Sunglasses, Dancing, and Counterpoint with Vocoders - Nina Deering of OrchidxMantis

On January 3rd, 2019, I decided that Nina Deering would be the subject of the second Bottom Feeders Quarterly article. 202 days later, on July 21st, 2019, the end is finally in sight. I'm almost ready to send the article off to Matt Schnarr so he can tell me how awful my punctuation is. I come out of a background of Kerouac and Saramago books, and I'm a fan boy of run on sentences, misusing semicolons, incorrect quotation marks, and starting sentences with conjunctions. Maybe the universe placed me here to inconvenience my friends who know how to write properly.

Where “A Bomb Falls In The Sea” was a straight forward article with Anna Zinova, a straight forward person, Nina and OrchidxMantis have been something of a challenge. Even now, I'm questioning my approach to Nina and their music, but as the drummer Lee Williams would say about releasing his recordings, “Sometimes you've got to let that bird fly.”

Here goes nothing.

It's my sixth meeting with Nina Deering, and somehow, what was supposed to be a simple interview has covered Gucci, Shostakovich, the nature of creative ownership in a group setting, Methodists, live-work spaces, teaching, Die Antwoord, and sharp eleven chords. Nina rolls on our hardwood floor, playing with my kitten Marcus Aurelius, complaining about how much her ass hurts from roller skating. Issac and Caitlin Crow sit on my couch looking at her with grins on their faces. Isaac is sporting a mohawk, an orange nylon jacket, a Slayer tee shirt, floral print sweat pants, and green sneakers that look like they were designed to be in a comic book. His wife Caitlin, who goes by the moniker Shiksa Baiul, is in a low cut red striped shirt, and blue spandex that seems like the 80s version of what spandex 75 years in the future might look like. There's an aroma of post roller skating sweats mixed with the Kikori whiskey I spoil myself with a few times a year.

It's my sixth meeting, because talking to Nina Deering is the human equivalent of talking to a collage. You will not necessarily get a straight answer, but you will receive select cut outs of vibrant thoughts that may be off the cuff or carefully arranged. Somehow, there manages to be a sense of organization and intent in the chaos which pervades her communications. Fronting one of the most musically demanding projects in San Diego, she is at home in OrchidxMantis; composer Issac Crow's brainchild of demented pop music that he approaches with an anthropologist's fervor and an archaeologist's method.

On January 11th, I go into the first meeting with my own agenda. It starts with a mushroom and cheese omelet. I want Nina to eat the omelet, and then I want her to talk about being a music director for a Methodist Church. I want her to do an interview about the difficulty of publicly being involved in OrchidxMantis and her work as a church musician. I want an exposé on the inherent contradiction between making genuine art and having to hold down a job in a society of people with very real and oftentimes stifling opinions. This proves to be immediately problematic as she rejects the omelet, saying “Oh god, I can't eat any more eggs.” She then says “I love breakfast, it's one of the only meals I eat.” And then, “Unless you're at a gig and get a nice dinner. Like Cafe Bar Europa.”

I tell her the one time Anastasya and I tried to go there. They told us we had to order our drinks online and it was confusing. We left before they found out we were incompetent - and lazy.

Nina replies, “Basilio is the proud owner of Cafe Bar Europa, aka the Turqoise. But, that guy's crazy. Yeah, that guy has the best time out of anyone there... Yeah, if I had to order online I wouldn't go there. But he lets me play once a month, and he lets me do whatever I want. In October, I did 1986, October, Kmart shopping music. And it's so hip...”

Nina bounces over to our 1970's Kawai upright - which I rescued from a strange little man in Point Loma who let his pets use the piano as a toilet - and proceeds to start playing Kmart music from October of 1986. I don't have sheet music as a point of reference, but I'd venture to say it's a note perfect performance. She continues, “And so while this is going on, I proceeded to read the last two pages, the craziest two pages, out of Frankenstein, I read them a lot, and Brandon Wallace played various worldly instruments.”

There's a ritard and a diminuendo but no pause in the conversation as Nina trails off, talking to herself. “Can you spend more time with yourself? I don't like all these people man... I feel like I've been influenced by... how do you say, the median.” She sees me in the room, and I'm once again addressed, “Does that make sense? Like I've taken in so much information, you know with what other people experience, with this whole social media thing. You have a really good idea of what's going on in most people's live... it's like inter-connectivity is too much.”

It's been six minutes since she's arrived, and we've traveled from a rejection of an omelet, to Kmart music, to her feelings about the nature of social media. It's a meandering kind of conversation, entertaining, and full of asides. There is something of a connotative logic to it, like a Murakami book. Nina's format for speaking is like a grandiose version of a psychologist's free word association exercise.

