This is a re-post of my August 2006 interview with Chad VanGaalen. I remember calling Chad up just before the release of his second album, Skelliconnection. We talked a lot about his recording process, building homemade instruments, and his endless backlog of unreleased songs. Chad released Soft Airplane on Sub Pop last year and on August 11th Flemish Eye will release the debut from his alias Black Mold.
Hugh Miller: Who was the first person who encouraged you to release your music?
Chad VanGaalen: I was putting out tapes and CDRs independently for a long time by myself. Ian Russell, the guy that runs Flemish Eye [VanGaalen’s label in Canada], the label that put Infiniheart out originally, was probably the first person that was seriously interested in putting anything out.
H: Is Flemish Eye putting out Skelliconnection in Canada as well?
C: Yeah, that was part of the deal I made with Sub Pop.
H: Did you have any musical training for any of the instruments you play, or are you completely self-taught?
C: Everything is self-taught beyond watching people play and listening to CDs and learning from that.
H: How many days out of a week are you in your basement making songs?
C: I’m pretty much down there every day. If it’s not to practice stuff, then to write. I don’t have any sort of schedule. I’ve been building a half-pipe in my backyard for the last week, so that’s been consuming a lot of my time. I’ve been building that in the day and then at night I’ll go into the basement when it’s cooler in the house.
H: Every article that I read on you says that you have hundreds of songs that haven’t been released. How big is this collection of unreleased music that you have?
C: It’s pretty big. It’s probably like ten suitcases full of CDs. Not all of it is good. I have a lot of side projects that I haven’t had the time to expose. I do a lot of hip-hop and a lot of experimental stuff. People only know the song-oriented part of me, which is just what became popular. There’s hundreds and hundreds of songs out there. I’m sure they’re floating around because I was passing out CDRs. In the next couple months, I’m going to have a website where I can put a song a day up. People have been bugging me about that. They’re like, “Where are all these other fucking songs?” I really want to get them out there.
H: Skelliconnection comes out next week, but it leaked online about a month and a half ago. When it leaked, the songs were in a completely different order than they are on the official release. Was that a reaction to the leak, or did you just feel like changing the tracklisting?
C: I felt like I just put out the biggest piece of shit. I was really bummed out about the album. I thought it was total cheese, but my girlfriend said it was because the song order was all crazy. She ended up doing a new song order, so I think it brought more of a mellow flow to the album. It makes sense more than what I originally had it as.
H: I saw an interview with you for some sort of Canadian news station and it showed you playing these instruments that you are always building. You had a little synthesizer and a flat harp. How did you get into building instruments?
C: I originally got into building instruments out of necessity. I was broke and I wanted to be able to get sounds like clarinets and horns. I decided that I could probably build something that was comparable using scrap wood and stuff like that. At the time, I was going to art college and I was good friends with the metal tech and the wood tech. They let me go in after hours and use the shop, so I had access to a lot of good machining and woodworking tools. I ended up making a lot of stuff over a couple years and then I didn’t have any space or tools to continue. By that time, I had made a violin, a couple harps, wooden clarinets, and thumb pianos with pickups in them. A lot of that got put on Infiniheart and then I got more into synthesizers. Now I’m getting into circuit bending, toy keyboards, stuff like that.
H: You’re going on tour in a couple weeks with Sub Pop labelmates Band Of Horses. Are you going to have a full band?
C: For the first part of the tour, I’m going to be playing one-man-band. I play drums with my feet, like a snare drum, a kick drum and a high hat. Then, I play synthesizers, guitar, and usually a mouth harp or something. My friend Eric [Hamelin], who’s a crazy jazz drummer, he’s gonna be backing me up for the other half of the tour. It’s going to turn into a dance party: homemade instruments, improvised weirdo music. I’m super excited because I’ve never had the chance to play out the electronic stuff that’s on the CDs. Most of the time I’m just playing the acoustic songs, or breaking them down into bluesy, folky stuff. This will give me a chance to expose people to the dancier, electronic, more experimental pieces.
H: I’ve been watching the music videos (“Flower Gardens,” “Red Hot Drops”) you animated that are included on the new album. I think those are really cool too. How long does it take for you to put together one of those?
C: It takes me about six weeks to complete three minutes worth of animation. That’s working like twelve hours a day, pretty regularly. If I’m working at it on a normal pace, it would probably take me about eight weeks, but six weeks if I’m under the gun.
H: Were you into drawing before music?
C: I’m still a visual artist before I’m anything else. Everyone thinks that I’m a musician, but secretly I’m totally into animation.
H: Is it overwhelming that the music has taken off so quickly? At the moment, it seems like you’re getting a lot of buzz.
C: It was overwhelming at first, but I’m getting used to it. I never expected that I’d have people paying attention. It’s good and it’s bad. I need to live with it at this point.
H: When you released Infiniheart, you went back and tweaked some of the songs. With the tracks on Skelliconnection, they date from 2002 to 2006. Was there a lot of tweaking with these songs too?
C: There were a couple changes that I made to some of them. “See-Thru-Skin” is probably the oldest one. That predates stuff on Infiniheart. [For] “Red Hot Drops,” I went in and put a new ending on it. I didn’t do a crazy amount of tweaking. I re-recorded a lot of the songs, so there were a few different versions that we were choosing.
H: What are the more recent songs?
C: All the experimental piano songs, like “Dandrufff” and “Systemic Heart.”
H: The little instrumentals?
C: Yeah, I’ve been modifying this upright piano for the past eight years and composing these thirty second instrumental pieces. Those are probably the most recent ones.
H: What was the inspiration for the album title?
C: I’ll give Ian a couple hundred songs to pick from and then he tries to put together a skeleton. I didn’t think the album had much meat to it, so it was a rough sketch. That’s why I called it Skelliconnection. It does gel together in a weird way, but it’s still really fragmented and thin. Plus, I like mashing up words.
H: Like “Gubbbish?”
C: “Gubbbish” is actually from a Philip K. Dick book called Martian Time-Slip. It’s about a kid that can see into the future and the only word he ever says is gubbish. Whenever he’s having these visions, he’s trying to explain them to people, and he calls it gubbish. But it’s this really horrible vision of the future: buildings deteriorated, skyscrapers full of corpses and stuff.
H: Do you do a lot of reading?
C: Actually, no. I’ve been reading that same book for like six years. I have a really hard time reading stuff. I have this thing called a Migraine Aura, so it’s really hard for me to read text. Most of the time, my girlfriend reads me stuff, or I get books on tape. I love literature, I just have a short attention span for it.
H: Have you ever thought about bringing in a full band for future recordings, or do you plan on keeping it solo and occasionally bringing in Eric to play drums?
C: Eric’s on the album. He plays drums on “Dead Ends.” We have a band together called Broken Ankles. I’ve got all these side projects, but as far as the solo stuff is concerned, I’d like to mostly keep it as me tinkering. We’re probably going to be releasing a Broken Ankles CD, if not before Christmas-time, then early 2007.
H: In comparison to the solo material, what’s Broken Ankles like?
C: Broken Ankles is mostly improvised. I don’t know if I’d call it jazz music.
H: More instrumental?
C: Oh yeah, totally instrumental
H: No vocals?
C: Not really. We also have a project called The Wool Nipples. I’m still doing a lot of the songwriting, but it’s other friends that are backing me up.
H: Have any labels expressed interest in Broken Ankles, or is that something you see yourself releasing independently?
C: I’m going to release it through Flemish Eye in Canada. I’d imagine that Sub Pop would probably put it out as far as the rest of the world goes. They might think it just completely sucks.
H: The Constantines, a Canadian neighbor and a fellow Sub Pop band, are another group that you’ve toured with. They seem to be big fans of your music. What was your experience playing with them?
C: It was brotherly love, it was wicked. I was a big fan of The Constantines before I toured with them. They’re my favorite rock band in Canada right now. Bryan [Webb], one of the singers, was playing bass for us the whole tour. It ended up being a big jamboree. I just recently played a music festival in New Brunswick with Will [Kidman] and Steve [Lambke], who both have side projects.
H: What was the festival?
C: It’s called the Sappy Records Music Festival. Have you ever heard of Eric’s Trip? It was a band out of Moncton that got signed on Sub Pop in the early 90’s. Rick White and Julie Doiron are both in it. There was a big reunion show. It was like a three day festival in New Brunswick. We were hanging out with The Constantines out there. They’re totally good friends now.
H: I know that you’ve also opened for larger acts like Built To Spill and The Pixies. How surreal was that?
C: To tell you the truth, I hadn’t heard Built To Spill. I didn’t know they were that huge of a band, but that was pretty awesome. I got to play with them in Vancouver. But, I mean, The Pixies, of course. I went through like three Doolittle tapes in high school. That was the way I learned to make looping cassettes… by taking apart my Doolittle tape and patching it up with tape. That was a huge honor to open up a show for those guys. I didn’t know what to expect and it was probably one of the best rock shows that I’ve ever seen. I was shitting my pants a little bit. I was stoked that I got free tickets to see The Pixies.
H: Is there any new stuff that you’ve been recording in consideration for your next solo album?
C: I just finished another album a couple days ago. I don’t know if it’s going to get released anytime soon. You’ve got to wait so long before you can put out another album. Hopefully, I’m going to try and put it out quicker. Maybe the next album might be a double album or something. Then, at least I can get a few more songs out there. I like these other projects I’m working on. Hopefully, they’ll be released in some form, if it’s not a download, then a CD or something.
H: For the album you just finished, is it an extension of Skelliconnection, or completely different?
C: The stuff that I’m recording these days is stripped down. It’ll just be drums and acoustic guitar for most of the songs. For the instrumental stuff, it’s just instrumental hip-hop music. It’ll be a mix between those two.
H: There was an instrumental on Infiniheart titled “J.C.’s Head On The Cross” that had this great beat over it. Are the new instrumentals anything like that?
C: Probably like that, but a little heavier. Less orchestration and more head-banging.
H: What was the sample of the people talking in that song?
C: Those were these kids that I was working with out in Victoria at this elementary school. We’d have lunch time to hang out with them and I’d teach them how to beat-box and play saxophone. I’d bring my instruments in and do these workshops. They were in a class for kids with behavior disorders, so they were super hyper. We’d feed them pancakes and syrup. That one kid was talking about chopping Jesus’ head and putting it on the top of the cross.
