Interview - Javelin (New York, NY; Winter 2010)

A few months ago, a bouncy lo-fi EP caught my ears, courtesy of a genre-bending duo by the name of Javelin. George Langford and Tom Van Buskirk have been making music together since they were young—they are cousins, after all—but have cranked it into high gear recently, touring with The Very Best and Yeasayer. As they prepare to drop a new full-length LP at the end of April, George took some time to talk to Melophobe about who exactly Javelin is and what exactly it is they do.

Chris Barth for melophobe: I guess just to start out with, how did you and Tom meet, and when did you guys start playing music together?

George Langford: Tom and I are maternal cousins, and we kinda grew up together, we spent a lot of time together in childhood, like every summer. I’m two years older and we both kind of grew up in musical households. Tom’s mom is actually a music teacher. And we kind of just grew up together for part of the year every year, and we started playing music together when we were teenagers, off and on. We really got it more together in around 2004 or 2005, when we were both in Providence. Tom is from Providence and I came to live there with him.

melophobe: Did you start out as Javelin at that point, or did the name come along later?

GL: We didn’t have a name for a long time, and then that name was sort of bestowed on us by my sister, sort of arbitrarily.

melophobe: Nice, I like that. And growing up were you always messing around with tape decks and stuff like that, or were you more of a guitar/drum traditional band? What sort of stuff were you playing?

GL: I was a guitar player for, well I’d consider myself a guitar player. I played guitar for about twenty years. As a teenager I was really into jazz guitar and blues. I had a four-track, but I was making very different music. I was really into slide guitar and Ry Cooder and stuff like that. And at the same time, Tom had a four-track and he was really into Beastie Boys, but also classical music. He’d play Bach Fugues on a Casio over drum loops.

Then I started dabbling in drums, and both of us became pretty good multi-instrumentalists. But we never really . . . we had very specific tastes, I guess I should say. And we jived with each other, but we couldn’t really find anybody else at the time who we thought was on the same page, so it was always sort of a problem solving thing. Like, “OK, how do we make music with just us?”

melophobe: It’s funny that you mention those things because I feel like your music doesn’t really fit into a tidy box. You can’t really say that you’re in one genre or another. So maybe having some Ry Cooder and Beastie Boys mixing is pretty accurate.

GL: Haha, yeah.

melophobe: So today I was watching the video that you guys did with XLR8R, where you went to thrift stores and made a cassette collage, and one of you guys made a comment about the nostalgia that comes along with the sonic degradation of cassette tapes and what happens when you’re drawing off of cassettes and other recorded music to make music. And I thought that was really interesting. Would you consider your music, as Javelin, to be nostalgic?

GL: Well I think each song is sort of an exercise in a production aesthetic. We like to try on different hats and different sonic . . . landscapes, I guess? Just different styles of making a sound. So some of those might be like nostalgic ‘80s-sounding things, and I guess a lot of the songs that have caught people’s ears recently are some of the more ‘80s-sounding stuff and we’re starting to be labeled as an ‘80s band, but we’re also into all eras. And we’re both fascinated by the idea of an alternative history. Like imagining a time period, say in the late ‘70s, and imagining what that period of music would have sounded like if, for example, Jimi Hendrix hadn’t died. What would that have done to disco music? And then we make a song that sounds like that invented era that we just thought of.

So I guess some of it is nostalgic, but we try to aim for a history that didn’t exist.

melophobe: Sure. Sort of more revisionist than nostalgic.

GL: Yeah, I’d say that’s accurate.

melophobe: What sort of equipment do you use these days when you’re recording?

GL: It’s a mixture of all different things. The MPC’s continue to be our main tools—we only use computers for recording onto them. But we also use tape machines, reel-to-reel decks, and cassette multi-tracks. Basically whatever is called for.

melophobe: And do you take most of that stuff on the road with you, or do you strip it down to the essentials when you’re touring?

GL: Yeah, we strip it way down when we’re touring. We perform with just the two samplers, and then we have a drum pad thing, Tom’s vocal effects, a synth, and I also play some live percussion stuff like a floor tom and cymbals.

melophobe: What’s it like transferring that music from studio to stage? Do you like that process? Is it difficult?

