by Patrick Pilch (@pratprilch)
We’re halfway through 2020 and it’s become fully apparent that everything is very bad. Landowner’s latest LP scourges America’s swathingly oppressive capitalist infrastructure with sharp observational critique. Consultant picks up right where 2018’s Blatant left off, taking aim at racist housing policy, generational wealth, the horrors of gentrification and the domineering big-neck machismo of it all. Their third album is their second for Chicago’s Born Yesterday Records, label home to bands like Stuck, Cafe Racer and Glued. Consultant is centered around the abuse and misuse of power; when policymakers tighten their bureaucratic grip, when capitalism pioneers new forms of exploitation and when shadowy power structures possess, oppress and control.
Dan Shaw writes, composes and demos Landowner’s music. He’s based in Holyoke, MA, where he works as a landscape architect. Landowner songs are lean and ordered with clean instruments and focused arrangements. The band’s high and tight post-punk is pin straight and bareboned - “geometric,” as Shaw describes. Landowner’s song structures mirror Shaw’s landscape architecture work, each track sounding mathematical in arrangement, precisely layered. The band’s punk ostinato deliberately pickets with spotless instrumentation, locking into quasi-kraut patterns and grooves that bring the vocalist’s scathing lyrics to the forefront.
Today, Post-Trash is premiering “Phantom Vibration,” the cutting first single from Consultant. The track addresses the haunting presence of a known abuser, one who has been exiled for the safety of a community. It questions the implications of excommunication, considering the danger said abusers may pose to the next community they find: “phantom vibration, circling in the dark, convinced this is someone’s fault, looks for someone else to haunt.” We also spoke with Landowner vocalist and songwriter Dan Shaw to speak about Landowner, his architecture work and his personal life. Check out the interview below.
Post-Trash: Are you working from home today?
Dan Shaw: Yeah. The nice thing about my job is I can work remotely with my laptop and an internet connection most of the time.
Post-Trash: You’re in Western Massachusetts right now, is that right?
Dan Shaw: Yeah. I live in Holyoke and my bandmates all live in the surrounding towns.
Post-Trash: When did you move back to Massachusetts from Seattle?
Dan Shaw: 2015.
Post-Trash: You work as an urban planner in Holyoke right now?
Dan Shaw: Basically - my job really is that I’m a landscape architect. The place where I work is in Northampton and does a lot of planning consulting. About half my work is landscape design for public and municipal clients, designing parks and public spaces. The other half is urban and regional planning in various forms.
Post-Trash: You did that in Seattle as well?
Dan Shaw: I did graduate school for landscape architecture at University of Washington, so that’s why I moved out there. My wife and I both lived there for five years. I started a band and stuff and we just stayed after graduate school. Moving is a big deal and I kind of settled right in. But both our families were from Massachusetts so we eventually came back to this area to be closer to the places we came from.
Post-Trash: As far as music goes, you mention that using “geometric sounding” guitars in Landowner’s music was a big part of the band’s sound. Without the use of distortion, it definitely hits harder and brings the lyrics to the forefront. How much of your landscape architecture work informed Landowner’s sound? Is that correlated in any way?
Dan Shaw: Yeah it is. It’s a whole thing I could get into. It felt crazy at the time but I actually did my thesis in grad school on similarities between the creative process in designing landscapes and composing music, as an analogy, for better understanding my own creative process. I felt like usually no one reads your thesis except you and your advisors, so I treated it like my own personal creative-process manual. I explored diagraming the layers of a landscape and ecological processes that happen on it by using layers of music with a bass and a rhythm section that’s more composed while maybe someone’s improvising on top of it. Things like that. So I thought a lot, over the years, about the crossover between designing a physical environment and creating a space you mentally inhabit with music. I can’t help but look at similarities between the two since I spend so much of my time thinking about one and the other. The way that works with Landowner, the layering in the music is very clear and important. The bass, the drums, the guitars, and the voices are these distinct layers. I try to make them all crystal clear, forming patterns that repeat and are recognizable. With repetition in music, it’s almost like walking through a landscape for a long time, then you encounter a sudden threshold - like between the woods and an open field - and everything changes at once. I think those sudden changes in music - where all the instruments are playing something repetitively, your brain starts to count on that repetition continuing, and then you get slammed by a sudden transition where all five musicians switch at once - that’s really interesting to me. You know how you can get locked in a groove as you’re jamming? To make it sound like you’re zoning out and repeating in music for a long time, then it turns out it was composed and there is a sudden switch that all the musicians know about, to me that’s really exciting. I try to go about constructing music in Landowner that way, too. I could ramble about that stuff for a really long time [laughs].
