Small portion of film sound designer, composer & effects boss Slusser headlining a godwaffle noise pancake show with an incredibly diverse set. This would be the loud portion.
----Justin Sanvicens from Xtreme Music interviewed David Slusser on May 30, 2004 San Francisco (CA), The Dark Room.
Xtreme Music: I'm here with David Slusser at The Dark Room. This is being recorded for Xtreme Radio and the Xtreme Music radio show. David, how exactly would you describe your music?
David Slusser: Not exact, I would not describe it exactly, that's the first part. I deal with resolution, I look for that in all the types of music that I do. It's transitional and it takes you along a narrative where you can go from one place to another. In other words, it's a change, so I document or try to present a change from one idea to another, that's the basic thing. I do a lot of different things but guarantee it will be something that will grow into another thing. I'm very much interested in how one form can grow into another.
Xtreme Music: So an evoling musical style within your live performances. Who are your main influences and how have they shaped your musical direction?
David Slusser: That's a good question. An unlikely source but just a preoccupation of mine is Duke Ellington. I come from a more traditional jazz background originally. I'm fifty-two years old so that means when I was a kid, an infant growing up, the first music I heard was swing based music in popular song. Those forms and melodies stayed inbedded in my brain whereas my baby sister, when she grew up all the music around her was basically three chord stuff and there's a difference in what you might have for your first impulse to go into something. Well, I accept these more complex forms from the beginning and I'm sure that sounds ageist in a certain perspective. But that's how those earlier pieces of music like Duke Ellington could influence me to hear a very broad palette. He was a very experimental musician and did not achieve a lot of popular success after the thirties and very early forties. He continued to grow and experiment, he was always pursuing something and painting pictures. So that was a very big influence. I think pictures, visualisations, mood.. someone like Ellington would be a great influence.
Xtreme Music: It's fantastic when musicians have that musical visual that they pursue. Are there any other jazz musicians in particular?..
David Slusser: For jazz players.. I play saxophone and I also play electronics, but when I think of saxophone Steve Lacey would be a good guy because he could also influence an electronics player you-know. You've heard him, he was able to take where jazz was from his generation but he was also hearing all the experiments and post-Cagian music in early electronics, and he has a language that is compatible with that. I starting picking up on him in the early seventies and that was a natural transition into how I could hear the saxophone be played in electronic articulation. I don't know what it is about that but he would be an influence. Going back to traditional jazz, there's all the greats that I love for jazz music. But Steve Lacey and Duke Ellington went beyond the jazz part of it into influencing other areas.
Xtreme Music: What innovative production techniques to you incorporate into your live recordings as well as some of the studio work you've done on Tzadik?
David Slusser: I work in the film industry for post-production and I am up on all the current technology that you can use. It was especially when doing my first Tzadik recording I had been working on a Synclavier for many years. Now that's not new technology but at the time that was the cutting edge of it and since then, the laptop revolution has really brought that type of synthesis down to a more level playing field. So it's not such a rarified area to work in that type of synthesis, but at the time I was lucky to get in on it early. Basically, it's translated down. It's still the same manipulation of envelopes and filters and combining voices, timing. You have to have good timing. You can have the greatest set of hardware but you have to be able to parce the music, so the technology in any case is secondary and anybody I think will tell you that, essentially because we are in such a technological age.
cont: http://www.xtrememusic.org/features/davidslusser.html
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