GDFX
Reptillian Trance
Interview Jacob Severn
Photography Gillian Steiner
The word “experimental” tends to get thrown around a lot, but very rarely do artists actively experiment with music and sound. It isn’t often that listeners are let in on the creative process when they hear an album or attend a live show. Though the songs on the GDFX LP One Thing (Impose, 2011) sound controlled, solo artist Greg Fox lets the idea of active experimentation pervade everything he does. In person, he’s at once easy going and intense. This comes across in his live show and on the album. He’s always searching for new sounds, but when he finds them, he knows when to let go, to let them take over.
Greg Fox is easier to track down than you’d think. For an artist who is involved in so many projects, and one who is on tour for over half of any given year, he’s surprisingly accessible. When he’s in his home base New York City, you can find the former Liturgy and Teeth Mountain drummer at Cong Ly, his favorite place to get pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup. In fact, Greg loves Cong Ly so much that the owner, Hai, is on the cover of another recent release, a split with DubKnowDub called Hai Life (Green Age Records, 2011). I met up with him, along with his collaborator and girlfriend Alex Drewchin (they play together in Guardian Alien), on a sticky Labor Day weekend in front of the small Chinatown restaurant. Eli Lehrhoff (Smhoak Mosheein, DubKnowDub), with whom he had recently toured and released a split tape, joined us as well.
I recognized him vaguely through his thick beard and long hair, and it turned out that he’d slept at my house in Seattle two years ago while on tour with Dan Deacon. See? He’s everywhere. We sat down over bowls of noodle soup to talk about the new record, life on the road, video games, Taoism, and aliens.
When we agreed to meet here, you said that you hung out here a lot and that you would be here for a while today. Is coming here a ritual for you?
Greg: Well, not really a ritual, but I probably started eating here a little less than three years ago, and I like eating here. It’s a good place to meet people. When the weather’s nice it’s nice to bike over here, and it’s just a thing that I do kind of regularly. So I’d hesitate to call it a ritual, but it is kind of a tradition.
It’s comfortable.
Greg: Yeah, if they had wi-fi here, I would spend a lot more time here. I would have my office in here. Hey, there’s Eli [Eli walks in the door and makes his way to our table]. But yeah, I like it here, the food’s always good. It’s really cheap.
You seem to know everyone.
Greg: Yeah, I don’t have to order. [to Eli] What’s up! [they shake hands] How’s it going man?
[The waiter comes and we order.]
Greg: During the whole quitting Liturgy thing, I got real stressed out about it, and I got a canker sore in my mouth that I think is stress-related.
How long ago did you make that decision?
Greg: I mean, it’s been on my mind for a long time, but it was something that needed to be timed well. We didn’t have anything booked after October. For a while I felt like I wanted to move on, and it felt like the best time to make the announcement. There was a set amount of stuff to do, but not too much: a short two week tour this month, then a couple of dates in October, and then there’s nothing else booked. Then the band started talking about booking something in February, and I just knew I needed to make the cut now. Because otherwise I knew I’d be looking at another six months of feeling like I needed to do something.
What was it that you felt like you needed to do? What made you feel uneasy about being in Liturgy?
Greg: Ultimately, I just have a lot of other stuff I’m trying to do. I was just starting to feel like it was an obligation more than something I wanted to spend my time doing. I was getting a lot of opportunities and offers to do other stuff as a drummer that I kept having to turn down because of this band that I wasn’t really feeling all that positive about. Ultimately, I’m happy I was in the band. I learned a lot of stuff and played a lot of great shows and met a lot of cool people. But it’s a short chapter in my life that I’m happy to just sort of turn the page on. I just needed to make a change. I also have other projects of my own that I want to focus more energy and time on. It’s really about knowing what you want to do and then being able to apply the time, effort and energy to those things, and it’s kind of hard to do that when you’re spending so much time and energy on something else. If I really wanted to focus on those other things, I just needed to cut out the thing that was draining most of my energy.
You spend a lot of time on tour. How much time out of the year would you say is road time?
Greg: It’s a lot. I would guess that it’s probably about half the year, maybe a little more. [to Alex:] Is it half the year?
