Speak Onion performing at the Charleston. Photo by Peter Schafer.
Speak Onion is a “drum ‘n’ noise” project by Queens-based musician Dan Abatemarco. Its latest release, Metabolor, (available as a free download here) is a full-length deluge of battered beats and sharp hooks pushed to the frayed ends of sanity. The first Speak Onion recording on Immigrant Breast Nest, it brings discipline to noise and buries any nerdy little tweaks in massive conflagrations of sonic entropy. Dan engaged Chief in digital dialogue just a few days after playing mad-scientist with weird noises in the Hamptons.
Chief: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Aren’t you currently working as a programmer?
Speak Onion: No, actually I’m a noise-control engineer by day. IRONY!
Chief: Quite! You seem to lose almost all control over noise when Speak Onion takes over! I mean that in the best way, of course.
Speak Onion: Yeah, that’s about right. Have to let it out.
Chief: When did you start composing and performing as Speak Onion?
Speak Onion: I got my first sampler and started doing electronic music in 1999, but I started using the name Speak Onion in early 2005 because I changed my style pretty drastically. Since then my style has probably changed even more drastically, but I keep the name because I like it and people know it.
Chief: That means you were creating electronic music while playing bass for the grindcore band Neurolytic Collapse. How did having both projects affect each one?
Speak Onion: Yeah, interestingly NC and SO started at basically the same time and I made a pretty conscious effort to keep them separate stylistically. Two sides of one fast, aggressive coin. Logistically they helped each other, as connections I made with one project were useful to the other in terms of getting shows and promoting and stuff. There’s a good amount of crossover between the two styles. I was sad to see Neurolytic Collapse end when Chris [the guitar player] moved away, but we had come a long way and done a bunch of cool stuff, so that was awesome.
Chief: Hopefully you guys will eventually work together again.
Speak Onion: Yeah, it could happen. I’m friends with those dudes for life.
Chief: What was the original stylistic approach for your electronic stuff? Did the change have anything to do with your more metal-based work?
Speak Onion: No, the change had more to do with figuring out what the hell I was doing. :) Once I really learned how to produce music better and get better control over my sound, I was able to do what I wanted and thus come up with a different style. And then the major stylistic shift that came more recently since I’ve been using the name, Speak Onion was when I started getting more into the noisy stuff and feedback loops and whatnot.
Chief: That’s interesting. I’d expect the opposite, since that means you developed into greater chaos, in a way.
Speak Onion: Yeah, I guess I’d say that learning how to really control the sound led me to be comfortable enough to get that chaotic.
Chief: The “chaos” is always well-balanced, however. How do you arrive at a balance of rhythm, noise, and hooks? Is there a tension in the process of integrating the nearly antithetical elements of Speak Onion?
Speak Onion: I have my beats and loops and I have my mixer with the feedback loops and I play with them and turn stuff up and turn stuff down until it sounds good to me. The tension is there, it’s how I feel like I keep it interesting, I guess. You can only hear a breakbeat loop so many times before you’re sick of it.
Chief: (laughs) I hear you. As dark as your melodies tend to be, I bet you have a synthpop past you’d like to keep buried, much like Ministry. You don’t have to answer to that, if you don’t want to…
Speak Onion: Oh SHIT! My version of With Sympathy, right? No, my past is more like bad industrial, actually. And the original Speak Onion stuff was kind of weak/lame breakcore. It’s all good. I like going through changes and doing new stuff. That’s the only way to find stuff that works.
Chief: I’m sure your gear changes as well, but what kind of a setup do you use to compose tracks?
Speak Onion: Uh oh. This could be the entire rest of the interview. I am a serial gear buyer/seller and I’ve gone through a ton of different stuff. The heart of my “studio” setup is my laptop with Ableton Live. That’s what I use for beats and loops. Then there’s my mixer and pedals, which do my feedback loops and noisier processing tasks. I am particularly addicted to resonant filters, so I have a big arsenal of those. Plus I have my bass which I sometimes use. I actually didn’t play any bass on Metabolor, but I hope to play it more on upcoming Speak Onion stuff. And for live performance, I run beats/loops from my iPhone using the Beatmaker app, with the same mixer and a rotating cast of pedals.
One manifestation of the ever-changing Speak Onion live performance rig.
Chief: Sounds like a versatile hookup. How long are you comfortable with a setup before creative demands require a few changes?
Speak Onion: Well, I change pedals for every track or every show. I’m constantly buying/selling/building pedals. And then I’ll generally make some other big changes for each release. For instance, I just got a Dave Smith Evolver to use as part of my breakbeat processing rig, and I’m hoping that will inspire a new style of working with breakbeats.
Chief: How does your technological expertise affect your music?
Speak Onion: For what I do, it’s really important. My style demands much more production competence than compositional competence. It’s all about timbre and texture for what I do, so I have to understand signals and how to create and process them to make it sound the way I want. And also I build a lot of the pedals that I use, and even some little mini-synths and also do some light circuit-bending, so really the tech. stuff is as important as music to me.
Chief: That kind of techno-intimacy is pretty hard to come by in a lot of contemporary electronic music. I remember reading about Aphex Twin’s setup, full of mysterious custom gear that he’d keep secret. What do you think about software synths and other less-demanding instruments?
