by Flóp (introduction) and Vincent Mougel (interview)
In a Vermont town that even Joe Biden wouldn’t be able to locate on a map, lives a hermit who has released over 35 albums in ten years, including an undecuple on Youtube. Chris Weisman is a great songwriter, jazz musician, conceptual artist and the only person in the world who has really taken seriously the lo-fi dogma.
Songwriter : From afar, you could mistake him for Elliott Smith, with his thin voice and his lo-fi McCartneyism, but only from afar. Refined composer, mischievous writer, he has harmonic super powers that allow him to use forbidden or unidentified chords. It takes only two bars to recognize his style.
Jazzman : author of a guitar improvisation method, fervent devotee of Kurt Rosenwinkel, his playful approach to music is fueled by his intensive jazz practice. It can be heard in his guitar solos but also in his cheeky way of presenting us with his flute and saxophone debuts.
Conceptual artist : his taste for formal experimentation pushes him to make extravagant choices i.e. a recitativo album backed by a simple drone or another album of instrumental synthesizer demos. The best way to appreciate Weisman is to consider his work as a whole. Each of his moves dramatically modifies the shape of it. That's why he is as exciting to follow as Prince or Lou Reed. Each of his releases feels like a new plot twist. He beats any Netflix series.
Last of the Lo-fi rebels : Ever loyal to the portable multitrack recorder, he embodies the ethical position of radical independence, not unlike R. Steevie Moore and Lou Barlow. He records alone and since late 2019, he has been releasing his albums directly on Bandcamp.
You can give the Pulitzer Prize or the FIFA world player of the year award to Bob Dylan, but Chris Weisman remains one of today's great living American poets.
I realized one thing that touches me when I listen to your music is that I enjoy hearing your voice, I never grow tired of it.
Thank you! I did some choral singing in high school and was in musicals and stuff (I was Don Quixote in Man of La Manche my senior year, when I was 18). I was also in a musical called The Paper Elephant, about the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. during World War 2 (in which Japanese-Americans were taken from their homes, stripped of their possessions, and thrown into camps after Pearl Harbor, having committing no crime), that had Bunraku puppet plays within the main play, in which I performed all the voices, speech and singing, when I was in 8th grade, 14 years old. And then in college I was in a Renaissance chamber singing group my first semester before I had to give it up to make time for a guitar ensemble that was closer to my interests at the time. I had good singing teachers in the groups I was in, but never private lessons.
When a friend first heard me sing in person, a decade or so ago, he was surprised that a certain overtone effect that he’d heard on my recordings was not some kind of recording effect, but just my voice. In high school there were a few weeks where my friends and I were compulsively trying to learn how to do Tibetan throat singing, and - this is my fun theory anyway - I did some damage to my voice which, in adulthood, results in a hissy layer of overtone when I sing in my main breathy, no-vibrato way.
I only practice singing as a way to practice music. I’ve done a lot of solfege longtone interval singing over drones in the last ten years, but I think of it as working on my ears, not my voice, although both are probably true.
Though I sometimes use different voices on my albums, my range of singing voices is actually much wider. I do a lot of annoying joke singing in life, to amuse myself and test the line between making people laugh and driving them nuts. (This last sentence reveals something about my music in general!)
I feel freer when I am just soloing on the guitar, not singing (or only unconsciously half-singing). But I return to singing because I love lyrics so much. And even though singing is scary and revealing and difficult, I love singing.
Have you had disappointing band experiences or is it just much more fun to do it all by yourself ? Aren’t there moments of doubt when you wish you had someone else’s point of view? Lennon’s? McCartney’s? Harrison’s? and Starr’s? Martin's? etc...) - the question could also end with the name of a non Beatles person of course.
