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electroradio
Todd Drootin [Books on Tape, Click Tracy] (Northridge, Californie, ÉU) • résidence: North Hollywood, Californie, ÉU • compositeur — membre de: American Entreprise Prostitutes • Box Social • Dewey Decimator • Subverse • Sluts on Tape
Articles sur Todd DrootinLes critiques de disques se retrouvent dans les pages de chaque disque (via l’onglet «discographie»).
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Sens, intensitépar Éric Thériault in Convergence #26 (Québec), 1 avril 2004 |700|
«… il offre toute l’intensité et l’énergie de la musique punk.»
Books on Tape berce sa création dans l’idéologie et l’influence du rock ’n’ roll. Par sa façon de jouer staccato et son instrumentation analogique, il offre toute l’intensité et l’énergie de la musique punk. En fait, il qualifie son style de «beatpunk», terme qui engloberait par la magie d’une puissante juxtaposition sa passion pour la guitare, le jazz et le dub. Cette vision particulière, cependant, est marquée par un désir profond d’exprimer son caractère et sa personnalité par le biais d’une structure instrumentale. Books on Tape n’est pas le type de musicien électronique qui joue pendant 45 minutes sans dire un mot. Il pause entre les chansons et s’engage pour enchanter son public. C’est sa façon, dit-il, d’offrir la sensation et l’énergie d’un spectacle rock n’roll. Nous avons rencontré l’artiste lors de son récent passage à Montréal. Convergence: Vous avez une connexion spéciale avec Montréal grâce à votre association avec l’étiquette No Type. Comment a débuté cette relation? J’échangeais des pièces sur Napster avec un mec il y a 4 ans. Il m’a dit: «Vous devriez vous joindre à No Type. On aimerait vous avoir». Je n’avais jamais entendu parler de cette étiquette. Alors j’ai composé un court métrage pour eux. Parce que ma musique est un peu atypique pour No Type, j’étais vraiment honoré de faire partie d’une telle ligue de musiciens. Et avec une étiquette mp3, on peut rapidement recevoir du feedback. Convergence: Los Angeles ne nous vient pas à l’idée quand on pense à la musique électronique. Y apprécie-t-on votre style? Absolument. Nous sommes un petit groupe de musiciens électroniques à Los Angeles. Il y a des fêtes tous les mois et les supporteurs sont nombreux. J’en ai vues de toutes sortes - d’un chanteur heavy métal avec de la guitare et distorsion au-dessus d’un rythme électro, jusqu’à un gars qui s’appelle le ‘TV Sheriff’ [qui performe] devant un écran vidéo très explicite. La musique essentielle est sans doute le hip hop des débuts ’90. Je me rendais souvent dans des régions plutôt dangereuses pour voir ces spectacles. Convergence: Vous étiez en spectacle au Festival CMJ de New York récemment, c’était une belle expérience? En raison de ma performance et de la réaction de la foule, je la classe dans mon top 3 de tous les temps. Parfois, il faut sortir de son environnement et se dire: «Je suis loin de chez moi et je vais tout donner ce soir». J’ai été chanceux, car il y avait peu de musique électronique cette année. Quand j’ai levé la tête, la salle était pleine à craquer, c’était saisissant! Convergence: Sings the Blues est votre nouvel album - le titre nous semble un peu trompeur. Ah… c’est mon côté farceur. J’ai pensé que ça serait amusant de fabriquer une couverture à la ‘Blue Note’ et de me montrer derrière un microphone alors que je ne chante pas du tout. Mes chansons ont aussi des titres très rigolos. La musique et le spectacle, voilà ce qui m’importe. Convergence: Votre style frappe avec une énergie qui rappelle le rock n’ roll, particulièrement les chansons She’s Dead to Me et Siberian Soundsystem. Ça s’explique par votre formation? Exactement. J’étais batteur dans des groupes rock dès l’âge de onze ans jusqu’à mes 20 ans. C’est à la suite de ma rencontre avec Kerri, ma future fiancée, que j’ai abandonné. Elle était bien meilleure que moi. J’avais commencé à découvrir les samplers quelques années avant ma retraite du rock car je vivais dans un duplex où il fallait être silencieux. J’étais donc à la recherche de la technologie et la transition s’est faite tout naturellement. Ma structure punk s’est maintenue car je m’intéressais à la