Parts & Labor

Parts & Labor is BJ, Dan, and Christopher. 

In Brooklyn people call them a "pop-punk" band.  Elsewhere, they're considered much "brighter and glitchier."

They're new album Mapmaker drops in May.



Chief Magazine: You guys just got back from a tour that lasted a couple of weeks?

BJ: It was kind of a crazy one. It was two and a half weeks, but that took us to Texas, Chicago and then back. We had a lot of long drives but we ended up playing everywhere from down the east coast and through the south to Houston and Austin. Then we came back up through the Midwest to Chicago.

Dan: It was a good time. It was December, but it wasn’t too cold and shitty, except for when our heater stopped working.

BJ: It was weird; the weather was all fucked up. We got down to the south in Houston and it was like, forty degrees. Then a cold spell went though and we were driving into these blizzards in the Midwest, but they had cleared out just a couple of days before we got there.

Christopher: I wasn’t ready for Chicago either. I didn’t know it was going to be that cold when we got up there. I had a sweatshirt and, like, one mitten.

BJ: Chris is from Florida and he still tours like he’s never done it before.

Christopher: I was the only one to bring a coat to Europe, though.

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That was over the summer, the European tour?

BJ: That was last October.

Dan: We were back for two weeks and then we did the trip with Todd.

BJ: It was more like three, because we were here from the beginning of November through Thanksgiving.

Was it the first time in Europe for you guys?

Christopher: We went to the UK in July for about a week and a half.

What was the highlight?

Christopher: Shit, man, I don’t even know, It was awesome. We did two shows with Japanther and The Good Good in Germany, which were really awesome just because they were good shows.  You get to go to some place you’ve never been and have all of your friends there. A couple of our friends came along and met up with us, too. We played one show with Sonic Boom from Spacemen Three, which is kind of cool because I’m way into that band. It was them and Clinic, which is kind of crazy.

Dan: We played on two boats.

For people on the boat, or people on the shore?

Christopher: No, they were boat shows.

BJ: There were these clubs inside of the boats. One in Switzerland and the other in England. We also had one of the longest trips between shows in the band’s history. We played Stockholm, Sweden and then we had to play Dresden, Germany the next night which entailed packing up as soon as we finished playing at around midnight in Stockholm, driving about seven hours all night to catch a seven am ferry in the south of Sweden to Germany, which was about a six hour ferry ride, and then driving all day in Germany and making it to the club just in time for sound check. It was a twenty hour trip total.

Do you guys book your own gigs, or do you have somebody doing it for you?

BJ: We were mostly booked by an agent who’s centered in Belgium. But the way they do it in Europe as opposed to the U.S. where a booking agent will book the whole tour, they do it by regions. So we’ll get passed over from a guy who books shows in Germany, to a guy who books shows in Italy and vice versa, they’ll give him bands that they’re sending around. He did the vast majority of it. There were a couple of shows that we booked on our own just to fill in some holes through various DIY contacts. That’s a new thing for us, it’s one of the first tours we’ve had booked by a proper booking agent.

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So what’s next?

Dan: We have a new record coming out in May, and we’re going to do a tour in April with this band Adult and Eraserata for ten of the shows or something like that. But until then, I don’t know. Maybe plan a couple of shows around town and some short trips.

BJ: Work on recording projects. The new record comes out in May. It’s called Mapmaker. Then we’ll probably be touring again in the summer for that.

So for the time being, you guys are going to stick around?

BJ: We have a couple of weekend trips. We’re playing at Vasser with Oneida and Ghengis Tron in a few weeks. Dan and I are both working on solo projects at home and doing a lot of home recording. We’ve got a lot of seven inch and Parts and Labor compilation tracks, so we’re working on finishing those.

Dan: BJ and I run a label called Cardboard Records and we’re working on a couple of things including a big ol’ compilation with a lot of bands.

BJ: Originally it was just going to be one CD and all of our friends in New York, and then we started talking and we were like, “Well, we know all these other awesome bands from around the country, so let’s make two CDs!”

Dan: There was talk of three CD’s. It’s going to be a big cluster-fuck scene report.

