Listening to Resolver, the latest offering from Footings, you’d never know that the main creative force behind the distinctive rock outfit got his musical bearings playing in hardcore bands. Footings blend acoustic sounds with electronic elements and straddle that fine line between folk and indie rock. The band produces moody, stark, and downright haunting sounds, all punctuated by the wry lyricism of Eric Gagne, a name you may recognize for a number of reasons.

Gagne and his wife, Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne, co-founded the annual Thing In The Spring arts festival. In addition, Gagne—who has been writing songs since the age of 13—has done time with several distinguished groups, including Death to Tyrants, Redwing Blackbird, Dweller, and Passerine.

“I also had a band in high school, [and did] some embarrassing stuff in college, but thankfully this was before the Internet as we know it,” Gagne quips. “I’m pretty happy to have the chance to go out and play music, and have people interested in the songs I write.”

Footings. Photo by Michael Gunlach

Footings is Gagne, who was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but grew up in Rindge, New Hampshire, and Elisabeth Fuschia, who has been playing viola since the age of 3 and has lived for years in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Since the band’s inception, Footings have rightly drawn comparisons to both Songs: Ohia and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. But even fans of acts like Dinosaur Jr. and Andrew Bird will find themselves transfixed by Footing’s brilliant compositions.

Gagne says the band spent nine months on Resolver, which was released in early August. “When I am thinking about or writing a song, I always feel like I’m accessing memories from growing up, which all took place in the woods, or with people who are from the same kind of area,” Gagne says. “So even when I’m thinking about driving down 95 to Washington, D.C., it’s like we’re shooting out of a deep forest into this strange and uncanny place.”

Footings play live throughout New England, and can be seen regularly at venues in Burlington, Vermont, Portland, Maine, and up and down New Hampshire’s seacoast. “We love that you can tour for two weeks for under $200 of gas,” Gagne says. “Generally, it’s amazing that such a small geographical area can support so many artistic communities. I have friends that I see once a year on tour whom I would drop anything for if they needed me. That is a special thing; fostering those kinds of relationships.”

He adds about being a New England musician: “It’s amazing to get to hear so many artists too; to keep up with all of my friends who write and perform, as well as getting to meet new people and hear new things.”

Want to know what’s on Gagne’s playlist when he’s not performing with Footings? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify channel to find out. While there, listen to what the other musicians we’ve profiled have on their playlists.

Eric Gagne — Guitarist and vocalist for Footings
Peterborough, New Hampshire
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Top image: Footings. Photo by Britt Shorter

The post Footings’ Musical Foundations appeared first on Take Magazine.

You could almost set a timer —every 20 years or so, the Northampton-area music scene attracts national attention. Bands get signed, stories get written, hype builds. Then, like a lighthouse beam, the spotlight rotates away to the next town or sound. A couple of decades go by, and the whole process repeats: starting in the late 1960s with western Massachusetts acts like Arlo Guthrie, Clean Living, and Fat; continuing into the late ’80s and early ’90s with Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and the Scud Mountain Boys; and moving all the way up to a crop of current groups that includes And the Kids, LuxDeluxe, and California X.

Yet as any music fan in the region knows, the local scene doesn’t rely on outside illumination to thrive. For more than 45 years, the sound of music in western Massachusetts—in Northampton, but also throughout the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires—has been abundant and varied. Rock ’n’ roll, blues, punk, and various indie rock sounds have all taken root, along with heavy metal, jazz, and plenty of folk. Bands have come and gone; venues have opened, closed, and burned down; and the scene has flourished through it all.

“I just always marvel at the richness of it, considering how small the area is,” says David Sokol, who was music editor at the Valley Advocate from 1977 to 1993.

Dave Sokol, photo by Izzy Berdan

Billboard magazine expressed a similar sentiment in a slightly condescending frontpage story in 1992 that described the area as “a picturesque, place-that-time-forgot farming community.” Yet despite a population less than a quarter of the 3.4 million people in greater Seattle—the aspirational baseline for music scenes since the city birthed the ’90s grunge explosion that gave us Nirvana and Pearl Jam—the four counties of western Massachusetts have for years had the essential ingredients of any successful music scene: a creative class of musicians; places for them to play; audiences who will go see them; and supportive local media, including radio station WRSI-FM and the Valley Advocate, that will play their records on the air and write about them.