musique alternative, punk, ainsi qu’au dub de Scratch Perry et de King Tubby. Convergence: Le terme «electronica» convient-il à votre musique? Mais oui, c’est de la musique électronique! J’embrasse le son et la technologie d’aujourd’hui. La combinaison est nouvelle et reste à découvrir. J’aime la sonorité du punk, mais pour moi, le terme ‘punk’ veut dire manipuler le son comme personne ne l’a jamais fait. C’est comme l’ancienne citation du groupe The Grateful Dead: «Nous ne sommes pas les meilleurs dans ce que l’on fait, nous sommes les seuls à le faire.» Tel est mon objectif! Convergence: En ce qui concerne le sampling, comment éviter les embêtements de la part des compagnies de disque? Habituellement je ne jouerais pas la pièce sur le même ton que l’originale. Je la coupe, je la renverse et je la manipule à quelques reprises. Je tente de la transformer et de créer quelque chose de neuf. J’utilise des pièces sous les yeux de mes amis qui font partie de quelques groupes rock et ils ne les reconnaissent pas. Peut-être un jour je leur dirai! Convergence: Bicycle Beat rappelle les sommets atteints sur l’album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts de David Byrne et Brian Eno. Vous connaissez cet album? C’est l’un de mes préférés de tous les temps! Vous pouvez carrément méditer sur ce disque! Je suis un gros fan de Talking Heads aussi. Je crois qu’ils sont les pionniers du mouvement réversible [cross-over] de l’ère moderne. Le rock en a profité beaucoup. Il est toujours vital. Il n’y a rien de mieux que de se faire comparer à un tel album. Convergence: Dans la pochette de l’album Sings the Blues vous confirmez que «cette musique n’aurait jamais vu le jour sans des groupes comme Albert Ayler, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Art Ensemble of Chicago, même David Bowie. Vous étes à la poursuite d’une fidélité sonore particulière? Je recherche un certain individualisme en associant ma personnalité à ma musique. J’adore ce culte de la personnalité. J’aimerais bien que les gens puissent dire «cela doit être Books on Tape.» Je veux que ma musique reflète ma personnalité. Convergence: Votre musigue s’adapterait facilement aux domaines de la publicité et du cinéma? J’y pense tous les jours! J’en ai déjà licenciées beaucoup à des êmissions de télévision. D’ailleurs, c’est la raison pour laquelle je peux me permettre de visiter des villes comme Montréal. J’ai aussi déjà travaillé pour un superviseur responsable de sélectionner de la musique pour le cinéma. Vous pouvez retrouver plusieurs de mes pièces, celles non appropriées pour mes albums, sur des émissions MTV comme Real World, Road Rules et des petites émissions de télé-réalité du genre. Ils me surnomment le «Maître de la tension» Genre: si une fille tombe enceinte ou s’il y a une bagarre quelconque, on utilise ta musique. Convergence: Selon le L.A. Alternative Press, vous seriez «peut-être trop ingénieux et trop difficile pour gagner la ferveur populaire.» Mission accomplie? C’est ma plus grande peur. Je ne souhaite pas devenir trop expérimental au point où les gens se demanderaient si ce que je fais est vraiment de la musique. Je ne veux pas qu’on me retrouve parmi les collections coûteuses oubliées chez le disquaire dans la section expérimentale. Certains ont toujours peur de la musique instrumentale. À la maison, j’écoute de la musique spéciale - du jazz expérimental et des musiciens comme Don Caballero. J’ai peur que les gens n’en viennent à vouloir que des groupes vocaux, mais je ne changerai pas de direction. Personne ne me changera.
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Concert Reviewpar B R in Vital #411 (Pays-Bas), 18 février 2004 |684_2|
«It’s trashy and noisy, ok, not too noisy or too harsh.»
[…] Books on Tape develops his ideas better and certainly in a more amusing way, especially if beat-punk is your thing. I think Todd Drootin is not using computer or laptop to make music, that’s why the title of his first album released by Deathbomb Arc is Throw Down Your Laptops. The music is made with sampler, sequencer, drum machines, keyboards… It’s trashy and noisy, ok, not too noisy or too harsh. It’s in many forms of nice unconventional songs worth to be discovered and consumed.