BJ: Oneida, Japanther, USA Is A Monster, Matt and Kim, Big A Little A, Gowns, tons. A bunch of British bands that we’re friends with like Infants and Action Beat.

So how does that process work, with the record label? That’s kind of a separate thing from making the music. Compiling it and distributing it…

BJ: It is a totally separate thing, but we’re going to end up putting out the bands that we meet playing shows as Parts and Labor. So all our first releases have been bands that we’ve met just from playing with them. For instance, we’re doing the Pterodactyl record, we met those guys on tour. Lots of crossover.

I understand that you do most of the album artwork as well?

BJ: Yeah, almost all of the album artwork I’ve done.

Are you doing album artwork for Cardboard Records?

BJ: I did the artwork for the Last Parts & Labor album, Stay Afraid, but otherwise the bands have been doing their own artwork. I’ll probably end up doing the artwork for this compilation that we’re doing. We just started putting out CDs. We put one out of this band Gowns from San Francisco, and we have the compilation. But we’re going to try and sort of unify the aesthetic so all of the CDs have a similar layout. We have some mild direction that we give people, sort of a framework to work in, but otherwise they’re doing their own artwork.

So the record company just came out of playing gigs with these other bands that you thought were really great?

BJ: It’s funny to hear it called a company.

Dan: It’s totally just wanting to support other bands that we meet, and are awesome who maybe need help figuring out how to distribute their record. In a lot of ways it feels like some of these bands are actually doing us a favor by letting us put out their records because they’re so fucking good. This Gowns record is going to be awesome.

BJ: It also gives us another outlet. For example, we did a split with Big A Little a. We put that thing together in about a month. We recorded a track, got a track from them, sent it to the plant and had it back in time for this tour we were doing. It allows us to have complete control over the process from the beginning. The records we put on Jagjaguwar are a long process. We have to supply our master and our artwork almost six months before the record is set to come out. Just because of the long bureaucratic promotions machine, they have to send it out to distribution, all the paperwork has to go through the appropriate channels. It just takes a while. It’s nicer to have something a little bit closer to the ground I guess.

Where’s Mapmaker in that whole machine right now?

BJ: It’s coming out on Jagjaguwar Records and Brah. Jagjaguwar Records is a label based in Indiana and Brah is an imprint run by Oneida. Brah is basically curated by Oneida, but it’s promoted by Jagjaguwar.

Dan: We have the finished CD and they’re sending it out to press now. It was weird last year when we put out Stay Afraid, it was the first time we dealt with having a finished copy of our CD like three months before we could sell it at shows.

BJ: And nearly a year after we had recorded. But this is a little bit quicker. We recorded Mapmaker last September so it will be about half a year by the time it’s released.

Dan: The upside of that is that stores seem to have it.

BJ: The downside is by the time the record comes out you’re really sick of the songs.

How did Parts & Labor come about, how did you guys meet?

Dan: Me and BJ met because we were working at The Knitting Factory. Then we did a bunch of half-assed noise improv, fucking around types of things for a while and then started the band in 2002. I had been doing some solo electronic stuff, like, early versions of the songs, and then BJ and this dude Jim Sykes played drums for the first six months of the band. Chris, we met at a show.

Christopher: BJ threw this big street party in the alleyway of his apartment building, which was maybe the second week I was in New York, and Lightning Bolt played, and then these guys played. So I came up to them like a big fan boy: “Oh my god! You guys are so good!” Then I just ended up seeing them at shows all the time until they needed a drummer about two years later.

So you moved to New York from…

Christopher: Florida.

Where are the rest of you from originally?

BJ: I’m from Connecticut originally.

Dan: Massachussetts.

Do you guys have day jobs?

BJ: I build web pages. I built the Parts and Labor website and the Cardboard records website.

How’d you make the Parts and Labor website with all the flashy, psychedelic stuff?

BJ: To get a little nerdy with you, there’s no flash animation on our website and I’m very proud of that. It’s a couple of animated gif's on top of eachother.

The visual is very close to the music you’re putting out, how does that mix together for you guys?

Dan: Glitchy and bright meets glitchy and bright.

