pure SHIFTER is Doug Deitchler (left) and John Genz (right).
Flip Rushmore and pure SHIFTER are playing Minneapolis’ legendary 7th St Entry with Denim Matriarch and VIAL on Friday, January 17. Find tickets here. Alex got both members of pure SHIFTER (John Genz and Doug Deitchler) on the phone to discuss the show and whatever the hell else.
As a member of Beasthead, Doug has "crossed paths" with various members of Flip Rushmore and Denim Matriarch in the past. Friday will serve as a chance to reconnect, as well as a chance to show off the difference between pure SHIFTER and Beasthead. Alex: When you start a new project, there’s always a reason. So what was pure SHIFTER gonna allow you to express differently? Doug: You want to take that one, John? John: This music is pretty much all my stuff, and Doug came on to help me reign in some of my … how do I put this … Doug helps to organize the music and put it together. He’s an arranger, in a way. Doug: We’ve actually had a little bit of confusion with this recently. Just with The Current and City Pages. I’m from Beasthead. And John and I brought Mitch Miller from Beasthead on the drums, so it sorta seemed like because there were two members (that it was a Beasthead project) … but the actual genesis of this was, this is John’s music. We just made songs out of it. And I don’t think I’ve picked your brain about this, John, but are the songs we’re playing right now, were they written in the past few years on acoustic instruments? This is sort of a rewrite of all those songs with different genres and newer tastes involved? I stepped in last spring to reform his songs and give them some new life. Making a live band and a show out of it. You’re taking John’s original arrangements and reworking them. But are you sitting down together and doing that? Or is Doug just going into the lab and coming back with something? Doug: When we got together last spring, John had all of this done. Pretty much all written. John: A lot of was done, but sort of in imperfect form. The beats would be sort of made and laid out, and the songs would exist, but sort of, like, they’d just be a couple loops, maybe a chorus. Very little fully-formed stuff. Or it would go on for 10 minutes and nothing would change. Doug would be the guy who would say, “Let’s think about the average attention span here.” Doug: He played me a lot of these nine-minute “blob ideas,” and I was like, “I can hear the 15 percent that’s usable here. Let’s carve out some songs. Early on, we ran into some things, like, you’re gonna have to rewrite this. Or rewrite lyrics. Figure out a different synth. And sort of against my instincts, any rewriting that comes up, I’ve purposely been uninvolved. Just to keep the core of it in the same stylistic vein … It’s interesting doing that with songs that I technically didn’t write, but did everything else for. I’ve listened to the four that are officially released on Bandcamp. You guys did these A-side/B-side releases this year. They’re all pretty different from each other. (Flip Rushmore) tries to do something different with each song, too. Then you have bands that have a very specific style. You can tell it’s them immediately. But pure SHIFTER seems to be more of the former. You don’t know what’s gonna come next. Did you have a huge pool of songs, and you picked four unique ones? Or is this something you’re trying to do with each song you make? John: We’re definitely trying to think about it in terms of that. Eclecticism has always been part of the goal. Each song is like an island. I want to make them all have their own individual reason to exist. Each release, we definitely think about, okay, what makes these songs go together? If we do two, why do they have to go back-to-back? Sometimes that reason comes after you’ve decided on the songs. But it’s very deliberate, I think. Doug: With the starting point being you writing and reworking older songs into this electronic format—which is relatively new for you … it’s a combo of stuff you’ve tried in the last decade on your own, and the stuff I’ve tried in the last decade on my own. Bringing that together and finding common moments. When we listen back to something, I refer to it as the “heads-up moment.” If there’s a lyric or a sound where your head snaps up, “Oh, that’s it!” I’m watching for when we both do that, and seeing what the crossover is and maybe why stuff ends up sounding kind of different. With the core of it being John’s songwriting and creating some kind of backbone or the thing that keeps it from going off the rails completely. So if you’re making new material, it stands to reason that you’d be starting from square one together once you exhaust everything John has previously worked on. But when you’re working on new stuff at this point, is it still going to be the same process? Is John still gonna come up with something and bring it to Doug? Or will it work differently? John: Shiiiiit. Doug: We haven’t talked about it. Maybe now’s a good time! John: There’s just so much stuff, still. Doug: I feel like if you just kept bringing stuff to the table, and on the backburner, started from scratch writing new ideas. I feel like that process of constantly putting things on the backburner (in a queue) and then bringing things in … we could probably do this forever. John: The way we make music is bound to change. It’s already changing. We just finished tracking a new single we’re getting mixed now. And for the first time—it’s still an older song—we decided to use the vocal manipulator that Doug uses onstage, as part of the tracking process. So for the first time, Doug is actually playing something in the recording. So it’s already starting to happen. Doug: Maybe the less and less finished stuff you have in the future, we’ll have more room to mess around. But he’s got more than enough to keep us busy for aware. But doesn’t it always go, like … you could have the largest backlog ever, but then you’re still gonna have this new idea that’s better than anything else you’ve been working on. Do you have any other outlets, John? When you come up with the next great American song, is it a pure SHIFTER song or does it go somewhere else? John: I don’t know. There’s a weird disconnect. There’s stuff in the catalogue already that wouldn’t fit as a pure SHIFTER song. So I don’t know if they just get discarded or not. I’m not sure about what ma |