Alex: I think I figured it out. Yeah, it’s about half a year. Because, when it was our two-year anniversary, I figured out that it’s probably only been about one year total.
Greg: I thought that was our three-year anniversary.
Alex: [Laughing] It was right here at this table, we were having dinner before he left on tour again – he’s always on tour – and he was like ‘happy three years.’
When touring, do you find that you keep returning to the same places?
Greg: Sometimes. I’ve definitely played a lot of the same places in the US and in Europe at least twice, and I like that.
What’s a recent tour experience that was super positive?
Greg: The tour recently with Dubknowdub and Fuckton was a lot of fun. It was the first time in a while that I was playing house shows. We booked all the shows ourselves. It had been a while since I’d done anything like that, unfortunately, so it was really nice to do it again. Then, I got to tour in Europe with Oneida, which was a total fluke. I was on the same plane as some of the guys in Oneida when we were flying over, and my little brother happened to be in Berlin, so I was flying into Berlin, and I wanted to hang out with him. Oneida was playing three shows to get to the show in Poland where Liturgy was opening for Oneida, and Liturgy was just going to get in the van and drive straight to Poland. So I was like, I’ll just hang out with the Oneida guys, hang out with my brother, then I’ll meet you guys in Poland. Then Oneida asked me if I wanted to drum with them. So I ended up playing three shows with them. We played this festival an hour outside of Berlin, in the middle of the woods. It was all these German families with babies, and everyone was making food, and everything was super chill. I feel like I noticed about five people who were actually working for the festival. It felt like I was at the park. We ended up playing at night. Just hanging out with the Oneida guys and touring with them was a really awesome experience. They’ve been doing it for a long time, and they know how to kick back and relax on tour. After touring in situations that were way more stressful, it was just nice to hang out with folks who were chill. And not to mention, Oneida’s awesome. Playing with them was such an honor. That was a pretty awesome surprise.
Do you find that stressful times on tour are due to other people in bands, or do they come from venues as well?
Greg: All stress comes from individuals. Some people are nervous. All people get anxious, but some people really let that anxiety lead, and it can totally color a situation for a whole group of people. One person’s anxiety can stress out 20 people if they don’t know how to keep it in check. It’s hard on tour sometimes, but you learn after you do it for a while that the best thing to do is to take it as easy as possible, and trust in the fact that things generally tend to work out. If you’ve been doing it for so long, it’s not all of a sudden going to go up your faces. I’ll put it this way: when I’ve done solo touring, it’s been the least stressful touring situations I’ve been in. I think touring as a member of Oneida was a close second. When I used to be in Teeth Mountain, it was stressful for a different reason. I love that band and I miss that band a lot. But there were times when I was on tour with them when I was convinced that everybody else in the band was totally batshit insane. I was like, ‘I’m out on the West Coast with a bunch of total weirdo insane people, I don’t know what I’m doing here. What is going to happen? Are we going to get arrested?’ All these crazy situations would come up, and I would get stressed out. We did a two-month tour where we were in my car, which is a four-cylinder small car. We had six people in the car and we were running a trailer off the back, and it was a shitty old trailer that would fishtail off the back of the van. So we’re in my car, I can feel the back of the car getting pulled, and… yeah, I’ll just leave it at that. It wasn’t wired up legally, the lights on the back of the trailer didn’t work, and you could feel the thing move, and I’d be like ‘Guys, I think something’s wrong with the trailer,’ and they’d be like ‘What are you talking about?’ And then a cop would pull up behind us and trail the car.
Did you guys end up getting pulled over?
Greg: Not once on that tour. It was amazing. It was amazing we made it back, I gotta say. It was a serious life experience. I felt like I got dragged through the dirt of the road pretty hard. It definitely whetted me for future touring, so I’m thankful for it. Some people are better at touring than others, and I don’t think I’m particularly awesome at it, I just think I have a lot of experience with it in a short period of time. You don’t want to be on the road with people you wouldn’t want to be stuck in the middle of the woods with. It’s a survival thing, like, ‘I may not like you at all, but if we get hit by the apocalypse at this very moment, will I be happy that I’m with you?’ And it’s not easy. You have to get used to not having the regular creature comforts that people have. When I started touring, I would shower almost every day and try to be clean shaven, and it’s because of touring that I stopped.