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Chomping at the Books on Tape (& other badassness)par Tobias van Veen in Dusted Magazine (ÉU), 11 février 2004 |683_1| Books on Tape swept through Montréal with his broken pants and beatpunk sampling techniques in January of 2004, arriving in the dead of winter to scream and freak-out at the little Casa del Popolo, otherwise known as ‘the asylum.’ It seems that every ex-pat American citizen flocks to this little watering hole. Whether the eclectic mash-ups of LA’s Todd Drootin are becoming known for their slegdgehammer composition and obscure sampling or for Drootin’s manic stage presence is debatable. Those who wage the quality beer swear it has something to do with the fact that Drootin yells a lot. Drootin fills the loadtime waiting for his AKAI MPC2000 with patter that ranks his lunacy alongside his assault calibre, heavy hitting brokenbeats. Those who wage the moonshine bet their nut that his success lies in the non-yelling bits, in the apologetic nature he displays when cursing the foreign policy of his Government. To set matters straight, as words do not describe the beauty=truth complex that well when dealing with drunk & bearded madmen, Drootin’s BOT project isn’t IDM, drillcore, or Kid606 tigerbeats - it’s closer to a heavy metal showdown, a stoner’s grind-out, something so filmic that only a native of the Smog City could love it to its rotten, bass-heavy core. There’s something atonally epic about his tracks which cry out for the whelping he delivers via frantic and heavy use of distortion and fuzz. If Drootin has Napolean syndrome, then it’s rational to claim that he’s acting out some superbly improvised Hegelian master/slave relations that nonetheless juxtapose the timeless themeatic of the body/techne tension, throwing his human, sweating self into the grids of his technological apparatuses with a Wagnerian fury. During ‘performance’ - others call it ‘therapy’ - Drootin punches and slams his EFX pedals, crying out with wanton lust and dancing with utter abandon and glee like a Dionysian at the edge of berserk. It’s a beautiful thing, when it’s not shameful and banned in the lower 48 States. With a recent album on Montréal’s diverse No Type label - & here I am partisan, for I throw down the wax at their oddball events - appropriately named Sings the Blues (2004), Drootin surpasses his past excursions, above & beyond the beat to explore the themeatics of the beat symphony… Emotional tones, danceable show tunes, and narratological outlines in song structure abound as Drootin laps past the deservedly polemic Throw Down Your Laptops (Deathbomb Arc, 2002). True, Drootin admitted during his spastic stage show that yes, indeed, sometimes he wish he had a laptop (& technically, the MPC 2000 is the precursor - it’s a basic hard-drive & processor). And true to form, however, he demonstrated with the vicious antics of his body that only the flailing arms and hands of a maniac can sustain the energy and pressure his gear requires… no laptop would live up under that heavy damage… it would be left in a heaping, smoking wreck. In a way Todd Drootin follows what Hendrix, The Clash and just about every cool rock band has done at some point - break shit. I’ve yet to hear of him throwing the MPC into the crowd, but damn, that will be a photo-op. As well as expensive. But in this other way, the point I was really trying to make, Drootin has more to do with rock music than electronic[a]. His tunes have been featured on MTV (he does commercial scoring), and he’s down with the serious in-ya’-face presence of the performer. Yah. My bet - Drootin on the upswing as long as he doesn’t fall to the pressures of the dialectics crowd. Watch your back for the Aufhebung! Tobias: How did you get started in music? Books on Tape: I’ve been banging on something or other since I was 5. Piano, then drums, then guitar and, around 1998, samplers and electronics. There’s a lot of musical history in my family - my grandfather’s brother drummed for Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and others, but it certainly wasn’t a matter of being pushed into music because my parents are completely unmusical. I mean, god forbid you have to listen to one of them sing Karaoke… Tobias: How did your sound get so heavy? Books on Tape: Well, I like rock in almost all its forms. And I like things extreme. So when the kids in my clique got into Metallica, I got into Napalm Death. And when it came time for Green Day and Nirvana to take over, I was stuck on