In a later interview, when she tells me that, “Isaac composes music in the style of Nina,” I start both seeking out and seeing a parallel between her narrative stylings and Isaac's compositional stylings. Maybe it's there. And maybe I'm making it up, projecting an explanation onto a different reality. When I bring this up to Isaac later, he will diplomatically amend that observation to include, “... and Caitlin.”

I have a distant kind of relationship with Nina. Because she is such an active person in the music community, and half the people I know are gossips - I hear rumors. I tell her the last rumor I heard was that she was the Banjo Heiress, next in line for the Deering banjo fortune. She immediately corrects me. She is not the Banjo Heiress; she is the Tortilla Heiress - only barely, and really, it's not all it's cracked up to be.

She tells me about the history of her parents' relationship. I try to cycle her back to music.

I waste the next hour trying to get her to see the contradiction between the lyrical content of OrchidxMantis and working in a Methodist church. Instead, I receive a lesson about my own closed mindedness. Each time I return to the first point I wanted to hammer home, I'm denied.

For myself, I write abstract lyrics to make my truths esoteric. I don't want to endanger my teaching profession by being offensive to the wrong group of people, and I'm impressed by Nina's ability to keep it all in one life. During my brief foray into classical singing, one of my teachers, an older gentleman with an illustrious career in the New York Metropolitan Opera, maintained a multi-decade socially closeted life to preserve his string of jobs as music director for various Baptist churches. The secret life is the interesting life; the one that exposes the arbitrary lines that we simultaneously create and have imposed on us by society at large.

There is still a conservative streak in America that stretches its long reaching arms like an archaic octopus. Somehow, Nina has escaped it's reach. Until our third meeting - where she abruptly changes her mind.

Our second meeting takes place a few days later at Avante Garde Music in Otay Mesa - a teaching and recording studio run by pianist turned entrepeneur Antonio Grajeda. Nina is hosting a live recording session with a dozen singers. After a bizarre and buzzed yogic stretching session, she commands me to go to the baby grand in (for lack of a better word) Avante Garde's living room. I proceed to put my 30 years of classical piano practice to good use by repeatedly pressing G every time the singers need to tune while she pulls take after take out of her impromptu choir for an unnamed solo album - to be released at an undisclosed future date. By the fifteenth take of the two minute snippet, I'm feeling the whiskey, and they are starting to sound soulful. However, my function as a G pushing automaton is wearing on me.

As I'm prone to do, I make loud and obtrusive remarks to act out and start playing Gs in rhythms and generally acting like an ass. With the twentieth take I can sense the fatigue setting in to her tribe as she continues to pull music from them.

Classical music (with it's notorious pretentiousness and inflated sense of self worth) is where many a talented person has gone to die. Despite knowing Nina originally from this context, doing four-hand work with pianist Jackie Gehrisch and taking lessons from my long time teacher and mentor Dr. Diane Snodgrass, she does not resemble the slow and bookish suicides that I have seen a number of friends transform into over time. She has instead gone in the opposite direction with a growing mass of energy in the form of:

The Voices of Our City choral work
Her regular cross collaborations with musicians from different disciplines
Her teaching
Her performances with Kalabash School of Music and Art based Baby Bushka,
And of course, her work with the notorious OrchidxMantis.

For people that allow their lives to be dictated by it, music provides people an experience that allows their lives to cross and overlap many segments of society. In Nina's case, this ranges from her work with our city's struggling homeless population, to teaching the affluent children of our upper classes.

In my naive and idealized fantasy world, there is a sense of music training as being the creation of a potential energy that will ultimately be released in some form onto the world. And there is a kind of darkness that accompanies the intellectual theft of generations of creatives by other more socially acceptable and financially viable professions. So too there is a form of institutional darkness that removes many of our most talented, relegating them to the role of museum pieces - where suctioning life from music for the sake of pedigree seems to be a perverse exercise in routine.

At best, whole communities of people have the ability to be brought together by a willingness to function with “other” sides. At this moment in time, crossing the artificial walls we construct between each other is a lifestyle choice. Within San Diego, there are now pockets of individuals that are transcending their backgrounds. Considering the odd and oftentimes combative financial relationships that venues and studios can maintain with musicians, simply sustaining yourself is a feat; and one mode of sustaining yourself is being categorized. You're a teacher. You're a cover musician. You over there, you're a jazz player. And you, you're a folk singer. You're an accompanist. You work for the symphony. Etc. It's an interesting phenomena when these barriers are crossing - and it's interesting to note that these merging and colliding worlds results in some of the most unique and artistically valid work.

On some level, Nina represents a path forward for the trained musician. Her open mindedness has allowed her to use her talent to an ever increasing extent. As Nina continues to pull music from her choir - which is probably the wrong word, maybe “posse” would be better - I recognize what I'm in. It's a happening. Maybe this situation will end up on an album; organized and released to the world. Maybe not. It doesn't matter.

