Bewitching Documents : the Pelt interview

This Friday, Pelt releases their latest recording Reticence / Resistance as part of the Three Lobed Recording’s 20-year anniversary series. It’s also the first Pelt release since 2012, and the 18th record in their nearing-30-year run, never minding the numerous overlapping projects of each individual member and in other iterations and formations. The family tree of Pelt is immense and continues to stretch its branches, rooted in the Virginia soil despite the migratory sprawl and evolution of its members. I spoke with Mikel Dimmick and Nathan Bowles, two “newer” members of the band (they have only been in the band for about an average of 15 years – nothing to scoff at). In addition to Patrick Best (who also created the album artwork) and founding member Mike Ganfloff, the highly influential group has reached new heights of awe-inspiring, transcendent, indeed life-affirming sounds with the ~43-minute performance recorded over two nights at Cafe OTO in London back in 2017. This interview has been edited for clarity, brevity, and linearity.

Listen to the full album as you read!!!

Lara: Can you each tell me the story of how you came to join Pelt?

Mikel Dimmick: Initially I wasn’t playing with the band, but I started traveling with them in ’97 and ’98 doing recordings and taking photographs. In 2002, Mike Gangloff invented this thing called the Mikel Dimmick Spiral Joy Band. He was trying to exploit my renown in the town we lived in, in Blacksburg, Virginia. I worked downtown at the record store, so everybody knew me. For that to work, something had to manifest that reflected that. So we started playing as Spiral Joy Band. I didn’t play anything so it was this funny little situation. But we started doing shows and I messed around with sound.

A few years later, I joined Mike and Jack (Rose) when they had a tour of Europe and Pat couldn’t make it. We toured as Pelt, and from then on I was a member of the band. That was 2004, I think. Nathan Bowles overlaps with Joy Band, as well.

Nathan Bowles: I was living in Blacksburg as well, so I met Mikel. I have a memory of you handing me a flyer for a Joy Band show outside of Bollo’s Cafe. I feel like we would see each other on the street. There’s only so many streets you’re going to walk around in Blacksburg.

I first started jamming with Joy Band, you and Mike in 2006, maybe. I started playing with the Black Twig Pickers in 2007, and at some point, joining Pelt just made sense. My first show with Pelt was at Terrastock in 2008. Before we joined, though, it’s worth mentioning that early electric, loud, trio Pelt, which is really special. I love that stuff. That’s the wild thing. I was just a fan of this band. I found Ayahuasca at some point and that record really…

MD: Mike gifted you a banjo.

NB: I tell that story whenever I get interviewed about banjo stuff, that’s the origin story. When I started with Twigs, I was just doing washboard, washtub bass, and bones. Mike and Isak had the idea to give me the banjo and that was that. 

Lara: Between all of you, there are so many projects and different ways you all overlap. How do you know when you’ve come up with something for Pelt vs. Spiral Joy or any of your other endless projects?

MD: It’s really about who’s in the room. If I’m in the room and somebody from Pelt isn’t, historically, that’s been a Joy Band occasion. But that’s making light of a number of other influences. With Joy Band, it’s always been pretty readily done. Geographically, we don’t live in the same place. When Joy Band started it was Mike and I and we lived in Blacksburg. Then, Nathan joined us. Pat lived in Wisconsin and then I went to Wisconsin to do my PhD and we had the Joy Band there. Now it’s kind of formalized around me, Pat and our good buddy, Troy Schafer. Who, if you don’t know, is brilliant. He’s worth checking out, to say the least.

NB: The four of us in the room, I’d say, but there’s also a stylistic thing. I tend to think of Pelt as a maximalist band in a lot of ways.  I think Joy Band music tends to be quite minimal and really specific and focused, relatively. Sometimes Patrick will be doing something that’s very big when playing with Joy Band. But I think Mikel’s sensibility will hone in on very specific elements. And sometimes that’s the defining element of Joy Band stuff. We all have different tastes and approaches. It all blends in different ways.

MD: I like when listeners go from Pelt to finding Spiral Joy or the Twigs because there’s certain continuities. Of the elements that are part of it, I think the Twig Pickers are the most distinct from Pelt. Then at the same time, I think they’re totally not distinct at all just because you can hear Mike’s fiddle. And a lot of the Pelt stuff, that’s kind of drawing on the same shared tradition.

Lara: Especially with Reticence / Resistance , there is almost a singularity achieved where all of this noise becomes one sound. I guess that’s the nature of drone, it becomes very unified and you don’t know who’s playing what and what sound is coming from where. 

