, and ever evolving because otherwise the listener will get bored.
That is unless you are the Chicago based instrumental trio Cmn ineed yr hlp and you make excellent progressive rock music with captivating album concepts, topped with a slew of innovative and intriguing audio samples to tie everything together. I for one had never heard an instrumental band use samples in such a prominent role and all I could think about when I heard Cmn ineed yr hlp’s latest release It Came Without Warning...As Most Disasters Do, was that these guys were geniuses. By using old archived vocal samples the band is able to add a lead element that almost acts as a vocalist and couple these samples with the bands heavy and original playing makes for a very entertaining listen.
At no point during It Came Without Warning, does the music drag. Another element that makes Cmn ineed yr hlp’s latest offering even more of an interesting listen is the intertwined concept of the album that the sampled vocals create, which is a story of a captured sea monster who retaliates against its captors. So being as I was super enthralled and honestly amazed by the kind of jams Cmn ineed yr hlp were creating I needed to know more, so I started emailing bassist Mark Oster to get more details on his awesome band and eventually all our emailing back in fourth turned out to be a really detailed and informative interview.
B.G.M.: How did Cmn ineed yr help come together? And how did you end up with such an odd band name?
MO: I had known Jose (Rosales, guitar) for several years as our previous bands were very friendly with one another and played shows in Chicago together all the time. Late in the summer of 2007, both bands were about five years old and running out of gas. We struck up a conversation based on our mutual frustration over that. That discussion spawned other conversations about artists we respected, what we wanted out of a band as we approached full-blown adulthood (we were both in our late 20’s), and the kind of people we wanted to play with. Before long, we had written a couple of things and decided that we needed a drummer.
I had a couple of ideas, but Ian (Gegenheimer) was my primary target. His older brother Eric drummed in my other band and is one of my best friends in the world. Over the years, Eric had played me recordings of these really great progressive punk rock bands Ian had played in that seemed to be the perfect sound for what Jose and I had in mind.
After we decided that we had a band, we set out trying to come up with a name. One day at practice, Ian had his cell phone out, going through old text messages he had saved. He came across one from his grandmother when she was looking for the number of one of his old drum teachers. His grandma is an incredible lady, sharp, kind, funny, and an extremely talented actress; among her many credits includes a stint as the voice of Mrs. Butterworth. However, like anybody born before 1975, text messaging was still a fresh concept, and popular culture dictated that everything in text needed to be randomly shorthanded. So it read:
“Cmn ineed yr hp. Lov Gma.”
The more we thought about it, the more we liked it. We added the “l” to clarify context, and it stuck!
I love the origin of the name, its super random. Has Cmn ineed yr hlp always been an instrumental band? Have you guys ever considered adding a vocalist?
It’s funny now to look back on almost six years together and see that we wound up sticking with just the same three guys that started the band. Early on we had all sorts of ideas about how we were going to extend the line-up: second guitarists, multi-instrumentalists, electronic musicians, we actually had a keyboard player play with us for a couple of weeks, but it didn’t work out.
We’re all really big fans of classic soul, and for awhile we had the idea that we would bring on a vocalist with that kind of background. But no remotely suitable candidate ever emerged, and as we developed our sound we realized that we were very happy with the collective personality and music we had just among the three of us. Any further musing since about bringing somebody else in has been rare and very short-lived.
It seems like a lot of heavy progressive instrumental bands have come out in the past decade or so. What do you feel sets Cmn ineed yr hlp apart and makes your band unique?
Oy… Ha ha! There’s not really a good way to answer this without coming off as a pretentious twat. I suppose it’s time to completely unsheathe the ego.
I think the cool thing about “progressive” as a rock sub-genre, or even as an adjective for a rock sub-genre, is that by definition, it lacks boundaries and invites exploration. As a result, in the near half century that the term has been applied to rock music, the rate of repetition among artists is markedly less than other rock genres.
I mention this because we didn’t really come into this band with a specific idea of how we’d stand out. The only plan was to do whatever the hell we wanted, as long as we all thought it sounded good. We use a lot of ingredients that aren’t necessarily unique to us: Local (Chicago/Midwestern) math and noise rock is a big influence, Jose and Ian have significant Latin music backgrounds, Ian and I both grew up playing in punk bands, and we all have extraordinarily eclectic tastes with a surprising lack of overlap. We play off each other’s diverging and converging backgrounds and come up with a sound that I haven’t really heard anywhere else. Some could and would certainly make the case that such a sound didn’t really need inventing…but we enjoy ourselves.