The thing is an end in itself.

The third time we meet is at Kava Collective off of University avenue. I drank kava for the first time up north in Nevada City, a small forest and farming town in the mountains populated by pot farmers and migrating hippies. My long time friend, environmental activist and singer, Sam Harkous, invited us to an open mic at Elixart Herbal Lounge. I had tea from a century old leaf accompanied by my cup of kava. It had an interesting mildly psychedelic effect Back in San Diego, I found Kava Collective down the street from my house. Their method of ladling kava from buckets has a straight forward kind of charm, and they always have a few people composing music at the bar. Naturally, I started frequenting it.

I'm trying to pin down a story or a recording for The Bottom Feeders Quarterly project, and much like Nina herself, it's proving difficult. I'm meeting her again because - despite her prolific nature as a performer - there are no solo recordings I can recommend to a reader, and my initial angle of wanting an exposé on a double life as a church musician and an art musician has failed. And now, creating the story is becoming part of the story, like an off brand Charlie Kaufman script - the poor man's Adaptation, or Synecdoche, New York.

As our mouths numb with kava tea and the new age hipsters take kava “shots” served from the buckets, EDM plays in the background. Nina waxes poetic about her future recording project and her solo shows. She then spends another chunk of time talking about Issac Crow composing in the style of Nina Deering. She explains that OrchidxMantis started as a string octet before evolving into it's current form. I don't know much, but I do know the natural progression of string octets is not postmodern musical collages with electronic drums and vocoders. I ask her about how the music is scored, and she says that Isaac leaves room for each of them, but that he is the one dictating how the music works. I question her about the vocal rhythm, and she again, points to Isaac.

The goal was to write about her, but it seems that all paths lead back to OrchidxMantis. When I bring up the failure of the initial angle for her story, she looks at me, leans closer, and says, “Actually, it's been a struggle.” There is the admission: there is a second life to reconcile. We chat about it for a good thirty minutes, and she mentions the song “Pussy Bow” and the cover of Rated X which features Nina with an open chested shirt, and she talks about the fear that she will be involved in a new Isaac Crow project entitled “Cunt”.

But timing is everything, and at this point, the time for exploring that story has passed. By the end of our conversation, three meetings in total, with mouths numb from Kava, I've decided to shift the focus to OrchidxMantis.

The first time I listen to OrchidxMantis's albums OrchidxMantis and Rated X, Anastasya and I are sitting at a table in our hotel room at the Luxor in Vegas. Practicing black jack, we're downing bourbon in the hopes of improving our odds at the tables. OrchidxMantis is oddly appropriate to the setting, while still managing to be out of place in the belly of the hyper consumerist beast that is Las Vegas. Anastasya mixes her bourbon with strawberry lemonade - which is sacrilege, but I'm having one of those nights where I feel a sense of innate good fortune that I'm with her, and I can't hold a grudge against the mixed drink blasphemies. We listen straight through both albums.

We wait for another of my friends, Poway native and indie film director Max Fox, to arrive in the guts of the hotel somewhere. We're planning on meeting him for pizza. Tall and skinny, Max is an interesting creator with the tragic ailment of typically being the smartest guy in most rooms he walks into. Later, he drives us in his Dodge Challenger to play pinball in a niche and empty retro-arcade a few miles off the great walls of advertisements along the strip. Nina's singing is looping in my head:

“Bitches be jealous. Bitches be jealous. Bitches be jealous.”

The night ends in a diner full of artificial trees and waitresses acting at their jobs. Max is a good looking dude, and it's been interesting watching how women interact with him all night. “Biches be jealous.” We eat potato skins and drink cocktails.

“Bitches be jealous.” Sometimes I have to sleep a song off.

I wake up the next morning, and it's still there.

“Bitches be jealous.”

The 2017 self titled, OrchidxMantis, should be a famous album. Let me amend that. If we were, as a music community, a smarter, more supportive, more literate group of people, the album would be famous.

I recognize that the above statement is pretentious, self involved, judgemental, elitist, off-putting, and moderately offensive. I don't care. It's true. I'm also hopeful that things will improve. So let me say it again. OrchidxMantis should be a famous album. Go listen to it now. And if you don't understand it, listen to it again. And again. If Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica's musical dadaism could amass a cult following, so too can the vibrant collage that is OrchidxMantis.

The first track, “Perfect Moment,” begins with a tremolo. Nina enters in on the vocoder, with delays, plate reverb, and a chorus effect that creates an intense vocal resonance. Her voice cuts and blends perfectly with it's surrounding, setting an auspicious exposition and point of return for the album as a whole. The track continues into “Day by Day”, full of momentum, then a series of starts and stops. There is a combining of electronics and acoustic strings.