[Our food comes. Greg adds very little spice to his pho.]
Eli: I’m glad there’s documentation of you having a cold sore.
Greg: It’s not a cold sore. It’s a canker sore. I read online this morning that canker sores can be caused by a weakened immune system and emotional stress. And I was sick when were on tour, and then quitting this band was super fucking stressful.
Eli: Oh, cuz you had to spend so much time combating things in comment threads.
Greg: Actually, I didn’t do that, but that comment thread was pretty amazing.
Eli: Really weird. I wanna know who this person is who goes on Brooklyn Vegan and just writes ‘hipster problems.’
Greg: Ugh, ‘first world problems.’
Comment threads like that are the bottom of the internet.
Greg: Yeah, just murky.
[We get into our food.]
Greg: Yeah, I’d usually go super spicy, but I’m just a lame-o now.
Eli: You’re not in a metal band anymore.
Greg: Yeah, I’m not hard anymore.
I saw three main things going on in the album. There’s an abrasive, arrhythmic aspect, there’s an ambient or trance-like aspect, and then there’s a pretty heavy, steady driving beat. Do you see those as different types of songs that you can make, or all part of the same thing?
Greg: I recorded a lot of that stuff a relatively long time ago, basically the beginning of 2010. I remember at one point being told that Impose wanted stuff that could be given to people to make remixes of. They were thinking about it along those lines. Also, I was spending a lot of time making video game music.
Do you think that the act of making music for a game is a continuation of your solo work as GDFX?
Greg: Not really, I think it’s the other way around. When I started making electronic music, it was definitely like video game music, and the more I was doing it the more I learned how to use the tools that I was using. I do it all with hardware. I don’t really use computers to make music. It’s all stuff like synthesizers, samplers and drum machines. The more I got to learn how to use those instruments, the more I started playing that kind of music. Being in Teeth Mountain was a big aspect of the influence too. I started trying to apply that kind of thing to making electronic music. It just started getting weirder. I find a sweet spot where it’s weirder and less straightforward but at the same time it hits that point where its like you’re not in the room anymore. That’s kind of what I’m going for. I’ve recorded a ton of stuff since the solo album that I’m much more into as far as the way it sounds, and is much more representative of what I’m doing when I’m making music. But because I have this album out, I feel like there’s some pressure to actually play the songs on the record, so I’ve been doing that a little bit. Up until the point that I started doing that, the live show was totally improvised. Now I’m actually kind of playing songs.
Do you prefer improvising?
Greg: I’m actually kind of into what I’m doing now, because I figured out a setup that allows me to play things that I recorded, but actively be playing them, not just playing them off a recording. It’s good because I record a lot and I can take things that I record and just use them in the live show, so its till feels really fresh to me. There’s no lag time. So now I’m doing stuff that’s more what I’m into doing and closer to what my sound is. I feel like it’s just gotten a lot better. My recording setup has evolved and the live show has evolved. Also, It’s a matter of being able to put more time into it. I spend tons of time at home, fooling around and recording stuff, but I have not spent a lot of time developing the live show. Now that I have the time to do that, I think it’ll flourish a lot more than it has been able to. I’ve been doing GDFX, whether it was called that or not, for almost ten years. It started out as sort of a hobby, but it could be more than that when I let it be.
Do you think you used live performance as an outlet for improvisation, and felt like on a recording you weren’t as free to improvise?
Greg: The recordings all come from improvisations. I record for five hours at a time, then I go back and listen to what I’ve recorded and I make a new recording out of that raw recording. I don’t get everything ready to go, press record, and do it, then stop and do it over again if it’s not perfect. It’s more free. In a live setting, it’s not like I’m alone at 4 a.m. in my room finding things. The pressure’s on to do something that people will enjoy. It’s just been about finding a really good balance between doing things that I set up in advance and leaving room for improvisation, for things to develop and find themselves. That’s just a matter of time. The first time I went on a solo tour, it got so much better from the first show to the last. It’s just about repetition. I need to spend more time doing it as a regular thing, and not as a side thing that falls between the cracks of other projects that I’m doing. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a side thing, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s never been a specific side project of anything. It’s just sort of fallen that way. So I’m trying to shift it back into the front.