I like working with other people, but I don’t like making micro-decisions together. In art, I don’t like saying No to people, and I don’t like people saying No to me. It’s possible for me to find an arrangement and chemistry that feels good, but it’s delicate. For the Still Romantics videos I just made with Omeed Goodarzi, Hannah Brookman, and Elie McAfee-Hahn, I applied the golden rule: If someone asks me to do something, I want it to be like my favorite jazz, where the people asked to be in the band can play the music how they’re feeling it. There are many accounts of sidepeople playing with people for months, years, and the “leader” says, like, one thing, sort of, to them once (and it’s basically poetry, a koan). It’s not like any of my friends asked me to change one of my chords or lyrics. Omeed’s role is a weird case because he’s literally just singing unison with me the whole time, but Hannah and Elie got to do what they felt like. I never asked Hannah to change anything in a video. The only thing I asked Elie to do was add overdubs to one more area, for more Elie in a certain place. And then they bloomed out into overdubs in this other beautiful spot instead, started in the section earlier.
But the collaborative thing is never wholly pure; it’s never a math of perfect rules. I’m forever thinking of this scene from this 90s PBS documentary Making Sense of the Sixties. The woman, telling her story 20 years later, was in a back-to-the-land commune that supposedly was leaderless, but what the interminable meetings (in a school bus, if my memory’s correct) were really about was everyone trying to read the Manson-esque alpha-dude’s body language. I.e. power can be more rancid and awful when it’s not acknowledged it’s there, or there’s some myth there’s no hierarchy. Astra Taylor, in her ironically-titled book The People’s Platform from a few years ago, about the internet, refers to a feminist theory in which systems stripped of rules, that are cartoonishly supposedly “neutral,” that imagine they can just start from scratch and everything will be perfectly fair and flat, these systems end up amplifying existing inequalities. I.e. you always have to account for those inequalities and be working to counter them; there’s no magic reset.
So my idealistic image of collaboration where individual freedom isn’t restricted and everybody is just nonverbally flowing and happy is simplistic and even dangerous if I believe in it too much, that it’s some simple fix. So, like I said before, it’s delicate. It’s a delicate dance where you (hopefully) stay awake to everybody’s feelings, whether you’re the person who thought up the project, are in someone else’s thing, or are (trying to be) in some democratic group.
When I work alone I am free from these considerations. Society is still there - I still have to weigh risks around lyrics (Will my audience hear the irony in my tone here? Is it worth it to leave this line and make X potentially hear themself, feel criticized?) - but mostly I can just have fun and spiral off.
I dreamed I was with the Beatles last night, sitting at a breakfast table with John and Paul (other people, and I think the other two, were around). My impulse was not to get any advice on my music. I remember saying, You are, after all, the Beatles! I wanted to talk about the Beatles, and whatever dimension we were in made it fine, not unwelcome. It was like I was telling friends how good they were.
You recorded most of your albums on a 4-track recorder, and when the tape machine broke two years ago, you moved to a 8-track portable digital device. This DIY aesthetic sets you apart from today’s pop music which is obsessed with production, packaging or how well it recreates the exact sound of a golden era of music production. Do you feel that the limitations of your recording equipment help to capture the magic of the moment?
At my best, I am like Bernie at the inauguration. I had my sights on being the one getting inaugurated, but I am very happy for my friend and ally (whose ear I do have for my more progressive views), and I’m just being myself, enjoying the day. If I don’t seem dressed fancy enough, don’t read disrespect in that. I have just always had a distaste for surface decorum, prefer to get down to the business that really matters most. If I hold my hands like a praying mantis in my mittens, if that doesn’t look masculine or normal or something, so be it.
I have a friend who has a theory about this. It’s that it’s a male-privilege thing to be unfastidious about looks and marketing and playing the game - there’s a culture of that disregard in my scene here in Southern Vermont /Western Mass. that it’s traditionally (white, cis) men who can afford to be sloppy, ugly, not have their ducks in a row, and still expect an audience will eventually come to them and celebrate them for what’s in their hearts. Like if you don’t hustle properly, maybe it’s because you think you’re entitled. That may be true of me.