early Sonic Youth as well as digging up Raincoats albums and other more obscure things that I had only heard or read about. So whenever I’ve played an instrument, it has always been with a Derek Bailey sense of “Do as no one has done before you”… the heaviness comes as a result of my dual tastes for the sound/energy of rock and the extreme/weirdo/groundbreaking styles of bands like The Slits, or, for a more current example, Melt Banana. Tobias: Would you use a laptop in lieu of an AKAI if you had MIDI drum pads that allowed you to do the same thing? An AKAI is just kind of a slow, heavy laptop. Books on Tape: Hook me up! The idea that I am an anti-laptop guy is really kind of something cooked up because there are so many people who do make great music using laptops. I will say, though, that one of the things I like about the AKAI is that I feel like I’m bastardizing it and using it within some limitations. I like when people familiar with the machine look at me and just shake their heads, confused. With a laptop, it seems, almost anything is possible. And I like the audience to understand - or at least to THINK they understand, what is going on. I find that lacking at laptop shows. Tobias: Do you make your music more methodically than the performance or just kind of set everything up and bang away on the Korg, the pedals, the AKAI? Books on Tape: Making the tracks is a completely methodical process that I enjoy far less than the live performance aspect. It usually involves me hovering over a warm sampler for the better part of a day or two, and then countless revisions over the life of a song. I do weird things like program sequences and leave them on mute, in case one day I feel like throwing that in at a show. It may happen, it may not… but I like to give myself that kind of room for improvising on the basic structures when I perform live. Tobias: Have you thought of doing a noise album? Books on Tape: I’d like to produce one with collaborators. I couldn’t conceive of doing it on my own. Tobias: Where would you most like to play and with who? Books on Tape: Tough one! I’d like to play with Sonic Youth or The Boredoms, anywhere… though since I brought up the Boredoms, let’s say in Japan! Tobias: If you were gay would you date T. Raumschmiere? Books on Tape: I generally prefer indie-rock boys, but Thurston and Malkmus are getting old and I’ve got nothing for the new crop of heart-on-sleeve kids. But I’m not picky… Tobias: What’s next musically kiddo? Books on Tape: I want to remix some rock bands this year. Wait until early next year to do another full-length. Tour as much as possible. Make new musical connections. Hang out with amazing bands like NYC’s Parts and Labor. And meet Jay-Z.
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Reviewpar Rich Juzwiak in Magnet (ÉU), 1 février 2004 |698|
«Sings The Blues feels as important as drill’n’bass
masterworks by Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and µ-ziq…»
Todd Drootin (a.k.a. Books on Tape) also wants to rock. The difference is, he knows how. Nothing sums him up better than the Pixies sticker on the side of his mixer. His rollicking approach to IDM deconstructs live guitar and bass loops via injections of white noise and hyper- distorted beats. Simultaneously gorgeous, fun and ear-splitting. Sings The Blues feels as important as drill’n’bass masterworks by Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and µ-ziq, only it trades animosity for swagger. The album’s title is a big lie: infrequent vocals are hacked to bits and fuzzed out like the rest of it.
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Reviewpar Martin Lomas in The Music Womb (Canada), 15 janvier 2004 |678_1|
«… cool and oh so good to move to. Bloody genius.»
Laptop lad Todd Drootin has made something very different, very complete and very satisfying. The format is like that of a DJ set. But the sheer imagination that conjured all the myriad of beats and sounds here is a joy to behold. The thing is alive with quirky grooves, abused samples and an old-timey feel enhanced with hiss and crackle where need be. What should often be pretty cheesy is cool and oh so good to move to. More than enough variety to keep you unsettled. This would be one helluva great party record to get people going. Bloody genius.
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Ten Bands You Need to Know Aboutpar Lesley Bargar in LA Alternative Press (ÉU), 22 octobre 2003 |661_4|
«… the brilliant premeditation is evident in how friggin’ good his stuff is.»