You said video game music was something you’d been interested in forever. Did you grow up playing video games all the time?
Greg: Yeah, totally. Going to the arcade was the greatest treat. I’d occasionally visit my grandparents in New Jersey and they’d take me to the arcade and it would be the best day. I have really strong sense memories of standing on a milk crate and playing “Altered Beast” in an arcade in New Jersey. That game used to be the coolest thing to me. The music, the way it looked, everything. I was so drawn into video games as a young kid. For my third birthday, my grandfather got me a Nintendo, and I don’t think I opened any other presents. I just opened it up, plugged it in, and just was not in the room anymore.
What was your favorite stuff to play on Nintendo?
Greg: Zelda. Straight up. Totally inspiring.
Has your interest in video games continued? Do you play newer video games?
Greg: I do a little bit. There’s something about a lot of new video games that I tend to not like. There’s some that I really like. I’ve been playing Minecraft. I think that’s a really cool game. I played Portal and Portal 2, and I thought those were really good. I definitely still love video games, but I don’t spend a whole lot of time on them anymore. I think I talk about playing them more than I actually play them. In truth, when I play video games, I feel guilty because I feel like I should be doing something else. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten to a point where I should be playing video games instead of being productive. So, that makes me not play them as much. But I wholeheartedly appreciate them. They’re cooler than movies. I think there’s a lot of potential in them as far as an emerging form of media, and as an art form. Like, what if political revolution was game-ified? What if people treated direct action as a role-playing game, where you’d level up if you glued the locks of some company? Video games really entered people’s consciousness in the ’80s. It’s a pretty new thing as far as a mass media goes, and I think that it still hasn’t really informed the way that people think yet. And as younger people get older and have more influence over the world, things will be more like video games. For better and for worse.
A theme that I see emerging, in your interest in video games and on the record, is the induction of a trance-like state. A zoning-in. Is that what interests you most about making music?
Greg: Lately, it’s been something that I’ve been drawn to when I’m making music. Going for making a sick RZA- or J Dilla-style beat and having it end up making you trance out and realize 30 minutes later that you’ve been listening to the same thing over and over again is pretty cool. A lot of trance music and techno is all about totally trancing out and leaving your body. I’m into that as a thing that music can do. I don’t think it’s what music is solely about. It’s an aspect of it, but some music is about being super present. Lately, when making music, I feel like I’m dong something good when I realize after things have been set it motion that ‘Oh, this sounds cool.’ I disassociate completely then realize ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is good. I’ll save this.’
So do you think it’s something that grabs your reptillian brain? Like, something instinctual?
Greg: I think of it as being higher rather than lower. I think of music that people listen to while jogging as more reptilian than music that makes you forget you’re sitting and listening to music.
Is the expansive, trancelike nature reflective of your interest in Eastern religion?
Greg: I’ve been reading the Tao for a long time. I’ve been studying the I Ching for a long time. But I wouldn’t say ‘Eastern religion,’ because I wouldn’t consider myself a Buddhist. But I would think of myself as a Taoist, and my personal realization and understanding of the Tao is about an inherent oneness in everything. A source and an end. When I’m making music and it feels like I’m going into that zone where I’m not in the room anymore, the boundaries are dissolving. I’m not thinking words anymore, and I go the place before words exist. Things stop being separate from each other, and to me, that’s a very Taoist thing. It’s something that I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from, and it’s definitely affected my music. There’s one track on the album where I just read the Tao, and that’s pretty overt, but it’s every passage playing at the same time, so it sounds like bees buzzing. It’s kind of a hard thing to talk about because it’s not even something that words should be brought to.
Is there something you think you can get from drums that you can’t from electronic instruments?