On the other hand, though, if I was spending less energy on my music and more of it on the game, and I was famous instead of being a cult figure with potential for wider renown, I doubt that would optically telegraph feminist solidarity. Whatever the case, this is me. I drank the kool aid the likes of Sesame Street and Mister Rogers fed to us in the 70s: that it’s what’s inside that counts. It is a privilege to be able to unselfconsciously disappear into the rich pleasure of the work, but it’s a privilege I wish was for everyone, and I can’t make that so by giving it up. But I understand the freedom coming off a Bernie or a me, tossing off whatever parts of the ritual we can’t be bothered with, can be annoying.
Another angle on the lo-fi thing: Imagine if we applied this frame to visual art. For example, it would be absurd to consider printmaking lower fidelity than, say, digital photography. Imagine telling a printmaker, People would be way more into this if it was a Pixar movie. The idea that music must always seem expensive to seem good is dumb. Plus it’s not even true. People like all sorts of raggedy stuff, or forget to notice it’s raggedy because it’s so good. It might well be a case of reverse snobbery on my part to look down my nose at all the shiny preening in my field, but I like the challenge of attempting something terrific with modest means.
Could you tell us how you work? Could you describe the way you write a song, the way you record it? How do you start a piece of music and when do you consider it to be finished?
I am a jazz guitarist and have learned a great deal from the crucible of high-pressure improvisation. Jazz is a combination of two extremes. On the one hand, learning to improvise new melody, counterpoint, and harmony through the skeleton of a song’s structure (often complex, rich, modulatory information to begin with, before the extrapolation begins) is extremely difficult. For most people, me included, when you begin to try to actually do it (I was 19), it seems genuinely impossible. Understanding and hearing and learning an instrument well enough to improvise music in a tradition of this complexity is about, I would say, a thousand times more work than learning enough about chess to play a decent intermediate game. The other extreme that jazz relies on, though, is kind of the opposite. A perfectly executed processing of all the information competently is not the point. Robotic-perfection jazz that doesn’t sound licked by the flame of near disaster, shocking revelations, and trance-like unconscious paranormal channeling is not the real deal. The art exemplifies an extreme (though not unique, see e.g. martial arts, etc.) duality between skill and (somehow) dropping that skill and letting the gift just fall into you. Holding the tension of that duality, bringing it together into a unity without losing the identity and friction of the halves, is key.
So I write songs using that same (powerful, strobing, vibrating) tension. I have a wider palette than the average songwriter (I am not, though, unmatched!) and I also write way faster. I.e. I use my knowledge and ears not for fastidious, labored-over contrivances, but rather to reach for the same magic that the jazz improviser does. The question is not What do I want to say next? but What will happen if I just open myself up and see what light wants to shine through this window?
I write my songs in one sitting. Sometimes I drop something I’m not feeling and start over, but more often I challenge myself to make what I started with work. I.e. the song can be a record of my shifting emotions about the song itself.
When I record the song, I treat the arrangement and mixing and everything the same way as the initial song. I go in there and do the whole thing in one compacted burst. (Here is probably the best explanation for me home recording: It’s fast enough and I don’t have to clog up the process by verbalizing anything.)
Even listening back to a song I recorded earlier that day is often strange. I’m not very familiar with the song yet, and even less so the parts and feeling of the recording. It’s like looking into the eyes of a living thing that is both you and not you. It can be uncomfortable! It’s not so much that the song is “revealing” - though it is often that - but more like I don’t even know who I am. Or what any of this is. The whole art form is a kind of compulsive meditation on... everything. Like I’m building a recursive hall of mirrors that I go keep tripping out in night after night and catching little slices of waking up, momentary flashes of the face of God, intimations of a higher order.
And though these winds I catch often have a strong, bitter tang, they are fundamentally a sort of pink sand activating and soothing my astral and earthly body simultaneously. It feels like medicine and it feels like love. But it’s intense!
Maybe I have misunderstood : does this mean you manage to reach a state of "(being) licked by the flames of near disaster, shocking revelation, trance-like paranormal channeling" every time you are songwriting?
I do mean I am near disaster when I’m writing, but that same risk allows me to get to all this well-balanced stuff I couldn’t get to through mere craft or clever ideas. I’ve been trying to think of a way to say it. It’s like throwing something up into the air and that’s the only time you can really see it from every angle. You could try to plot it out ahead of time, but the only way to get a really good lifelike thing asserting its own natural personality is by doing this more daredevil-type move. It’s like something very hot that requires you to be hyper-focused and very quick and gentle with it.