The way we approach composing our albums is something fairly unique that we’re particularly proud of. Instrumental music and found sounds are not strangers to one another and it’s no secret that progressive rock loves itself some concept album. But I don’t think there’s anybody that puts those pieces together quite like we do. Actually, a friend turned me on to this Australian band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard who just released a sample-based story album as well. But while we emulate monster movies, they followed a spaghetti western theme, and their sound reflects it. It’s a great record, but nobody’s going to be mistaking our bands for one another.
Great answer. You mentioned King Gizzard and sample based concept albums. But for me, you guys were the first instrumental band I had heard do a sample based concept album. I think your use of the samples actually really takes away from some of the monotony that instrumental bands tend to fall into, which in my opinion is what really makes Cmn ineed yr help stand out. How did you come up with the idea of using samples throughout your albums? Where do you find the samples?
Thank you very much! The idea to use the samples actually fell in place pretty organically. Jose was already experimenting with sounds on some compositions he was working on independently, and started bringing some of those for us to play around with. I’ve been enamored the idea of using old audio clips over instrumental music since I discovered Estrus Records–era Man or Astro-man? back in high school. Early on, we came across this old Epcot-y General Motors PR film and just playing around a bit were kind of floored at how natural it sounded.
Jose had a fairly clear vision of the storyline for our first album when we were only a couple songs in, and I took on the challenge of trying to put together a “narration” to go along with that. I only wanted to use rights-free, public domain material. Not that I genuinely thought anybody would care, but largely because I don’t think there’s any aesthetic comparison for the audio quality, vocabulary and diction of those old recordings. It was a bit of a slog at first, but then I started to explore the public domain treasure trove that is Internet Archive.
Nowadays, I don’t really bother looking anywhere else. It still takes a bit of time finding narration and dialogue that will fit our storyline and is of a salvageable audio quality, but with enough work, Archive will provide. For this album, a large chunk, maybe 65-70%, of the verbal samples come from three sources: an old time radio show called The Unexpected, a B-movie named Creature of Destruction, and a newsreel about a harbor disaster. Then there are lines and sounds pulled from another couple of dozen sources: radio, movies, television, newsreels, filmstrips, plus some material Ian provided early on. It’s quite a bit of work, but really a lot of fun.
You mentioned the story line for your first album. Describe how you guys come up with the concepts of your albums and where you got the inspiration for you latest It Came Without Warning… As Most Disasters Do.
There’s a bit of a difference here between the two albums. The first, The Curse of B’zhang, sprung pretty much fully-formed out of Jose’s brain. It dealt with the struggles as urban grown-ups to maintain your creative soul as you take on the responsibilities and drudgery of adulthood. Within that template, we tried to write music and find samples to create a story line to speak to that concept.
For It Came Without Warning…As Most Disasters Do, there was a much greater give and take between the music, the story line, and the samples. We found that the first couple of parts we were jamming on were in six, giving it the feel of being at sea. So I began mining for samples that would suggest a water-oriented adventure. I came up with the opening sample for the first song we finished for the album, “Without a Sail In View”, as well as the diving adventure from The Unexpected that would later make up the samples for “175 Feet is a Lot of Water”. We found that these were leading us toward a classic “don’t mess with nature” monster motif. The next song we finished, “Cold, Airless, Forbidding” had the feel of a protagonist sea monster escaping into the ocean, which is how we decided we would end the album. From there, it was just a matter of connecting the dots: discovering this exotic creature, bringing it back to mainland, exploiting it for financial gain, then having it escape a midst considerable human carnage. If I’m being totally candid, I don’t think the concept is quite as profound as the first record. However, because there was so much more symbiosis between the composition and story line creation on this record, I definitely think music, story, and samples are much more cohesive with one another.
Do you guys ever find it hard to push yourselves creatively? What have been some of the band’s inspirations / influences musically?
Pushing ourselves creatively is never really a problem for us; the real struggle comes from trying to meet the standards we set. We abide by a pretty strict “single veto” rule, where any one of us can put the kibosh on a part if we’re not feeling it. At times, this has resulted in writer’s block for weeks or even months, as the proverbial floor becomes littered with parts that don’t pass muster with us. This is where the patience and respect we have for ourselves and each other plays a huge role in not letting frustration take over the creative process, and we always overcome it in the end.