Greg: It’s just tangible. For me, drumming is the ultimate music-making thing. Electronic music is a lot of fun, and there’s a lot I can do with it that I can’t do otherwise, but I’ve also been doing it for a while, and they are just instruments that I can play. Drums, on the other hand, are real. There’s an urge to connect with the earth, and you can’t really do that with electronic music. It’s more ethereal with electronic music, but with drums, you can affect people’s heartbeats, you can make people sweat, and you sweat too, and you get tired, and you pull yourself into it. It’s a real spiritual thing for me. If I could play drums all the time, on every recording I do, I would. It’s more a matter of, right now, not having a facility to record drums properly, living in a house where I can’t play them, and not having a practice space, but drumming would be a part of everything I do musically if it was possible. Again, it’s just about having time, giving the project the time and effort and energy that it deserves to let it develop. I planted this seed called GDFX, and I’ve been watering it a little, nourishing it a little, but I haven’t really taken care of it. I don’t know how it’s going to look when it’s full grown, but I need to feed it, otherwise it’s not going to grow. I just have to get a big bag of manure and throw it on top.
Eli: What a great metaphor. Just throw shit all over it.
Greg: Everything takes time, effort and energy. It’s just a collaboration between you and whatever’s out there.
I have one more, unfocused, expansive question: I was wondering if you could talk about your interest in aliens.
Greg: That’s a big question.
Well, let’s start with this: do you think that aliens are here among us?
Greg: I don’t even really know how to answer that question. I’ve had personal experiences that were super weird and that I can’t explain. I had an experience about two years ago, where a bunch of inanimate objects started moving in the house and I was being communicated with. I don’t know how to explain that. Maybe my left and right brain were talking to each other, or maybe a ship landed on the roof. I was definitely trying to make contact. I sat down with the intention to make contact, and really crazy shit started happening.
Do you think they speak to anyone who makes the effort, or to specific people that they’ve chosen?
Greg: You’re much more apt to see or experience something if you’re open to that kind of experience or if you believe that it’s possible. Maybe this question should be opened up to the table.
Alex: [to Greg] You forgot to mention my favorite part of your experience story, the vision you had of a guy opening up the top of his head and pointing at his pineal gland. I love that image.
Greg: There have been times on tour when I’ve woken up with weird markings on my body. And a lot of people say that’s a sign of alien abduction. I don’t know. I think that kind of stuff belongs to the realm of altered state of consciousness. Maybe it’s tangible, maybe it exists in the third dimension, with little grey guys who walk around—
Eli: That was me, I gave you the implant.
Greg: You’re one of them? Fuck! I used to be way more into the idea that there are aliens in big spaceships who land on earth and interact with people and are flesh and blood to some degree. Now I think it falls into the realm of faeries and ghosts and all kinds of other weird stuff. Things that could exist in the maybe-world. A lot of stuff exists in the maybe-world. Sometimes it manifests itself to people. Also, maybe the government and aliens have been conspiring to enslave the human race for the last 50 years. I think that’s possible, but I don’t believe in it because it’s a pretty shitty scenario. I would rather not believe that. Also, maybe we are aliens. There’s a thing called the “Terra Papers” that tells the story of a Native American guy who helped rescue a being from a crashed ship on a reservation. It told him the true history of the galaxy, that life on earth was seeded by people from the Orion Constellation. It talks about the reptilians and the dog people, and how we were originally a slave race, but one of the people who wasn’t into the whole slave thing taught us how to make love, and that taught us about all the possibilities of being alive on this planet. I definitely believe something about that, or everything about that. Everything is true.
Alex: I think that the belief in aliens is just the embrace of mystery itself. It’s actually not belief. Belief is the end of intelligence. As soon as you are focused in one direction, you form blinders and you forget to see this infinity that exists where everything is possible. And you realize how much you really don’t know. Humans don’t like to admit that they don’t know, but when you do admit that you don’t know, that’s when everything is opened up.
Greg: Everything is there, it’s just a matter of whether it’s next to you as an observer or not. And, if everything is one thing, you can’t really make the differentiation between yourself and everything else anyway. So, yes, everything is one alien.
Eli: There is only one thing.
Greg: And it’s an alien.
