The Willis

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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