Western Massachusetts is also an affordable place to live, with a youthful atmosphere that flows from the local colleges, most notably Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts. It’s also near the intersection of two interstate highways, which is helpful when it’s time to go on tour. Those attributes have made this area attractive to a continual flow of music-minded people, far more than there’s room to mention. Some of them got famous; more of them, then and now, play music simply because they love it and it’s fun.

“Northampton is an incredible place to emerge as an artist and to find that group of people who support what you do,” says folksinger Dar Williams, who moved to Northampton in 1992 and began building her career. So far it’s yielded 10 solo studio albums, including this year’s Emerald. Though she relocated to New York in 2000, she adds, “I would say it’s the reason I’m still doing what I’m doing.”

Ray Mason, photo by Izzy Berdan

The beginnings of the western Massachusetts scene date to the mid-1960s, when musicians like Holyoke native Ray Mason would play the local YMCA and slip an occasional original song into sets of covers of The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Rascals. The covers-are-king attitude started to fade when bands like the Rockin’ Ramrods from Boston and The Wildweeds from Connecticut came through playing their own songs, almost as if they were demonstrating that such a thing was possible for regular guys from New England.

The post Reverb and a Zip Code appeared first on Take Magazine.

If you are a fan of alternative comic books, the name James Kochalka should almost certainly ring a bell. His is the visionary mind behind the Johnny Boo, Dragon Puncher, and SuperFuckers comics as well as the autobiographical American Elf series. He was also the first Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont.

However, in some circles, the cartoonist—who was raised in Springfield, Vermont, and now lives in Burlington with his wife, two kids, and two cats—is perhaps better known for churning out jocund, exuberant yet edgy experimental rock that recalls the likes of Ween and early They Might Be Giants.

Kochalka says he’s done time in numerous bands since junior high school, and even plays live shows with his band, which features members of art-rock collective Swale. Or at least he did. “Technically, I just retired,” Kochalka says. “I had a big, big concert for my 50th birthday that I billed as my last show ever. But since my official last show ever, I’ve played three impromptu shows and it made me wonder why I wanted to retire in the first place.”

Jame Kochalka, photo by Sam Simon

As James Kochalka Superstar, he has released over a dozen albums and a handful of EPs. He began writing a cappella tunes on his own before joining forces with gifted players who could help bring his music to life. “I am so lucky to have some really skilled musicians to work with,” he explains. “I had several bands that never played out, though. One was called Soap Men, and was with a buddy of mine. We both worked at a Howard Johnson’s, cleaning rooms, so all of the songs were about cleaning.”

When he was college, he formed Jazzin’ Hell with Peter Katis, who, today, is a sought-after producer who has worked on albums by bands like Interpol and The National. The Casio-imbued jazz combo performed throughout New England and even opened up for Dinosaur Jr, the Lemonheads, and Phish before calling it a day.

His cult-like following began growing when he was in grade school, and started selling his subversive comic books he’d print using the copy machine in his friends’ father’s office for half a buck. “Straight profit,” Kochalka says with a laugh. “Someone was paying for these comics to be made, just not me. Probably the local church paid for it all. My friend’s dad was a minister.”

This fall, Kochalka says that he’ll release SuperFuckers Forever, a sequel to his popular series of books, and next March, he’ll debut Mechaboys, a comic about two teenagers who building a robot battle suit “to take revenge on everyone at their high school. It’s kind of like Robocop meets Superbad. His eighth children’s book, Johnny Boo and the Ice Cream Computer, hits bookshelves next summer.

Kochalka credits his New England roots with his success as both a cartoonist and a musician. “We have such extreme differences between our seasons that, every time the seasons change, I feel rejuvenated, and it is like a rebirth each time,” he says. “I have four rebirths a year. When it gets cold in the fall, and the leaves fall off, I get really excited, and then it starts to snow, and that’s really exciting. And then the snow begins to melt and turns to mud, and that’s exciting, and then it gets real hot, which is really exciting. It makes me want to create.”

Want to know what’s on Kochalka’s playlist? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel. While you’re there, take a listen to the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured. Enjoy!

James Kochalka–cartoonist/musician
Burlington, Vermont
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Top image, James Kochalka by Luke Awtry

The post Comics and Codas appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our December/January 2015 print issue.

