A LIVE BLOODY LIVE INTERVIEW WITH MOOEY MOOBAU
(by mooey moobau)

Q: So you did what?
A: Made a live album by cutting together all of my live shows so far. Well, most of them.

Q:You mean each song is from a different venue, a different concert?
A:Yes, but within each song there are also multiple performances trading off or going simultaneously. Most of them have about 8-12 different layers.

Q: Isn’t there a Frank Zappa album like that?
A: Not really. Zappa would blend live and studio takes a lot, but his stuff is always so civilized. Crass have some albums that are kind of similar, with spoken word parts cut into live tapes. But the closest thing is this one Grateful Dead album that John Oswald put together from decades of live bootlegs. I imagine that most live albums have some degree of this kind of thing, whether it’s studio post-production, or editing out embarrass- ing banter with the audience, or…

Q: Knowing you, yours is probably trying to preserve the mistakes.
A:Yes and no. There are some perfect blunders that I kept. But I did try to cut out anything that didn’t sound good. That left less than a complete song sometimes, so it all begged for some rewriting. It’s not so much a live album but more like a rewrite of the songs from scratch, using their live recordings as source material.

Q:You aren’t really rewriting the material, though. Wouldn’t people familiar with the studio versions immediately recognize them?
A: Probably, yeah. It’s definitely a companion piece – you can appreciate it better if you’ve heard the All Murmur Of Our Mothers’ Waters versions first. It makes the seams of the songs a little more transparent. So much of my stuff appears to be totally freeform at first, but if you’ve heard a few different live versions of one song then you start to see what’s common, and how wide the variation can be.

Q:Which is what you do in your live shows already, right? You make a point of reinterpreting and chopping things up every time?
A:Yeah, I’ve gotten into playing back little bits of studio recordings during my live sets, or digitally cutting up my live voice in realtime. You can hear that all over Live Bloody Live. Most people would probably be surprised how much of this record wasn’t edited at all – a lot of it is no different from how it sounded in the room, in front of human ears.

Q: Hearing it now, this album is really… I hate to use this word, but it’s actually really psychedelic.
A: I know! Isn’t it, though? Maybe a better word than psychedelic is… impressionistic? In the past I’ve always gotten too cerebral about these cut-up things, but this time it just felt completely intuitive! And irrational!

CD • Amazon • iTunes • FINA • Waxpoetics
(double album! includes Live Bloody Live and Mooey Moobau’s studio record, which the Deli Magazine called “silly, frustrating, complex, and refreshingly innovative“.

:: permalink