Harley Magsino, the tasteful and competent bassist, uses a subtle electronic tone that serves as a foil to the strings, which oftentimes work as a more traditional reference point within the context of what become a series of increasingly stuttering beats from Issac. Harley hits that sweet point that certain guitarists manage, where at the point of accent, the effect enters. As the collage like sensibilities of Issac's composition are introduced in this song, I am reminded of Warsaw based Polish artist, Magda Gorska, and her brilliant digital work.

“Day by Day” continues into a second half that sounds like a memory of pop music. Nina sings like a cello. After a brief string moment that has the flavor of Messiaen's “Quartet for the End of Times,” there is a return to electronic sounds. And it ends with repetitions of the phrase “Day by day/ People grind me down.” The consonant string lines keep the work sounding grounded, as the esoteric and scattered drums travel further and further out.

The complexity of “Day by Day” is immediately responded to in “Little Death.” With a simple bass ostinato of 1 + 2 3, 1 + 2 3, windchimes are introduced. The sounds of those windchimes are then reproduced by Caitlin Crow's strings before leading into an electronic beat with the phrase, “It's so beautiful.” There is again, a stuttering sensibility reminiscent of glitch music, with a series of beautiful pauses.

Minimalist and inspired bass lines by Harley are used to great effect. Nina takes an operatic scat solo before a return to a section of electronic dance music. Glissando-ing strings contrast the electronics, and then the words “It's so emotional” follow a long period of “It's so beautiful” and becomes “Days are dreamings in time will end.” Finally, the voice becomes more affected as the windchimes of the introduction are brought back over it, creating a tight synthesis of core ideas. Here, the words “Lullaby, go to sleep” appear, and finally, “Far from you, Life would be despair, Without love.”

The next track “OrchidxMantis,” reminds me of when I was nine years old and my dad had bought me a Yamaha keyboard; of hitting play and cycling through 99 presets of drum beats with accompaniment. Listening to cliches so brief they were interesting, I was too young to have any real discernments. “OrhidxMantis” starts with Nina's voice running through the vocoder's deep bass effect, along with the lyrical motif that will follow the band through their follow up album Rated X. “I just want to, I just want, I just want to dance.”

The framework of the vocal rhythm can be discovered in the drummer's sensibilities. The square lead lends itself to a video game quality and there is a brief journey into chip tune territory. The bass line is inspired with tasteful rapid subdivisions that relate to the trap beats apparating in the drum lines. The music slows down and Harley takes a bass solo. Dissonant electronic sounds appear. contrasting with beautiful string like vocals before a return to electronic beats. “Tonight lets dance/ get your butt on the floor/ don't be so insecure.” The cliches that do happen, occur in a hyper aware fashion. I want to call it intellectual dance music. IDM.

“OrchidxMantis” is followed by the brief track “Ninja Stealth.” Compositionally, it is a cycling of presets, or channel surfing. It ends with the tongue-in-cheek line, “THE WAY IT WORKS IS PURE NINJA STEALTH.” “Ninja Stealth” and the intro of “OrchidxMantis” are similar enough that it sandwiches the music in between. “Ninja Stealth” almost acts in a similar way to a post-cadential extension, albeit very far removed.

“Exomoon” takes the listener back to a minimalist tact. There is a gorgeous bass line and simplicity once again sounds refreshing after the previous half of the album. Harley's bass slides coexist naturally with the strings, and Caitlin's pizzicato sounds like bones. The string part evolves through the song, ultimately serving the role of a cymbal to the drum kit. In my notes, I wrote, “Exomoon is rhythmically honest,” whatever that means. The implication is that there are things that are rhythmically dishonest. However, there is some value in initial impressions in music - even if the logic is hard to discern.

A rapid 15/8 time signature and bass line appears in “You Said You Loved Me,” and it's proceeded by a slow R&B jam before returning back to stuttering glitch beats. “Bitches be jealous,” the ear worm from Vegas, crescendos with intensity and finally there is a synthesis of the vocals and the 15/8. The auto-tuned singing sounds like money, and the vocals end with, “You're a stupid bitch,” and I can't disagree.

The album closes with the return of the vocoder, choral style vocals, beautiful effects, and the vocals being used as percussion. “In My Dreams,” is a lush work of audio. There is a two chord progression of G major to B major, the simplest chord progression of the album, and the D#s in the B chord create a continuous and increasing tension. The lyrics of “Maybe it could be,” or “It could be, maybe” continues on and on, leaving an open ended question.

Perhaps the only answer is another listen.

