No Filler Music Podcast - Sidetrack: Textual - Cracked Halls Menthol In My Pocket

Episode Date: February 2, 2019

David LeBleu​, drummer for The Mercury Program (and The Album Leaf!) and all-around dabbler in sound manipulation, has been creating his own electronic music for at least a couple decades now under the name Textual. We take a quick look at his first full-length, ​Hindsight Sunglasses​, which is the much more melodic and rhythmic side of Textual. Robot Science finishes out the episode with "Teacups", a song from his 2010 album, ​Square​. For more info, check out the show notes: https://www.nofillerpodcast.com/episode/ep-28-the-mercury-program-a-data-learn-the-language#sidetrack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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you impress your customers while ohio's affordable cost of living and quality of life will excite your employees why survive somewhere else when your business can thrive in ohio visit success in ohio.com today and welcome to no filler the music podcast dedicated to sharing the often overlooked hidden gyms that fill the space between the singles on our favorite records my name is quentin Travis with me. And this is our sidetrack episode for our Mercury program episode that we covered their debut album, Adada Learned the Language, last week. And today we're going to cover a side project from their drummer Dave LeBlow. He also goes by the name Textual. Travis, have you heard of anything by Textual? Textual.

Is it like a texture? As in like texture, yeah, textual. No, I don't believe so. I had neither, dude. And you heard a little bit of it in our intro clip there. It's just this feel-good electronic music by Mercury Programmer's drummer. It's kind of about like a chip tune vibe in some sense, like in like the more rudimentary sounding electronic effects, you know, like very, it's very

computerized. Yeah, I love that stuff, man. Yeah, it's, uh, it's kind of hypnotogic almost because it sounds like old video games, you know, soundtracks sometimes and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So again, last week we covered the Mercury program. Uh, they're this four piece instrumental band. There's, there's, there's something.

about their sound and that it's it I think we quoted someone from pitchfork that was saying that you forget that you're listening to humans making music with their instruments you know um and that goes along with that chip tunes like hypnagogic type of electronic music you know it's obviously you know electronic music that you're listening to but that's what you like about it you know Yeah, like it sounds like it could be a, like if a computer decided to make music kind of thing. Yeah. That's funny because that's, that is what that music used to be. It's like this is what a, this is what music I can create with a computer, you know, like early video games and stuff.

That is the sounds that a computer would produce. You know what I mean? Yeah, right. Like it was using, it was, you've got a human being that's controlling. Yeah. were we were using the computer as a musical instrument, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Which is badass. Dave Loblo also has a side gig as a manipulator of modular synthesizers. He has his own company called DLB Electronics. And he, what he does is he sells electronic instruments from. What he does is manipulates circuit boards in old electronic devices. I don't know how else to say it. There's a technique called circuit bending that he got really into, and that's what kind of got him into the whole electronic genre.

So according to Wikipedia, circuit bending is the creative chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices, such as low voltage battery-powered guitar effect pedals, children's toys, and other digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators. Yeah, that makes total sense. You would have to kind of get into that kind of stuff if you wanted to manipulate, you know, sound the way that he's doing it, you know? Yeah.

Or at least, it's cool. Yeah, it's the same kind of thing, you know? Yeah. So the one, so if you go to the website, his website, dLB electronics.com, you click on instruments. It's a really cool thing that he's got under circuit bending. You click on that. And he's got this, it's like this little handheld electronic device.

It Let's see Let me see if I can find a little bit more about it This was a Electronic toy By Texas Instruments Ti That came out in 1980

It's this thing called Speak in Math I'm sure if you were a little bit older We would know exactly what this is dude But it's basically like a device That teaches you about math Through like I don't know

Word problems and stuff like that. And so he's taken it, busted it apart, and like tweaked the circuit board to make it turn it into like a modulated instrument, you know, where you can manipulate the tones that come out of it. Yeah, that's awesome, dude. And then he also sells, he also sells like, you know,

just switchboards and stuff for synthesized kind of music, you know. So anyways. So the thing about Dave LaBlow and what he's been doing on his own, like aside from the Mercury program, you've got this album, which is beat heavy. You know, it's all just computerized, like synthesized music. And it's very happy, you know, and it makes you feel good. But the rest of his music that he does under tech,

it's very ambient. There's, like, most of it doesn't have any drumbeat at all. So this is an album of his called Hindsight Sunglasses, and it came out in 2004. This is his first full-length album, but he has been kind of doing his own thing since as far back as 2000. So, like, even before the Mercury program's first album, Dave LaBlow has been just kind of kind of tweaking, you know, playing around on his keyboard and stuff. So our official sidetrack is going to be track two on this album from Textual's hindsight

sunglasses. This song is called Cracked Hall's Menthal in My Pocket. Yeah, I liked it a lot. I think it got a little like a little too, like disjoint it at the end there, I feel like. like he had a lot of going on with like the multiple drum tracks. It definitely has like it feels like two distinct pieces, you know, from an artist that's just kind of start just starting out, you know, having these song ideas, you know, just kind of working through them and just piecing them together to just finally have a full length album to release. Yeah. I mean, I like the overall.

like idea of it, you know? And I really like the beginning of it. That's what that was what drew me to this song out of all the other songs on this album is that build, the buildup, you know? And if you give it a solid listen, you'll notice little textures that he throws in during the buildup. It kind of reminded me of that feeling that you get when you listen to an animal collective song. I remember I mentioned it in our Animal Collective episode where you've got these like bubbly, babbling brook type sounds like that really organic.