Post-Trash: I’m glad. That’s really cool. You said that you demo your songs, is that right?
Dan Shaw: Yeah. The first Landowner album is called Impressive Almanac and it’s on Bandcamp. It’s a solo album I made by myself. When I had first moved back to Massachusetts I didn’t really have friends since I’d been away for a long time and I didn’t really know where the local music scene was at quite yet, so I got busy making music for myself, music that I just wanted to hear personally. I made that album with the limited resources I had, turning constraint into opportunity. I had a practice amp and a drum machine on my laptop and I figured out that I could make this nervous-sounding, hyper-clean version of punk and hardcore that would sound almost funny at first - but after a little while you’re like “actually it’s really good.” That kind of thing can be almost better than normal music in a weird way. You put on Impressive Almanac and it’s sort of hilarious but then you realize it’s good. So then I started going out to shows and meeting people. I’d talk about the music I was working on and trying to be really social at shows and get out of my shell. That led to forming a live band with Landowner. The last two albums we made as a group. I still write everything but we turned it into a live thing.
Post-Trash: The other members of your band also have different backgrounds in jazz, experimental and avant garde scenes?
Dan Shaw: Yeah, they all bring all kinds of different experiences together. They all got excited about the weird potential of this project, since Landowner started with a really specific vision. They’re all about it. It is something a little different than what each of us has played before. That’s been fun. It’s still them playing stuff I’ve written so it kind of falls into place, but everyone’s a really competent musician. Some of them have spent time in music school and stuff like that. It ends up being really easy to work with those guys and a lot of fun.
Post-Trash: Yeah. In the press release I thought a really important quote was “as if an abrasively clean band were reading the sheet music of hardcore songs,” and I couldn’t really agree more with that.
Dan Shaw: There was a band called Antelope from Washington DC that wrote hyper clean, geometric, diagram-sounding songs. They’re great - Antelope’s album Reflector is just so cool. So I imagined a really specific sound that would be as if those guys were just matter-of-factly playing a Discharge song. That’s what I envisioned at first. It was definitely a starting point only for writing stuff. It evolved from there, it’s not like we just write little hardcore songs. It turns into a more composed post-punk sort of thing. I always sit down and say, “Okay I’m going to write a really simple little hilarious take on a d-beat song with abrasively clean guitars.” Then it always morphs into something a little more elaborate.
Post-Trash: So you recorded most of Consultant in Massachusetts?
Dan Shaw: Yeah. I write by demo-ing at home, kind of jamming to the drum machine on my headphones. I send the demos to my bandmates and they learn the parts and then we play shows. For about a year we had been playing shows where we were playing these songs. Then we went on tour in Europe for two weeks and got really tight from that. We recorded the album when we got home pretty quickly, just a couple sessions in our bandmate Josh’s studio.
Post-Trash: We are premiering “Phantom Vibration” when this interview runs. The title is in reference to the phenomenon when you think you hear your phone buzz in your pocket. Thematically it reminds me a lot of “Invisible Wall” by Stuck, label mates of yours. Could you give us some background on that track?
