photo credit: Tae Won Yu

The potential and promise of pop were crystallized in the 1960s, a decade whose music many bands have sought to recreate yet whose spirit few have been able to successfully evoke. The Aislers Set is, in my opinion, the group that has best fulfilled the legacy of the 60s. Band leader, songwriter, and producer av Linton is an unassuming successor to such greats as Brian Wilson and Phil Spector, yet her talents are equally monumental. The three albums she made with The Aislers Set--Terrible Things Happen (1998), The Last Match (2000), and How I Learned to Write Backwards (2003)--represent a perfect progression and encapsulation of everything we love about pop music from decades past: as if Moe Tucker stepped out from behind the drums to front the Velvet Underground with a trumpet and an electric 12-string, writing angular and abstract post-punk pocket symphonies, equal parts Shangri-Las and Shop Assistants. In September, the three albums will be reissued by Slumberland (Terrible Things and Last Match) and Suicide Squeeze (How I Learned), and Linton and co. will take to the road for a few shows on the west coast, their first here in over a decade. There has also been mention of a collection of singles and rarities to be released next year.

I got in touch with Linton to ask her some questions:

Have you listened to your albums much over the years, as I assume you've had to do to gear up for the upcoming shows? What are your impressions listening to the songs again? Excitement? Nostalgia? 

no, not so much. a song here and there over the years. I've definitely not listened to an entire aislers set album, except when recently remastering the records.  we've played a handful of shows in the last couple of years so I've had to re-familiarize myself with some of the songs, really listen. but thats about it.

for the most part, i think within those records are some really good songs I'm proud to say i wrote. a lot of the songs still sound relevant and interesting, to me. which, obviously, is something you dont think about when your recording, or at least i didn't.

i guess i do feel a bit of nostalgia when i hear them, but a disconnected feeling  too. nostalgia for being in my 20's…part of an amazing music and art scene in a once wild wonderful city. but i feel very disconnected to a specific creative endurance, spirit, temperament, or whatever you want to call it, that i hear in those records. i just remember feeling inexhaustible while making them. i remember the feeling of "finally" hearing something id worked for days and nights in a row, finally done and sitting back and having a smoke in a kind of fugue state wondering what just happened.  i imagine a lot of people feel this way after recording.

the thing with recording on analog 8 track is you really have to be focused on the many steps ahead of what you are recording at that moment. placing things on the sonic spectrum and sub mixing instruments. tracks you can never recall individually if you make a mistake and decide something should be louder later or just plain out of the mix altogether. if the bass isn't loud enough, bummer or do another track which means more moving around and more sub mixing. 
on attraction i think i recorded almost 20 tracks. was such a process on the 8 track. i think this is where people might get that "wall of sound" vibe from. its just the result of packing everything i wanted to hear onto limited amount of tape space. the more you sub mix the more things blending together, becoming a mass, for better or worse, you definitely lose tonal definition on the individual tracks. thats why the vocals are always a bit trebly and clustered together. 
if i knew i wanted a multiple vocal harmony i usually had to record that at the beginning after drums and scratch guitar, then mix them all to one or two tracks to make room for the rest of the music. on my particular machine i knew that the outer tracks were eating up the high end but sometimes thats where my vocals had to be as you can't bounce multiple tracks to an adjacent track cos it creates a feedback loop. so an internal track always had to be open so you could leapfrog it. anyway, i would have to do vocals early on cos,often,  i wanted so many of them  i sub mixed them trebly knowing the treble would lose out in the end over the many tape passes it would take to record the whole song. on songs where the vocals are present and clear its cos there aren't that many of them and i could record vocals near the end of recording the song.

you didn't ask for that information but its what i miss. that process. that is nostalgic to me.

How has it been going getting back together as a band to rehearse?
   
we haven't started rehearsing yet for the west coast shows. wyatt has a family and lives in sweden, yoshi is married and lives in germany, alicia and dan both have families and live in san francisco, I moved to NY in 2002 but just recently moved to LA this year. 
basically rehearsing will just be a few concentrated days in san francisco before we head to seattle for the first show. 
its nice to play together again. everyone has grown up a lot and the difficult dynamics, when we were a band, have faded.
the first time we got back together to play a show in new york a couple of years ago i was surprised by how much i enjoyed it. the songs sounded good. felt good playing them.
our friends, gabe saucedo and gary olson,  will be playing with us in LA and SF. playing horns and percussion and filling out the songs more than when we were a touring band. gary and kyle forester played with us for that ny show. having friends play who weren't initally involved really reinvigorates the songs for me. it will be fun.