BJ: It was kind of a long development with the artwork, I hadn’t done very much visual art before Parts & Labor. I drew when I was a kid, but I’d never done something for someone else. I guess I was just trying to come up with visual ways of representing our sound.

Christopher: Half of the people who experience it say, “Wow, that’s really pretty.” And the other half just think it’s awful.

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In the early stages did you guys ever play any gigs where people were just not getting it?

[Burst of laughter.]

BJ: There was this one in San Francisco with this band The Lovemakers, a really dancy band who played the show and only had T-shirts for sale, no CDs which is pretty remarkable.

Dan: They did Smith’s covers and things like that.

BJ: We didn’t go over too well there.

Christopher: It was in an art gallery where every note we played was like 70 decibels louder than it should have been because it was bouncing off the gallery walls.

And then you come home to Brooklyn and people rock out, right?

Christopher: It’s like, “Hey, we know these people!”

BJ: People call us a pop-punk band here.

Dan: Here there’s a whole scene of bands with noisy keyboards and pop shit with loud drums.

BJ: Every new pandering indie band that comes up has keyboards now. That’s only come about in the last three or four years. When we started we were just like, “Wow, we’re going to have keyboards and be a noisy punk band!”

Dan: You go out to the Midwest and kids are like, “My favorite band is Taking Back Sunday and I just made this noise box to play in my band!” Also part of the thinking around the comp is to put shit like us, Japanther, Oneida, and Matt and Kim, and USA Is A Monster in a row. There will actually be some cohesive shit going on where everybody’s feeding off of eacother.

Is that cohesiveness something you guys think about when you’re putting the comp together, or more of just a “thumbs up, thumbs down kind of thing?”

BJ: The comp’s going to be kind of a hodgepodge overall, there’s going to be a lot of tracks on it once we actually get everything in, you slacker bands. I think the cohesiveness is just going to be when we have all the bands next to eachother. There are bands who’re going to stick out and be a little weirder but we love what they’re doing anyway. There’s going to be some sort of common thread. Most of them have slept on my floor.

When you guys were kids were you always making noise, taking things apart and putting them back together?

Dan: I was in a noise band in high school. I played mostly bass, but there was a remote control car joystick rigged into my shit, that kind of stuff. We were really into hardcore shit.

Christopher: I was far less cool. I had the alternative music taste in Port Charlotte, Florida which meant that I listened to the Minutemen when I wasn’t listening to Rage Against the Machine. I liked a lot of hip-hop too. My parents were happy that I wasn’t in trouble or into drugs because I was always in my room listening to records or playing video games getting fatter and fatter every day.

Dan: I was actually thinking about a formative noise experience that I had forgotten about today. My dad used to have this basketball game each year where all his buddies would come and sit around and drink beer and play basketball badly. When I first started playing guitar he asked me to play the national anthem at the beginning of his basketball game “like Jimi Hendrix!” I had this shitty $150 guitar that I had bought at the mall, and I took the wammy bar off and did the whole Sonic Youth scraping the pickups thing for like ten minutes in the middle of the national anthem.

BJ: I took piano lessons when I was a kid. My first instrument was the saxophone, I played it for years and was really into jazz growing up. I was also thinking about a formative noise experience when I was a kid. I set up with my brother two tape recorders and we did this whole time-travel skit where we recorded all of the dinosaur noises first, put that tape in my parents' stereo and cranked it, then recorded ourselves running away from the dinosaurs into this really low-budget multi-tracking thing. I used to have all of these audio LPs. I was really into The Muppets, I had this He-Man record that was an audio play that came with a book. It had some goofy sound to turn the page. I remember that’s where I learned the word “molecule.”

Christopher: The biggest problem with those tapes you make as kids is that when you hit about twelve years old and you find them in your closet, you’re like, “Oh my god, this is so embarrassing, I’m going to destroy it.” And then six years later you wish you still had it. My friend and I made a whole tape of rap songs. But the thing is, there was no one way to make the beats so we had to do them all differently. There’d be one where we’d take a record and scratch it and another one where we were hitting boxes and another one where we’re playing those toy guitars.

So were you guys like, making people mix tapes?