I’m going to try to keep the inspirations and influences to the size of a small novel. It’s probably not that easy to hear in the sound we came to, but an enormous admiration for Jaga Jazzist played an extremely significant role in initial creation of the band. We all really love The Mars Volta’s Deloused in the Comatorium, which had an influence as we searched for our sound. We also discovered And So I Watch You From Afar’s self-titled album as we were mixing our first EP in the winter of 2009 – 2010 and really admired the formula of math and dynamics they used on that album.
We’re also fortunate to live in a great musical city and count tremendous bands and musicians among our peers that keep the bar at pretty lofty heights. Throughout most of our existence, we’ve shared a practice space with Bear Claw and Mayor for Life who are prodigies of taking innovative noise and math and shaping it into great hooks, melodies and songs. Beyond that, with stifling fear of leaving anybody out, I’ll mention CaffeinatedRecordings.
What can people expect from Cmn ineed yr hlp’s live show? Who handles the samples?
The one thing I can guarantee attendees at a Cmn ineed yr hlp show is a sweat-soaked bass player. I’m dependable like that.
Beyond that, people should expect considerable volume. We love playing loud, and ideally, when you’re in the room when we’re on stage, we hope that the sound is able to permeate and transport you to the seafront setting where this story takes place. Or, at the very least, ensure that you don’t forget earplugs next time they see us.
The SP-555 sampler sits on a chair or stool between me and Jose on stage. By design, most of the samples trigger at points where it’s relatively easy for me to get to it without obstructing my bass part, and the few that don’t fall where it’s similarly convenient for Jose to trigger them.
Have you guys done any touring in the past? Any tours coming up? If you could tour with any bands past, present, our future; what would your dream tour be?
I wish we had more exciting road stories than we do. Unfortunately, a myriad of reasons, both logistical and financial, have kept us fairly regionally confined. I’ll spare your readers the sob story, but in an era of four-dollar-a-gallon gas, I think a lot of small independent bands find themselves in this conundrum. That said, as people continue to discover and enjoy the new record, we’re trying to ratchet up our live regimen significantly.
The most elaborate tour we’ve done to date was a three-day weekend jaunt through Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin with the late, great Canyons of Static a couple of years ago. That was a lot of fun; I miss that band like hell. We’re hoping to do more weekend runs throughout the Midwest like that in the very near future, and maybe a full week when the weather warms up next year.
Fantasizing about a dream tour, you’re probably going to get a wildly different answer depending on which of the three of us you’re talking to. But I’m going to be diplomatic, and resist taking my time machine to 1992 to pick up Drive Like Jehu and Fugazi. Instead, I’m going to take it back to 1970 to pick up King Crimson, then bring them back to do a global tour with us, Jaga Jazzist and And So I Watch You From Afar. I think that makes for a nice combination of bands we all have some degree of deep admiration for and that would fit with us stylistically. Though I will admit the temptation is overwhelming to say nuts to all that and just pick artists that, as a music fan, I would want to see in their heyday. I think touring with early 70’s Curtis Mayfield would be cool as hell, but I don’t know how well our two styles would match up.
I think the world definitely needs a world tour of you guys, Jaga Jazzist, DLJ, Fugazi, King Crimson, and Curtis Mayfield. I would pay some serious money to see that one. Haha. What does the future have in store for Cmn ineed yr help? Where do you envision the band’s sound progressing to?
Haha! Thank you! I would pay serious money to play that, or even just to be there!
For the immediate future, we’re just release It Came Without Warning… as a 12″ EP. It’s going to be on random color recycled vinyl, with the full album on one side and a single color screen print on the other. In promotion of it, Jose redesigned and relaunched our website, and we’ve been booking more heavily within Chicago and places within a couple hours of Chicago.
Looking even further ahead, we’re fairly enamored with the storyline EP format that we’ve utilized on the first two records, and I suspect that we’ll continue to develop our sound within that format. So much of our evolution is organic, it’s hard to predict exactly where it will go. However, based on where we’ve come from and the loose plans we’ve discussed so far, I suspect we’ll be more intricate and dynamically diverse. Jose is trying to branch out into more complex chord and key structures within his guitar parts, so we’ll probably try to show off some new colors that that opens up to us. We’ll also continue to build on the lessons we’ve learned so far from composing with samples and use those to provide more depth and texture to our sound. And last but certainly not least, we hope to improve on the three-year turnaround between our first two albums.
Links:
Bandcamp
Website
Photo Credits: On stage courtesy of Mary Kroeck, On the floor courtesy of Christina Beller. Thank you so much!