The fourth and fifth time I meet with Nina are at shows. I invite OrchidxMantis to play a fundraiser for ArtReach at my studio, The San Diego Music And Art Cooperative. A few weeks after the performance, Isaac messages me and asks if any of my bands can play a Thursday night show at The Bancroft - a cool little dive bar, and the only oasis for decent live music in Spring Valley. The owner's son, TJ Froelich, is a member of the in-your-face mathcore band, Poor. Fronted by artist Jerry Villalobos, their combination of intensity and a moshable intellectualism is a manifestation of a unique pocket of musicians in town - INUS, Tardigrade, and Dr34mBr05 come to mind.

I ask Phantom Twins, as we need to pay our dues in empty bars on weekday nights for at least some time longer. I don't know why this feels like a rite of passage, but maybe the San Diego band's walkabout, the ascent to it's manhood or womanhood, is related to playing for less than ten people for less than ten dollars. Maybe that's where artistic integrity comes from. I don't feel above it; but I do feel bad asking the members of Fistfights With Wolves or Latifahtron to do things like this. It certainly feels strange sometimes, to go from our jazz and classical gigs that pay fifty to a hundred bucks an hour to pennies on the dollar in our creative passion projects. Those of us who live in multiple economies are shooting from our hearts. We need to be existentialists, because the act of playing is oftentimes the only result of a performance.

So the fifth time I meet with Nina is at The Bancroft for an OrchidxMantis show, at Isaac's invitation. We are each other's audience, and a few hours later, I will be struck by the hilarity of how emotionally invested we are in playing “right” even if it's only for ourselves. Isaac's anger at their performance - which by any layman's standard was fine - exhibits a creative integrity. Even when you are your own audience, perhaps especially when you are your own audience, there needs to be a standard. When I was younger and angrier and a worse musician, I ended friendships over less, kicking people out of my life for messing up in empty dives. The whole endeavor is a learning process and I'm not proud of it. But I don't have a large enough ego to believe in free will, so I've forgiven myself for my past lives. I hope other people have too.

It's interesting to note that Isaac and Caitlin don't drink. This means, that for every show they play, in every dive, they are entirely sober. While alcohol dulls the senses of the rest of us, they're there, with eyes wide open. I wonder what we look like to them.

2018's Rated X is the follow up to 2017's OrchidxMantis. There are some marked contrasts between the two albums, despite their close proximity in time. Isaac tells me, “OrchidxMantis was me learning how to write and arrange and mix and use computer programs. RatedX builds off that and is geared towards songs that will be performed, knowing that just a couple people will experience the album as an album.”

It starts with the track “Negligee” with only Nina singing and a shifting delay on single drum tones. The first half is sparsely laid out, and the song is organized in three sections - each one increasing in dynamics and instrumentation over the previous sections. I messaged Issac to ask if they had a guitarist play on the track, but it ended up being Harley competently noodling in the upper register of his bass.

“Negligee” is followed by “Louis Vuitton,” a catwalk song that reminds me of a fashion show, that turns into a 1980s dance party. It turns into a punchy square lead solo, that ends in an ambient and dark section of “Fuck my life, I just want to dance,” over Vangelis style synth pads. We have a return to, and development of the line, “I just want to dance” from the previous album. The expansion of the previous idea is notable, and one of my favorite things about listening to discographies versus single albums.

The next song, and my personal favorite off the album, is in 11/8 with bass ideas that sound like little worms. One third of the way through “Trench,” the song drops into a 4/4 dance beat accompanied by electronic sounds resembling a flock of robotic birds. I assume they are in pursuit of the bass worms. Crescendoing cymbals are used to great effect for a climax that hits right at the end. Ending on the highest point requires some forethought, and is atypical to most composition - especially within the context of pop music. Not that 11/8 is a common feature of pop music. Still, the ending is noteworthy, even within the context of OrchidxMantis's two albums.

Track 4 is “Normcore,” with catchy and pretty vocalise lines, and contains time changes between 8/4 and 7/4. Arguably, it is the most catchy melody I've heard in a 15 beat idea. The background vocals add a layer of emotion that would not have come across with more straight ahead sounds.

The second half of the album starts with the song “Pussy Bow.” I group the album in two halves, because the first half sounds decidedly like a development of their self titled. However, this song appears to be placed as a transitional point to the next three pieces, which come across as “hit singles.” The intro of “Pussy Bow” is decidedly punk, and I feel like a 17 year old at the Che Cafe, ready to throw my immortality complex against other punks, and then it drops into what could have been a prime example of the mumble rap archetype - if the vocals of Caitlin and Nina weren't so well done. Various synth leads are used effectively, and propel the song into a Gwen Stefani-esque landscape. Nina sings, “Bouncing bouncing up and down, pound that cake, lay it down,” before a return to the mosh pit of the punk intro.

