by Mandy McGee
photos by Krys Fox
Sxip Shirey is a composer/producer and performer who is based out of Brooklyn, NYC. His diverse career includes creating music for circuses (Bindelstiff Family Circus, Anti-Gravity, LIMBO), playing in a gypsy/tango/klezmer punk band (Luminescent Orchestrii), writing for film (Neil Gaiman’s Statuesque, Douglass Keeve’s Hotel Gramercy Park, Stoya’s Graphic Depictions) and as a touring solo artist (including support act for Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls).
Before the release of his upcoming album, A Bottle of Whiskey and a Handful of Bees, (January 13th on VIA Records), Shirey was kind enough to do a Q&A with That Mag.
TM: What was your time like touring with LIMBO?
SS: Amazing. We toured all over. Nine months living in London and performing at The South Bank Center was a dream. I’d leave work and there would be the London Eye. We played in Sydney, Bogota and Edinburgh. It was great; 415 shows in two years and after I left the show kept going, it’s still going, but with Elyas Khan playing my role. I taught him to play harmonica for that. It spoils you. You are so used to having people fly through the air and big balls of fire when you’re playing your music, somehow just getting onstage with musicians that don’t do acrobatics seems tame.
TM: What are the pros and cons about touring as a solo musician versus a group of performers/musicians?
SS: Solo means more money. A group means shared labor. However, group personalities can clash. Solo, you have no one to blame but yourself. Solo means a lot of lonely moments, a good group is a good family.
TM: Was it your idea for putting together the LIMBO shows, or was it a collaboration?
SS: No, this show was directed by Scott Maidment of Strut & Fret Productions. He produced a show I was in years ago for the Adelaide Festival that went by the snappy title of “Rocket Jonny and Roxxane Rolls, Untimely, Tragic, Death Stunt Show” He then calls me years later and says, “Sxip, I’ve got this show…”
TM: It seems you collaborate with many musicians; what is that process like?
SS: It’s great. When I work with my crew, everyone is listening and everyone is servicing the art. It’s something director Katie Pearl told me years ago. “Service the art.” Take your ego out of it, it’s not about you, it’s about the art. Leave your shit at home, do the work, make the art happen. It’s a gift because you can leave your bullshit behind and be in the clear space of making good things happen. Everyone goes in open and excited and sees what happens. Everyone says yes to opportunity.
TM: After performing with LIMBO, have you picked up any side show act(s)?
SS: “Pick up”? You mean like at a bar? I do have some stories…I woke up in a bedroom filled with taxidermied mice in suits and hats once in London.
TM: What is your recording process?
SS: Right now I get the songs mostly done on the computer. I create as I travel. I create in hotel rooms, on top of red double decker buses, backstage, any place really. I then bring the rough tracks to my engineer and co-producer Don Godwin and we work the material so it sounds bigger and more fluid, adding live instruments or running digital sounds through analogue gear.
TM: How has your recording process changed over the many years of being a musician?
SS: I used to hate it. I hated being in the studio but then I shared a flat with Joe “Bass” DeJarnette. Joe was the bass player in the band The Wiyos when I met him. He’s also a recording engineer and over a two year period we made Sonic New York, my last album, in our living room. After that I liked being in the studio.
Also, I no longer try to capture what I did live. I let the studio be its own experience. That being said, I just recorded a half dozen slamming JANK tracks with Brian Viglione (Dresden Dolls) and Don Godwin and it’s close to being live so, maybe it’s just that I am learning to be in the studio environment better.
TM: Do you think there has been a negative or positive impact on your music since technology has changed from analog to digital and the fact everything can be so instant these days?
SS: Yeah, it sucks for musicians. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. There is less opportunity to make a career of it, but this is the way it is, you gotta just get on with it. That being said, there is great music being made by young musicians these days and it’s much easier for them to get it out there as a recorded medium.
TM: What gear do you use and what are your favorite pieces of gear?
SS: I love my resophonic guitar. Electronically, I love Synplant and Microtonic, both Sonic Charge products. I love how easy it is to sample in Ableton. I also have these fie large disc music boxes, with Christmas discs I play backwards. I play them all at the same time then play a lead line on melodica or bells over the top. My favorite thing is something I’ve only gotten to do twice. That is play my Lee Oscar harmonicas through a POG octave generator and then through a Leslie cabinet with both horn and barrel spinning. That sounds amazing. I am trying to find an excuse to buy a Leslie cabinet. They are very heavy.
TM: How do you go about inventing/modifying an object to use as an instrument?
SS: I mostly don’t invent things, I mostly just gaff tape shit together so that I can play everything at the same time. Or, I take a common object and coax musical sound out of it. Or I use pitch-shifter to change the quality of the instrument. .