MD: I agree with you. For this record, I think that maximalist element comes out of the anchor to Pat’s piano playing. That becomes this ground for much of the lift-off that I think happens. I’m really proud of this record. It’s stupid to comment on one’s own record like this, but I have always felt like an outsider to the records that we make just because they’re so tied to a moment. Then you move past them and they become these bewitching documents. You’re like, “What in the hell did we do?” When I listen back to this recording, Pat’s piano playing is always the first thing that just floors me, because it’s kind of a newer component, a more pronounced component, of the Pelt sound in that instant. 

NB: His piano playing doesn’t really show up on other recordings like that. He did a similar piano approach to that set we did at TUSK Fest. That was the first time I had heard him do that because I think all the piano playing on Effigy is me. I don’t think Patrick’s doing any of his approach on that stuff. What he does is so amazing.

MD: It fills and then everything kind of coheres inside of that and expands and breathes and give space to it. I’m kind of in awe of what we achieved. It sounds very braggy, but I really mean it in the sense of I look at these things and I’m like, “good Lord. How did we do that?” They’re always out of body experiences or these enigmatic moments that give light to some aspect of our being and our existence that we just hadn’t tapped fully into.

What brought you to England in 2017 to record this performance at Cafe OTO?

MD: I still don’t know why we went on the trip. What was the motive?

NB: We planned dates around those two shows after we got the offer from OTO. We had a gig in Brussels, then we had the gig in Todmorden in Northern England through friends of ours.

My memory of that week-long trip is that I was really thrilled with the music. Also, we passed a flu around amongst us, but we all got sick at different points. I think Michael and myself got it at a similar time, in Todmorden. But we all played through it. I remember sweating, playing through it. A little hallucinogenic in that way.

But we were all feeling pretty good in London. Shows at Cafe OTO are always great. It’s one of my favorite places to play overseas in general. The sound is really good, and each night had different permutations. There was a night at OTO where Joy Band played. Matt Payton was on the trip as well so he and Mike did an Eight Point Star set one night. I did a solo set one night and then the Pelt sets. 

MD: For a place with so much good stuff coming through, it’s weird that OTO is really just this small, open coffee shop/book store. There’s not even a stage. It’s all concrete, no rugs or anything.

NB: When you describe it like that, it sounds like a sound nightmare. But the sound is great.

MD: Right. The other part of that trip was an effort to make back some of the money that was going into it all.

NB: Oh, and chasing down a harmonium. 

MD: [Groans] It’s this ridiculous thing. My harmonium got stuck behind us. We kept trying to connect with airports to figure out where it was. It wasn’t anywhere and that was the only instrument that I brought. It  was just chasing us around. We’d be in Belgium, but as we were leaving it was supposed to be showing up. We’d ship it over to Heathrow and so it’s supposed to go there. So everywhere we went we had to find harmoniums. Eventually we gave up and had it sent it back to the US.

Amazingly, we ended up having enough people donate harmoniums for the shows that it worked out. So that was an interesting component, playing different harmoniums every night. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say that and I probably won’t ever say it again 

Lara: Did you know you’d be releasing this performance as a record before, or decide to do so after the fact?

NB: I think we had the idea. We knew the mics were good and the sound would be good. We didn’t think it’d definitely be a record, but we thought it would be good to have in the can. Pelt is always a live band, because even when we’re recording without an audience, it’s a live situation. And generally, we don’t need overdubs or anything. We’re recording it as it happens. It’s nice to have a good live record where people were in the room. I think the audience feeds the energy. think you can hear and feel it.

MD: We get together so rarely that we hold on to anything that we can get recorded. Give it a little bit of time to breathe and then try it out, sample it. See if it works, see if it’s good stuff. This just happened to yield a lot of good material. I think the best Pelt moments are when you can feel the space in the sound. That it has that sonic presence inside of the songs, so to speak.

NB: Mike and Joe, who mixed the record, spent a lot of time riding the faders. The sound was all generally there because it was recorded well, but they really dug into the sound and found the moments that are particularly synthetic and made sure those are audible.

I remember it feeling like it was lifting off when we were doing it, but it’s cool to hear it back. Like Mikel said, we play so rarely that we have this built-in breathing time. That aspect of having some remove is really useful. I remember being at Big Ears and hearing a rough mix of it with Mike, which was even a few years ago now. By then, we had enough to remove to realize we should do something with it.

Lara: Did you guys think of Three Lobed or did Cory approach you about putting something out?