[…] Valley native Todd Drootin (a.k.a. Books on Tape) suffers from a severe case of electronic epilepsy. Standing behind his series of odd sequencers and mysterious boxes bursting with knobs, levers, and who-knows-what, the man seems to compose in a fit of spontaneity. However, the brilliant premeditation is evident in how friggin’ good his stuff is. Using samples as minimal as a single guitar chord or bass line as his palate, Drootin mixes in blips, buzzes and other kinds of primitive electronic noises to create music that is somewhat punk, somewhat dancey and often cinematic in scope. The project began when Drootin wanted to play music but lacked the space necessary to store his various bulky traditional instruments. Sequencers, about the size of shoeboxes (but a lot more fun), seemed like the way to go. What has grown out of this space-issue is a full-fledged act that is less “electroclash,” and more a direct result of influences such as jazz, punk, indie, and just plain rock. Books on Tape shows have been described as “high-energy gymnastics” and even the most die-hard electronic traditionalists and jaded indie-rockers have been known to break a smile watching the frantic, knob-turning, pedal-slamming spectacle that is a Books on Tape show. Drootin has had the opportunity to play with such established acts as Cursive, Rilo Kiley and Stars as Eyes. The debut Books on Tape album received high critical acclaim and became a staple on college radio stations nationwide. Drootin feels that his recently released second album, Sings the Blues, captures the vibe of his live performances. He has been invited to play at this year’s CMJ festival in New York City and can be expected to surpass the Los Angeles underground soon enough. […]
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Show Reviewpar David Cotner in LA Weekly (ÉU), 4 septembre 2003 |633|
«… a smorgasbord of drum breaks and disemboweled beats.»
Books on Tape, a.k.a. Todd Drootin, twists and gyres while poring over an assortment of processors and guitar pedals that are essentially a smorgasbord of drum breaks and disemboweled beats. Gingerly twisting dials and pecking at his equipment like a fussy child at supper, Drootin shoots speed-metal guitar lines with tranquilizer darts, slowing them to 8 rpm even as the overamped sulfur trail of the high-hat wends its way through dancers and head-nodders. It’s faintly reminiscent of watching an autistic root for his favorite AFL team, or the release by the Gerogerigegege called “Shaking Box Music (You Are Noisemaker),” wherein a metal box is filled with blank cassettes and nothing more. Frantically, Drootin batters the pedals like congas in this night at the house of knives, detonating for an audience that is at turns appreciative and mystified.
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Off the Spinepar Tobias van Veen in e|i magazine #1 (ÉU), 31 mars 2003 |556_5|
«… broken beats with plenty of pianos and guitars, injected with meticulous and
miniscule sampledelia.»
Cowboy techno? Acoustic breakbeats with a country twang? Y’all better throw down dem’ laptops, y’hear? While I think Todd Drootin’s call for laptop performers to “return to live gear performances” is a regressive and reactive solution if taken seriously, his playful acoustic jam-sessions play the South of electronic music & launch a critique reminiscent of — or at least the spirit of — Kid606’s Down With The Scene. Energetic ‘organic’ broken beats with plenty of pianos and guitars, injected with meticulous and miniscule sampledelia. Where Books on Tape excels is in the arrangement and composition of each track — a shot from a six-shooter, some bullets a dive into inventive indie d’n’b: hick Gold Chains? Effects and sounds are used with introduction, precision, and care, yet every confinement has its prisoners and here the live, gearbased performance risks an overdetermined audio palette for the potential multitude of animals in this vibrant jungle. Given the handcuffs, the restraints nevertheless provide a medium for experiencing pleasure, a stripped sonic canvas: Gear without Laptop (GwL). Whip me over that barstool in this forgotten backwater saloon filled with DVD pirates high on nanodrugs — some twisted William Gibson novel gone horribly awry in a Western timewarp — but Drootin is not John Wayne: he’s the sharp shootin’ fourth amigo missing from the trilogy of electronic music: gear, digital, and electroacoustic. A new cyborg from the T-series plant? What sounds will breed from this huevos rancheros hybridity? Whereas the melodrama and quirkiness of each track bodes well, the vocals on Sporty But Sensible Car don’t. The practical dada voicing on The Contenders spanks me better: it cries indielectro. (A spark in the naming engine?) As ‘acoustic’ as it is, this disc is experimental simulacra, each track a forensic foray attempting to breathe vitriol into a wired world through a sonic mirror. Its success depends on whether you like American dualisms.
