Among the bands born in the last decade, Jack O’ The Clock is surely one of my favourites, thanks to their ability to merge two seemingly irreconcilable worlds such as American folk and avant rock with a disarming simplicity. So it was a real pleasure for me to have the chance to get a very interesting chat with all the band members: the founder, guitarist and singer Damon Waitkus, multi-instrumentalist Emily Packard (Damon’s wife), bassoonist Kate McLoughlin and the rhythmic section: Jason Hoopes on bass and Jordan Glenn on drums.
With them we retraced all their history, their present and their future, hoping to raise awareness of a band often ignored by Italian audience.


Hello, first of all I'm curious to know wherethe name "Jack O' The Clock" come from? And why did you choose it?

DAMON: A Jack o’ the clock is an automated figure in some Medieval churches that comes out to strike the hour.
I am fascinated with the border between materialism and spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, and the Jack symbolizes that border for me, as do clocks themselves. Mechanical things that nonetheless behave like life in some limited way: I identify with them. This is not as dark or nihilistic as it might sound. I think the mystery wants to be pursued with the entire sensorium of science, it is not going to be squeezed out of the picture, and we get into trouble when we are too protective of it. The transcendental wants to be challenged, I think, so it can assert itself.

You have made your debut 8 years ago with your first album "Rare Weather". An album, mostly acoustic, where the folkish components are more pronounced. Can you tell me the genesis of your debut and how, in that period, you were imaging your future artistic development?

DAMON: “Rare Weather” is almost a solo album of mine. I began work on some pieces like the title suite, Half Life, and Fire At Noon before Jack O’ The Clock was even formed and by the time I finished it Nicci Reisnour had left and Jason, Kate and Jordan had joined. That’s why there’s no distinction between band members and guests in the liner notes, I didn’t know what to call the project. Jack O’ The Clock was fully up and running in its second incarnation by the time I released that album and we were playing a lot of the material from it live. I like to keep things tidy, so I called it Jack O’ The Clock, even though the band’s first real album is “How Are We Doing and Who Will Tell Us?”. In “Rare Weather” Jordan plays on one “Rare Weather” piece, Emily and Nicci on a couple others, but it’s mostly me.
That album has a different sense of pacing from the later ones. I was coming out of the world of “classical” composition, listening to a lot of Morton Feldman alongside Gillian Welch and Leonard Cohen. Nicci, who formed the group with me and Emily, was also a big Feldman fan and student of Gamelan. He was writing half-hour long pieces with me at Mills College, where Emily was also studying contemporary improvisation. So I think it felt comfortable for all of us to move slowly, with an ear towards deep listening and just revelling in the sounds of the instruments. We used to have a nice resonant, high-ceilinged room with a wooden floor to rehearse and record in, we’d get the wine glasses, harp, hammer dulcimer, violin, banjo, psaltery and bells set up and it was beautiful just to hear all those bright sounds washing over each other.
When Jordan initially joined he didn’t play drum set but blended into the quieter, fully acoustic ensemble with an array of bowls and bells on the floor. The only recorded songs that really represents that era of the live band are New American Gothic and All Last Night.

What Instruments did Nicci play? And why she left the band?

DAMON: Nicci Reisnour played harp, melodica, and wine glasses. Nicci's passion was Gamelan, even when she was in the band. She left the band and moved to Indonesia. She has lived in Bali for a good six or seven years I think, we've lost touch, unfortunately.

From "Rare Weather" to "How Are We Doing And Who Will Tell Us?" three years have passed. The evolution between the two albums is quite evident. Compared to your debut you went to a more avant-rock approach. What did you trigger to take this path?

DAMON: The songs from the period when Nicci was in the band -New American Gothic, All Last Night, Disaster, Analemma, Last of the Blue Bloods, Ultima Thule - are spread over the first three albums, most of them arranged for the quintet, with Nicci’s original parts preserved.
I don’t think I imagined we’d become a rock band at the outset, though the “avant” part was arguably always there - I’d been frustrated in the past trying to realize my more elaborate ideas with rock musicians, so I didn’t dare dream too big, thought we’d keep it simple and if it picked up steam and became something else, great.
We’d been talking about trying to find a bassoon player to fill the gaping low-end hole in our chamber-folk ensemble, but then Jason materialized at the same time as Kate and suddenly we had both bassoon and bass. For Jordan not to play kit with Jason in the band would have been ridiculous. They have been an unstoppable drums-bass unit in many ensembles (including their current trio with Fred Frith). I'm frequently blown away by the things that spontaneously happen between them: Kate started referring to them collectively as Jorston Gloops to honor this eerie synchrony.
I was thrilled to be able to become a band with a full-fledged, organic rhythm section. For a while I had the silly idea that "Serious" music was what I should be doing as a "composer," and that I'd grow out of my childish habit of writing songs. And now I reject that whole way of thinking... I composed All My Friends Are Dead, Saturday Afternoon on the Median, First of the Year, and a bunch of other things right away and never wrote another non-band piece of music unless I was asked to.

