By Shawn Perry (http://www.vintagerock.com)
Trey Gunn has to be one of the most unique musicians to ever come up through the ranks of King Crimson. His mastery of the nine- and 10-string Warr Guitar has given the band a savory and frostbiting edge for a solid 10 years - a long haul for most anyone aside from the group's sole original member Robert Fripp. During that same time period, the Seattle-based musician has steadily developed a prolific solo career as well, recording several highbrow and atmospheric albums. Throw in the session work with the California Guitar Trio, David Sylvian and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, and it's easy to figure out that Gunn likes to stay active.
With the arrival of Untune The Sky, an unconventional CD/DVD combo compilation, Gunn has stepped out from the shadows of Crimson to establish himself as a unilateral, multimedia solo artist on a mission. His recent departure from the group underscores his commitment to go the full distance. If there is someone who will more than likely succeed on his own terms, Trey Gunn seems a worthy contender.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Gunn about the new disc, the Warr Guitar, Crimson, James Joyce, Radiohead and a variety of other strange and wonderful topics. To his credit, Trey Gunn is one artist who holds nothing back, yet is almost magnanimous in his taste for the surreal and oblique. Needless to say, there was never a dull moment during our brief chat.
Shawn Perry: Let's start with Untune The Sky. Much like your music, this seems a little different than your usual, run-of-the-mill greatest hits compilation. How did you go about putting it together?
Trey Gunn: Well, generally speaking, I hate greatest hits records. I think if you've done a really good record in the first place, it's bizarre to take the strongest material from a bunch of records and stick them together on one record. You're listening to the songs out of context and it's always been disappointing to me. I took on the challenge of trying to figure out a way to make that work. I picked what I felt were my strongest tracks and put them all together, and it wasn't that great as a whole piece.
So, I kind of free thought the whole thing. There's a fair bit of material to choose from -- from my solo albums, other live bits and outtakes. I just kind of started working the material to see how it would flow as an essentially new record and it worked out really well. I think it's really strong in that the pieces don't flow out of context. It's a very long record for me -- 70 minutes. I think records over 60 minutes are absurd. Most of my records clock in at between 45 and 50 minutes. But it still works even though it's long, and I'm really happy with it.
SP: You have pretty much worked with the same group of players on your previous solo albums, is that correct?
TG: Most of it is me. There's kind of a pool of people that I've worked with. Essentially, the main percussionist Bob Muller, who also plays in the live band, has played on all of my records.
SP: From listening to the songs and seeing some of the live clips on the DVD, there seems to be this great interaction between you and the other players. How have you been able to solidify such a fluid chemistry?
TG: Well, we work really hard. I think I picked the right guys to work with. Bob and I clicked right from the beginning. We've worked together a lot. The other guitar player, Tony Geballe, I've known for 18 years now. And then Joe Mendelson, the second touch guitarist, I haven't known him that long, but we just click together really well. When we get together to rehearse for a tour, we play a lot; we work 10- or 12-hour days. Once you kind of make the soup and then you heat it up, that's when you try to recapture the recordings, either during the middle of the tour and at the end of the tour
SP: How much of what is on Untune The Sky is improvisational?
TG: There's a lot of improv within sections, but it would be kind of hard to pinpoint exactly where those are. On the tune "Arrakis," there's a lot of improv. In fact, it was built out of an improvisational context and then we laced the melodies into it, but it's mostly improv. What I really like to do is have a very structured musical arrangement with moments inside it where it can be free. For example, what we'll do in a song like "Sozzle" or "The Glove," the first two tracks, we'll have a solo section or a section that is completely free, and then one of the musicians can cue when we go to the next section which is more composed. That's kind of the way I like to work.
SP: I'd like to ask you a few questions about the Warr Guitar. First of all, it looks like it weighs a ton and would be extremely difficult to keep in tune. Is that the case?
TG: No, it's not hard at all to keep in tune. It's a finely made guitar with really fine tuners. If you can tune it, which I can, it will stay in tune, even when you ship it. I'm surprised how well it stays in tune. It is heavier than a guitar, but it's not as heavy as it looks. Most of weight is in the wideness of the neck. I've spent a lot of time working with Mark Warr, the maker, for about 10 years. One of the main things we've been trying to do when he's working on new models is to bring the weight down. However, when you lower the weight, you lose the mass of the body, which changes the tone. The current instrument I'm playing is the best possible compromise. It has the best bass tone of any of the instruments he's made for me. And it has a fair bit of mass, but it's not that heavy.
SP: So you're pretty involved with its design?
TG: Yeah.