Can you share any interesting stories or trivia about the recording of Terrible Things Happen, The Last Match, How I Learned to Write Backwards? 

i can't think of much right now. hummm let me think...after "terrible things", then untitled, was recorded and mastered and on its way to be a record i was with mike schulman who had this incredibly expensive photo of the artwork layout for the album and i spilled a beer on it. i can't even imagine how pissed off he actually was at that moment, but he hid it well and just said "terrible things happen" . so thats what we called the record.

i used to have this amazing car, i worked on it all the time. it was a 1959 austin healy bug eyed sprite. i loved that car. i would work on it all night long fixing and improving it. i probably listened to the first comet gain record and the first tvps record a hundred times each while working on this car. but after henrys dress broke up i sold it to buy an 8 track reel to reel machine. I guess I'm glad i did, otherwise there would be no aislers set records. the funny thing is, i recently saw what that car is worth now. if id just kept it, i could have made way more money selling it now than all the money ive earned from all the records I've made, combined. oh well, I'm happy to have the records. 

when recording the last match we sometimes tracked at my house and sometimes at wyatt and alicias. they were living together at the time. we owned the same kind of machine. an otari 8 track. that record sounds really different from the others because of this, i think. wy and alica lived in a warehouse and my garage space was a carpeted 10ft by 10ft room. you can really hear the difference especially in the drum sounds between songs like the last match and the way to market station. the former being recorded in the warehouse. it was a fun way to record the songs we all played on. moving between the spaces depending on what we thought would sound better or what instruments were where. i,e, alicia and wyatt had a piano.  having the same machine, wyatt and i could independently work on our own songs. get them to a point were we wanted each other and the rest of the band to contribute and the format didn't matter. we could do it here or there. whatever would sound best. of course this doesn't sound like a big deal with digital recording being how most people record now.

how i learned is a weird record. i know. and maybe its some folks least favorite of the three but, personally, i think its the most up front. its a lonely sounding record. with the last match people were really taking notice and liking us. we were making the lists. after touring that record exhaustively a lot of shitty things started happening in my life. some of them my fault, personal, some just the course of life. regardless i was having a terrible time. 
at one point i had some physically paralyzing problem where i couldn't move my legs. it lasted for months. i went every other day to the doctor, tests tests tests, and they couldn't figure it out. we had to cancel an entire tour the night before leaving cos i was in the hospital. anyway, that time was dark and weird. 
after i was physically feeling better a lot of time had passed and i felt like i wasnt connected to making/recording music in the same way. out of practice. emotionally tired. sometimes when that happens, when you're so tired, you just have to get to the point. so i recorded mission bells, emotional levy, unfinished paintings, and attraction action reaction. they might not be to the point as a listener but for me they were. other songs on that record were just trying to get reacquainted with the studio, mostly. those weird songs. experimenting and re-familiarizing myself with the whole thing. other songs are just accounts of trying to reintegrate, socially.
during this time my great aunt died. my great aunt katherine. she was 84 years old and delivering a check to her neighborhood church, as she regularly did. one day she fell down the concrete stairs at the subway station in sheepshead bay, brooklyn. it took too much time for folks around her to respond, act with urgency, and she died before she got to the hospital. the "note" on her check said " please god, dont let me fall". i know she didn't mean it like that, so literally, but she fell and she died.  at the time i blamed stranger who saw it happen, who moved on not wanting to get involved, for her dying. i wrote catherine says and i put it as the first track on the record. 
i knew it wasn't the best or most appropriate first track, especially with the obvious religious references and all, but i figured anyone who really cares to hear the record will keep listening and if that song scares people away, good riddance. 

One of my favorite things about your music is your singing.  Even within modern "indie" music it's very unusual nowadays to come across a female vocalist who sings in a straightforward, non-affected or overly bombastic way.  Who are your influences vocally?  What do you sing in the shower?  

im not sure how to answer this. I've always thought my singing voice just sounds like a more melodic version of my speaking voice.  i can't cite any direct positive vocal influence. i knew how i didn't want it to sound, though.
i don't sing in the shower often, unless I'm having a coffee at the same time. when i do its probably "jeane" by the smiths. when I'm at work i find myself singing "kill the poor"  by dead kennedys way too often. always popping into my mind.

You've mentioned in an interview before your affinity for Television Personalities and the work of Dan Treacy (modestly dropping his name in "Been Hiding," years before MGMT).  Have you ever met Dan or thought about collaborating with him? It seems he would be a great fan of your work.   


i met him at a show in london six or seven years ago and he asked if i would want to collaborate sometime. i said yes knowing nothing would come of it. it would be a disaster, I'm sure of it.
the first time hearing the first TVP's record immediately inspired and grounded me simultaneously.  if it weren't for that record and a few others including galaxy 500's today, i would never have recorded the first aislers set song, friends of the heroes, which might be obvious. anyway, "and don't the kids just love it" is one of the best records ever made, in my opinion.
 