Speak Onion: I use plenty of software synths. They can do stuff that I can’t do otherwise. If I could program better I’d love to make my own. I like the gear I use to be very “open” and leave it very much up to the operator to make it do something cool. That way, it’s really open to what I can come up with, so I end up with stuff that sounds distinctly like Speak Onion. And I don’t get why people keep their gear secret. I love talking about what I use and can do it at length.
Chief: I agree. That kind of secrecy seems to imply creative insecurity. How do you feel you fit within the electronic music scene, or even the larger cultural context?
Speak Onion: Dang, that’s heavy. I suppose I fit somewhere between the really aggressive electronic scene of like breakcore and hardcore (speedcore?) on the one hand and harsh noise on the other. I think I’ve been more embraced by electronic music than noise or experimental. I sometimes wish I could get down with like some industrial or rhythmic noise or power noise shows, but I don’t really know any way into that scene. I think those acts play at like goth parties or something? I want to do that. I think. I don’t even know if that’s correct or a real thing. This limbo between scenes is pretty much what led me to want to create my own scene and set up my own shows and even to work on creating Immigrant Breast Nest.
Chief: How has founding Immigrant Breast Nest influenced your music?
Speak Onion: It hasn’t influenced the music itself at all.
Chief: So it’s pretty much the formal organization of a creative scene you already helped to get started.
Speak Onion: Well, sort of. I.B.N. was something that David (David B. Applegate) and I decided to create because we had a lot of music we were making divided between different projects, and thought it would be best to give those projects a home from which to operate. It’s helped because any publicity that any act on I.B.N. gets is publicity for the whole group. We had been doing shows before, but now we can put “I.B.N. presents” on the flyer and it promotes I.B.N. as a whole. We just want to put our stuff out there for people, and connect with anyone who would dig it.
Chief: It’s definitely exciting to see I.B.N. making its mark as a definitive entity. I really enjoyed the label launch party and look forward to the label’s future output and events. I understand you collaborated in some musical football in the Hamptons over the Memorial Day weekend. The resulting recording is a mixture of gritty and fluid textures. How was that experience?
Speak Onion: I assume you’re referring to Thermometerometer’s Oceanjam?
Chief: Yes.
Speak Onion: Thermometer meter [T-MOM] is the experimental “band” that I have with David, which kind of led to creating I.B.N., and we decided to follow up our track Dunejam (from our record Who Measures The Measurers), which we made by taking some battery powered gear into some sand dunes and jamming for a while, with an “oceanjam” where I would use a contact mic attached to a ball floating in the ocean as a sound source for some fx processing, and David would jam with a battery-powered synth. It was definitely experimental. It didn’t come out sounding quite as good as what we’re used to doing, but as any good experiment, it taught us something, and we’re going to take the lessons learned and do it again. That kind of thing is what T-MOM is all about, just trying different ways to make weird sounds. We’re going to change up the way that T-MOM releases music, and go to more of an “episode” model rather than a “release” or “record” model. We plan to regularly post short pieces of music that are more live and improvisational on the I.B.N. website with lots of documentation so you get an idea of our process. We’ll also do more formal, polished releases like “Who measures. . .” but the episodes will augment that and hopefully be interesting for anyone who digs our stuff.
Thermometerometer’s Oceanjam setup.
Chief: You’ve really set up a great way of maintaining stylistic freedom while keeping everything grounded. That’s something you do in individual projects as well as through I.B.N. as a whole. Speaking of styles, did you coin the term “drum ‘n’ noise”? It’s a very apt name for Speak Onion’s approach.
Speak Onion: I don’t think I coined it, but I’m trying to blow it up. It’s a quick/easy/accurate way to describe my sound.
Chief: What’s next for Speak Onion?
Speak Onion: The first thing coming up for me is a collaboration with good friend, Mercy Choir, over at Dead Language Records. Mercy Choir is a very quirky psychedelic folk act, and we decided to get together on a release, where I would produce some of his tracks in a very active and heavy-handed way. That’s almost complete, and will be available shortly. Soon after that, will be my split with my main man, Xrin Arms. We’ll be doing a split CD together, which is something that we’ve wanted to do for a long time after playing tons of shows together and touring together last year. We’ll be doing a release party for that on July 31 at Coco66 along with tons of other great hard electronic acts. It will be an awesome night. Actually, I have a bunch of shows coming up this summer. I love playing shows. I’m playing at Wreck Room in Brooklyn on June 20, The Tank in Manhattan on July 3, Coco66 in Brooklyn on July 31 like I said, and Goodby Blue Monday in Brooklyn on August 13. That’s my summer show schedule so far. I’m really looking forward to it. Plus my experimental dance project with Danita Shaheen, Clairaudient, will be performing Solar Powered Dance festival July 23, 24, and 25 at Stuyvesant Cove Park along the East River. We’re really excited about that. Generally, anyone who wants to know what Speak Onion is up to should check http://www.immigrantbreastnest.com. That’s the best way to keep up with me.
Chief: Sounds exciting! I have one final question. If onions could speak, what would they say about your music?
Speak Onion: “This music makes me want to be in a delicious marinara sauce. Maybe with a nice piece of fish.”
Chief: Beautiful. Thanks so much for taking the time to provide insight into the many layers of your world.
Speak Onion: Thank you for taking an interest! We want to spread the message of I.B.N. and Speak Onion to the 5 boroughs of NYC, and maybe even beyond!
Websites:
Speak Onion on MySpace
Immigrant Breast Nest
Dead Language Records
David B. Applegate (T-MOM)
Xrin Arms
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