“Brutalist Veil” launches the listener into an uptempo dance. The B section contains a rising vocal line, that ascends, and ascends, and ascends. Strings play against the vocal lines, and I am again impressed with the use of vocals in a manner reminiscent of string quartets. There are interweaving vocal lines of “I want something more” and cello. The outro is a fade out of the line “I need much more than love.” The lyrics play tastefully with the instrumental lines.

“Shiksa Baiul” has a Bollywood sound with its harmonic flavor. There are a handful of interesting rhythmic changes triggered by Isaac's drum lines, but of all the songs on the album, it is the most straight ahead. However, the framing of a straight ahead song in the context of what is occurring manages to work.

Rated X ends with “Power Tie,” featuring Nina singing tongue-in-cheek lines through the vocoder with an octave drop on the vocal lines. Harley falls into a funk bass line. The vocal rhythms interplay in an interesting way. Most notably, as a keyboard player, there's a crazy and industrial synth solo that conjures images of old cement and beat up cities springing to life.

Rated X comes across as five songs that belong together followed by three stand alone singles. It has less introspective and beautiful moments than the previous album, but that is because it functions with a different intent. This is clearly an album for people to get down to.

And finally, we are back to where we started. The sixth meeting. Nina speaks to my kitten in a high pitched voice.

0:00-0:31

Nina

You're too much strongs, You're too much bravings.

Marcus Aurelius

…

Nina

Sometimes you can be too much strongs. Too much bravings.

Marcus Aurelius

…

Nina

You're going to strangle yourselves! You're going to strangle yourselves!

Os Mutantes plays in the background. Caitlin is soft spoken and always grinning. Nina is sprawled on the floor. Isaac sits like a statue, like he's trying to preserve energy.

2:42-5:10

Mat

How was your show yesterday?

Caitlin

We do not speak of these things.

Mat

That good?

Isaac

It wasn't our best. But our last show was pretty good.

Caitlin

Yeah, the Casbah show was pretty good.

Isaac

It's been hard not having Harley too.

Mat

Is he out?

Isaac

No, we've been trying to get Katy ready for New York. So the best way to do that you know, is just to do shows. Like, sink or swim. It's like, here you go. Rather than having your first shows as the bassist in New York. That's why, you know, we've tried to book as much as we can between now and August whatever. But, he's going to be joining us next week. We're going to be playing the Space Bar. It's kind of like, in Princess Bride when he's like 'I'm not left handed!' It's going to be, you know, kind of nice.

Mat

That guy's a beast.

Isaac

Yeah, so taking that out, and trying to do drum and bass, without having an actual bass, it's kind of hard. He also does a lot of soloing. He has a load of tasks.

Mat

He's also older, right?

Isaac

Yeah, he also has that kind of jazz background where he can just play for like a half an hour and kind of fill it out. He knows all the songs too. So it'll be kind of a treat. But he doesn't know if he can actually go with us to New York yet so we're just thinking that it's not going to happen.

Mat

Where are you guys playing in New York?

Isaac

Trans Pecos, Pianos, Gutter Bar, Gold Sounds. I think that's it for right now. We'll be there for a total of seven days with two of them being travel days...”

7:58-9:45

Mat

...Jazz, is that your thing? Is that what you did at school?

Isaac

Yeah, I mean, there's no pop, or rock n' roll in school. The closest thing to it is jazz.

Mat

You play a lot punchier than jazz guys.

Isaac

Punchier?

Mat

Yeah.

Isaac

Well in a rock setting, I guess.

Mat

So in a jazz setting you lay back?

Isaac

Yeah! I can be quiet... I used to have a gig with a heroin addict actually. He was really really smart. But he was just... off. But he was really militant about volume.

Mat

A militant heroin addict.

Isaac

A militant heroin addict. I was already really quiet I think but if anything was over he would just like, freak the fuck out, but I needed the money, so I was just like, “Alright!” So I learned these different techniques of playing quiet... There's some situations where you have to be really quiet, like when you have patrons and someone who wants to keep their gig.

12:37-12:54

Nina

Ow, my ass is so sore from roller skating.

Isaac

From roller skating?

Nina

I fell so hard!

Isaac

It's the thick fit workout. Bitches in roller skates.

Nina

So excuse me for laying, but my ass is sore.

Isaac

I need a series, like “Bitches in Roller Skates.”

Mat

Do you want a pillow?

Nina

No

13:50-28:45

Mat

So Nina was saying that you compose in the style of Nina.

Nina

Lyrically maybe!

Isaac

Well...

Mat

Or is that just like, Nina's narcissism.

Isaac

I mean yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that. I mean, it's totally a group thing. Like Harley has his thing... A lot of times we didn't bother writing it in, but it's hard to be like, I wrote that bass line. It's definitely a group thing. I can be like, that's the root of the chord, or I write out the rhythm I want, and same thing, I can write out a melody with a chord symbol, you know, but usually I don't use specific voicings, I mean, there's a couple times where the voicings are specific, but I view it as like a launching point.

