Beauty is Imperfection

A few years ago I was telling a friend after I’d finished an album that I thought I was a pretty good timekeeper.

Without missing a beat, he said: “No you aren’t.” (Thanks, Jason, for keeping me honest!)

If you are a Salon de la Guerre fan (a rare breed) you have likely sensed something critical about my music. Not something missing, necessarily, but a certain sound quality that has characterized my (almost 600!) songs. You are right, and I won’t make you guess: I have never, ever used a real drum set. No real drummer has ever graced a Salon de la Guerre song. Every beat you hear has been patched, drum-machined, looped, fabricated and preconceived by robots. I have found a way many times to work in real instruments (including acoustic and electric guitars, pianos, banjos, lap steel guitars and saxophones). But never a real drum kit.

That is, until this year, when I completed an album called Carnival, coming to a streaming service near you soon.

But let me back up.

How can a rock ’n’ roll fan like me have gone so long without real drums? Well, it’s not because I don’t like them. The answer is one of pure practicality: I live in New York City with my family in an apartment that won’t accommodate an extra room for a drum kit. Even if I did have an extra room, I couldn’t play drums here without bringing down the wrath of neighbors (or my long-suffering wife).

Practical point No. 2: I don’t have a band. As I’ve said before, Salon de la Guerre is largely a one-man project. While that has disadvantages (band dynamics do often make music better), it has also allowed me to release a lot of music at a quick pace because my software lets me to churn it out constantly … so my listeners get to drink from the fire hose.

Since I’m limited only by my imagination, since I’m allowed to be ridiculously productive and since I’m (usually) proud of the work, I’ve never let the drum issue bother me too much. However, I’ve always imagined there’s some audiophile out there who hates computer sounds and might well hate my work for all its computery qualities. That’s bugged me enough that I occasionally have wondered as I’ve passed a drum kit in a store or at someone’s house: “Why not just sit in someone else’s drum kit for a bit and make my own loops?”

Then I had an “Oh, duh!” moment. My son recently started going to a performing arts high school, and during the open houses, the kids told me what I didn’t already know: There are drum rooms all over New York City where I could have been doing this shit all along for a very modest fee, putting real drum parts into my laptop.

Derp!

So with that new knowledge, I booked rooms at Rivington Music Rehearsal Studios this fall. And now Salon de la Guerre is about to release an album where you actually get to hear me play drums for the first time.

Now back to my friend Jason’s point: Drumming is a real talent. It’s not just about doing rolls, flams or other magic tricks. You actually have to count and keep a tempo. My talent at this is suspect (you have all my respect, you real drummers). So most of the songs on my newest album, Carnival, actually mix the real drum beats with the computer loops so that I didn’t lose the time.

Is that cheating? Maybe. Do I care? No. Again, the point was to increase the dimensions of the sound. Having computer and analog sounds together has always been part of my aesthetic, and the contrasts it creates cut deep into the heart of how I see art in general: Art mostly is about contrasts, first and foremost. Forget messages. Forget theory. Forget shiny objects. Contrast (antithesis) is where all the compelling stuff usually is, whether it’s in music, painting or novels.

If your art is about one color white clashing with a lighter shade of white, you and I are likely on the same page. So a computer drum contrasting with a real drum is automatically interesting to me.

Having said that, I did go out on a limb on two or three songs and build the beat in my own wobbly time without a backing drum loop, click track or metronome. Real producers will probably be able to tell which ones, but I still think the music in those cases came out exciting. I might do that again in the future.

I recently submitted Carnival for distribution and hope it will be available on streaming services in the next couple of weeks (or maybe the beginning of next year, since my preferred distributor, CD Baby, has gotten a bit slow lately). I’ll discuss the album more when it’s released.

But look for it. And enjoy some real drums, if that’s your thing.