SP: What's the difference between the Warr Guitar and the Chapman Stick?
TG: The most obvious difference is the Warr Guitar has a body and the Stick does not have a body. That changes the possibilities for it to have different tonal characteristics. The mass of the instrument is really one of the main influences of the tone. That and the kind of wood. I'm not at all versed in the kind of woods that affect the tone. Mark knows a lot about that. There are some things I just don't need to know. But I do know that the kind of wood I use has a particular sound I really like. Essentially, both the Warr guitar and the Chapman Stick are in the family of touch guitars. They are specifically designed for tapping with both hands on the fret board. However, you don't have to play either of them that way. You can play them traditionally like a guitar.
SP:
You can strum them?
TG: You can. It's a little easier to strum the Warr Guitar than the Stick because the Stick gets fixed in a vertical position. The way Mark has designed the Warr Guitar, it's weighted so that you can play it vertically or pull it down horizontally.
SP: You've said the Warr Guitar has a wide range. It can sound like a piano and guitar, so would it be correct to assume that playing bass lines is sort of infringing upon its potential?
TG: Well, you're down in a lower register. I don't have any attachment to how I use the instrument; I just use it however the music needs it. Sometimes, it is as purely bass player, which was my role in the last batch of King Crimson recordings and touring. In my solo band, I'm most often not the bass player, so I can go up in the upper registers. I kind of think of it like a piano. It's like your hands are inside the keyboard of a piano, and you can play it low or high. I'm quite good at processing the sound in organic ways so I can get a lot of different sounds out of it.
SP: Are you able to explore other ranges on the Warr Guitar when you're doing your solo stuff as opposed to King Crimson?
TG: Definitely. In this last version of Crimson, I was the bass player. You can leave the bass player area, but when you do, there's no one down there [laughs]. It's a little tricky to do that.
SP: To me, Crimson often attacks with a harsh, in-your-face abrasiveness, where you and your band opt for a much more subtle and organic route that travels into some truly intricate and ambient soundscapes. Would you say this is an accurate comparison?
TG: Yes. First and foremost, King Crimson is a rock band. It's a very sophisticated language for a rock band; the language isn't of a rock band. With my work, it's more world music; it's a bit funkier. I guess there's a more seductive, developing quality within it as opposed to knocking you over the head.
SP: You recently left King Crimson. May I ask why?
TG: Well, I've been doing it for 10 years and that feels like enough [laughs]. Also, we were pretty much completing a phase in the life of the band. I need to do something else. I feel like I've really done this really well. Crimson was at a peak and my participation was at a peak. It was time for me to move on.
SP: Did The Projekcts CDs have anything to do with you wanting to diversify beyond Crimson?
TG: I don't know if I'd say that. The Projekcts were a really special thing where we just kind of cracked open the whole idea of what you can do on stage. It was incredibly freeing where you could essentially play anything. As long as you followed the musical idea, it worked. That kind of opened up the language and opened up a whole different kind of energy that certainly rock musicians never get to touch on. The Projekcts were more akin to the late John Coltrane than anything else.
SP: You worked with Robert Fripp in The League of Crafty Guitarists and he was sort of like a mentor to you, right?
TG: Yeah.
SP: Did that make it any more difficult to leave Crimson?
TG: It wasn't really any surprise within the band. We weren't really making it public, but I think everyone knew something was going to be changing soon. Nobody really knows to what extent King Crimson will continue working. No, it wasn't really a problem.
SP: Considering that Fripp appears on Untune The Sky, is it safe to say you will maintain a working relationship with him?
TG: Yeah, I think so, sure.
SP: How about the other guys in Crimson?
TG: Well, I hope so. Everyone lives in a different city and everyone is always busy, so it's not always easy to get together and play with the musicians you want to -- or even your friends -- cause everyone is so busy. But I hope to.
SP: I had the pleasure of seeing both the double trio configuration and the more recent quartet. Did you have a preference for one over the other?
TG: They were different animals. I suppose for myself, the double trio was just so hard. I almost didn't have the energy to enjoy the material that much because I had to concentrate so intently to make the sound work. It was more like being a part of an orchestra as opposed to being in an ensemble. You couldn't really diddle around, you couldn't stretch the time or re-harmonize. You couldn't do a lot of things that I could do with the latest Crimson, but I still enjoyed it.
SP: Is it true that Tony Levin has returned to Crimson?
TG: This is what I've heard. As with all things Crimson, it's kind of wait and see what really happens. That's the plan.
SP: What do you think about that?
TG: I don't know who else can do it [laughs].