Mat

One of the things that's interesting in listening to your music is everyone is doing monophonic lines. Cello, voice, bass, drums or drum pad, Caitlin's voice, and then the only thing that's stacked is the keyboard, but Nina is doing vocoder...

Nina

The vocoder really is a keyboard...

Mat

So that's one of the interesting things you guys are doing. There's certain contrapuntal lines between vocoder and Nina's singing, right?

Nina

Contra Punt.

Mat

Yeah, just Contra Punting all over the place. Are you writing that Isaac? Or is that Nina?

Isaac

Oh, that's Nina. Or like, in “I just wanna dance,” that middle section, she was just like, let me do another take, let me do another take, and then there's enough for me to edit. But then there's that first one, where there's kind of like a bass, and then she kept stacking takes on top of that and editing. I think that editing is like a compositional tool. Especially going forward on Rated X, instead of writing all the parts, we were like, lets just go in, and I think Caitlin just used her ear, I think I started with just whole notes, and was like, these are chords to pick from, and then we just did takes and edited it down from that.

Mat

So that's interesting, because when I listen to your music, compositionally it sounds like a collage. In your actual recordings, you're using a similar process to what happens structurally. So if you're selecting from eight takes, even if you're taking from individual musicians, you're still making these final decisions.

Isaac

Well, we are. That's the thing. My task is kind of like the editor. Kind of like what we did today at Roller World. They do all the shit, I video tape it, put it into my computer, and I’ll be like, nope nope nope nope, send it out, and they'll be like I like this one, or I really don't like this, so I'm definitely the editor. Composing by editing. And everyone kind of contributes what their ideal part would be. So there's sheet music, but that's really to get things going... There's some bands, they have a riff, and the singer comes in with poetry or whatever and they just kind of record themselves doing it and no one has that kind of time because we meet once a week. So it has to be as structured as it can be, then recorded, like that's what we're doing right now... like a song we're recording right now, there's a beginning, and there's an end.

Nina

I think it's interesting that in the first establishment of OrchidxMantis, it was written for an orchestral string octet. So I still feel like that's a part of our roots.

Mat

Who was writing that?”

Isaac

That was me. But yeah, now that's ridiculous. And it's time consuming

Nina

And it's also dangerous, having strings in a bar. You know, having these fragile instruments.

Isaac

So I'm actually trying to do more composition in Ableton. Like having everyone do their thing, and using it as a template. For me, personally, I have to write it out, but I can't read my own handwriting so I have to put it on the computer... So I'll get some lyrics, and no one can do anything with them unless there's rhythm, so I'll put the rhythm of the lyrics where the lyrics will be.

Mat

That's one of the most interesting things about your music. Singers fall into certain rhythmic patterns that are very intuitive to singers, but whenever Nina's singing or Caitlin's singing, they're singing like drummers. Especially around upbeats, what they're doing is very unique and different from what you hear on a regular basis.

Nina

Mr. Crow's music is very fun to sing.

Mat

A lot of people, especially if they're coming out of a garage rock background, the singers are very blocky. With them, there's a lot of starting on the one beat, with your music, there's a lot of falling into the one beat. Or, a sense of falling into the accent instead of it just occurring. Now you've said a lot about your compositional process... So if I had to simplify it a little bit- you're writing the piece and then you give it to your group and they improvise around the thing you compose, and then there's a second composition that happens in the process. Is that fair? With the second part being your editing process.

Isaac

Yeah. But it depends on the song. Cause there's some things where there's something very specific. And generally, when we record, it becomes something else, and there's something better, and that's the definitive version of what we do. I feel like if I have an idea, everyone gets to contribute to what the final idea is. Is that it? I feel like I'm not making it out to be as collaborative as it actually is.

Nina

Also, the scores that you write are incredible. Your notation is impeccable, and we follow it. That's something where if I were to make any edits to what you're saying, thats what I would say. Regardless of how it develops, there's a really strong foundation in the composition.

Caitlin

Yeah, it's easy to follow.

Anastasya

How many of the parts do you write when you're starting a new song?

Isaac

Yes, I do a melody, then a bass note, then I fill it in with what the chord would be, then once I know what the chord quality then I can give a cello line recommendation and then they'll know what sort of vocoder or layer takes. If it's a major chord, i'll throw in the 3rd 7th or sharp 11, or something like that, from being in college, you know, there's certain things that I'll do on certain chords that will color my numbers and will sound good... It always starts with the melody and then a bass line.

Mat

So basically, your formula is that any time there's a major chord you make it Lydian.

Isaac

Yes!

Mat

Wait, really?

