What are your names and what do you do in the group?
Swede: My name is Swede and I play guitar, pedal steel, and regular guitar and banjo.
Jim: My name is Jim and I’m the singer and I play a nylon gut string guitar. I play harmonica and I write some songs.
Ben: My name is Ben and I play keyboards.
Mike: My name is Mike and I play drums.
Dustin: My name is Dustin. I do all the turntable and sampler work on stage and the ‘jack of all that’s needed that’s not musical.
Pierre was in Montana this day and he is the bass player and genius engineer and as Dustin calls him, “the mad scientist.”
You all combine music technology with pop song writing. What is the spark that gets a track going for this band?
Jim: Well, a lot of times they start as Folk songs. We’re experimenting more with building loops and experimenting more with what might happen accidentally. Usually we start with songs that can be played with and acoustic guitar, lay it down with a click track and build it up from there. For this next record, we’re experimenting a little bit with going the reverse route to mix things up.
When do the samples and loops come in?
Jim: Our studio and writing process are inseparable, really, but after we get some chords and lyrics we start our insane process that is too complicated to get into. We won’t bore you with all the details today. But after much obsessing we finally get something that we are happy with and we hope other people are happy with too.
What’s happening in the world right now that become topics or themes when you write?
Swede: God, open the news paper. Watch CNN.
Jim: Our lyrical side of things is usually existing in a different universe than the musical side. The musical side is an exploration of sounds, whereas the lyrical side is more personal. Lyrically, I’ve been dealing what I call, ‘conspicuous appropriation’ or a collage aesthetic that coveys a picture of something that’s happening today.
When did Mountain Con start and what was the original idea?
Jim: Four of us were in a band in Missoula, Montana where all of us except for Dustin are from. It was a more contemporary early nineties guitar driven rock band kind of thing. We moved out to Seattle when we were 18 and thought that within a year we’d be, ya know, big rock stars or whatever. Basically the whole thing just kind of fell apart. But we regrouped here in about 1998 and it gave us the ability to really rethink how we made “Rock Music.”
Mike: We also really liked the beat approach to hip hop and the way that felt, so we experimented with taking Bob Dylan songs or rock songs and applying that to say, Public Enemy and basically trying to get that beat stuck into something that doesn’t fit.
Jim: Yeah, that got the gears turning. I mean, when we first started out we didn’t even know how to make a loop. Now we can just about have our way with anything that we want.
Tell me about the title “Dusty Zero’s, Dirty Ones.”
Dustin: That title really puts together the two worlds of folksy rock and digital production, I mean you got the whole binary code thing that is at the heart of digital based production and sampling, and the human element of what all of do instrumentally and what styles we play.
With the declining industry sales and the threatening legal strategies being implemented by record label, how do you guys feel is the best way to get your music to the public?
Swede: Well, it almost got to the point with our dealings in LA that we fed up and just wanted to put out the last record on the internet.
Dustin: We did the whole shopping thing (delivering demo’s of your music to record labels) with the record and it was brutal. I mean, unless you have a huge fan base and a lot of record sales to show on your own, people in the industry aren’t taking any chances. They got enough problems as it is. So we went to all the local record stores and radio stations and we’ve been getting a lot of great support from them. KNDD has been really helpful to us and KEXP as well. But Seattle and Portland are the only real markets that this record has seen.
Jim: The only National grasp that record has achieved is over electronic means and the internet.
Dustin: We just got on iTunes three weeks ago and that alone took months because we didn’t have a record company backing us and it’s hard to get the attention of these large companies on your own.
Give me your top 3 or 4 hip hop production influences.
Mike: I’m into the old school East Coast thing. Like Tribe Called Quest, and Public Enemy.
Dustin: Erik B and Rakim.
Jim: Digable Planets.
Mike: Currently, I like Mos Def’s stuff. He’s got some great stuff goin’ on. But definitely not any top 40 stuff, or at least rhythmically to me that stuff is less interesting.
Who would be your dream artist to open for or play with?
Dustin: Beck! He would be the dream first choice obviously.
Jim: The Dust Brothers are huge.
Dustin: We’d love to open for the Roots and Interpol.
What sets you guys apart from the rest of the crowd?
Swede: We get a lot of comments on, the slide (guitar). A lot of people come to our shows and don’t even know what the hell the thing is.
Dustin: If someone knows what they’re looking at on stage, they see a slide, an old Hammond organ, keyboards and drums, and tucked in the back is turntables and samplers. We have such a unique set up live that we just stand out by what we bring to the table.
You all have a very pop oriented sound. The Stranger here in Seattle even commented that you had a “cookie cutter M-TV” sound. Where does that come from?
Jim: I think that comes from growing up in a small town where, the only outside access was the mass media. So, it’s like it’s in our DNA when we want to arrange a song, we instinctively gravitate to the classics. It wasn’t even until we were 18 or so living here that we had any access to alternative music. Sometimes we hear criticism for that, but we can’t help ourselves and we have no interest in making music that we are not. It’s what’s true to us.
What social or political elements do you champion in your music?
Dustin: We like to combine social consciousness with good grooving’ music. Really we make party music, but one piece we’re proud of is a song that is a mixture of a beat that sounds kind of like something Outcast would do, and we took some lyrical influence from John Lennon’s “Gimmie Some Truth” and made a song that we really resonate with consciously. Also it was made in time for the elections and we felt very strongly about that outcome in that we didn’t want to see four more years of lying and cheating as demonstrated by the current administration.
Tell me about the name “Mountain Con.”
Jim: Our Grandfathers worked in one of the largest open copper mines in the country in Butte Montana. It was called “Mountain Consolidated” and we felt like it was a nice big powerful name for a band. Our music is a mine. We dig through the sedimentary layers of culture and make modern music, so we’re a mining project in our own right.
For a closing thought, I want to go around and ask each of you this same question: If you could go back in time, what musical movement would you like to visit for a weekend?
Dustin: I’d probably go back to the Bronx in the early eighties. I, mean, just the musical invention of plugging in two turntables into a light post on the street and creating the greatest musical art form since rock.
Mike: Even though it doesn’t necessarily inform my rhythmic influence with this band, I’d like to go back to late ‘70’s London and be around the punk energy as well as the fashion and design movements happening then.
Ben: There were a couple of weeks in the early ‘70’s when Pink Floyd rented a room and started jamming on E minor to A, which became “Breath” from Dark Side of the Moon. I would have liked to be around to see that.
Jim: Did they have the Lear Jet in ’66? Because I need to bounce around to a few places if I’m only getting a weekend on this on. But there was like a competition between the Beach Boys and the Beatles and Bob Dylan around that time for the most amazing pop album of all time really. It’s like the history of pop music was moving into a gigantic focal point and after which rock music just broke out into a million shards. So, I’d need a Lear Jet to go from LA, to London, and back to Woodstock NY.
Swede: I would have to say Hamburg Germany in 1959 with the Beatles playing at the Kaiser Keller and the Star Club back when they were all hopped up on speed and were still a punk rock band.
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