SP: Aside from your work with Crimson, you have worked with other performers like the California Guitar Trio, David Sylvian and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones. What was it like working with him?
TG: It was great. John and I met each other, I think, either at the David Sylvian shows at the Royal Albert Hall or maybe it was Crimson at the Royal Albert Hall -- somewhere in London. He had been talking about a project he wanted to do for quite a while. It probably took about a year and a half before it got to the stage where he was ready to bring me over to play. I really like John a lot. I think he is certainly one of the most underrated guys of that age of rock. His musicality completely blows everyone else in Zeppelin away. He's kind of the unsung hero of that group and that era. A fine, fine musician, so it was really fun to play with him. The session I did with John was, for me, the beginning of the kind of playing I discovered that led into The Projekcts. He was a great bass player, so I was free to go into the upper registers and really cut loose - which is what I did.
SP: Is there anyone you haven't worked with that you'd like to?
TG: Probably [laughs]. The bands that I really like, they don't really need me. I'm a huge Radiohead fan and I'm a huge XTC fan. They don't need me, so I don't really know.
SP: I understand that James Joyce has had an impact on your artistic life. Have you read "Ulysses"?
TG: I read part of "Ulysses," but for some reason the one that really draws me, apart from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," is "Finnegans Wake." I can't really explain it, but there are passages in that that just ring inside of me. I don't know exactly how he's influenced me, but I've found it some of the most striking things I've encountered.
SP:
How much of an influence have writers like Joyce had on your music?
TG: I couldn't say directly, but obviously they must. Especially now, my present and future work is in the multi-dimension area with text and video. You know music isn't really narrative, although it can be. However, this new area I'm going into is much more narrative, and I'm kind of revisiting these guys to get the effect of their works.
SP: I read that you want to incorporate various mediums into your music, especially visual stuff like on the DVD that comes with Untune The Sky. How would you describe the difference between what you want to do and a music video?
TG: I think I can describe it fairly simply, although I don't know how accurate it will come across. What is really interesting to me right now, like what I'm doing with the Quodia project that you probably read about, is essentially when you score music to a film or a TV show -- which I've done a fair bit of and have some more on my plate coming up this year -- the visuals are cut, the story is cut, the edit is locked, and then you come in and put the music into that medium. When you make a music video, the music is written and cut and locked, and then you bring the visuals in on top of that. The two mediums aren't really interacting; one is subservient to the other. What really interests me is where you have these different access points inside the art form where there's a visual access, there's a storyline access, and then there's a musical access. And they all interlink to make an essentially new kind of language. So, if you remove the music, it doesn't make sense anymore. If you remove the visuals, you've lost the meaning of the language. To do that, I'm finding it very, very strange because essentially each of the little bits that go together...of that language...they're all incomplete on their own if you do it right, if that makes any sense. It's kind of a way of conceiving the whole of it together, at once.
SP: It sounds better than a music video.
TG: It's really quite different.
SP: What's your take on progressive rock in general? Do you think it is still a viable form of music?
TG: I don't like progressive rock [laughs]. Nothing about it appeals to me. But I guess I'm from a prog rock band, so I'm told. That's all I can say. I don't really know much about it. I suppose I have listened to music that would fall in that category, but that was 20 years ago. I think I'd rather listen to classical music or world musicians, personally.
SP: So you don't think Radiohead is part of a new wave of prog rock?
TG: Well, if they're in that category, then I do like prog rock, but I don't think they are. They're so musical.
SP: They remind me of Pink Floyd, and I never really thought of Floyd as being a progressive rock band.
TG: I guess I didn't either. They're too moody. You know what my definition of prog rock is? [laughs]. It's the artifact that you get, that's left over after you have a bunch of really, really clever and very talented musicians who have no emotional connection to each other.
SP: It can be daunting at times.
TG: Rock music in general is not that interesting to me. Except I think Radiohead is so musical that it transcends the meaning.
SP: You've told me about some of the multimedia projects you're working on. Are there any plans for a tour?
TG: Yeah, we hope to start doing some shows in April. It's an immense amount of work, to bring all the video editing and animation into it. We're not just doing music. Joe, my partner, mixes the audio for film soundtracks, not just music, but placing the footsteps and ambient sounds. For this project, we're working in quad and building a sound design atmosphere around the music and the text and the visuals. It's a lot of work. The piece we're working on now is called The Arrow, which has seven parts to it. We have most all the parts mapped out and about half of them done. So we're working frantically to get ready to do some shows in April.
© Copyright 2004 Shawn Perry. All rights reserved.