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Crossed Wirespar Wendy Gilmartin in LA Weekly (ÉU), 14 mars 2003 |552_1|
«Some call its sound “beat punk” — a tightly wound ruckus that’s
composed completely on a wired box.»
Northridge-born and still a Valley dude, electronic manipulator Todd Drootin drinks a lot of coffee, smiles easily, and swivels his attention between L.A.’s charms and its cons, disparaging our pitiful radio selection, praising Claremont’s KSPC, then musing about the dearth of decent live venues. “I had a gig at the Bar Marmont, and they stopped me after three songs and were, like, ‘Uh, that’s good enough, thanks.’” Drootin’s musical incarnation, Books on Tape, can be heard more regularly ricocheting inside the Smell’s slimy walls downtown. BoT might look like a one-guy outfit onstage; really it’s a duo: a give-and-take between Drootin and his sampler. But where other electronic artists revel in that self-reflexive world of glitches, blips and buzzes, Books on Tape wants you to think it’s a band. Some call its sound “beat punk” — a tightly wound ruckus that’s composed completely on a wired box. “If people want to call it beat punk, that’s fine; to me it’s just music I made on a sampler,” says Drootin. “As long as things remain interesting, I have no need to be consistent.” Audiences seem to have a fairly immediate grasp of the 25-year-old Drootin’s noise now, in contrast to his wobbly first show alone at a straight-edge punk festival in Florida three years ago. “I was really thrown in the fire. Those guys didn’t know what to think of me, but in the end I got a pretty good reaction.” Now comes a souped-up, full-length CD excursion, Throw Down Your Laptops (Deathbomb Arc), recorded and produced by Drootin and Brian Miller via samples of generated and found sounds. One or two seconds of zooming guitar, run backward through the sampler, might serve as the beat of a song, while another two or three layers of amp hiss chop out a melody you’ll hum for days. Simultaneously electronic dance and sloppy punk, BoT submits warm & fuzzy bits of sound to mechanical bondage for its DIY-meets-DOS feel. Drootin’s last band — during his college days in Santa Cruz — played too loud for their practice space, and Drootin and his collaborator eventually pooled their cash for a sampler to generate beats. “He wanted to have his hands in everything, and so did I, so we stopped working with each other. That’s when I started going it alone.” Santa Cruz was also where Books on Tape’s amalgamative style originated. “I used to live up in the mountains. There was this one spot where all the radio stations would just bleed onto each other, and that was the best part of my ride home. I was such a spaz in my car for two minutes, just hearing all the combinations, like Spanish and jazz and this and that. I’d never heard indie and electronic, and I said, ‘There it is.’ It was the crossings of all these kinds of music that got me the idea of that sort of peanut-butter-and-chocolate mix. I thought, ‘Hey, what’s my Reese’s melody?’” The tastes in Drootin’s larder are not that simple a mash; they’re blended with great discrimination, as becomes apparent on a stroll through Amoeba Music. “I like Jim O’Rourke, but he’s not the savior of the world,” he says. Others who arouse polite uncertainty are Hot Hot Heat (“It’s all the same”), Missy Elliot (“I wanted to like it so bad”), Beck, Fischerspooner, and Dntel (“But there are good ideas on that album”). The positives are more varied: Watts Prophets, Daedelus, Foghat, Negativland, Scarnella, Derek Bailey and Jay Z. “Jay Z is a guy who knows the image he wants to put out, and there’s something very valid about that, even if it’s not always listenable. I appreciate that in bands, like with Sun Ra — he stuck with his story. I have Jay Z and Sun Ra fairly close together on my record shelf.” Drootin says he was thinking about that kind of unified approach more with Throw Down Your Laptops than he did with his previous releases. “Now I have to do my Todd’s United Front — which seems riddled with holes to me, but maybe someone else doesn’t know that.” The title is a direct reference to the cut-and-paste genre of IDM dudes like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, though it’s not exactly a gauntlet thrown in challenge. Drootin says he’s not trying to start a cultural revolution: “I love MC5 and Kick Out the Jams — antagonistic, but playfully so.” He hesitates and sips his coffee. “I don’t want to end up in the ‘unusually experimental’ section at Amoeba with $160 box sets.” Then he smiles. “Well, maybe someday.”