Dan Shaw: It’s mainly about being friends with someone who is called out for abusive behavior and then needing to put that person at a distance because they’re not getting it, and not being sure what to do after that. Do you try to work with that person? Do you try to get them to see the harm they’re causing? And what if the victim’s confidentiality or safety is at stake? Often our only choice seems to be to banish the abuser from our social circle. Which is troubling because then you have a person out there on the loose, maybe with a chip on his shoulder, who doesn’t quite understand, deeply, why his behavior is so wrong and damaging, and he just moves onto the next group of people or the next community to repeat the same damaging behavior. There’s an analogy in the song about when you play Pac Man. You know how the ghosts are invincible? You can’t really engage them, you can only avoid them. In real life you don’t want to support this person’s shitty behavior, and you don’t want to send a mixed message that maybe it’s OK to get away with manipulation and abuse and still be accepted here. So you keep your distance. And the more this happens, I wonder if society around us becomes like the maze in Pac Man getting filled up with these ghosts, these resentful abusers who have not taken true accountability. You’re not sure what to do next. You’re not sure how to engage with them. It’s definitely an example of a song where I’m not offering an answer, I’m just illustrating my impression of a situation that I’m sure a lot of people have experienced from various perspectives. I called it “Phantom Vibration” because of that vague feeling of like, “Oh, is my phone ringing?”, not sure how or if to connect and communicate. Also there’s that phrase people use, “ghosting someone.” You’re not sure how to communicate so you just mute it without engaging. You stop talking with no explanation, which isn’t satisfying. And then there’s the idea of ghosts from one’s past or from our culture’s past coming back and haunting us. So that’s the source of the imagery in the song. The lyrics are a composite of imagery from reflecting on those kinds of things.
Post-Trash: To switch gears here, I did a little research on micro housing in Seattle but I know very little about micro-housing. I’ve never really been around it. It seemed micro-housing was a catalyst for gentrification especially in neighborhoods like Capital Hills? But Seattle has also effectively banned micro-housing?
Dan Shaw: Our song “Swiss Pavilion” references this. Micro-housing refers to these little dorm room style modern apartment units. Now, to preface, personally I think density is a good thing in cities. There’s a lot of reasons why. People living efficiently in a compact footprint is more carbon efficient, more community oriented, you can walk to the things you need. But because real estate is a private enterprise, developers’ efforts to profit often lead quickly to gentrification like I was seeing in Seattle, as they try to see “how high of a rent can we charge before finding the limit?” It was feeling like spaces where people lived were getting smaller and smaller and more compact and more expensive. It was marketed as this slick, cool thing, as this sustainable idea. “Young millennials don’t need a lot of space, they just need an internet connection and a small place to sleep and shower” because we’re “mobile” - “we ride bikes, all we need is a co-working space or cafe to set up a laptop”. But you keep going in that direction and eventually there isn’t the personal space for people to live dignified lives. So there’s some songs on the new album about that, especially “Swiss Pavilion”. And what I had in mind in that song was an even more specific thing: I haven’t witnessed this first hand but I’ve read about the phenomenon in San Francisco where you get these - not even micro-housing, I don’t know what you’d even call it - but it’s almost like barracks-style living where you rent a top bunk or bottom bunk in a hall that’s done up with modern rustic interior design. It’s got USB chargers in every unit, there’s a shared shower. You’re paying about a thousand dollars a month to just sleep in a bunk. There are people living in the Bay Area trying to make a career in programming or tech and they just need a place to crash or sleep at night. Having seen cities in other parts of the world where people are living in cramped quarters with no other choice - limited infrastructure, urban slums, that sort of thing - makes it so this slick marketing of overpriced sub-standard American urban housing kind of rubs me the wrong way. Something like a quarter of people on planet Earth are forced to live in urban conditions that neglect livability. There’s a certain threshold you don’t really want to get past, at least not as the de-facto standard. The song “Swiss Pavilion” hints at this gentrified American movement in that direction, as those in power present lowering standards as somehow desirable and cool.
Post-Trash: Are you essentially saying that smaller and smaller, more expensive, marketed-as-desirable but in reality less desirable living spaces are a reverse in progress? Like, how do you market a shitty living condition in a city?