Christopher: We were in England and we were hanging out in this dude’s attic and someone was just like, “Make me a mix tape!” So I started making people mix tapes all night. I’m a junkie.

BJ: I had mix tapes for myself, but never really traded them with my friends or anything. It was more of just something I put together to listen to while I delivered pizzas in high school.

Christopher: I live to force my opinions on people.

Dan: I have two very formative indie-punk mix tapes somewhere from high school with like Born Against and The Swirlies.

So last year you guys released an instrumental album, but Mapmaker has vocals?

BJ: Yup. On every song.

Christopher: The instrumental one was a part of a series of experimental EPs that we’re doing called Escapers where we sort of flirt with different ideas and different textures from our regular records.

BJ: Doing things that we do on our own and in practice that don’t really fit well on just a Parts & Labor album. Our music is pretty diverse and kind of goes all over the place as it is, and we want to focus for the main album and save the experimental stuff for other releases.

Dan: The first Escapers is basically beats and noise. Each of us started two tracks at home on our computer then passed the two tracks to the next person and then to the next person and then you get it back. So there’s six tracks where Chris did most of the beats and layered different noises. Some of it’s more sprawling, ambient Psych-shit and some of it’s hard, noisy beats.

So do you just fuck around with noise and make a good loop and hold on to it, or is it more planned out?

BJ: Both of those things. The two tracks that I started off with, one of them was just based around this beat that I was recording. I made a few loops, then edited it down a little bit, and it’s this gross sound that sounds kind of like a robot chewing.

Dan: What was cool about that was not thinking about how we were going to do it live, but just, “I’m going to make something that sounds cool.” A lot of my shit, I would just get a beat from somebody, take my guitar amp, go out into some pedals, plug it back into itself so it was feeding back and making all of these noises and just improve over it a couple of times and then pick out sounds that were cool and that I could make a melody out of.

BJ: It’s a lot of stuff that we can’t re-create without samplers and we don’t want to get into that. A lot of the stuff on the albums, we’re very conscientious about performing it live. Dan and I have these tables full of electronics and guitars and we’re kind of switching back and forth between these things.

Do you guys ever improv live?

Dan: Never. That’s kind of why we did that.

BJ: The only time we improvise is if something breaks live. So there’s more and more improvisation as our equipment gets older and we tour more.

What were you listening to when you first started playing this sort of stuff?

BJ: A lot of the Boredoms. Sonic Youth, Fugazi.

Dan: One of the lesser known one’s is this band Amsterchrist from LA which I’m really into. He does a lot of folk songs, only with homemade electronics.

Christopher: As far as my beats go, I’m influenced by a lot of hip-hop and punk. In high school I got kicked out of marching band so I joined a local punk band where I had to learn to play really fast beats.

What do you guys think of the people today who pretty much get up there and dance or rap along to a recorded beat?

BJ: Power to ‘em man, they’re just smarter than us. They’re going to have a lot less back problems than we’re going to have in fifty years. I have to have live instruments, when I’m performing and when I’m an audience member. But there’s something nice about the one man band, and the portability of it.

Dan: The odds are that the more people you have on stage, there’s going to be at least one thing that the people in the audience will like. But if there’s only one guy, you’re putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Are your tours getting easier over the years?

Dan: Oh yeah, they sort of jumped up in easiness a lot in the last six months.

BJ: Pretty much since we put out Stay Afraid and being on a label that really supported us and got us on college radio.

Dan: we’ve done some legwork too. We’ve done six-month-long national tours.

BJ: In a lot of the cities we play more in the small clubs as opposed to the DIY art spaces that we used to play in.

Dan: Partially because they all get closed down after a couple of years.

BJ: Another thing though, is that a lot of the people who came to see you in those art spaces don’t necessarily come with you when you move on to the clubs.

Any last words?

Dan: Buy the Ecstatic Sunshine record, it’s really good.

Christopher: Buy the Big Business record, it’s really good.

BJ: Don’t buy things it’s really bad.

Downloads

agreatdivide.mp3
voltage.mp3
endlessairshow.mp3

Websites

www.partsandlabor.net
www.myspace.com/partsandlabor

Photos

Tod Seelie

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