I do experiments with limitations, scales, and concepts when I’m practicing, but not when I’m writing. When I’m writing I just sing a little something to myself, or play something and start singing over it, and then just keep improvising off that till I find one more keepable bit to add at a time. I write down the lyrics as I go, writing them on paper, and make voice memos for the music in case I forget something (most often the melody to A after I’ve been working on B). Once I hear I’ve got a section I’ll either loop it back into itself or push on into a B section, whatever seems next. I just follow my ear for every element, micro and macro. Occasionally I’ll write all the lyrics first and go from that, maybe changing the words here and there as I start to hear how singing them works. When I write instrumental music I almost always notate the melodies on paper, which is nice, a very soothing and rewarding task. But aside from that it’s the same as sung songs: just one thing following from another.
I build the song like a bridge across a river except I just make the part I’m walking on, then the next part. Because there’s no gravity, and no way to get hurt, I can make it as weird, or plain, as feels interesting to walk on, whatever has that ticklish vibration, that feeling saying This.
When I start a song I don’t worry about whether it’s a verse or chorus or whatever. Lately it seems like the B section is less often the chorus and more often a bridge in the old sense: not the 3rd section of a pop song, but the 2nd section of a jazz standard. I.e. the B is a beta bridge, not an alpha chorus. I seem to be writing more AABA in that older jazz way. This goes with that: Most of my songs lately are two sections, not three. But then sometimes one section will kind of have multiple sections in it, a kind of discursive building-up thing. (Or is every section always that?) Yesterday I wrote an AABA song that felt very rich and full and not especially short but it was only 1:37 long when I recorded it!
As for all the weird stuff I get into my songs (or my songs get into me?), I seem to be looking for a certain type of thrill. Basically earworms. They say an earworm has a particular alchemical combination of something you know and something that surprises you, something natural and “right” feeling and something asymmetrical or off somehow. Maybe the brain is replaying it to learn the new move. Something that is just novel is not enough - like Schoenberg, not to disparage him (I have a CD of Gould playing Schoenberg I really love), has tons of wild stuff, but you wouldn’t call much of it earworms. An earworm is more like a nursery rhyme or fairy tale. It feels like a cartoon but also sort of scary and old, or maybe even outside time. You go, I know this place. But simultaneously you’re like, What the flying fuck was that? The uncanny thing is the gap between how new to you you know it is and how oddly ready your brain seems to be for it. It can summon a chill. My interest in earworms isn’t a cynical commercial interest - I am possibly too grotesquely drawn to the feeling to be to most people’s taste? (I have no idea) - my interest is basically a compulsive desire to blow my own mind, to learn more about reality from the bleeding edge of musical notes.
Practicing, for me, is to feed my subconscious, or the fairies, a wider palette so more of those crazy things can (hopefully) unspool.
A lot of your recordings feature a 80s FM synth sounds (i.e. on double life, MIT, or more recently the Venova saxophone solo moment on Sherbet and Stars...), you even wrote a series of instrumental pieces for it back in the days, on Maya properties part 2. What does this instrument mean to you? Synthesizer sounds are always very anchored in the years they were produced and put into use. In a way, they are a doomed to be the eternal reminders of a moment in time (especially preset sounds), days gone by. How much do you acknowledge the potential nostalgia dimension they add to your music?
The synthesizer is a Yamaha DX7. It actually belonged to my music teacher who cowrote and directed The Paper Elephant musical we talked about at the start of this interview. In fact, this DX7 was used in the pit band for the play. It was contemporary technology at the time; this was the late 80s. Me and my friend Ben borrowed it for one of our albums, I Am The Cornship, in 1993. Later our teacher gave it to my brother, and later my brother gave it to me. (I also had a DX100 for a while which is on some of my old music: Fresh Sip, etc.) The DX7 needed a battery change at one point, which was an insane process (the keyboard was not designed to outlast its battery) a tech-genius friend spent all day on for me in 2012. When the battery died, the keyboard’s memory was wiped, and my brother went all over online and found all these sounds people had designed for it that he thought I would like. I have those 32 sounds, plus 2 cartridges with 64 sounds each that I use less. Those 32 sounds in particular, esp. a handful of them, began appearing later that year on Maya Properties, and continue to appear, literally yesterday, on Wet Casements.