You wrote a really touching anecdote some years ago about your experience recording on John Peel's show.  What role did he play in your musical upbringing?  Were you aware of him growing up in New Mexico?  


up until a few years before i first met him i didn't even know there was a real man behind it all. 
as a teenager, i was aware of, and buying, the peel sessions the strange fruit label was putting out. those kinds of imports were hard to find in albuquerque in the 80's so i had to mail order from ads in magazines like maximum rock and roll. one day i got an order in the mail and someone had thrown an NME into the package. until then id never seen or heard of the magazine. jeez, how that changed things. this is where i found out john peel was a real man! 

in the early 90's, on my first trip to england, i stayed in Leeds with stuart, of boyracer.  there was a festival in town called Leads Sound City. i met peel in small bar one of those nights. i asked him if i could give him my record. i had the henrys dress ep in my pocket. i showed it to him and he said he already had it. i couldn't believe it but i couldn't not believe him. we hung out for a bit and talked about the southwest of america. he was an insurance salemen or some sort of salesman in texas for a while. ended up we had quite a lot to talk about. mostly about the desert, not about music. 

our peel session was recorded at the maida vale studios in london. we were all very excited to meet him but he wasnt there. of course he wasn't there. can you imagine him hanging around while bands record all day? no, he was at home. but it didnt make the session any less exciting and nerve wracking and kind of mind-blowing.  

when we heard the session air, a week or so later, we were in a glasgow bar listening on a tiny one speaker battery powered radio. the radio reception was terrible and someone had to be holding the antenna the whole time so the signal wouldn't break up. god forbid we miss a moment of it. it was perfect. his voice coming out of that little thing and then our music coming out of it… all these years later i still can't really describe how i felt at that moment. just too incredible.


What was the music scene like in New Mexico when you were growing up?  How did you initially get into music and who were your main musical (or other) influences?  Do you hear those influences when you listen to your music now? 

there is a university there but the college radio station, at that time when i started playing in bands (mid 80's), wasn't cued into punk and alternative "college" music and the locals who played it. from what i remember, the station mostly played native new mexican music. i could listen to that all day now. but wasn't interested as a teenager. that or talk radio.
 
since college radio wasn't supportive, weirdos and punks occasionally made videos for public access television. sometimes they even had their own weekly program. so i became aware of some people/bands that way.

albuquerque was the only real potential gas money between arizona and texas for small touring bands, so every small punk band came through. if you wanted to see something bigger you had to go out of state.  it was seeing those small punk shows that made growing up in albuquerque one that i wouldn't change for any big city alternate history. had a massive influence on me musically, and eventually, politically.
everyone came, from the descendents to unsane, over the years. saccharine trust, token entry, dough boys, slap shot, warlock pincers, monsula, even screwdriver (who's van was overturned at the show. ha!). in my memory every diy band played a shitty show in albuquerque.

in the mid to late 80's i was in two bands that really played shows. a hardcore band which later became and a ska band. typical, right? i was really young and really suburban but playing in bands with folks who were drawn to punk for reasons i really didn't understand at the time. me being white middle class and 13/14 years old, i didn't understand a lot. i got energy from the people and playing and listening but not the politics. basically, i went home after the shows, while a lot of the kids didn't. 
a bunch of punk bands, including mine, practiced in a self storage yard where the storage containers were old train cars with electricity. bands would throw parties and play shows in them all the time and a lot of those teenagers lived in them. made homes there.

i remember playing a show in a back yard at our singers dads house ( we were all 13-16) and the cops came and beat anyone who couldn't run fast enough. my bandmate had his shoulder knocked out of place and his face torn up against a stucco wall by the police. he was 16. it was his dad's house and his dad was home! i remember standing right there watching while it happened. i was barely approaching 5 ft tall and 13 years old. i remember that night so well.
every show or party seemed to end in violence or some kind of darkness. but i was just a tiny witness, a musical participant who didn't have to live the rest of those nights in that violent place. i just went home, to my comfortable home.
my mom is just about the kindest supportive soul a person could be. a lot of nights a friend or two, of my brother and i, would come home with us cos they really just had no where else safe to go. she would take care to make them comfortable and never asked questions but sometimes, when my brother and i were out of the room, i could hear a friend talking to her and them crying together. friends called her mom too. "ma linton".   
 
when i went to college the scene was changing. or my participation in it was.
it was like all the darkness of the 80s had lifted. i was living with friends and we became henrys dress and bands like tiger trap were coming through town. calamity jane, the nation of ulysses. the swilrlies. the jesus and mary chain and spritualized even came. different. positive, relatively speaking.

