INTERVIEW: MARCIA BASSETT

AN AMERICAN UNDERGROUND LEGEND ENTERING HER FOURTH DECADE IN THE GAME

It’s not hard to do a stint in underground music. The energy and ignorance of youth often provide enough kindling to keep the fire burning for at least a decade. But the years pass, and the trends come and go. Warehouses slowly start to smell worse. Those floors that were so comfortable for so long start to feel unforgiving, even hostile. And that’s just year 12. What about year 22? Year 32? Is it possible to mature into a sustainable life within the world of weird music?

The Brooklyn-based artist Marcia Bassett figured it out. I first heard of her playing when I was in high school; at the time, Bassett was in a band called Double Leopards, who were known for a mysterious brand of psychedelic noise that was often performed with the band hunched over a tangle of electronics on the ground. Years later, I discovered the band un, who put out a few releases on the legendary indie label Siltbreeze and whose 1996 self-titled LP remains one of my favorite records of the era. The record is contemporaneous with a band like Royal Trux, though it does its own thing altogether. There’s nothing quite like its blurry, slow-motion jangle. It took me a second to put it together, but Bassett was in un, too. 

Bassett has since been involved in a large number of projects—too many for me to name here—that extrapolate on the kind of enigmatic sound work that she first explored in the 1990s and 2000s. She runs her own label and has a wide range of collaborators. A little over a month ago, her duo with Samara Lubelski opened up for Wolf Eyes and Anthony Braxton at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York. Her newest release, REPEATER, came out in March. I had a nice time chatting with Marcia over Zoom—even though, as it turns out, we live quite close to each other.

How do you think you've changed as an improvising musician since the ‘90s?

Improvising for me has always been about discovery and experimentation, listening and finding a zone. Initially I was purely improvising and experimenting with the sound—getting inside it. Once Grant and I started playing together as un, he was really driving the songwriting. I just kinda fell into the fold and started to explore that structure, though I wasn't really comfortable with it, and would easily meander away from the structure. With Double Leopards, we made a conscious decision not to write songs and focus on improvising. I've taken some turns since—revisiting ideas of songwriting but mainly continuing to explore ideas of improvising and connecting with people through improvisation. Aside from connecting with people and a space that way, I've come to realize that I like putting myself in uncomfortable situations and discovering magical moments within those moments. There's always more to discover and connections to be made.

So, after a point you found a language you enjoyed working within and you've sort of been iterating upon that? 

Yeah, I play a lot of different instruments now and I tend to gravitate towards what I identify as more of my sound. But within that, it's always interesting playing with other people. I’ve learned a lot from playing with other people and just listening to other people. I like to challenge myself, too. If we start with un, that was a situation where my partner at the time, Grant Acker, had played in a lot of bands and was really proficient on the guitar to the point where when I would ask him to teach me something on the guitar and he was like, Oh, no, you don't wanna fall into the trap! So he just taught me some basic chord progressions and we kind of went from there. And there was a lot of space for diverging from songs and improvising. 

Would you consider un to be the most “rock” band you've ever been in, for lack of better words? 

No, not really. GHQ definitely touched on some rock aspects. And I played with Tom Carter from Charalambides, we had a band called Zaika. It was totally improv, but it definitely had free rock elements to it. 

When I think about Siltbreeze, I think about bands that were abstracting the rock language, but still felt within a rock tradition. I don't know if that's actually true or not, but I’m thinking about that moment of indie compared to Double Leopards. When I was a kid, they felt like a full break from indie rock. 

I mean, it was a very conscious decision with Double Leopards to not have a song structure. Anytime we started to get into a pattern like that, we would break out of it. We had discussions about not playing songs.

And with un, there was still some form of songwriting.

Oh, yeah, definitely. Grant was very heavily influenced by indie rock and exposed me to a lot of indie rock, more than had been exposed to. And yeah, it was definitely about songwriting. It was a trio with myself, Grant Acker and Tom Roach. And then after a couple years, Tara Burke [Fursaxa] joined us. I invited Tara to join the band because I liked her playing, and I really wanted someone else to contribute to the songwriting. But then a year went by and we never finalized our second record. 

The magic of un to me is that I still hear that Velvet Underground influence and I still hear that kind of indie rock influence, but it's so abstracted—it's teetering on this line. Was the second LP pushing it past that point? 

The second LP was, I guess, in a similar vein. At that time, I was really getting into Krautrock. And so I think there were more elements of that. More abstractions, which I mean, it's hard to say abstractions in the context of un because it was really abstract. But the first album to me felt less abstract than the second record we were working on.

So you were kind of pushing it in a certain direction. 

I was definitely pushing for more abstraction and less traditional songwriting. That's just where I was personally. With Double Leopards I was working with people who also wanted to break away from songwriting.

About Double Leopards—this is a really funny question, but when I was a kid going to shows, I noticed that a lot of noise and psychedelic acts played with no tables or stands, kind of on their knees, pedals in front of them. It's not something you see so much anymore. Now that I've gotten older, it makes more sense. But it was so mysterious to me as a teenager. I'm curious: what was the thinking behind that? 