Dan Shaw: With these songs, I don’t have the answer. But the lyrics are a reaction to what I think I’m seeing. You could go to a place like Seattle to see tiny, redeveloped apartments that are really expensive for what you’re being offered. Really what you’re being offered is access to downtown or to a commuter rail. It risks being another way to exploit people. There is a fine line. I don’t want to be mistaken for saying I think density is bad. And small spaces can be designed really well in many cases. I think revising zoning to allow mixed-use, multi-family buildings in urban areas does make a lot of sense. It’s just troubling that it’s profit driven because it’s private landowners who bank off of it. They refer to housing as a “product” as opposed to a fundamental necessity for human life, because of the way the system is set up.
Post-Trash: Can you tell us more about what a Swiss Pavilion is?
Dan Shaw: It’s a couple things. Having gone to design school and hearing about architecture history, it was this name I’d hear, and I just included that phrase in the song because it was amusing to me. A famous building in architecture was called the Swiss Pavilion, by Le Corbusier. I think it was student housing. Then there’s the Venice Biennale, which is an arts and architecture festival that happens in Venice, Italy every two years. Every country that participates has a team of architects that design their country’s “pavilion”. It’s a quickly erected structure that’s mainly showing off innovative or edgy conceptual ideas in architecture. Every year you’ll have the Japan pavilion, the Italian pavilion, the Swiss pavilion, etc. The idea is for the excited arts and architecture crowd to look and say “ooh wow, look at the Swiss pavilion, how interesting.” But sometimes what was once an interesting or hip concept in an academic presentation can actually take the market, like the song says, and become a model for a new way of living. It goes from being sort of a new, edgy and interesting idea one day to mass production: “this is where you’re going to live”. At the end of the song I’m yelling “I want to live in the Swiss Pavilion.” It’s funny to me since a thing like the Swiss Pavilion is kind of dangled in front of architecture students more as an idea or idea-generator; you’re probably not expected to want to literally move in and live there. It’s kind of like, I’m stuck living in this disappointing commodified housing unit, naively saying “wait, but I wanted to live there, in the Swiss Pavilion”.
Post-Trash: There’s a musical prefix tacked onto the front of “Extreme Youth.” Is that part of a demo?
Dan Shaw: Totally. That is a demo. I took my demo I created when I was writing the song and I had Arran Fisher, who mixed the record, blow it out and make it distorted. The idea is to be a palette cleanser roughly halfway into the album. When you’re hearing one sound the whole time - it’s kind of like a live band in the studio type of album - there’s not a huge variety of sounds. This kind of shakes it up. I was also trying to make a silly little jokey reference to the type of genre that I’m imitating with this abrasively clean sound. So like, “I see, the DNA might have been this gritty sounding hardcore thing”, and then it just snaps right into that abrasively clean sound, only a little faster. It’s funny, that song wasn’t sitting right with me. I liked it but I couldn’t tell how it fit into the album. Adding that little thing at the beginning, for me, totally put all my hesitations to rest. That’s just what it needed and I was 100% enthusiastic about it again.
Post-Trash: Katixa Espinoza made a great point in their review of Blatant on Post Trash. It says, “Blatant serves as a reminder that through self-awareness, empathy, and passionate aggression, one can unlearn desensitization and act upon it within personal boundaries.” Would you say that’s what you’d like people to walk away with after listening to Landowner?
Dan Shaw: Yeah, that seems like a fine takeaway. I wouldn’t want to directly tell anyone what to think or how to act. I make albums that are reflections of what I’m processing in the world around me. If people hear it and if it sparks ideas in you, that’s good enough for me. I’m not trying to be an editorial writer or something. I’m trying to make connections in the system that we live in that are ironic, troubling or interesting or resonate with me. I’m just trying to illustrate those in songs and put them out there to offer a perspective as much as I can. How people want to interpret that is up to them.
Post-Trash: With everything going on in the world, what things help you keep grounded?