The DX7 is a bit like the 4-track used to be for me. What registers as retro was actually a contemporary tool that a weird guy just kept on using till it was old. I am not a very technical person. Many of my friends know a lot about synthesizers and have owned many different ones. And/or use all sorts of beautiful sounds through MIDI. I’m just less that type of personality. If there were other keyboards in my studio set up and ready to go I’d use them. But I’m not the type to buy them or learn which ones to buy. I have some pedals that I just used on Wet Casements that I basically didn’t bother to get out of their boxes for years. Why I didn’t for so long, and then suddenly did on every song, is probably just that whatever I’m doing, or not doing, I tend to repeat. (The spark for getting the pedals out was as simple as: my friend Carl’s into pedals right now.) I form very deep grooves very quickly, have a lot more natural inertia, for better or worse, than the average person.
The DX7, this one in particular, is like a family member to me. It’s lineage runs back to a very important teacher, and then my brother did all this work to build me a palette for it. My personal connection to the instrument and to those sounds is deep. That said, I also love Prince, Hall & Oats, etc., etc. I started the 80s as a 4-year-old and ended them as a 14-year-old musician. I love that music, those sounds. But neither my fidelity to this instrument, or my sympathy with many radio hits from the 80s, are really a choice. It’s just where and when I’m from.
I feel like a tree with all these resonate rings inside it, that hasn’t been cut down, if you will. I, myself, am a sort of record of all these eras I’ve lived through, been making music during. Like, I was already a couple years into making albums before Nevermind came out. I know that’s not rare - old people are obviously more plentiful than younger ones (more people on the planet over 65 than under 5 - though my generation is much smaller than the boomers or the millennials) - but there’s something about going so long and not getting famous, not being at all associated with any of these eras I’ve been working through. I mean, whatever. I’m probably just interested in my own story because it’s mine. There are all these bygone times and places I can feel so richly, that I feel like are singing through me still. But everybody, whatever age, has that. We are all 100% full.
As for being marked by time, marked by the times I’m from, I embrace it. I wince at on-the-nose retro stuff and era-redux branding, but if I’ve come by something naturally along the way, like the DX7, and just keep feeling like putting it on another song, so be it. But then that - that Gen X distrust of marketing, stubborn desire for authenticity, self-defeating or ultimately-ironic distaste for selling out - those mark me as much as the corny tones of my 80s keyboard.
10 SONGS
The Opera Is Always On The Table:
A distortion of “The offer is always on the table.” A song about my marijuana addiction which was really bad, all over the place, at the time. (4+ years sober now. :) I doubled a tenor recorder line on bass, with no regard for how those notes would affect the chords and melody as bass notes. Then that ended up being a thing on Chaos Isn’t Single. I would double the vocal melody on the bass and it would sound all crazy down there, cast notes above it in a weird chaotic light.
Yacht Rock:
Just the true story of loving that genre in college in the late 90s, when I was studying jazz, before it was called that. I was a baby when that music was on the radio. I remember hearing Seals &
Croft’s Summer Breeze in a car seat in my parents’ Volkswagen Bug in the late 70s. Steely Dan is one of my favorite bands, etc. The song makes no attempt to be Yacht Rock, but it doesn’t try not to be either. That’s a funny tension of the song. I.e. are these modulations referencing the genre, or is this guy just always modulating. Yes and no, I don’t know. :) It was really fun to harmonize this for baritone guitar for the Still Romantics video project.
No New Hampshire:
This one is hard to understand lyrically if you aren’t from New England. New Hampshire, where I’m from, is a weird state, a weird mix of elements. Now I live in Vermont, which suits me a lot better. People talk shit about New Hampshire, including me, but this is my ode to its bitter beauty. It is a mystical, spectacular place in many ways. All of the Closer Tuning album is written in a tuning I made up called Closer Tuning: ADF#ABC, the strings getting closer and closer together (you have to restring for it). It allows for very tight, keyboard-like voicings that drive me absolutely wild. The title is a joke reference to the famous No Wave compilation No New York.
ride in the sky:
I used to write high but almost always record straight. The mess of the 3rd section of Maya Properties was recorded high. I thought it was terrible, but was also interested in the feeling of having something terrible, crumpled, expressive of a sort of aggressive disregard for my own dignity.
maya properties:
I love that song. That section of the album was all music on paper, just performed using that one DX7 sound (one of my brother’s), out of my notebook. That song was a lead sheet, melody and chord symbols, and I voiced it out to record it. I have a lot of instrumental music on paper in my notebooks, years and years of it, that I’ve never recorded. I loved your cover of it on the OSR compilation.
Wanting Credit:
For a friend who didn’t get credit for something they should have. But also exploring the part of myself that wants more recognition for my work. The song posits that it’s “often better,” though, to retain less visibility, more autonomy. What goes up must come down, but what doesn’t go up but “should have” can hold a sort of charge, golden energy. Plus you get to practice humility, make sure you’re making the work for the right reasons. It was a poem that I just set line by line into the machine, leaving that wonderful, harsh full digital silence between each one. (One of my favorite things about working digitally now is the severity of the collage-style cuts.) I thought of Memes In The Old Sense on Sequent Toil as precisely that: a Revolution No. 9. :)
i draw you near:
Another very nice cover by you on the compilation. That song is a little distant for me. I can hear the music in my head though. I think of pink sand.
Working on my Skateboarding:
Written in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 2006, played a little live, but not recorded until fall 2008 after I moved to Vermont. That gap is unusual for me, but I kept quitting making songs all together back then, was all over the place. I remember writing it and thinking it seemed like Bruce Springsteen, who I’ve never been into, but also crying, which has only happened to me a handful of times while writing or recording. I don’t skateboard, beyond a little bit of Back to the Future-era rolling around, but I thought the expression “working on my skateboarding” was funny. Like, I’d never heard anyone say that, but there were always people everywhere doing exactly that. It’s a metaphor. It’s ironic though, because I’m so far from the sort to do physically dangerous stuff or not do what a police person says or be a punk at all really. Like pretty much everybody else haunted by a “signature song,” I resist it, avoid it, resent it a little.
Lake Of Fire :
In another tuning I made up you have to restring for called Inverted Tuning. I really like that lyric, everything about that song. It’s the true first song of HI really. My friend Kyle’s drum set used to be set up outside my room back then and I could just use it. That’s basically my one drumbeat I can play all at once on a full set. Mostly I do percussion by overdubbing each thing, if at all. The drum set is routed out of the 4-track, through a flanger, then back in. It’s the one time I figured out from the manual how to do that to a track.
Reunion Story:
When I lived in Austin, Texas, from 00-03 I used to walk over to the music building at UT (I lived on West Campus) and write and record on the pianos in the practice rooms. There would just be doors left ajar; I wasn’t officially supposed to be there. It opens with a progression that modulates the key up a half step every chord. That album, August Demos, really was demos for my band Clov with my friend Ben (the friend/band from high school - we made an album a year for a while after not working together during college). One of those songs from it ended up on our album later. I was writing more than the project could bear, though, and this was the first demo tape that seemed to assert it was really its own album. It’s a fine line though: Reunion Story was really not meant to sound finished like that. The piano arrangement, yes, but the vocal, no. I pictured that song performed by a big band with a Sinatra-esque singer. It’s a tragic character study à la Steely Dan. I remain proud, 19 years later, of the inner voice leading in the piano part. Maybe someday it will be realized “as I intended.” But, always, fuck what the artist intended. It is more expressive as a failure to thrive, as the flawed sketch of a passionate, but troubled, young man. I love him how he is.
(Special thanks to Kate Stables and Jesse D. Vernon for helping with the English translation)