Smokeless:

An Interview with Tobacco of Black Moth Super Rainbow

Words: Shawn Goldberg

Photo: Jae Ruberto

The otherworldly textures of the Vocoder-heavy insanity that is Black Moth Super Rainbow, led by Tobacco, hail from Pennsylvania. Leave all your preconceived notions behind. - he's not looping the factory level in an early Mega Man game, or culling through forgotten '70s sci-fi programs searching for laser sounds, or scorched on pineapple-flavored nitrous oxide.

Today Tobacco is “filling out envelopes all day.”

What?

He explains that he's inserting one-of-a-kind Polaroids, into pre-orders of his new CDs Eating Us, of the band doing “random stuff. It's supposed to be like tiny little art pieces. Some of them are pretty abstract. Us hanging out with masks on. I found some really creepy masks. Like Judge Lance Ito kind of masks.

“I usually put aside one or two days a week for post office stuff. Normally, it's just a lot of hanging out. Thinking about stuff. Some weeks will go by where I don't make any kind of music. Hanging out, thinking and debating on what needs to get done.”

REAX: Without a day job, you have all day to create. Is that freedom a good thing?

T: I think it's changed a lot. Maybe I didn't obsess as much about getting things to sound exactly the way they should. I only had a few hours and I had to do it and get it done. I was recording on the fly before, where now I have so much time to just obsess over it. I don't know if that's healthy.

In the past, Black Moth Super Rainbow has been Tobacco's brainchild, with band members needed for tour duty.

“The new one started out like that," he says. "And I pretty much finished it. I finished a version of the record by myself and then I gave it to my drummer to write her own drums to it, and then I passed it along to the guy who runs Graveface Records … when we went to the studio, the whole point of the studio was to get the drums, record the drums in the right way. If there were any leftover bass parts that needed recording I had the Graveface guy do that. So we sort of worked backwards.”

REAX: What do you mean 'The drums the right way'?

T: The drums that I do, I play them all on pads. I play them on an electronic drum synthesizer MPC. This is the first album actually that's got DRUMS drums, a person actually playing. There's one song on there where I left my MPCs running but the rest of it is all her playing.

REAX: You had a producer on this one. What was that like? Before this is a solitary thing you're making alone, now you have different voices. Did it change?

T: It didn't really. We didn't do it the way a band would typically do it, I think. Because I think a band would typically go in the studio and record everything. And the producer would have a lot more creative control, and I think in this instance the thing was done before we got there. We knew exactly what we were there to do. And that was mainly to record drums. And let Dave Fridmann the producer mix it, because he has such a great - he's just got such a great space that I wanted to see what he could do with keeping my parts the way that I make them, because I think that I probably record them a lot differently than he would have, and I wanted to see the way he mixed those out.

Concerning equipment, Tobacco is hesitant to explain, admitting that he uses an MPC for all his recording, along with box samplers, Rhodes piano, a couple of Vocoders from the '90s, and old Casios; the equipment used on tour is “old Yamaha stuff.”

“I think all I'm trying to capture is something that sounds real," he says. "It doesn't matter if it's old or new, it just turns out that the stuff that sounds the best is the older. I haven't found anything that's newer, that's not vintage, that's not like an old antique, that sounds alive at all.

"I've learned that I get lucky with the sounds that come out. The actual notes and the textures are all sort of luck these days, but the concepts and the moods have more to do with what I'm thinking about.”

REAX: How do you build a song?

T: Sometimes it's with an acoustic guitar. Other times it's just, songs get built out of just plugging the keyboard in and just playing around, sort of warping the pitch and tone. Something that sounds kind of musical comes out, and if it's good it might be the basis of a song. Usually the keyboard stuff I start off with is the kind of stuff that I'd never be able to recreate, so I'm always kind of recording. The demos always morph into the real recordings because I can't recreate some of the stuff from the demos. I think four out of five times it's some kind of accident.

Tobacco designs all the artwork and packaging for his records, some which include scratch-n-sniff covers.

“I'm a kid of the '90s so that's what I know, that's how I got into so much of the stuff I got into, from going to the record store and looking at the cool covers," he explains. "Ever since I started downloading stuff, like with Napster back then, it all got really disposable. If I didn't like something on the first listen, I deleted it and I went onto something else. Like when I was a kid, if I didn't like something on the first listen, I put 15 into it, I'm going to listen again. Some of that stuff ended up becoming probably some of my favorite stuff. So I think all that stuff is really important, especially for what I'm doing. In some cases the artwork comes before the songs do, and they dictate what the songs are going to turn into.”

Each album cover retains a monstrously strange and surreal image from the one previous, such as distorted rainbows, mismatched eyes, giant corncobs, lending an outrageous physical personification to the manipulated and deformed sounds. The new CD, with its cover of a face on the back of a hand, comes in a furry case soft as a newborn kitten, with a booklet of abstract black-and-white photos splattered with neon pink.

