Do you find genre characterizations useful? How would you characterize the music you make with Bing & Ruth?

It depends on who I’m talking to. If it’s one of my parent’s friends, I just say it’s classical music. If it’s somebody that’s a little more involved with the scene, I go with orchestral, ambient.

Is ambient a meaningful term?

I think it was at one point for us, but it really isn’t anymore. I really dislike the term experimental. Ambient is just sort of a catch-all, I guess, but it doesn’t really describe the new record at all. It has its moments, but I don’t know what it is. Ambient also usually implies electronic, and we’re all acoustic except for a little bit of tape delay stuff. I actually really love classic ambient stuff – there’s a time when the term made sense, I just don’t think it really fits what we do.

Yeah, no question your music has ambiance, but there’s gotta be a better way to describe it concisely. How would you say that ambiance, or the characteristics that bring about the ambient characterization, come about in music?

I like to think about what level of attention our music exists at. There’s music that begs to be listened to loud, with headphones, very immersive full-attention stuff. There’s also music that works as a background thing while you’re making your coffee or whatever. I was focusing on making music that worked at loud volumes that could capture your full attention but also get along for passive listening. I wanted something that could function as both, simply because I have a need for both in my life. All the music I make always comes from me wanting to hear something that doesn’t exist. I guess for ambient music it functions as passive listening, like I just saw a live performance of Music for Airports and I really didn’t like it – I love the piece, it’s obviously so good. It just didn’t work very well for active listening. It’s written as a passive experience.

Do you think there’s a specific sonic palette that makes something ambient? I’ve seen post-rock, at least when that was a useful descriptor, called non-rock music made with rock instruments. Is ambient then non-classical music made with classical instruments?

It’s funny how genre descriptions are usually pretty good for about five years, beyond which it just splinters off. I can’t say I have an encyclopedic knowledge of ambient stuff, but it seems like it’s always been focused on electronic instruments, while I’ve always been inspired by acoustic instruments. Initially with the band, the idea was to create something that would normally be made electrically with acoustic instruments. Not in a cheesy way, like let’s play exactly this without electricity but sort of what’s the aura of this thing that’s normally accomplished in a particular way and how can we get to that?

That seems like it would necessarily require approaching an acoustic instrument in a manner outside of its traditional usage.

Yeah, and the people who play in Bing & Ruth don’t do that at all. I’ll write pieces where the clarinet player plays the same note for six minutes straight and they’ll say it’s one of the hardest bands that they’re in, even though it’s very simple and static and slow-moving. It’s hard to have that, to quote Brian Eno, immaculate consistency.

Looking online, I couldn’t find a straight description of Bing & Ruth – lots of collective, ensemble, etc. What exactly is the format?

I write the music, and the group itself goes through waves of different personnel. We’ve done two EPs and two full-lengths and there’s been a different band for every project. It’s very album- and project-based, but everything is sort of related to each other. One of the clarinet players in the band has been in it since day one, and one of the bass players. It’s evolved, from one string instrument at the beginning to two vocalists. It just evolves, and we got up to eleven people on our last full-length. When I started working on this new one I embraced logistics and decided that it was just going to be better overall if we made the ensemble smaller. Basically I just cut a few people who had been in it from the beginning, which was not easy to do. It was important for the ensemble to move forward.

So you’re down to six people – does the album sprawl at all beyond that? Like is that the essential personnel that you need to perform it, or did everything come from those six guys?

That’s most of it – there are slight variations. I’d love for the seven of us to be here, but one of our clarinet players is on tour in Europe right now. It’s an exciting challenge to figure out how to do it with less people.

It sounds like you’ve mostly made cuts, but when someone new is introduced what sort of recruitment process have they come through?

I generally try to go with people that my bandmates trust, so we needed to get a new bass player and I just asked our current ones. It’s more of a family, with three different guys who can be involved. We usually have two at a time so it’s whoever is available.

For a given session, is it usually availability-based or could you be listening to something you’re working on and know that you need to have certain people on it?

It’s not a huge group – I don’t just call someone up for one gig. It’s sort of a language that we’ve developed with how to play. It’s not like everything is notated on the page, just the barebones essentials and then you interpret what’s written through the common language. It’s not something that’s very easy for somebody to just step into. That’s why you need a family of people that understand the language and can come in. The ensemble here at Big Ears has never played together in this exact formation – should be interesting.

