Drekka Interview with Bryan Brussee
If you like music and live in Bloomington, you’ve probably run into Michael Anderson– he frequents local shows and works as a clerk at TD’s CDs and LPs. He also makes ambient recordings under the name Drekka, and was recently kind enough to sit down with me and discuss his nearly 20-year career under the pseudonym. Want to know more? Read the interview. Want to hear more? Check out his Bandcamp page and see him live this Saturday at Culture Shock.
Let’s start at the beginning. When did Drekka start?
I started doing Drekka in ’96. I was 26. I started doing my first recordings probably around ’86 – like these silly little tapes.
Who were the influences?
When I first started doing stuff, me and my cousin would do these little radio plays. He was super into The Beatles, and I was into Devo, so we would do these silly little pop songs. But then by the time I was 20, I was just really into the industrial movement, Psychic TV and Neubauten – the British and German post new-wave industrial scene, post-punk and that kind of stuff.
So how did that inform the sound of the first couple Drekka releases?
The first couple Drekka records… by then, at that point I was super into this sort of Bristol scene, that was kind of space folk… post-My Bloody Valentine people that were also really into psychedelic folk music. So I was playing in a group that was sort of a bigger, ambient shoegaze band, and I was combining field recordings and the wall-of-sound shoegaze stuff with folk.
And this was all happening in Bloomington?
No, I was in Boston still and just mostly listening to bands like Flying Saucer Attack and Slowdive out of England and His Name Is Alive out of Detroit. And then I moved to Chicago in ’96, right around the same time that I started [Drekka].
Grieve was recorded at my old house. We lived in this huge red house, and everyone moved out and we just recorded it in the big empty rooms.
When did you come to Bloomington?
I moved here in May of 2000 to work with the then new Secretly Canadian label. We were just in a house right up by the Denny’s with everything shoved in the basement.
Jumping back to the name “Drekka” – what’s the story there?
Since the mid 80s, I was obsessed with The Sugarcubes and band they were in before The Sugarcubes, Kukl. I used to go see them all the time when I was a teenager, and they were really confused and excited that I new about a lot of the other Icelandic punk bands, so they sort of took me under their wing. The first time I went to Iceland was in ‘90 something, and they introduced me to all these other people that I’d worshipped. Drekka is Icelandic for ‘to drink’ because I was trying to think of an Icelandic name that would be very Icelandic, and they’re all total alcoholics, so I just chose it. And I was straightedge at the time so I thought it was really funny. It also turns out to mean “new-born infant diarrhea” in Slovenian.
You recorded your most recent album partially in Iceland.
Yeah, I’ve been going [to Iceland] once or twice a year for the last ten years. I’ve developed a close friendship with some people over there, mostly with my friend Thorir. He and I record every time I’m over there and play some shows. Half the record is a reissue of a 3-inch CD-R made for a tour we did over there. It’s called “Ekki gera fikniefnum,” which is the name of the album, too. And then the new record that’s coming out later this year is also from stuff I recorded in Iceland.
And the title of the latest record translates as “don’t do drugs” or “don’t make drugs.”
It’s a mistake. My friend who came with me on the trip, her mom wrote a note that said jokingly “don’t do drugs,” but she Google translated. What it actually means is, literally, “don’t make the drugs” as in “don’t make the drugs come over there and slap you.” It’s a really bad translation.
I was thinking it might be a reference to straightedge.
It’s a reference to that, yeah. I’m not straightedge anymore though.
What was so attractive about straightedge?
Just being a kid in the suburbs, it was mostly afraid of drinking or whatever. You see your friends acting stupid and you’re like “they’re being stupid, you shouldn’t do that, Minor Threat rules!” Straightedge was really big on the East Coast in the 80s, because we were so close to D.C. We had jackasses like Slapshot and stuff like that. The D.C. scene was much cooler than the Boston scene. The Boston straightedge scene, I quickly realized, was just a bunch of violent goofballs beating up kids for drinking, which was stupid. Back then, it meant not drinking Coke, you couldn’t drink caffeine, you had to be abstinent.
I can’t really think of two more opposed genres than hardcore punk and ambient folk.
Even before that, I was super obsessed with the Butthole Surfers, which are like the most psychedelic acid freaks on the planet. It was pretty funny. Not too many straightedge Goths, that’s for sure.
How has your sound changed over the almost 20 years you’ve been writing and performing as Drekka?
I’d say it’s almost regressed. When I started doing the shoegaze, space-folk, whatever you want to call it, I couldn’t play guitar or anything. I sort of tried to learn but didn’t really have the discipline to do it. And then I sort of got less interested in playing the songs [and more into] making the sounds. I think what I’m doing now is more influenced by what I was listening to when I first got into Psychic TV and all that stuff in ’88, ’89ish. It’s almost like doing what I’m most comfortable with. I don’t know. I’m mostly interested in just sounds, how different sounds work or don’t work together. Simple melodies. I’m really into implied melodies. You hear a sound, and for some reason think of a song. Simplicity.
