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Sleepytime Gorilla Museum have a penchant for the otherwise.  No two records – or tours for that matter – have ever fallen to uniformity, and that’s just the way they like it.  Their roisterous show last night at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall featured a rambling mustached Italian, apocalyptic dances, and a 20-piece marching band bazaar.   And did it ever rock.

It’s been just under two years since SGM’s last record, In Glorious Times was released, and the band has just wrapped up their latest spring tour, finishing up with this hometown show.  For a band whose live show can only be described as a ’spectacle,’ this show was truly an extravaganza amongst spectacles, pulling out all the stops and playing at the top of their game.

Fortunately for the 6 and a half billion not in attendance, the evening was documented on film as the first official video evidence of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum live experience.  But as the Museum regularly updates it’s collection, the next tour will likely be an entirely different exhibition of natural history.

Museum curators Michael Mellender [guitar, percussion, stuff], Dan Rathburn [bass, slide piano log, things], and Carla Kihlstedt [violin, stroh horn, trappings] gave up some of their precious pre-show preparation to chat with me about their musical philosophies, songwriting processes, listening habits, and plans for the next record and forthcoming film.

dP: You guys are really great at bringing out artists that most people haven’t really heard.  Last time here you brought along accordion extraordinaire Jason Webley and bass clarinet quartet Edmund Welles.

Michael: Ah Edmund Welles, we played with them on this tour.  Occasionally we’ll do an entire tour with one band, but that is not the norm.

How do you find these guys?

The goal ultimately is to play with bands we know and love and want to be on the road with.  There was one tour where we did a string of shows with Cheer-Accident from Chicago, our favorite band in the whole world.  And also we went out with Secret Chiefs 3, they’re incredible.  This time we went out with Dub Trio, we did a week of shows with them.  We try to line it up when we can, but it’s usually at the discretion of the venue or the promoter.  They really know what’s going on locally; we don’t really know the bands in Doylestown, PA.

I’m excited to see Fred Frith.  I was talking to Nils earlier, he used to the term mentor.

Yeah, mentor, influence, man about town.

What do you think he meant exactly by ‘mentor’?

If you listen to some of the Art Bears records or the Fred Frith solo albums, you’ll definitely hear similarities in the music, certain approaches.  Especially the Art Bears record, which had a huge impact on the way Sleepytime Gorilla Museum sounds.

They’ve influenced your musical philosophy.

Yeah, Art Bears have this really cool way of expressing this complicated idea musically, but with the most minimal delivery.  Everything that’s in there belongs in there – it’s just so effortlessly delivered, but it’s never technically flashy or anything like that, if you catch my drift.

It’s a vibe sort of thing.  Creating the sound and atmosphere you’re want to create without playing for playings sake.

There’s a lot of that where it’s like technically amazing, but, you know.

You have lots of personalities in your band, how have you learned to express musical intention to each other?

I think there’s a certain agreed upon aesthetic that we like, that it sort of comes out.  The In Glorious Times record is just completely diverse.  Every song is like a different band almost.  But I think within that there’s a through line that I couldn’t really begin to verbalize.

The writing process is different for everybody.  I mean, somebody brings in a certain amount of the song, be it, this is my guitar thing I can play and I have a verse and it gets thrown into the group mind.  Or it’s a completely scripted thing and here’s a drum fill in measure 87.  Within that, everyone kind of writes their own parts within that kind of spectrum, and everyone throws in their hat into the ring for a certain song.

And you guys have such a great vibe live, how do you recreate that on tape and keep that same feel?

That’s almost an impossibility.  That’s two different worlds, live and recording.  I like both, but definitely the performance aspect is really hard to capture on record.  I don’t have an objective enough opinion to know if we’ve pulled it off.

When you go about recording, is your intention to make a sonic statement unto itself, or are you trying to recreate what you do live?

No, it’s not a recreation of the live, but in the process of making – this has been true in everything I’ve done musically – in the process of making it, it’s sort of like the meaning is sort of revealed, you’re just sort of unearthing the music or any sort of through line on an album.  It sort of gradually becomes known to you just through the act of doing it.

Dan and Carla

Could you tell me a little about this film I’ve been hearing about?

Dan: A couple of years ago, we did a tour with our favorite ‘movement artist’ Shinichi Moma Koga of Inkboat, and we created the idea of The Last Human Being very quickly for that tour.  And since then, we’ve decided to make it into a movie.  So the movie is going to be called The Last Human Being, and it will star Shinichi Moma Koga as the last human being on Earth, and we have started to film it.