When you’re composing, to what extent are you consciously imparting a mood, meaning, sense of place? What degree of completely personal connection do you put in music and do you think it’s received on the other end?

It’s a difficult question to answer. I find that I generally come to those meanings afterwards, where I’ll write a piece and record a demo and listen to it – I’m an obsessive listener, so I’ll be listening to every rehearsal, every demo, everything all along the way. Midway through the writing process it might find a meaning for me and exist as something. I’m very careful to not make the piece about that, title it about that, to not give the listener any sort of direction. I just leave it as free as possible for them to come into it and find something.

So it’s like the difference between listening to something six months after the fact and being brought back to a specific mindset and listening way after and something suddenly clicking for the first time.

Yeah, and it changes meaning as it goes. Some sounds that meant one thing now mean something completely different to me. That’s why I try to not pin it down and say this is based on this story, that’s fine if people like doing that but for me it’s a much more flexible type of thing. If somebody can bring their own story then it’s more personal to them. They’re not jamming their story into an existing narrative but instead being the narrative.

As a larger ensemble I imagine that you guys are pretty limited in terms of where you can record, but do you find that the environment of performance, recording, or composition comes through in the end product?

Absolutely – you’re a product of where you are and what you’re doing. It’s not even like a physical location – when we did this album it was important to me that we were outside of the city. We were in Yonkers, barely outside, but it was important that we stepped away. It was a rawer space, so we brought lights and candles and made the vibe of the place really nice and personal. The other part of it was that I scheduled all the recording sessions for very early in the morning. We didn’t have to, but it was important for me that the record sounded like that, like people who maybe weren’t completely there yet – that this was the first thing they were doing, before checking their email or any of that stuff. They got up in the morning as late as they could and made it to the studio without time for anything else. There are subtle ways outside of the actual notes that you can control how the ensemble sounds – where it’s playing, what time it’s being played. We’re not talking about that early, but Yonkers is a little ways outside of town so people would be getting up at 6:30, 7.

So it’s almost like all that they’ve been exposed to before putting a track down is NPR, maybe, on the drive in. Do you find that the circumstances of performance further alter the sound? I guess if there’s an improvisational element then you’d have to.

Absolutely, that’s really important. I haven’t written a setlist for today’s performance yet because I wanna go by and see what the space is like, what the crowd is gonna be like. It’s really important for me because it’s all a part of what’s happening, which is the reason I really like keeping the improvisational element to it. You’re not trying to take one static thing and jam it into lots of different environments. Sometimes we’ll be playing super late at night in some tiny back room and we’ve got a set of pieces that would work a lot better there. You want to make it fit for every environment.

For the listener, outside of a live environment, do you care at all about where they are or have hopes for how they might be listening to it?

I have in the past, but another important thing for this particular record is to have as wide of a listening experience as you can get. I’ve really focused on headphone listening for a long time, and it was important for it to work with headphones, speakers, low or high volume, laptop or hi-fi. If you perform something that relies on the full sonic spectrum to have an impact, then that’s totally fair – I’ve written music like that in the past. Walking into this new record, though, it was important for it to work on every level. If you’re listening on a laptop and the bass isn’t quite there, it still works. It works in a different way, but it still makes sense. It’s like the Bach conventions where if you take out one hand it still works. Not that I’m comparing myself to Bach, but that was an inspiration – that every piece of the puzzle should stand on its own.

For song titles, is there a rhyme or reason to them? Specifically, I was listening to Police Police Police Police Police – Knoxville is a little more skyscraper-y than my home so I was getting a very urban feel from it.

The titles for me are just things that pop into my head. To be honest, it’s not something that I’m super-concerned about or that’s really tied to the music. Mostly it’s just a way to differentiate the songs during rehearsal or making a setlist. For the album I didn’t want to put titles on it at all but the band really liked them and pushed for it.

It’s just enough information for the listener to go wild with imagination and come up with some bizarre backstory.

Right.

Do you have people outside of the band that you consider your contemporaries, and do you take inspiration from people working in the same space as you or from outside of your sound?

It’s hard to say where a particular inspiration comes from, but I have some close friends in New York that I like working with. Pete Silberman from The Antlers is a close friend, and this band Port St. Willow. I’ve gotten to know Porcelain Raft a lot recently, Julianna Barwick – there’s a cool little scene in Brooklyn right now with this sort of stuff, and people find each other. All that’s a part of what inspires me and who I am, so it’s going to come out in what I do, but it’s not like I hear a piece and come home and write something off it.