It's hard to remember how I felt on November 1st, the day before the 2004 election. On one hand I was brimming with hope and optimism, and on the other hand cynically bracing myself for the worst. Either way, that day I had a job to do that had little to do with the impending election.
I met Dan Friel, the singer and songwriter for Parts and Labor, at Cono's Pizzeria in Williamsburg on a cool, crisp night for our interview. He'd just released his second solo album, Sunburn, a deliriously gorgeous EP of loosely wired electronics and fuzzed out guitar noise. Wearing a sock-hat pulled down to his eyebrows, dusty black jeans, and a tattered flannel, Friel arrived looking like an unearthed zombie from the grunge era. As he sat down, I saw that his flannel concealed a "Fuck Bush" T-Shirt. This blunt proclamation put me at ease. Already we agreed on something.
Friel turned out to be a gregarious conversationalist capable of traversing almost any verbal terrain, especially when it came to discussing the finer points of grind-core. When it came to his job as the receptionist at the Onion however, Friel became tight-lipped. "It just doesn't have anything to do with my music," he insisted, after a long silence.
Since you write most of the songs for Parts and Labor, why did you feel the need to go solo?
It's actually the opposite. I did a solo CD in 2000 and self-released it. I toured a bit, and decided I wanted to start a band. I felt that it just wasn't interesting enough live, so that's how Parts and Labor happened. With BJ and Jim Sykes, the original drummer, they were originally playing pretty close to the presets on my keyboard and it sort of became a band from there.
Did you already have the songs written?
Yeah, the first solo EP had some future Parts and Labor songs on it. I kept doing shows solo but Parts and Labor got busier and busier and I didn't have as much time, and all my good ideas were going into Parts and Labor anyway. But I got a computer and I figured I could do home recordings of my electronic stuff and put them out pretty cheaply and take as much time as I wanted to record them.
Is the record composed or improvised?
It's about half and half. The second track is improvised, but the third track is all composed throughout. It's a mixture. I have hours and hours of that stuff recorded on my computer. I've been doing it for a year and a half but never had time to pull it together because I've been doing Parts and Labor. I just picked out my favorite stuff from those recordings and put it together.
And with all that material available you decided to only use seven songs?
I like keeping it short and sweet. I could have padded it out but I like the way those seven tracks work together.
To me, the record's success is largely aesthetic. Would you agree with this?
That's pretty accurate. I wasn't using any sounds to reference anything. I get a lot of "This sounds like video games" and stuff like that. And it's really not the case. The keyboard I use to generate a lot of those sounds, I got when I was, like, eight. It was my first instrument. I know it pretty well and I know how to make it generate weird sounds. So I didn't set out trying to do anything other than make something that was texturally interesting and pretty. I have a fairly limited setup and making something emotionally riveting with really shitty electronics is a reasonable challenge.
Do you think the record is accessible?
This is probably the most accessible record I've ever been involved in. My first band was a total noise-grind band with homemade electronics and horns. With everything I've shown my parents they're like, "Well I don't get it, but it makes more sense than the last one."
So you're gradually turning into your parents.
My next record therefore will sound like Simon and Garfunkel. I don't think it's that accessible, but I sort of saw it as a party noise record. It's a lot based on electronic noise and creaky sounds and shit, but I think it's also very uplifting. That's sort of the theme I chose for this.
Does improvisation play a role in Parts and Labor?
No. The songs are all written. The first songs were all me, but later it became BJ and I writing collaboratively. Our previous drummer Joel, he comes from a drum and bass background and you can really hear it on that record. That's definitely something we'd never have done otherwise.
I really like the raw room sound on your first Parts and Labor album.
Yeah, that was done in a studio with this guy Mike Bowden. He's just one of those guys who works on mainstream records in a studio but likes weird shit. We recorded it late at night after hours whenever he had time.
We definitely instructed him not to make it too slick. [Parts and Labor's] Rise, Rise, Rise definitely has a slicker production value to it, but in retrospect, I think there are certain elements of our music that need to sound shitty. You don't put a two thousand dollar microphone on a ten-dollar keyboard with a broken speaker. My ears are pretty much fucked as far as being able to hear if something sounds good. I spent so many years listening to nothing but grindcore, so the shittiest basement tape, I'm like, "Yeah, sounds fine."
What is grind-core exactly?
Grind-core is basically defined as being really harsh and just as fast as possible. Napalm Death is the seminal grindcore band.
Are there subgenres in grindcore?
Oh, absolutely. My big thing in high school was West Coast power violence. It was a scene that revolved around Man is the Bastard, No Comment, Crossed Out, and Infest. Man is the Bastard built their own guitars and amplifiers and it was all very vegan, pro-marijuana, anarchist hard-line shit. I found it very inspiring in high school. It didn't sound anything like rock music. They were coming from punk and mixing it with prog.
Tell me about your appearance in Time Out's "Bands to Watch" feature.
[Time Out's] Mike Wolf wrote the first review I ever got of my solo stuff. That EP, Broken Man Going to Work, was a lot harsher and a lot more lo-fi than the stuff I'm doing now. And he was like, "This is awesome!" and wrote the best review I'll ever get in my life. He's been pretty good to Parts and Labor, too. They proposed it originally as a fashion and music shoot. That was the thing that scared us. It was like, "We're gonna team up-and-coming bands with up-and-coming fashion designers. It turned out the fashion thing was like nothing.
Did they dress you up?
They tried. They had shoes we were supposed to wear, and I said, "Well, I usually wear sneakers." And they were like "How about this?" It was all Nike. I was like, "I'm not gonna wear Nike in a photo shoot." I absolutely refused on moral grounds, so we're barefoot in those photos. The rest of the clothes were from local designers. BJ managed to tear his designer jeans in half during the shoot and the photographers were like, "Oh, that's great!"
Did you notice a surge of interest in the band after that? Did you get any emails?
Nothing. I look really stoned and BJ looks really pissed off. And people are like "That's the next big thing?"
[The day after the election I emailed a final question to Friel.]
So, did you think Kerry had a chance?
I did think Kerry would win. Going up against an incumbent wartime president is historically very difficult, so it's not that surprising, but I think the fact that the Democrats couldn't produce a decent challenger is pretty disheartening. Also, Diebold rigged Ohio. In New York I never meet Republicans. I need to spend more time in red states in the next four years, so I can try to understand what happened and try to change a few minds. My day job is at the Onion, so at least I know I'll have a steady paycheck for the next four years.
Mark Griffey
November 17, 2004