What’s the process like for writing a Drekka song?
A lot of the times I won’t start working on a piece or a song unless I have some sort of melody in my head for weeks, and then I’ll go try it out on different instruments. A lot of the stuff I’ve been doing the last five or six years is actually collaging. The live shows are 70-80% improvised, and I record them all directly to my hard drive off my board.
And there’s some of that stuff on the new record.
And so a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing lately takes those recordings and uses them as the material for new stuff. A lot of the new record started off as live recordings. The first track that I did with Annelies Monseré is a collage of two different live recordings of the same piece, panned left and right. They sort of come and go because they don’t come out the same every night.
And that first track is based off an English folk song.
It’s a song that Shirley Collins used to do called “Go From My Window” that Annelies is really obsessed with.
I’ve noticed from a lot of your track titles that “windows” are a recurring theme.
The whole B-side of Windowframe, the album, is all different ideas of the same melody recorded on different sides of the glass, the inside stuff being “comfort zone” and the outside stuff being natural. So the tracks recorded on the outside are the melody literally being recorded during a windstorm with a contact mic on the window so you can’t really hear it because its being played inside.
The back of the latest record has a picture of the word “coward.” What’s the story there?
I played this show, and it like… it was weird. I had to keep moving room from room because so many people were smoking out I was paranoid that I would catch a contact buzz. These people were totally out. Totally fucked up. It was an awesome show, though. It was in a basement, and there were two different video artists working at the same time, projecting onto the wall behind me, and I just sat on the ground and had a ring of Christmas lights as a sort of barrier and people were sitting right up to [me]. And the next day I wake up and there’s people just asleep everywhere. It’s really weird. And I go into the kitchen and there’s this huge, awesome, weird ring of salami. Food everywhere. And then I went in the hallway and there’s really stark morning light, and there’s this mirror, and for some reason someone had written above it the word “coward.” It just looked perfect.
Have you ever played culture shock?
I did. I played Culture Shock when I was a member of Racebannon in 2001, I think, and it was great.
What kind of band was Racebannon?
They started out as kind of a hardcore screamo band, and evolved into this scream / post-rock / metal-tinged machine… sort of like Melvins or something like that. What I used to do was I would sit on stage while they were playing and record the volume coming off the stage and collage it. So when they were done with a song, I would immediately blast back sort of a cut-up of the song that you’d just heard.
What are your views on today’s independent music scene and independent music distribution over the Internet?
It’s so easy for anyone to put anything out now, so the listening public has gotten overloaded and desensitized to a lot of stuff. So, on the one hand its really amazing that anyone can do it, but now a hundred times more people are doing it. It’s much harder to stand out or to even get someone to bother listening. But there are still people out there listening.
What’s been your favorite place to perform?
I really love playing in Slovenia. I was super excited to go there, because I was really obsessed with Laibach, this Slovenian industrial band. And then I went there and nobody cares about Laibach. It’s kind of like here. I grew up in Boston and moved to Chicago, where everyone was obsessed with Magnetic Fields and Dinosaur Jr. I didn’t go see Dinosaur Jr. like a hundred times because I just didn’t care.
What makes a good audience for the kind of music that Drekka makes?
A relatively small audience. Situationally, it could be a place where people are predisposed to be quiet. People need to be quiet. The worst shows are when people aren’t paying attention, which is fine, I don’t care if people pay attention to me, but it makes it almost impossible for me to play a nuanced set. So if people are talking, I need to go into crybaby mode and get really obnoxious and loud, and those shows are kind of fun, they get really punk, sometimes you get some fights. And that’s fine, I used to sing in a death punk band called Turn Pale, and there was a lot of physical interaction with the crowd. Same thing with Racebannon. I have no problem kicking someone in the face, but with Drekka, I feel like when its done, I think “that was garbage, it was just a dancing monkey show.”
What’s the future of Drekka?
Well, it’s kind of weird, because Drekka’s become less a band name and more a name. People refer to me as Drekka, so if I play on someone else’s record, they’ll credit me as Drekka or Michael Drekka. It’s kind of become a life brand, probably. I think if I started something else, I’d probably credit myself as Drekka, just to be funny. At this point, I pretty much continue doing it because it’s a free ticket to travel the world. As long as that’s feasible, I’ll probably keep doing it.
Last question: What’s your favorite Drekka record?
I really love the 3-inch CD-Rs I’ve done, especially the original 3-inch version of “Ekki gera fikniefnum.” I had a tour planned to go all they way around Iceland’s one highway, Route 1, in 2010. The ring road, they call it. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull made travel to the south impossible, so with a couple days off, Thorir and I recorded, mixed, designed, and burned 20 copies of this little EP. It was a lot of fun, and we had a special new release to sell at the remaining shows!