Dan Shaw: My wife and I had a baby in December. The cool thing about that is you have to hunker down when you’re raising a baby for obvious reasons. I realized this just recently, but I don’t suffer the same kind of FOMO a new parent might, like, “aw man all this stuff is happening, people are going to shows, and I gotta stay home to take care of the kid.” That isn’t in the equation at all because everyone is stuck at home right now. So actually, I’m lucky because I have my wife and my son. We’re just in the house together taking care of each other and I love them both. It fills my days with a lot of activity. A lot of work, because of the baby, but I love doing it. That keeps me grounded and it’s not even a choice. Like, there’s this kid that depends on us for everything. Whether I like it or not, if I’m feeling lazy or groggy, if he starts to cry I have to pick him or change a diaper or give him some milk. That gets me out of my own self pity instantly - if I was going to have any, I don’t have the option to dwell on it too long because there’s a beautiful little human being that needs me. That, above all else, is the big thing keeping me grounded. And I still make music. At odd hours of the day or when he goes up to bed, I have my guitar and headphones and I can record demos. I’ve got a stockpile of material slowly accumulating for whatever the next Landowner album may be.
Post-Trash: What have you been reading?
Dan Shaw: I’m reading two books simultaneously right now. One of them is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I thought that would be the last thing I would want to read during Coronavirus because that thing is just like one hundred years of madness. Lyrically, such a good book. Some fucked up things happen in that story. Every part of that book is the most interesting part, the way it’s constructed. There isn’t really a climax to the plot, I would argue. It’s rather 400 pages of beautiful, weird, interesting word choices. Given that it’s translated from Spanish, I have to give the translator credit. It’s a book where things go wrong and there are conflicts and plagues and crazy violent things happen and weird surrealist magical stuff gets put in there. It ends up being a perverse sort of comfort, as the world kind of unravels in 2020. That book’s been good company, surprisingly. The other book I’m reading is called The Color of Law, and that’s a way more “responsible” read. That’s about the history of government policies that segregated housing in the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s. Basically it enumerates the policies and laws that mortgage companies, federal housing agencies, etc, enacted to enforce or actually artificially create segregation between blacks and whites throughout the US. At my work, we were asking ourselves, “what should we do?” As planners, we need to face the racist intention that was deliberately programmed into planning over history. Since unequal access to housing based on race was intentional and by design, the only way to reset the scales is by putting corresponding intention into righting what’s wrong. On a typical urban planning project, usually no one is paying you to push back against the system in that way. You could sort of go along and remain colorblind, and then all you’re doing is remaining complicit with the system you were born into. So it takes some awareness and purposeful pushing back to do something about it. So anyway, The Color of Law. It’s fascinating.
Post-Trash: Interesting. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a pretty nutty book.
Dan Shaw: Yeah it’s wild. You can imagine, too, as a lyricist, thinking about interesting word choices. I want the lyrics to be interesting to listen to, not just the subject matter. I want the word choices or phrasing to stand on their own as “music.” A book like that, that’s the way it’s written, is fantastic.
Post-Trash: I like the use of not really traditional English to describe things in that book. I think it’s really neat.
Dan Shaw: I know. It makes me wish I spoke Spanish. I’m curious, now. Is this book as witty and creative in Spanish? My mom is a native Spanish speaker and she said it is. I assumed that the translator did a really good job to match the same language.
Post-Trash: What have you been listening to?
Dan Shaw: For the past year or two Cate Le Bon has been a pretty constant thing. I’ve been super into Neil Young lately. It scratches an itch for me. I’ve been singing Neil Young songs to my 7 month old kid a lot on the guitar to entertain him. We’re stuck in the house all the time so I’ve been learning some songs. He’s been starting to like it, to the point where I throw Neil Young on the stereo and he sort of stops and listens which is pretty cool. My friend Ian Crist has a band Béret, which I’m really into. He and I were bandmates in Seattle before I moved away, then I started Landowner and he started Béret. The guys I play with in Landowner are in the bands Editrix, Hot Dirt, and First Children, all of which are worth checking out - everyone in those bands really shred. Editrix has kind of a post punk vibe, Hot Dirt is more proggy, and First Children is a heavy bass and drums duo. And two of my personal longtime favorite bands that I should probably mention are The Fall and Lungfish. If I had to give just one short answer, I’d probably just mention those two and leave it at that. I get a lot out of listening to them.