POST CRESCENT
Local musician sets the stage for sonic experimentation
By Jim Lundstrom
Post-Crescent staff writer
Stephen McCabe said he became pretty good friends with the ladies
at Goodwill when creating one of the musical instruments that will
be featured when his band, Willis, performs a multimedia experiment
Friday at the New Moon Cafe in downtown Oshkosh.
“I had this idea to get a bunch of pan lids and mount them
on a board,” McCabe said. “I spent four to five hours
at St. Vinny’s and Goodwill with a pitch pipe, banging on
these pan lids, trying to find something that would at least approximate
an octave.”
As he searched for the right lids, he said the Goodwill ladies
joked with him (and perhaps about him). But he found what he was
looking for.
“The timbre of each lid is different, so you play a scale
and it doesn’t sound uniform, but it’s definitely neat,”
he said. “It can fit nicely if you do it the right way.”
McCabe and his cohorts will be playing more than pan lids Friday
in a two-hour concert in which they will perform music to a film
compiled by bass player Eric Blumreich.
McCabe said while the band members have not seen the footage, they
know it will include imagery Blumreich shot for the occasion mixed
with footage from various sources, including things shot of various
bands the members have been in.
“It’s going to be a surprise to all of us. It’s
going to be a montage of all different things,” he said. “We’ll
be trying to respond to the film as we play, shape what we do sonically
with the visuals the film will provide. There is definitely an element
of danger involved.”
McCabe said the band’s music “tends toward the theatrical
and semi-symphonic.” The idea to create a soundscape to a
film seemed a natural extension of the band’s inclination
to challenge and push itself.
“We were looking for something new to do,” he said.
“We’re always trying to challenge ourselves, do things
we haven’t done before, challenge song forms, lyrical forms.
The next extension was to challenge the actual performance of music
itself.”
The band is rounded out by Eric Van Thiel on guitar and synthesizer,
Dean Hoffman on keyboards and guitar and Todd Farber on drums. Besides
the pan lids, McCabe also plays guitar, sings and will play marimba
Friday.
“We don’t usually use marimba, but it is going to be
on the record we’re making right now,” McCabe said.
“I’ve played it for years, so I’ve always tended
to put it on albums I’ve made in the last few years.”
He said the band’s debut CD – with the working title
“Melodies to Coup d’Etat To” — is about
two-thirds done.
“We’re really taking our time on it. We’re trying
to do it right,” McCabe said. “Even though we play synthesizers
live, for the CD we are doing mostly analog keyboard stuff —
using a nice old organ, a Rhodes piano, acoustic piano. There will
be strings. We’re trying to go back to the recording techniques
of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones,
(Phil) Spector, people like that who were using the room sound a
lot and experimenting with what that brings to a recording.”
McCabe said the recording work is being done at Topsoil Studios
in Oshkosh with producer James Lisom,who produced a CD for McCabe’s
former band, Congratulations On Your Decision to Become a Pilot.
“He used to be an engineer at Smart Studios in Madison,”
McCabe said. “He’s a really good friend of ours and
he’s really patient with our fairly off-the-wall ideas. He
also has a great vision and demands a lot of us in our performance.
He’s really great in that respect.”
Once the CD is completed, McCabe said the band will focus on finding
a small label.
“We’d like someone to put it out who can offer distribution,
but our job is to really just make a good record. That’s how
we’re looking at it, and, hopefully, the rest will take care
of itself, as naive as that sounds.”
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