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Drootin throws down electrifying debut albumpar Andrew Lee in Daily Bruin (ÉU), 22 janvier 2003 |544|
«Drootin’s approach may be wildly unconventional, but it has the spirit of rock and
roll.»
About two years ago, Todd Drootin was sitting at his home in Encino, surfing on Napster and trading his music with other tech-happy, independent artists. While online, a man who went by the name Infoslut told Drootin about his mp3 label No Type. “I’d never heard of it,” Drootin said. “The entire concept of an mp3 label was just out there to me. But he told me it was a cool thing, just a community that can get a lot of attention.” Drootin, who releases and performs music under the moniker Books on Tape, released an EP on the label and received a respectable fan response, but more importantly, No Type planted the seed for his own label Subverseco, which now serves as a home for several other experimental artists. Drootin, a prototypical and self-described beat punk, was raised playing piano, drums and guitar, but the tech-age has turned him into more than just a rock musician. “It’s certainly been an exciting time for music right now,” Drootin said. “The indie rockers are finally unafraid to be electronic.” Drootin’s debut album, Throw Down Your Laptops - released just over a month ago - isn’t your typical electronic release; it was recorded live, which led to a distinct big-arena rock sound. But its frenetic sound, propelled by obscure samples and sequencers, signals a new direction for So Cal independent music. Drootin’s break from traditional rock started about four years ago when he moved from a house to an apartment. He soon realized that he didn’t have room to put his drum kit. He bought a recording device, a sort of digital workstation, to play around on with a friend. “We started to explore the possibilities of it, but we couldn’t just sit there and do this all day; we needed to be looping and stuff like that. He was a guitar player, I was a drummer, so those were crazy concepts for us back then,” Drootin said. Ever the inquisitive musician, Drootin soon started to get into Los Angeles’ underground-hip hop scene. “Eventually, we went in with a sampler, and the idea was that we were going to make hip-hop beats,” he said. “But it just so happened that two white kids from Santa Cruz didn’t have a shot in hell at making hip-hop beats for anybody but themselves.” Turning to his own brand of spastic knob-twiddling, his live show gave him the recognition he needed, notably from his current non-mp3-based label Deathbomb Arc records. They were disappointed in Drootin’s first recordings and convinced him that the live atmosphere reflects the essence of his music’s charm. As a result, a few of his tracks have been picked up by MTV’s “Real World.” Still, his particular approach to electronic music isn’t the kind that purists would fawn over. “It keeps coming back to me that the people really taking interest in what I’m doing are people who are into more eclectic stuff, into rock and jazz and dub,” he said. “When I walk into Amoeba and I go to the techno section, those are not the people listening to my albums. I think it reflects the fact that I didn’t grow up listening to electronic music.” That’s not to say he doesn’t have something to offer the so-called purists; Drootin’s approach may be wildly unconventional, but it has the spirit of rock and roll. “You’ll see them - laptop users - lean over each other’s shoulders and go ‘check out this trick.’ Then they’ll hit Control+F or something. I don’t see the music in that,” he said. “When I (see) people taking their samplers and completely battering them and doing something totally wrong, that’s when my eyes light up.” Books on Tape performs regularly in Southern California, check http://www.deathbombarc.com/ for recent dates.
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This may (or may not) computein Los Angeles Times (ÉU), 2 janvier 2003 |939| One of these days, Todd Drootin says of his atypically frenetic electronic stage show, “I’ll probably fall and hurt myself”. But those are the risks for the harried knob-twiddler who titled his album Throw Down Your Laptops because, he says, “I don’t think a laptop is a way to do a live show.” Drootin, who performs under the name Books on Tape, brings his pedal-pushing, dial-spinning show downtown to the Smell on Jan. 11. If Throw Down Your Laptops is any indication, expect a melange of sequencers, effects and digi-beats, all stirred into an edgy froth the L.A. artist describes as “beatpunk.” His music, with influences ranging from underground hip-hop to “really quirky rock with a lot of character,” has been used on MTV’s The Real World and Road Rules. electrocd.com Todd Drootin [Books on Tape, Click Tracy]: presse |
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