Isaac

Yeah! If its a 5 chord it's going to be Lydian dominant, almost never just mixolydian, if it's resolving it'll be like an altered dominant or something with more stank or maybe a susflat9 or a natural13 or if it's a minor chord it's always going to be Dorian, like nine times out of ten.

Mat

So that's the jazz aspect.

Isaac

If it's a minor chord and the melody note is a C, my first instinct is always going to be a Bb or a G minor, because I want it to be the 9 or the 11 or the 7. So it's kind of color by number. Just to get through because to me the melody is the most important, and rhythm is a big part of that. So the last step is what the quality of the chord is going to be so I can just run like, that software. Then Nina spends more time, and she kind of relates to it whatever. So she'll orchestrate it... I've been writing music for a really long time and nothing happened until I started working with Caitlin and Harley. Good musicians can take anything, you can scribble, and a good musician will interpret that. If you give your music to people who are empathetic to what you're trying to do, like I give it to Harley, he'll be like, “Fuck yeah!”

42:40-50:46

For the next eight minutes, there is an incredibly interesting conversation on the nature of cultural appropriation in music and it's implications, but due to the sensitivity surrounding the issue, it's been cut from this article. We live in a strange time period where anyone and everyone can have a bully pulpit. The self censoring of intellectual discourse happens to be one of the byproducts of a culture where thin skin has become a moral standard. I grew up in a small and incredibly Caucasian town in Ohio in which I experienced mild to moderate amounts of racism on a weekly basis from elementary school through high school. My current reality involves appreciating the honesty of my enlightened classmates, because then, at the very least, I knew where they stood, and it's helped inform my understanding of mankind. I don't value delusion and politeness tends to be it's own form of dishonesty. We exist at a moment in history where feelings need to be preserved, and unnecessary conflict avoided. Hence, the self censorship. In any case, this section has been cut.

51:28-55:31

Mat

This isn't even a question, but if you guys want to comment on it, you can. One of the things that's weird, is you really love a thing so you become good at it, and then once you're good at it, what is a cliché and what you're trying to avoid or what you like, is constantly changing until you start removing yourself from the general public, and you go through that process on a daily basis, and years go by, and then all of a sudden you're making shit that's really out there, but it doesn't seem out there to you. But it is out there, and so your audience gets smaller and smaller and more specific. Especially in a community like San Diego. There aren't a lot of good musicians making it out of San Diego... I can think of maybe three bands that have done it here...

Nina

I've heard that's changing. I've heard that are onlookers into San Diego, like people from New York or Arizona or wherever, that are like, dude, San Diego is where it's fucking at right now. Like its being established as a musical center. I want to put my cards there.

Mat

I mean, I agree with you, but it's with guys like you or the Fistfights project, or Abnormal Mammal, or even Lexi Pulido and and what she's doing, it's basically like being a monk, because you're not getting compensated for what you're doing, like we just played the Bancroft and we made zero dollars...

Isaac

You actually made like $5, here.

Mat

No, it's cool. But it is like one of those things, seriously, I really don't care. Okay... well, thank you.

Isaac

I think it's one of those things where it's better and healthier to take responsibility. You look at our band, and in our band, it's our fault. You can look at where sometimes it's patience, but sometimes its aspects of the performance that need to be better, or marketing that needs to be stronger, like a lot of bands that you mentioned they're not doing the same stuff that more successful projects are doing... because no one owes anybody anything, it's not really good enough to have good music and a strong performance, you also have to get the word out. What is it? Like a thousand albums that are uploaded to Spotify everyday? You have to get yourself to where people can hear you, and you have to do it without sponsored ads, not that there's anything wrong with sponsored ads, but how do you create fans that are really excited and want to tell people about other people that they've discovered. I don't think it's that San Diego is not fair, I just think you have to be patient and think, what could I be doing better?

The parts of the interview I dictated represent about 33 minutes of a 90 minute conversation, and it was difficult to decide what to omit and include. I wanted to let them to speak for themselves, in their own words.

It's hard to write something that encompasses an artist like Nina. It's hard to write something that encompasses a project like OrchidxMantis. They are more prolific than I can keep up with, and frankly, making something smarter and more diverse than I can consistently comprehend. I've been trying for a half year. On a daily basis, the members of OrchidxMantis are releasing new work into the world: loops, green screen videos, video interviews, fashion shoots, shows. An upcoming tour. On any given day, I can swing by their social media and see something both interesting and new. In that sense, they are the most dependable creative source in town right now.

And when a group of people are doing something this interesting, it's up to us, as a community, to support what is happening so it lands. While hiding a band like OrchidxMantis on weekday nights in empty dive bars may seem like a pragmatic course of action to the short sighted, using good music to build a more reputable scene - in which people actually leave their homes for the sake of music - would be transformative. The music's there. Let's give them the audience.