When you put Dan Friel’s third solo album Ghost Town [pictured]in the CD player you are greeted with the title track: a difficult, high pitched squeal of distorted electronics and barely controlled feedback that makes your teeth grind and brain clench.
But after 30 odd seconds of thin meandering chaos something strange happens. Some of the painful sounds begin to take on almost melodic qualities before slowly building in density. You can tell something big is about to happen. When the beat kicks in, a booming unapologetic stomp, suddenly all these difficult sounds coalesce into an incredibly triumphant keyboard line, and the song is transformed into the most infectious noise anthem you will ever hear. This is fist in the air music. Ghost Town continues in this vein, using shrill difficult electrics and harnessing them into melodic shots of musical adrenalin. When I suggest that noise has never been used to such melodic ends the Brooklyn based Friel is quick to disagree.
“Electronic noise and catchy melodies totally have raging boners for each other, and have since the ’60s,” he says. “Think about Hendrix, Sun Ra, Velvets, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, etc. I’m just following their lead, and reducing it to all simple electronics.”
The reaction to ‘Ghost Town Part 1’ is immediate. Your fist is either in the air or you’ve angrily left the room. It’s not the kind of music you can sit on the fence about. This polarising effect stems from the timbre and pitch of the sounds themselves and Friel’s desire to harness the difficult and uncomfortable; sounds that signify tension, an error, or that something’s wrong.
The problem may lie in the fact that Friel’s aforementioned reference points not only all chose to place a little conventional melody up front, but also began with relatively normal instruments and only descended into noise for brief moments that were in the main slowly built up to. Friel doesn’t pander so much to his audience. It’s about adrenalin not seduction; he’s cut out the roughage so only the raw exhilarating stuff remains.
“This is purely about what sounds good to me,” he says. “Warm, gritty, barely controlled electronics sound beautiful to me. So do tight pop songs. So do heavily effected drum machines. I just want it all at the same time. I think the way to make something sound new and unique is by borrowing equally from as many types of music as you find yourself liking. I also borrow from dub and hip-hop pretty heavily in places. I got ‘Appliances of Bremen’ (track four on Ghost Town) from listening to a CD by Alacie Tullaugaq & Lucy Amarualik, two Inuit throat singers.”
The raw, at times violent nature of Friel’s sound is also very clearly a product of the tools at his disposal. They’re the kind of instruments that anyone can easily obtain, including Friel’s first instrument, an ’80s toy Yamaha keyboard, a few guitar pedals, a feedback looped Peavey practice amp, and some walkie talkies. All the drum sounds come from the keyboard, just distorted through the pedals.
“That’s kind of the whole point of the band/project/this,” he reflects. “It’s folk electronics. It’s stuff anyone can get, and there’s no knowledge of circuitry involved or anything. Just practice. When I play shows now, I have all my stuff in a big suitcase I built. I can take it on the train, and it opens up and sits in my lap when I play. I view it as the equivalent of watching someone sit down and play a guitar or a banjo. I just plug into whatever sound system is there. Last month, I played a show through a tiny Peavey practice amplifier, and I think it sounded rad. I also played through a massive rock PA system that made it sound like club night in hell. Both were fun. It’s about flexibility.”
So how did Friel arrive at the place where noise and music intersect? Taking time out from his main gig in Parts & Labor, an experimental yet melodic indie rock quartet in which he sings and plays keys, he spent a winter toiling away on Ghost Town, recording almost everyday, plugging his live gear straight into his computer. “I don’t think there’s a sound on the record that was made out loud,” he remembers. “Big chunks of it were improvised, and then had drones layered on top of them to make the final product.
Prior to that it was a traditional if not a little extreme route.
“I played guitar and bass in noise-core/punk bands in high school and college. I was listening to a lot of noise, drone, hardcore, free jazz, Boredoms, Sonic Youth, Pink Floyd, Man is the Bastard. I got bored with guitar for a while, so I started running the toy keyboard through my guitar pedals. I released a solo CD with that set up in 2001, and started playing those songs as Parts & Labor in 2002. From there Parts & Labor became a group effort that was more of a rock band with lead electronics, while my solo stuff is still about making a little language out of just those sounds.”
“I only started ‘playing keys’ in winter of 2000,” he says, “when I started making my first solo CD. Most of what I like about what I do involves using the presets and switches on the keyboard to make sounds it wasn’t really intended for.”
Friel’s music leaves him in this peculiar nether-world, Ghost Town is on Important Records, home to the likes of Merzbow, K.K Null and Pauline Oliveros, however, whilst there’s plenty of experimentation and improvisation on the album, he doesn’t necessarily feel a natural affinity with many of these artists. Nor does he feel too closely aligned with his electronic contemporaries.
“I feel a bit isolated from a lot of other electronic music,” he says. “I’m basically orchestrating various strains of folk/pop/metal for low-fi electronics. As such, I still feel closer to rock bands.”
Ultimately though, Friel views his solo work as having an almost co-dependent relationship with Parts & Labor, and there’s no denying the similarities between the two projects. It’s the best of both worlds, enjoying the power and control the solo project affords, yet also relying on his band-mates as a foil from which to bounce off his creative impulses.
“The strength of electronic music is that you can make any sound you want,” he offers, “but that freedom can be paralysing.â€
“The attraction is “simplicity,” he says, “a forcibly limited palette, and total control, all of which gets pretty boring if you don’t have a band full of rad people with their own ideas to spend your time with the rest of the year.”
Bob Baker Fish
Dan Friel’s Ghost Town is available now on Important.