Yeah. It has some of those moments at the beginning. I love that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of that in this album. But again, if you listen to most of, his other albums, it's much more ambient.

It's all really pretty. Like, it's not, you know, it's not ambient music that's hard to listen to like, like some of it is. You know, it's, it's all really pretty tones and textures, but this is the only album of his

that has these really cool electronic beats in, which I really like. Yeah, it's good stuff, man. I've got like, I've got a playlist that's like 14 hours long that has just music like that, you know? Yeah. Different variations of that type of, of sound. I've always had, um, had a hard time figuring out what to call that type of sound, you know? Yeah, because chiptunes, it's not chiptune.

It's not chiptunes. Chiptunes is its own thing. Although I would put chip tones like I've got, what chip tones? Chip tunes. I've got chip tunes on that playlist. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because to me, it all kind of fits in the same type of musical style.

I mean, I think it's interesting. I wonder if that style of music and like our love for it. I wonder if that's unique to our generation, you know? Probably going back to the first generation that really sat down and played video games. Yeah, probably. Because when I think about it, for the most part, that music, that sound is. is tied in with video games because that's that's probably the first time that that computers were used to make to make music you know was for video games dude and we're the first generation

to be able to take those uh songs from the games of our childhood and manipulate the sounds from it and make music out of it you know yeah i mean i love the fact that uh that that We have such an, our generation has such an affinity for that sound. Like, it has become its own musical genre because we're so fascinated with that, that sound, that feeling that we get from that type of music, that nostalgia that we get. We were the first generation that's able to do that, you know. Yeah, I mean, to me, it really is. To really embrace our past, like, musically and create our own music out of, that nostalgia.

Yeah, it's absolutely tied to nostalgia for me. That's why I love that type of music because it just reminds me of when I was a kid. I mean, really. Yeah. Dude, I think we need to do, if not a full-length episode, maybe a sidetrack on the music of disaster piece. Yeah, dude, absolutely. He's done... I mean, you might be more familiar with him than me.

I mean, now, you know, now he's done movie soundtracks. He did the soundtrack for this sort of kind of cult indie horror movie called It Follows. And, man, say what you will about the movie. The score is great, man. He does an awesome job because what's funny is it's that type of sound, but, you know, with a like a horror, like through the lens of like a horror film, horror, like a classical, not classical, but classic horror film, right? It's great, dude.

Yeah. It's awesome. I did, dude, I hated the movie, but I loved this. I thought the movie was interesting. I liked the, I liked its take on like the, you're being stalked by a killer trope, right? I wasn't a fan of the acting, dude. Well, that's fine. But in the same vein, like the soundtrack for Stranger Things, man.

Oh, sure. Exactly. It's the same, it's the same deal. Right. Absolutely. All right, so that's it, man. That's our soundtrack for this week. So I checked out what other side projects,

members of the Mercury program have done. And Dave Lobloes piqued my interest more than anyone else's. So let me ask you this. That is, that's music from its first album, right? Does it get, can you hear a definite like evolution? in his approach? Like, does it get more honed and polished, you know? So, like I mentioned before,

so this one came out in 2004. If you hop on Spotify, it has another album before this one that's just called Early Works, and it's got music that goes as far back as 2000. And when you listen to that album, there's a few songs that have him playing his drum set, you know, like it's just him recorded playing drums. And there's some xylophone in there. It sounds like Mercury program.

But it's just him. You know, and then you've got this album, Hindsight, Sunglasses, where it's his first full-length album on his own. And, yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's. It's the electronic drum beats. You know, it's this fully synthesized electronic album. But then from that, from then on, all of his music from what I heard is all extremely ambient, you know, like no drumbeat, nothing. It's just it's tones and textures and that's it. So that's how he's evolved over time.

You know, when he's stepping out doing his own thing, it's just, it's more about like the mood. Anyways, so that's our side track today. For the outro song, Travis, I'm going to play a little robot science. Let's do it, man. Yeah, dude. So this is, again, an artist that we fell in love with back in our nudist days. His name is Charlie Yin. He used to go by Robot Science.

now he is under the name Jerophage. He's an electronic musician out of California. And I'm going to play one of his songs from the early days. It's an album called Square that came out in 2010. And that's going to do it for us today. Next week, recovering radio heads, Hill to the Thief. It's about fucking time, dude. Yeah, we actually, it took us a lot longer to get around to it because of scheduling conflicts and whatnot between the two of us.

But yeah, it feels nice to get to get back to radiohead finally, dude. I'm pumped. Yeah, hell yeah. I can't wait, dude. All right. So again, this is a song by Robot Science. It is called Teacups. And we'll talk to you all next week.

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