The Green Mountain State’s most famous musical product is almost certainly the jam band Phish. If that quartet, formed in Burlington in 1983, earned a reputation for playing extended improvisations and working in the spiritual and musical wake of the Grateful Dead, MV & EE took shape largely in the twenty-first century, in the southern end of the state around Brattleboro, still playing off many elements of the Dead’s legacy but with drastically different results.

Valentine and Elder are also a couple. Unlike Phish, MV & EE are unlikely to sell out Madison Square Garden anytime soon, but the duo operates on a whole other level, making deeply psychedelic, small-batch, boutique, esoteric folk music that’s tinged with noise. Or maybe it’s indie rock tinged with folk. Either way, their recordings and performances are highly improvisational and experimental. The music of MV & EE embodies a thread of the reality of their home state: it’s both earthy and spacey, and it’s all propelled by a spirit of intrepid self-reliance.

This year was a big year for Valentine and Elder. A new MV & EE double album, Alpine Frequency, came out in the summer, at about the same time Valentine released a solo double album as well. “They were both pretty large records,” says Valentine. “We try to make a record that someone ideally is going to go back to and revisit. So we try to make the album have a certain depth or trajectory. There were several years of work on both of them. Hopefully that will tide some people over for a while.”

Photo by Paul Specht

Valentine’s new record is called Midden Mound, which, if you’ve forgotten some of the terms from your college anthropology class, is basically a prehistoric trash heap made up of shells and bones and other stuff. It’s a meaningful pile of refuse, dense and old, yielding secrets to those patient and learned enough to sift through it. The title seems to fit right in with the concept of “sonic agriculture” Valentine has spoken of, a utilitarian, plow-sow-and-reap vision of music making, with natural forces and human labor producing fertile results.

“I can’t get out of the underground,” jokes Valentine about the record’s title. But then he adds, “I thought [the title] worked for that body of work specifically; it’s definitely the remains of a certain sonic settlement of mine.”

That’s not all just talk. Sound attains something close to physicality in Valentine’s solo work and in the music of MV & EE. The music and the recordings are more about textures and resonance than melody, lyrics, and song form. The attention to the physical extends to the packaging and marketing of the music as well. Both new records were pressed on vinyl in addition to being available in other forms, such as CDs and MP3s. The duo often creates limited-edition original artwork to go along with some of their small-batch releases or to bring to shows, to make each record one of a kind.

Valentine’s connections with recorded music—with vinyl in particular—go back to his formative musical experiences.

“I’ve always been around records,” he says. “My parents collected records. They had a record library. They encouraged me to use the turntable. I heard a lot of music growing up that was interesting to me. I worked at record stores since I was a teenager. I stayed working at record stores. I was a lifer, a record-store casualty.”

Selling records has never been the most remunerative line of work, and surviving by playing DIY avant-garage folk presents challenges. But Valentine and Elder approach the work with a flinty Yankee ethos. They are impressively prolific, releasing an average of two records a year, which brings their total to something like 32 since 2001. They also run a boutique record label that releases limited pressings of live recordings, packaged with original artwork. Oh, and they have a two-year-old daughter. So they keep pretty busy.

Elder does work as a freelance graphic designer, and she says their living space reflects the creative multitasking that goes on there. “You should see our house— it’s part house, part workshop. It’s all blended together,” she says.

MV & EE possess a particular kind of twenty-first-century musical eclecticism, drawing on the Old, Weird America of Harry Smith’s epic Anthology of American Folk Music, steeped in old-time music, country blues, and field recordings (the duo was asked to contribute a song to the highly regarded 2015 tribute record to English singer and folklorist Shirley Collins), and yet their work is also in conversation with some core ideas of contemporary classical music, minimalism, and free jazz.

Photo by Paul Specht

“That’s very natural,” says Elder. “If you look at our record collection, we’ve got our Carter Family and our Sonny Sharrock records right next to each other.”

She grew up in Virginia, where singing was a regular part of her extended family gatherings. “I kind of brought the Appalachia to the table,” Elder says. “I grew up thinking that everybody just got around the piano on Sundays and played different songs.” That included folk songs and plenty of religious material, sources that MV & EE have returned to.

“I played sax in elementary school,” says Valentine. “I got kicked out of the school band for trying to play like [keening iconoclastic saxophonist Albert] Ayler. I got booted.”

Valentine got one strand of his musical education for free by auditing classes in the Conservatory of Music at the State University of New York at Purchase, where several pioneers of experimental and computer music taught and where the homemade instruments of maverick composer Harry Partch were housed at one point.