GL: It’s difficult but I enjoy it. It’s a challenge—I’ve said this before, but it’s kind of like taking something that’s two-dimensional and making it three-dimensional and breathing life into it. It can be really fun. Some of the songs are easy to do that with and others are more difficult. The one thing that ends up happening first off is that we try to bring the party, because it’s so stripped down that you might as well be as psyched as possible. But that tends to cast aside a lot of our music that isn’t crazy party music, so we end up playing . . . when we perform it’s only one aspect of ourselves.

melophobe: One of those sonic landscapes that you were talking about.

GL: Yeah, it’s like a whole other world that we just can’t really do yet. We haven’t figured that out yet.

melophobe: I know at least for a little while you were transmitting your show to boomboxes. Are you still doing that?

GL: Yeah—it’s kind of an unruly process, but yeah. We have a transmitter, and we split the signal between the House PA and the transmitter, and we have a whole pile of boomboxes and they all tune in to that station.

Lately we decided that it all sounds better if we don’t send the entire mix through the boomboxes, but only, say, my drum machine sounds. Then we mic the guitar amp so the whole PA sounds a little fuzzier and a little more radio-y.

melophobe: Totally. And I feel like that kind of plays into what you were talking about with the party vibe, with everything coming at you from all angles.

GL: Definitely.

melophobe: We’re really excited to see you at some of the parties at SXSW when we send a couple people down. Are there any shows you’re particularly excited about?

GL: Oh man. We’re playing like 16 shows in four days, so I have actually no idea what we’re doing. I know on Wednesday we’re doing one show and this girl Dominique Young Unique is playing and I’m really excited about that. I really like her—she’s sort of a party rap girl from Florida. Super young, but has a really good vibe about her and I’m excited to check her out.

melophobe: Sixteen shows in four days is quite a schedule.

GL: Yeah, haha, I have no idea.

melophobe: And after that you’re headed out on tour with Yeasayer, right?

GL: Yeah, we actually just came back. We did the first leg of their Europe tour, we were in the UK with them. And then we’re going to join back up with them in DC for the first half of their US tour.

melophobe: How was Europe?

GL: It was good, it was really great. Definitely a good experience playing in larger venues. The English, and people in the UK in general, really understand the importance of sub-woofers, which is great. The soundsystems were just insane, they’re so good.

melophobe: I’ve heard that, that the soundsystems in the UK blow the US out of the water.

GL: I think they’ve been living this DJ culture a little longer than we have. Or it’s just more prevalent, so they understand what is needed.

So we were playing on big systems in big rooms to an appreciative audience who was very reserved. So they didn’t actually dance so much. But we were also playing really early in the evening, so there’s not a whole lot of liquor flowing to get salty British people to dance.

melophobe: Hopefully that won’t be the case at SXSW.

GL: I don’t think it’ll be a problem at all.

melophobe: You guys have a new album coming out soon. When is that happening?

GL: Yeah man! It’s slated for sometime in April, I think the 20th or 22nd. But that might change.

melophobe: And I’m sure you guys are excited about that.

GL: Ohh. So excited. It’s a mixture of old and new, and some of the older tracks have been very much transformed. But there’s a lot of material on there that we’ve kind of been sitting on for years, so I’m very excited for it to come out, to share it with the rest of the world.

melophobe: Any particular influences on the album? I guess if it’s been around for a long time . . . .

GL: Each track kind of has its own world of influences. The whole album is all over the place, so it was actually sort of hard to sequence it and decide what songs go where, because song-to-song it’s just such huge stylistic jumps.

melophobe: And you want to avoid sounding schizophrenic.

GL: Right. But I’m afraid that that’s our lot in life. So we might as well just appreciate it.

melophobe: Hey, go with it. It’s worked so far. Along those lines, if you had your absolute wish, what would the next five years look like for Javelin? Are you happy where you are, do you want to get bigger and go mainstream? Do you want to do something completely different?

GL: I’m pretty into what we’re doing now. I think I’d like to do some more production work for a wider array of people. And you know, just be able to support myself doing this and maybe saving a little money. Just making this into a stable thing and continuing to be able to make the music that we want to make without having to compromise, and hopefully making people happy in the process.

melophobe: A noble goal. Best of luck!

DOWNLOAD: Javelin - Lindsay Brohan (MP3) or Follow us for more Javelin MP3s (Twitter)

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