“I used to think of my music in colors all the time," Tobacco says. "Every song had a different color, a different pattern. But now I don't. I never think that way anymore, and I don't know exactly where I lost that. I used to do a lot of lo-fi stuff in high school and every song I had, I could see it perfectly. I must have lost it right after that. I was at my most open-minded and excited about music back then. Everything started to change when you realize people are going to be hearing what you're doing. There are a million things that play into it. I just think that when you're in high school and you're first starting out, you write your first couple songs, you're writing them with the idea that you have the potential to be the greatest thing in the world. You have no idea. All you want is for someone to hear what you're doing and that's all that matters. I almost think you're on a different plane of existence at that time.

“When I was little I didn't really like music at all. The only song I ever liked was 'Just a Friend' By Biz Markie. That was the only song I liked for like four years. Never got into any other music. My mom wouldn't let me have a tape or anything. High school, I got really into Butthole Surfers, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.”

Tobacco listed the Gibby-tronix, the namesake vocal effect machine used by the Butthole Surfers frontman, as a major influence.

“And I loved, I think the only band that really stuck with me from like middle school on to now is Stone Temple Pilots. I love those guys.”

REAX: Really?

T: Stone Temple Pilots, I don't know, there's just something about them. I think those guys got slagged pretty hard, I think Weiland got slagged pretty hard. If you really listen to his voice and his lyrics, they're so, his lyrics are so absurd, but that's the kind of stuff that can mean so much. And his voice, when he delivers, in that demented kind of voice, there's something about that I think people never picked up on. The new Scott Weiland double disc is the greatest thing I've heard in a long time.

REAX: Up until a week ago, I didn't know where you were from. I was convinced that you guys went to the beach all the time. And you were just making beach music. The ultimate beach music to hang out with your friends.

T: I'm not a big fan of the beach.

REAX: You never think about your music at the beach?

T: No, not at all. I think that's great. I haven't told you and because I haven't sat down and went, 'well, this is what this is,' you're able to make it whatever you want it to be.

REAX: Is that why you don't have lyric sheets with your albums?

T: Exactly, I did it one time. It was a dumb mistake. I regret doing it, because I don't like people knowing my lyrics. On the new album I think it's pretty intelligible this time.

Without trying to push people into seeing things the way I see it, these days I see the environment around me as going with the music. Maybe not the new album, but the one I'm working on right now, everyday I go out and jog to it and it's like to the rhythm of my steps almost. I guess that's where my head is right now. It's whatever is around me at the time. I can make the music become that, for that time being.

Anything that I put out, I like to listen to like a million times. Whatever the current thing is, I normally listen to it until the next thing comes out because I need to figure out what sucks about it, what I like. If anything was good about it, what was good about it?

REAX: So you think each record is building something, or getting closer to a specific thing?

T: Yeah, I think I'm sort of figuring that out about myself. I think we get a lot of criticism, people say that we sound 'too same-y' sometimes. But the way that I work, I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel each time, I'm trying to just perfect something, and discard everything that came before it. I just want to have this one perfect piece, and nothing else exists, you know what I mean?

The mystique developed by Black Moth Super Rainbow is a paradox, because Tobacco is pretty open; whatever mystery has extended from the band's persona remains solely an open participation by the audience. Tobacco is given to the phrase “That's just the way it turned out,” and despite the band's output of warped and distorted tones, surreal covers, and cartoonish pseudonyms, the enigmatic atmosphere that surrounds them appears uncontrolled by the band.

“The whole mystique is another side effect of the way that I am," he says. "I never gathered everyone together and was like 'hey guys, band meeting. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna be mysterious.' It's the way that it worked out. I don't like to really talk, and I don't like to talk about myself, and I really feel like I have nothing to do with - my personality, you need to separate it from what you're hearing.”

REAX: Like you don't have to be interesting, the music is interesting?

T: Exactly. Look, I go out jogging every day. I go to the gym. You don't need to know that … it doesn't matter. Just by me saying this, I'm breaking hopefully some of the mystique that doesn't really exist. It's really been a lot of the press saying that we have this 'cultivated mystique,' but it was the press who cultivated the mystique for us, because they say we don't do interviews. But I've been doing so many interviews for this record. Because we never get offered interviews. Nobody ever cared. That's just the way it turned out. We don't talk about ourselves. We don't have blogs to talk about what color our shit is that day. Things just turned out that way. It's the same as the music. The way it seems that we're on drugs, and psychedelic.

Tobacco confirms he makes crazy pop songs, and is drug-free, and whether the psychedelic label is provided out of simplicity or the listener's subjective relationship, he credits the equipment and elements of older rock music as a contributing factor.

“The covers aren't exactly standard, and the instruments are a little older," he says. "But it's not - I can't really get upset, because I'm using instruments from the '70s, I'm using a lot of echo, a lot of effects associated with that stuff. The recording, at least up until this album the recording has always been pretty gritty. It totally makes sense. It's not psychedelic on purpose. It's just sort of the way it turned out.”

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