Crib Notes

Left to right Bimbi Smoofus and Dream Sanitation (photo by Stevie Brown)

Now that Noot ‘d Noot’s much anticipated proper debut full-length Goofer Dust (International Hits) has hit the streets the world is getting its first real look at just what Atlanta’s premier party band is all about. Drummer Mathis Hunter (A.K.A. Bimbi Smoofus) and keyboard player Rich Morris (Dream Sanitation) took time out of their day to talk about the atmosphere surrounding the record, and where it’s going from here.

Chad Radford: Did Noot ‘d Noot start as a joke hip-hop band or something like that?

Bimbi Smoofus: No, there was never really a joke. It started as a side project to Good Friday Experiment. We were learning to make beats on the MPC and were trying to use our own music as a sample source. We were using records too, but we were trying to sample ourselves.

CR: Were you doing this because you wanted to sell beats to people?

Dream Sanitation: We were doing it mostly to have fun and make music on Friday nights because the clubs in town weren’t playing the kind of music that we wanted to hear.

CR: It’s hard to come up with an accurate hyphenated catch phrase to describe Noot ‘d Noot’s sound.

BS: That’s what we want, but you’ve come pretty close. I think of it as being like a modern day version of Can, or at least taking the concepts of Can; taking everything that you do and cutting it up into pieces of music with modern technology. We don’t have reels and reels of tapes, but we do have 4-Track cassettes, Garageband files, ProTools files, minidisk…

CR: Do you think of yourselves as a party band?

BS: Sure… But the record was made before the band existed. People that are in the band now played on the record but it was before we had ever played any shows. It’s very much a fun thing, but it wasn’t like we were preparing this music to go play a show or a party, or that we wanted to learn these songs and play them tight. We were just fucking around and making music. We want that to carry over into the live show. We have fun making this music so we want you to have fun.

CR: I was drawn into a conversation at lunch this weekend where someone said that they couldn’t believe that I-Hits put out your record on CD and LP because they couldn’t imagine any circumstances where anyone would want to listen to it on either format, ever. I defended it by saying that it it’s not a Don Caballero record. It’s a party record. It isn’t meant to be studied or cathartic or driven by any sort of songwriting or complex arrangements. It’s a groove-heavy record that gets people moving at shows and at parties. People react to it en mass. Does that seem like a fair assessment?

DS: yeah. If you’re into Don Caballero you’re not going to like what we do.

CR: It’s not virtuoso jams, but at the same time there is some very skilled musicianship going into this record. Will there be another one?

BS: Yeah. The thing is we have a band now that’s playing music that’s completely different from the record. It’s like a live band. When the band got together we learned how to play a lot of the stuff on the record, but a lot of the record has never been played live. Now that we have a band I would really like to record as a band.

CR: So you have songs? It’s not all just improvised while jamming on rhythms?

BS: There’s an element of improv to it, but there are jump off points.

CR: And all of the points appeared on the Goofer Dust mixtape that came out in ’06, but they all felt like rough sketches back then. The record seems to have fleshed them out into coherent numbers that stand on their own legs.

DS: We have compiled all of our beats since Noot ‘d Noot was born. We actually have like 3 or 4 best of Noot ‘d Noot mix CDs from different eras. Goofer Dust is a highly polished one. It’s the best one.

BS: We went into the studio with it and tried to match things like horns and percussion with what we had.

DS: The live show developed by watching what got the most reaction from the audience, what got people dancing and it grew from there. We didn’t plan that it would become what it is. It grew out of what worked at Lenny’s on a Friday or Saturday night and it’s fun to play.

BS: What kind of stuff is the guy who doesn’t like us into?

CR: Math rock, really intense, angry and fiery hardcore stuff. Shellac, New Brutalism… Uptight stuff like that.

BS: That’s pretty much the opposite of what we’re all about: angry mathematical, discordant and with no sense of rhythm….

CR: You say that with a sense of pride…

BS: I went to all of those kinds of shows when I was in high school and early in college, and at a certain point my musical development lead me completely away from that stuff.

CR: I think of the screamy angry stuff that I was into when I was younger as being like the big bang from where all of the dark matter of the universe came from that I’m into now… But I can’t turn my back on where I came from.

BS: No, and that’s totally cool. In my own development as a musician I have gone toward what I excel at, and crazy, mathematical stiff things is just not what I’m good at. It is what it is and all of us were hardcore kids. I watched a million shows at The Driver Dome back in the day and I just loved being around music. But when I was 18 I saw Tortoise and Stereolab at The Cotton Club within two weeks of each other, it was the Millions Now Living Will Never Die and Emperor Tomato Ketchup tours, and it was the end of punk rock for me in a lot of ways.

CR: I think of Tortoise and Stereolab as being stamped in time and defining an era of music. It was the Clinton years. People had money and they were experimenting a lot, mostly because they could afford to. But things have changed since those days and I identify Tortoise with a particular time and place that is now long gone.

BS: So do you think of Noot ‘d Noot as being like a Southern version of all that stuff, but ten years after the fact?

CR: Kind of. It is interesting to hear you making this kind of music in a completely different time and place. It makes me think of bands like Tortoise a lot differently and I wonder how dated they really are to the rest of the world and how well they would sound now. By that logic Noot ‘ d Noot could come across as dated, but there are numerous things about it that put it in the here and now.

BS: Right. But what I think is most important is that sometimes you just have to say fuck and do what you love and have fun playing music.

Bookmark to:

Posted in Music news | Leave a comment

Tags: International-Hits, Noot d' Noot, Tortoise.