The trick with creating sound from objects is to figure out what the object wants to do and what it doesn’t want to do. You try different things to pull sound from it and then you really listen. An object like a glass bowl with a marble really wants to do three distinctive things, a thunder tube, maybe about five different things and something like a tampon applicator you can make all kinds of sounds with. You then have a pallet of sounds with actions that make those sounds and, it’s like a dance or puppetry.
TM: You have your hands in many different artistic endeavors; do you have a favorite project and why?
SS: Right now my favorite project is the gauntlet. It’s two rows of a choir facing itself in pairs all standing on stools. The audience walks through it. It’s a choir you walk through. I am working with Choral Chameleon on this currently. The first Gauntlet I did was on the Highline in NYC as part of Make Music New York and I just did a big one in Norway for the 450th anniversary of the city of Fredrikstad. I worked with first year students from NTA (Norwegian Theater Academy), we had singers with flares singing from one old fortress to another over a river using megaphones with bell beats rising from the base of the stone wall we were standing on. It felt magic.
TM: How did you get into music/art? Were your parents artistic/creative and were they supportive of you being a musician?
SS: My parents just wanted their sons to be good people. They didn’t care what we did. I was always making sound. I banged on glasses in the kitchen. I would line up the wood we had cut out in the forest and play the pieces like a xylophone.
TM: Were you formally taught music or did you just pick it up?
SS: I was a very bad drummer through grade school and into high school. I took three years of piano lessons and was okay. I am a bit dyslexic but didn’t know it at the time and so learning wasn’t so easy for me in the conventional sense. I pushed through. In seventh grade there was this guy, Andy Stout, who showed me how to play the blues scale on an old electric piano in the band room. Suddenly I could play a tune! I realized if I made up the tune myself I could play it. So that’s how I’ve learned. I learn by composing and always challenging myself to compose something better. A lot of times I am reinventing the wheel, but somehow it’s all worked out. I didn’t go to music school, but now I would love to have time to do it.
TM: Why did you want to play many different instruments instead of sticking with one?
SS: I compose differently on different instruments and since I am mainly a composer this is a great way to find new paths.
TM: You teach and have done a TED Talk; what are your favorite moments of this?
SS: My favorite moment at TED was meeting Paul Stamets, who is a mushroom scientist. In his lecture he was talking about how the mycelia mass that connects the trees under the forest floor looks like a neural network. I said to him afterwards, “Do you think that the forest is thinking?!” “Yes,” he said.
At NTA (Norwegian Theatre Academy), my students always come up with something that blows me away, something where I go, “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?!” I love it when that happens.
TM: What or who inspires you to create?
SS: A need to connect to something greater.
TM: Who are some of your favorite composers, musicians, and bands from the past and present? What is on your playlist right now?
SS: Baby Dee is the greatest living song writer. Andrew WK and I have had our moment of Baby Dee bonding. Once you tap into what Dee is doing it’s amazing. Songs like “The Robin’s Tiny Throat” and “My Love Has Made a Fool of Me” exist someplace between art song, hymn and musical theater. They are amazing. Leonard Cohen wrote one Hallelujah; for me, Dee has written at least ten of them.
I also love Elyas Khan—used to be a New York artist and now lives in Berlin. I love his music. He’s my Radiohead. I am glad that most of my musical heroes are friends of mine also.
I also like watching Shaun Wasabi videos. Arvo Pärt makes the most perfect music, Phil Kline’s “Unsilent Night” is the most amazing public contemporary piece of music to experience live, The Bowed Piano Ensemble is amazing. I’m also a big fan of the DIY brass band scene in the US. It’s amazing. It’s the most punk thing there is right now. I just saw the Dresden Dolls in concert after many years and it was really amazing the power they create between two instruments.
TM: What are the earliest memories of music or art that you have?
SS: Apparently I was kicking in the womb every time my parents would put on John Fahey’s album The Transmogrification of Blind Joe Death. I remember listening to that album as a child. It’s sort of folk guitar meets 20th century dissonance. Years later I am the same type of musician really. A folk musician who easily works in 20th century dissonance.
TM: Is there a particular song or musical passage that never fails to move you emotionally?
SS: Look up “My Love Has Made A Fool Of Me” by Baby Dee on YouTube. Find the video that shows the lyrics. “And I will climb for kisses everyday, in such a painless rush, that every other rose will blush and say, oh love what foolery, oh love what foolery, my love has made a fool of me.” Perfect.
TM: What are your plans going into 2017?
SS: I have two albums in the works- a messy rocking JANK album and an electronic album. I want to finish them and I need to start touring again. I am flying back to Australia for the next installment of LIMBO called LIMBO UNHINGED. I am not going to be in the show but I am supplying all the music. I am getting ready to do a MASSIVE choral Gauntlet in Madison Square Park. I am very excited by this.
I am excited to see how this new album does out in the world.
Sxip Shirey’s album release party takes place on January 9th at National Sawdust in NYC with special guests Rhiannon Giddens, Xavier, Dessa, and Choral Chameleon.