There wasn't really much thinking behind it. Honestly, there wasn't. It was just something that happened, you know, our setup—being able to reach your pedals on the floor rather than bend over. It was just easy. You're set up and gravitated towards sitting on the floor. 

Yeah. 

With Double Leopards there was a lot of switching up instruments, mid-piece. So, you know, you might have some stuff laying around and the gear is surrounding you. So you're just unplugging and plugging back into the overall sound. 

There was something about it formally that struck me. Maybe it's because I was coming from a punk and hardcore background. Just the idea of seeing an act where they were all kind of crouched on the floor. Again, it felt like a full break from what I’d known. Were there any sort of conversations about it or was it just really out of necessity? 

There were no conversations about it. At the time when Double Leopards started, I had a basement and I used it as my practice space and yeah, again, it was just like, that's the way we were set up. Maybe someone would sit on a milk crate or something. There weren't tables and chairs around, and we just gravitated towards the floor. 

That era was really scrappy. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on contemporary sort of indie-adjacent ambient music? It's not something I know that much about, but a lot of the time it feels like it's missing that scrappy kind of homespun edge to it. Do you listen to much new contemporary ambient music?

I go out to shows a lot and I buy a lot of music. I love listening to WKCR, WFMU, and being exposed to music that way. People have access to really professional recording tools now on their desktop and I feel like some people will really clean stuff up. For me it lacks some grit. Live, too, I can have the same experience where it's missing some grit or some personality—it feels polished to me, like it's a score for a movie. It's just smoothed over in a way that sounds professionally slick, but to me it lacks a personality. 

Professional tools are accessible in a different way than they were 20 years ago. 

Yep—even with Double Leopards, we were using a four-track. And we went into a recording studio. I used to have people say to me, How do you get that lo-fi sound? And I was like, Huh? 

Well, now there's plugins for that. 

I mean, we were pretty sloppy [with un], let's put it that way. We weren't really meticulous about our recording style. I’ve been transferring some of our four track tapes, and there's a lot of bleed on the tracks, we didn't do a lot of separation. 

On those Double Leopards records, there's something claustrophobic about them. It's psychedelic music, or it's drone music, but it’s made in New York, which is an intense place to live, and even if you're making psychedelic music, the sort of energy of the city is going to come through. 

Oh yeah, for sure, I feel like that has always been a big influence as well—being in a city that has a lot of energy and is just a very intense place to live translates into the music. 

I'm curious how you've seen your life in music sort of ebb and flow over the years. It seems like you end up doing a fair amount of stuff in Europe. Do you find that you get more support outside of America?

Europe has always had more funding for the arts, and there's always been an interest in what people are doing in the American underground scene. It's great to discover and connect with people in Europe who are also doing similar work. So I just feel really fortunate that I've had an opportunity to meet people over there who are interested in my music and have that exchange.

You've done some residencies, right?

Yeah, I've done residencies over there. I wasn't really doing residencies until after Double Leopards, more doing solo work and collaborating with people. I don't really seek them out. I find that it's really helpful to go to a place where you're very focused on creating a body of work or thinking about a body of work without your regular routine. 

Do you ever consider moving to Europe? It’s a move many make, because of that additional support.

Not immediately, I work as an archivist here in New York. I've been doing this since 1999, when I moved to New York. I made a conscious decision to have a job and not try to work as a professional musician—in the sense of a lifestyle of residencies and constant touring because I would find that really grueling. I work on my music in fractured sections and make time to concentrate on it that way. I have a day job so I don't have to worry about supporting myself solely through my music, which is pretty much impossible. Some people manage to make it work, but I don't envy that. 

It’s possible to be in a pocket of time where you have a project that maybe gets some attention and you can get by, but the idea that underground music is any less fickle than the mainstream music market is insane. It's just as trend based. 

Even when I was younger, I kind of had a limit. I didn't really want to go out and do month long tour, that was just too long for me. I like a two week, 10 day tour. I just did a tour with Samara Lubelski, and Barry Weisblat joined us on the West Coast doing visuals. That was two weeks, and we didn't have a show every single night; we had a couple of nights off here and there. 

When you're in your 20s, it's not hard, but then you get a little bit older.

If I'm feeling like I just want a night to myself, I can get a hotel room.

As you enter your fourth decade in whatever you want to call it, the experimental music world, I don't know if there's a better catch-all term, but do you have any goals about what you want to do in this next decade, or are you just sort of doing it? 

I'm doing it. I mean, I play with a lot of different people, I like playing with new people and experimenting with them. It's been really fun to get more into synthesizers and electronics. I've become much more familiar with software, and it's been enjoyable multi-tracking and considering recording in that way. So, yeah, I'm just doing it, and it's slowly evolving. But again, there's no pressure. I do it on my own time. I have a label that I release my records on—or cassettes, I just recently put out a cassette of my own work. So I'm just kind of doing everything on my own terms and that's a comfortable place for me to be. 

Marcia Bassett on Instagram and Bandcamp

(Top photo: Bassett and Grant Acker)