Extended drones, ominous echoes, alternate tunings, dub effects, and spooky war whoops all make appearances on Valentine’s new solo record. Two-chord vamps attain a mystic density as they’re prolonged. It fits right in with the MV & EE oeuvre. The DNA of much of MV & EE’s material seems like it can be traced to either “Dark Star,” the Dead’s epic interstellar exploratory vehicle; “Cortez the Killer,” Neil Young’s mythic caveman-like protosludge masterpiece; and “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” David Crosby’s haunting and beautiful comedown opus. Those are good genes, at any rate.

Valentine and Elder make the most of what they call the global I-91 corridor—a joking way of referring to their spiraling network of friends, fellow musicians, and collaborators. And the town they live in, outside of Brattleboro, is something of a magnet for other creative people.

“We’ve been here for 13 years,” says Elder. “Everybody who lives in this area whom we’re friends with is here for the energy. It’s still a very important reason why we’re here.”

But the actual I-91 connection links them to likeminded artists from New Haven, Connecticut, through western Massachusetts and up through Vermont. Contributors to the new batch of records include J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. and Pete Nolan of art-noise trio The Magik Markers. And the band has recorded on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! record label, based in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

For MV & EE and for Valentine’s solo album, recording isn’t just a matter of heading into the studio with some tunes, some guitars, and rolling tape. Bits are recorded in Valentine and Elder’s home studio or sometimes at a friend’s place, or while traveling; then sometimes layers are added on elsewhere. Some tracks might take shape in a living room and others in a fancy studio. The setting needs to be conducive to improvisation, which is central to much of the duo’s work.

“I have pretty elaborate recording techniques deployed that we use now,” says Valentine. “And they’re primitive, too, in some cases. There are techniques used to sometimes make one performance sound like multiple ones. The mood of the moment was more important than the technicalities.”

MV & EE balance the raw and the refined, the overstuffed and the stripped down. “It’s sometimes very minimal, sometimes very maximal,” says Valentine.

Photo by Paul Specht

For all of their folk tendencies and pedigrees, MV & EE can also sound like a stoner rock outfit, with lumbering bass lines and bruising drumbeats anchoring their unison singing and slashing guitars, like on “Susquehanna (Sole Art Trample)” from 2007’s Gettin’ Gone. Though the deep psychedelic connection is clear, there’s also a classic rock aspect to some of MV & EE’s eclecticism. “Susquehanna (Sole Art Trample),” for instance, is followed by a song called “The Burden,” which has gentle finger picking and high, atmospheric pedal steel guitars. It’s a pairing that might be at home on Led Zeppelin III, where the howling stomp of marauding invaders gives way to soothing and dreamy acoustic songs rooted in traditional folk music. “I’m in such a trance state usually when I’m playing,” says Elder.

That textural and tonal perspective is what helps the music withstand repeated listenings. “We try to keep it interesting for ourselves as much as for people who might be hearing it,” says Valentine.

But—as with something like a Fela Kuti record, an Indian raga, or a piece of music by La Monte Young— sometimes the music of MV & EE and Valentine’s solo work are meant to possibly scramble one’s sense of time: to transport the listener into a slow-drip mindset, where a pattern repeating for 15 minutes somehow becomes more gratifying and meaningful than one that stops after 3 minutes. Sometimes that aesthetic can be at odds with the demands of the marketplace. Valentine had originally planned on making Midden Mound a triple record, but he decided to settle on a double album.

“I kind of peeled that concept back,” he says. But he will be releasing the material that would have been that third record as another single solo album in 2016.

Valentine and Elder don’t have an elaborate promotional machine behind them. They do much of the behind-the-scenes logistics themselves, booking and publicizing shows. So if people are possibly starting to hear their music more and know their name after years and years of productivity, it’s because the world is beginning to come around to them. The combination of heavy rock, obscure folk, and experimental music is perhaps less of a head-scratcher than it was 20 years ago. “People are a little more ready for what we’re doing now,” says Valentine. “People are catching up to the sound.”

One senses that being creative and productive is just the way Valentine and Elder live their lives, and they’d be playing music every day and handcrafting one-of-a-kind art to go with it whether or not they had fans and a career. “I just like to make things,” says Valentine. “It’s probably why I like living up here.”

MV & EE–musicians from Brattleboro, Vermont
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The post Small-Batch Mystical Folk Noise appeared first on Take Magazine.