NB: I live in North Carolina and I see Corey fairly often and it’s funny that we haven’t worked together on a record even though Mike and I have played a bunch of Three Lobed events. We always said, “One day it’ll happen, one day it’ll make sense.” It’s a good fit. I’m really glad this record worked out for it.

MD: I’m ecstatic that it’s paired in there with that Sunburn record and that Six Organs record and the Gunn-Truscinski record. 

NB: The contextualization is really cool as part of the anniversary series. All the packaging looks great, too. Patrick’s art design looks good on the card stock, just the sleeve. In person, it looks less digital or has more of a bleed or something. 

MD: He’s working on an album cover for us right now.

NB: Oh, for a Joy Band thing?

MD: Yeah. Feeding Tube is going to put out a couple records.

Lara: How do you know when it’s time to come together as Pelt? 

MD: The world calls us. That’s what it is.

NB: When someone starts an email thread. Someone asks us to do something.

MD: I liked the more cosmic version of the world calling, but that’s the far more pragmatic response.

Lara: Well, on the Three Lobed site it does say that “Pelt is one of those acts that will emerge from the shadows when you need their services the most.”

MD: I like that it’s a collective divination. The world is designing when it is time to summon forth the Pelt.

Lara: There’s a Pelt signal.

MD: It’s just that it speaks to your soul instead of the clouds in the sky.

Lara: I know that Sundogs was composed by Jack Rose, but particularly for this album, can you describe how you prepared for the performance, versus how much is improvised?

NB: I feel like I was hoping this would come up because I wanted to throw it to Mikel and his diagramming. If you get a physical copy and look at the label, we added a scan of some of Mikel’s diagramming that I’ll let him talk about.

MD: I make these diagrams that help me to think through and anticipate what’s going to happen. The harmonium is a funny instrument, because you can’t hear it very much outside of the harmonium world. The harmonium is just blaring right in your face. You’ve got to keep leaning back just to hear what other people are doing. The diagrams help me to get a sketch. Maybe they help shape some of the conversation. I don’t think anybody other than me uses them.

NB: They definitely help. You’re under-selling it. They’re both beautiful and interesting as graphic notations. But they’re the germ for the conversation. Depending on the gig or recording, Pelt stuff tends to be centered around an instrument idea, or a key or scale. Someone wants to focus on this instrument, and then we start from there. Or, these are the notes we want to use in this scale, here’s the key we want to use. We want to maybe at some point start moving from this scale to this scale or this key to this key. These instruments to these instruments, this texture to this texture where they blend. And the diagrams help to visualize that.

MD: It keeps me grounded a little bit. Helps me think through, visualize what y’all are doing and anticipate where and how it might move.

NB: They helped me, too. I think the whole band gets something out of those.

Lara: Pretty amazing that you’re able to make that and it’s comprehensible to everyone involved.

NB: Well, that is part of just the language you develop over a long time.

MD: Yeah. Early days with Pelt there was a lot of time together, before we started living in different places. I think that carries through. There was a time when Mike and Jack and I all lived in the same place. Nathan was there too, but we didn’t know him yet. We spent a good bit of time just hanging out, drinking Jack onto the floor and just talking and going crazy. The early days of touring and being constantly together physically, but also mentally, spending long hours on the road, listening to the same music. I still remember feeling like I was going to drive us straight into the Rocky Mountains, off the road, into a mountain because we were listening to Terry Riley and it was so loud. The rhythm and the bass elements of it were throbbing and I couldn’t think. Those moments of shared appreciation of music can provide a place to bring together shared sonic sensibilities and conversations. That translates into developing a vocabulary around what Pelt wants to do.

Lara: I read a quote from an interview from some of the other guys from maybe the late 90s or early 2000s that said, to paraphrase, “The only good kind of music has drone.” Not exactly that, but all of the best music has drone and that’s the commonality. Do you guys still feel that way? Editor’s note: The exact quote is from David Keenan’s 2004 article on Incredible String Band for Wire. Patrick Best says “Drone is just so fundamental to all music that is good.” 

NB: Well, it’s what I’m drawn to. And luckily, it’s a huge part of traditional music the world over, and that has influenced all the best popular music. There’s plenty of it around.

MD: There’s something life affirming in drone. The best of it, anyhow. I think some of it can get really tedious. But then again, so can life. I think there is something humanizing in it, that kind of summons something from inside to listen. To be aware of this exterior and the kind of relationships we have, even as it orients you inward. But then again, I also think the Cardigans are the greatest band of all time. [laughs]

Reticence / Resistance is out tomorrow on Three Lobed Records. Pre-order it on Bandcamp.

Header photo by Matt Peyton