Are you all participating in the creation of it?

Some of us are staring in it.  We started a couple months ago; we did a few weeks of shooting, and now we’re finishing a tour.  Some more shooting will happen, some editing, and hopefully we’ll have an absurd and entertaining movie at the end of it all.  That’s what we’re shooting for.

And tonight you’re doing a different kind of film.

Tonight is really just a documentation of the live show.  Believe it or not, after all these years we still don’t have a great documented version of our live show.

Will this be the definitive Sleepytime experience – of this tour?

Carla: I don’t think there is a definitive Sleepytime Gorilla experience.

I’ve been wondering why we haven’t seen Sleepytime on vinyl?

No good reason. We’ve talked about it with the label and decided it would be a good idea, we just haven’t done it.  I can’t tell you why we haven’t gotten around to it.  The potential is exciting.  We have too many ideas as a band, so it’s really easy to not get around to things.

How do you guys like to listen to music?

Carla:  Underwater. Definitely underwater.

Dan: Some of my most profound music listening experiences have been on vinyl, but they were also 20 years ago, when I was a youngster.

There was a time when just the idea of recorded music was so new, it was like my world was being exploded constantly.  The more that I spend all my waking hours working on music in some form or any other, the more often I’ll come home and choose silence.

So I imagine most musicians have that experience once they surround themselves with music as a life’s work.  The amount of recreational music listening you can do – not that you’d ever give it up – but when music is the work of your day, sometimes the relaxation wants to be silence.

Either way, focus is the important thing.

Certainly I like to pay attention to music when I’m listening to it.

That seems to be the lament of many people, who are either musicians or interested in discovering or appreciating music.  The fact it’s becoming so disposable with the iPod generation and downloading and things like that.

It was disposable long before any of those things.  Before digital music was even available, there were already people making disposable pop hits that would last for a season and then be gone.  So I agree with you, but I wont blame it on digital music or downloading.

Do you feel a personal responsibility when you create to make music that is not necessarily timeless, but far more listenable and interesting and worthy of a listener’s time?

Carla:  I don’t think ‘listenable’ and ‘interesting’ always go together.

Dan:  When I’m writing or creating music, one of the questions I ask myself is ‘if I was listening to this on a CD, what would I like to hear next’?  Or ‘how would I like this to sound if I was the listener’?  I put myself in that position, which is totally subjective you know.  That’s just what I would like, but that’s the best I would do.  I can’t claim to know what anyone else wants, but I can know what I would like.  And I can do my absolute best to produce it.

Michael and I were noting that ‘In Glorious Times‘ is one of the band’s most diverse records, with each song was a little world unto itself.  Was that a conscious effort?

No, that’s just the way that it happened.  In my ideal world, the writing process is about following a muse, letting it take you where it’s going to take you.  You can have some ideas as you approach new songs and new albums, but ultimately it doesn’t always go there, and for us I think it’s really important to stay open to new ideas and allow it to go where it needs to go if it needs to go someplace else.

Which sometimes can be frustrating from a technical point of view, if you’ve worked a long time on an idea and invested a bunch of time into it and it becomes apparent that the song needs to do something different.  Sometimes you need to throw away a piece of music that you’ve written or a section of music you’ve written, or sometimes you need to go back and erase something you’ve recorded and record something new, and sometimes you’ve put a lot of effort into it and you’ve become very attached to it emotionally.

So, are you starting to conceptualize a new record now with the band?

We have some new songs that are written, or at least have started to be written.  So that might mean yes.  And we have decided that the album, the CD that will accompany the movie will have the same name.

So our next release will be called The Last Human Being, the same as the name of the movie.  It’ll be the soundtrack plus other songs.  What we don’t know is how the other songs will fit thematically in with the themes of The Last Human Being.

But we can definitely assume a thread within the songs.

You can assume a thread within a bunch of the songs.  I doubt that every single song will be… although though we have surprised ourselves in the past by putting together what we thought were a somewhat disparate set of songs, and then sort of came out sounding like a concept album.

Like Of Natural History.  We didn’t write it as a concept album.  We wrote it as a bunch of songs, some of which were related, and then as we put it together it sort of fell into place as a concept album.

So this album we’re working on now is starting out with more of a concept than any previous, so I guess you could say it has more of a chance as coming out as a concept album – but I don’t think we’re gonna know that for sure until it’s done.

There will definitely be a Last Human Being suite on this CD.  We’ve already written that and really recorded it  That’s the part of the CD that’s done.  We have recorded it.  We haven’t mixed it yet, but it’s been recorded.

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