bands like the drags and big damn crazy weight were happening and getting notice and releasing records on estrus and amphetamine reptile. this was a very big deal in that small local scene. bands from albuquerque being noticed. personally and musically both bands had a massive influence on henrys dress.
really great pop bands were coming together too. the ant farmers and the rosemary's to name couple. but most notably, flake music.

right when we were leaving albuquerque to go to california, james mercer and flake music was becoming active and getting positive attention. such great music and different from anything that was happening there. james' songs, then and now, are incredible. he took over our house, 1620 silver ave, when henrys dress moved to sf. flake and HD would play shows together when we came back through. all such cool guys. we eventually put out a split single on omnibus records. 
dave, of flake and the shins, was the guitarist/songwriter in my aforementioned teenage punk and ska bands. such a great songwriter even at 15 years old. such energy and an incredible ear for catchy melodies.  i wish i had better documentation of those bands.

anyway, just as henrys dress were thinking of moving out of albuquerque, tiger trap came through town and stayed at our house. i don't even remember if we played with them but they stayed with us. we all became friends immediately. and henrys dress moved to california shortly after that. they were our landing pad.

woah, long rant! but to answer the last part of your question. yes i can hear all of everything from that time in my music. in a way, that time is why i still play music. 


You studied architecture and are an architect if I'm not mistaken.  Are there similarities between constructing the space of a building and the space of a song?

  
i didn't get a degree in architecture. i studied sculpture and printmaking. architecture was always an interest of mine though and in high school and college i took a lot of classes in it. a few years out of college i got a job as a draftsperson at an architectural firm. sometime within a year of that having that job my boss threw some blueprints on my desk and told me to design my first vertical addition to a house. after that, i designed everything from additions to entire homes. i learned an incredible amount from that job. i was obsessed with it. i never stopped thinking about work except when i was making music. i had that job at the same time i was making the aislers set records. i do think those two obsessions did inspire and inform each other. though maybe not directly. just the energy of having two passions. they spilled into each other. vitalized each other. 
this is an interesting question to me but hard for me to answer. no one has ever asked me about the space in my songs which  i feel i took a lot of care in, and often paid even more attention to than the songs themselves.
i think on the level where ideas and sounds or ideas and forms are just springing from, they are very similar. 
start with the whole structure then create the paths/structure within it. things will likely jut out here or there, some details might feel far away or subtle, and other instances will be smooth and open, or reflective, or closely detailed, or just transparent. pile idea on idea as far as as you want to explore but at a point things have to be reeled in to meet realistic limitations. for architecture that mostly meant money/budget/planning codes etc. for music, for me, that meant the 8 tracks. perhaps, boringly simple, i think, for me, the similarities between constructing physical and aural space is just my particular process of problem solving/decision making. where to put things. 
this may sound trite, but the thing i love most about music is the connection of interior spaces between the maker and the listener. you could say this about architecture and visual art too but with music the path between the two is much shorter.  


I saw Henry's Dress play at the Slumberland Anniversary show a few years ago in LA--it was a very exciting set.  You are a monster drummer and seeing the crowd's enthusiasm when you came back and performed "The Red Door" was really moving.  Do you recognize your own influence, the mark you've created with your music? 

thanks for saying  that. hopefully not sounding arrogant or insincerely modest, people have told me this before. that the music i made has a place in pop history, and more importantly and humbling-ly in their present lives. even after 10 or 15 years. that those records are still listened to and referenced and affect people in a positive and creative way is so insanely incredible and lucky to me.

Can you give us any info about the "singles/rarities collection"?  Will it be mostly singles and b-sides?  Demos?  unreleased songs? Peel Sessions?


will be mostly singles and demos, some live stuff, some unreleased things I've found on the reel to reels. maybe some things I've done alone since recording the last record. unfortunately we can't afford to by the rights to the peel sessions so it can't be included.

What besides music do you like to do in your free time?  Do you have any hobbies?

i rent a cabin in topanga canyon. i spend a lot of time there building it out and trying to make it more livable for me. i do some print making up there. mono prints, lino prints, silkscreening etc.  i also spend a lot of my free time at the beach. surfing or just watching the ocean.

And finally, what in your estimation is the best pop song ever written?

ha! thats impossible to answer! theres no such thing in my opinion. maybe one could go back and call out a buddy holly song or "to know his is to love him" or something a ton of pop fans could at least consider agreeing on but theres just too much incredible stuff. aren't we so lucky? 



Indeed we are. Do not miss these shows, folks:

9/22 Seattle, WA - Neumos
9/23 Portland, OR - Holocene
9/26 Los Angeles, CA - Echoplex
9/28 San Francisco, CA - The Chapel

-Nick Cullen

Enjoy Slumberland's awesome sampler:



and a lovely new tune from av: