by Patrick Pilch (@hosewater0)
In late September, Mo Dotti released one of the best shoegaze records of all time. Opaque is an immediate classic, a masterwork in genre and songwriting that casts a wide sonic net over precise and effective arrangements. Mo Dotti keeps things balanced between noise and space, big hooks and swallowing atmospheres. Primary songwriters Gina Negrini (vocals, guitar) and Guy Valdez (guitar) possess a unique sensitivity to composition and aesthetics, and the results on their first proper full length exceed the mile high expectations set by the band’s previous pair of EPs; the breezy and crunchy, dream pop landmarks Blurry and Guided Imagery.
Mo Dotti’s music contains so many reference points, too many to count. In the end, as Guy Valdez puts it, “We just sound like us.” Post-Trash caught up with Valdez and Gina Negrini over Zoom to talk about the band’s humble beginnings, DIY empowerment, and their phenomenal new record Opaque.
credit: Sophie Negrini
PT: Tell me about yourselves, are you both from LA?
Gina: Yea, our whole band is. Born and raised.
PT: What do you do?
Gina: Aside from music, I work at a coffee shop. Guy works at a movie theater, he manages a movie theater. Greg (bass) and Andrew (drums) also work for the same movie theater as Guy.
PT: You’re playing a lot, I watched a couple of your gigs online. Tell me about your relationships with music.
Guy: One of the only things I’ve consistently been doing since I got out of high school is I’ve played in a band. There may have been a few months or so when I wasn’t in a band or playing music. At the theater, I started doing all the hiring. I made sure to hire a bunch of artists and musicians to make the work interesting. A lot of the people I ended up hiring I also ended up playing music with. It becomes a big part of the whole thing. You have film, music, and art.
Gina: Working there and meeting Guy changed my life. I’ve also been in bands since being out of high school. Having a place to work where it’s work but it doesn’t feel like work because you’re with your friends. Then after work we’re going upstairs for band practice. That was something I don’t think any of us took for granted. We don’t do that anymore. That theater doesn’t exist anymore. But the foundations of Mo Dotti came out of that theater.
PT: You hinted at it before but I’m sure your interest in film - does that have an effect on the music?
Gina: Subconsciously, I’m always trying to create an atmosphere in a song and I think our music has an arc, but also I think it might be universal to music itself. Gregg Araki’s movies, when I watched those in high school, were hugely influential. Learning about bands like Ride, Slowdive, and Pale Saints - I learned about all of those bands through his movies.
PT: I read you were also into the Beatles in high school, when did the shoegaze thing happen?
Gina: Shortly after my Beatles obsession I found Isn’t Anything and Sunny Sundae Smile. I dubbed them to a cassette tape and I remember listening to them as loud as possible when I would take the train. It damaged my hearing. Shortly after my Beatles obsession I started to learn more about “alternative music.”
PT: Tell me about your experience with DIY.
Gina: All the people we met at the theater were unintentionally doing it themselves. We’d all play at the same venues. I think the only one from the old days that still exists is The Smell. We really got to know Greg and Andrew through playing with their other bands (Hellen Keller, Post Life, Moaning, French Vanilla) before they started working for the same company. What I’ve always appreciated about this community is that we’re not doing this because we want to be famous. This is part of the world where people come to become famous. For our scene, it feels more casual and social. Most of the time, when I hang out with people, outside of work, is when we see friends at shows and catch up there.
Guy: Before I even met Gina, Greg, and Andrew, we had two bands that had worked at the theater. I was in one. We would use the theater as our factory where we wrote and recorded the music. We’d screenprint our own t-shirts and CDs. We’d assemble them, fold them, glue them. When it came time for us to put out stuff with Mo Dotti, I pretty much knew how to do all that stuff because I started my own record label out of that theater. That’s why we do it on our own. I know how to do it, and there’s less hands on your stuff. You can do what you want and it comes out exactly the way you wanted it to be.
Gina: We’re obviously a very small band, and while it would be cool to be on a label to get more attention on our band, we just don’t see what the point is right now of not doing it ourselves. Even if we’re getting a dollar on Bandcamp, every penny we make goes back into the band. If we were sharing that with a label, it would just take away more resources.
PT: Gina, I read Mo Dotti began with you and a drum machine.
Gina: Yea! Drum machine on my phone. I would use a loop pedal and play along. The Mo Dotti entity has gone through different incarnations. Guy started playing and writing with me quickly after I was getting pretty frustrated with the limitations of doing it by myself. He had really great ideas and he’s my favorite guitar player. He added really interesting things to the skeletons of songs I was creating. Then we added a bass player and it was bass, two guitars, me singing and the drum machine. That was also wacky, so we added the drummer. When we added the drummer we were like, “Oh, this is changing into something else.” Over time it’s gotten louder and louder.
Guy: I think the only limitation of the early Mo Dotti stuff is we were relying on live loops. There’s a lot of timing involved. It was a very lo-fi endeavor because we didn’t have a phone that was playing the beats, but we had this really cheap mixer, then this guitar pedal, ugh.
Gina: We never thought to make a backing track, that would have been way smarter! Instead of like, “let’s press play on the beat and, oh, gotta hit the looper at the right time.”
PT: That’s cool. That’s commitment.
Gina: Glad you think so.
PT: I read about Tina Modotti. Incredible person. Admirable, fascinating life. Can you talk about her significance to you?
Gina: Yes. Before I even knew who she was, I was really into the band Fugazi. They have a song called “Recap Modotti. I thought that name sounded cool, and I thought maybe I could start a band called “Recap Modotti.” Then I thought that’s weird for a band to be a song title of another band. Then I read about her work and I was super fascinated by her story. More than anything, I just loved the way the name sounds. It reminds me of Mo-dettes or Durutti Column. I just like the way it rolls off the tongue. As far as Modtti herself, I’m into photography and art history. I like her connection to Diego Rivera and Edward Weston, I’m a fan of both of those people. I think she also had a relationship with Frida Kahlo, which is really cool. She was probably assassinated for being a communist.
PT: I read Modotti wanted to “capture social realities” which I thought was an interesting parallel to your music, since Opaque at times questions reality. I find the lyrics to be pretty dark and dissociative. There’s this unreality anxiety or paranoia, can you talk about where these lyrics come from?
Gina: A lot of it is subconscious rambling. I’m not intentionally thinking about it unless I write something and it’s too corny. Then stuff will get changed. In terms of the subject matter, I want it to be a bit vague because I don’t want to impose too much of an idea on the listener. I am a happy person, I don't think I suffer from depression, but I have a lot of anxiety about everything, especially death and the world ending. I think about it every day. Obviously I’m a working person. I go to work and do my thing and we act like everything’s fine. But I do feel hopeless sometimes and in the lyrics is where that part of my psyche gets to exist. The juxtaposition between that imagery and Modotti’s work - I’m never trying to make a conscious connection to her work, especially because she’s so deliberate and has her own ideas. They’re super political. Obviously I agree with the message of her work, but I never want it to seem like I’m co-opting that. The major themes of the lyrics are about the Sun. There are worse places on the planet, but the weather can be super oppressive where we live. Therefore, sometimes I hate the Sun! With climate change, everything feels unbearable. That’s a huge theme in the lyrics for sure.
PT: I like the way your lyrics feel part stream of consciousness, part word painting but the boundaries between those ideas are sort of blended. Can you talk about the mode in which you function as a lyricist?
Gina: When we first have a song Guy and I present it to Greg and Andrew. Or if Guy is playing something for me, I’ll just sing along Liz Frazier style and whatever words sound like they fit will be a jumping off point. I don’t ever sit down and try to do pen to paper. You have to play the song and see what I can, forgive the word, “vibe” with. You just have to feel what works with the chord progressions. I definitely write for the music and let that dictate how I’m going to phrase lyrics. I don’t like to be too revealing. I never want something to be super personal. A lot of times, stuff is personal to me that I’m writing it in a way where no one might get.
PT: There’s a strong balance between Mo Dotti’s songwriting and aesthetic, both of which speak to the power of the music. I love the decision-making behind those elements, from an arrangement and songwriting perspective. Can you talk about the intention that goes into the songwriting? Arrangements? Style?
Gina: We spend a lot of time planning an arrangement.
Guy: For this record, me and Gina did a 50/50 split of the songwriting. Some of the songs went through a lot of edits in arrangements. I spent a couple months hearing it in my head and playing it on the guitar with the drum machine just to figure out the best arrangement. I figured if it works with those two instruments, it should work with the whole band and have even more behind it. We were still working on a handful of songs on the new record up until the point where we were recording them.
Gina: We probably could have used another year before we went in the studio.
Guy: We definitely were figuring out an overall sound or idea for a few of the songs that ended up becoming great. I just think the four of us together, it just comes out the way it comes out, especially with the new drummer and bass player we have for this record. I can show Greg and Andrew a demo of what I’d like it to sound like. They’ll play something, and for the most part it sounds like that except a lot more dynamic and better. Sometimes I won’t have a demo and I’ll show them what I’ve got and it just turns into this thing. It sounds like us.
Gina: The song “Whirling Sad” used to have more of a jangle pop vibe, akin to “Glow in the Dark.” One night Joe Trainor (Dummy) was at our house and I was like, “Here’s this song, I don’t know how I feel about it.” And he was like, “you can play it way faster. And a lot crazier.” So we were playing it really fast. We played a couple shows where we made it fast, noisy and crazy. We actually ended up slowing it down a little for the recording. I would say nothing feels final. I would still have made some adjustments. It’s like the Kevin Shields thing, you can keep working on it forever and ever and it’ll never be finished. That’s his practice and he’s a genius and in no way am I comparing ourselves to him. But I know we can keep doing it forever and it can get better and better. At the same time it’s like, let’s just put it out because it’s fun and people want to hear it.
PT: I think that’s a big thing with making art. It rarely feels done. I can definitely sense the intention and pacing in the songwriting. One of my favorite songs is “Carnelian.” It’s one of the shorter songs on the record and it stays in that zone, but never overstays its welcome.
Gina: I want to say Guy and I did that pretty quick. We also recorded it out at our house. It was a super rainy night, you can kind of hear the rain in my vocal tracks sometimes. I was happy with how that one got put together. Opaque was all made 2020 on. “Carnelian” was written two weeks before we recorded. “Wave Goodbye” was done after we pretty much recorded the whole album. We had all of these songs brewing and they were in different states of repair. Especially “Dead to Me,” we spent a lot of time on that and “Wasted Delay.” It took a really long time to figure those out. In between taking a break on those we wrote “For Anyone and You.” We thought it was a strong single song and decided to record it immediately with Andrew. He helped produce it with more atmospheric synth sounds and whatnot. We released that and used that to gauge the temperature. When that got a bit of attention that gave us more drive to light a fire under our asses to release our record.