With "All My Friends" you have finalized the taken path, reaching a surprising balance between the folk and the more experimental components and realizing what is my Jack O’ The Clock favourite album. From your point of view, did you feel "All My Friend" as a significant step in your growth?

DAMON: Like the two parts of “Repetitions”, “How Are We Doing” and “All My Friends” always felt like companion albums. A lot of the tracks came from the same original sessions. I’m learning as I go with recording, mixing, and production, so there was probably a slight improvement in that department. And I think some of the arrangements, like “All My Friends Are Dead” and “Old Friend In a Hole”, got a little more ambitious, we brought in more guest horns and whatnot. But to me a similar sunny energy pervades both of those albums, and I don’t hear “All My Friends” as much of a step forward. Maybe I just have a soft spot for our first full-band album: “How Are We Doing” was really exciting to present to the world, that’s when we first discovered what we could sound like recorded.

"Night Loops" is your most obscure and cryptic album, in some ways antithetical to the brightness of "All My Friends". Is this related to a particular period of yours?

DAMON: I had a number of unfinished experimental recordings kicking around like “Fixture”, “As Long As The Earth Lasts” and “How The Light Is Approached”, plus a few older songs we’d been playing live like “Ten Fingers”, “Salt Moon”, and “Down Below”, and they all seemed to have a nocturnal flavour. I found the idea of making these the backbone of an album of nocturnes enticing, and for a while thought it’d be interesting to try to do the whole album without any guitar at all so that it had a radically different sound from the others straight through. But I had a couple new acoustic songs on nocturnal themes just really wanted to be in there, and came to the conclusion anyway that a diversity of sounds only served to make a more interesting listen overall.
“Night Loops” was hard hard hard to finish because so much of it was being arranged for the first time in the studio. When the fundamental building blocks of a piece are four flutes pitched down an octave, a log drum, rubber bands, and some plucks on a heating grate, overdubs often need to be load-bearing, and there’s a lot of trial and error.
With “band” music like the stuff on “Repetitions,” by contrast, we know the basic arrangements work because we’ve worked out the kinks for the live show, it’s just a matter of getting the mix right, and overdubs are just icing on the cake. “Even Ten Fingers”, which had been a band piece, resisted my efforts to record it for years.
All that said, I’m really glad we went all out on that one and am proud of where it ended up.
EMILY: I never heard “All My Friends” as a brighter album. The title is short for the title track “All My Friends are Dead” and the second-to last track on that album is probably the darkest material we’ve ever recorded, with lyrics about a friend who committed suicide. Maybe the folk-y elements of banjo and other Americana sounds make that come across as happier, and “Night Loops” is a darker soundscape, but to me they have similar themes and preoccupations.

Last year you published "Outsider Songs", a curious and very well done mini digital album of cover versions. What is surprising is the choice of artists like Bjork, Paul Simon, Duran Duran, REM, Morrissey, Charles Ives and Vic Chesnutt, seemingly distant from your musical world. Why this choice? What’s the connection between you and all these artists?

KATE: For me, the covers project was a satisfying new way for us to collaborate. Each of our unique voices coming into play through the selection of songs as well as our performances. Our listeners can experience some of our diverse influences and pleasures, and draw their own connections between these songs and Jack O’ The Clock’s songs.
While the Duran Duran song is my #1 pick here, getting to sing Ives on tape was also a thrill (and a humbling challenge). Coming from my classical background, Ives was the first ‘real’ classical composer I knew about who was into weird stuff. His works legitimized my childhood fascination with the sounds of damaged cassette tapes and radios tuned to different stations.

DAMON: Thanks! The Duran Duran cover is the one I’m most proud of, Jason picked that one and spearheaded the arrangement, I didn’t know it at all beforehand.
In general, the idea of covers doesn’t excite me, which is why I’m so surprised we actually completed this project, but the timing was right. “Night Loops” wore me out creatively. We had recorded all the basic tracks for the “Repetitions” albums and I wasn’t up for taking all those epics on right away, but still wanted to do something. The way the early Yes did covers, completely recomposing them, changing the harmony and melody in places, seemed like the only way to go.
“Outsider Songs” was maybe 75% fun diversion, 25% effort to see if we could grab the ears of listeners who weren’t trawling the “prog” landscape. I didn't necessarily pursue a "prog rock" audience, at least at first, we thought of ourselves as some sort of folk band, but the audience found us, I wouldn't have discovered Jack O' The Clock since I don't actively seek new "prog" bands. I’m not sure we really reached that many fans of the artists we covered, though; the market is so saturated and I didn’t have all that many points to my plan as to how to actually broadcast the covers. Oh well, it was fun farting around for a few months.
Those artists are not distant from our musical world. Simon and Garfunkel records were playing at my house when I was a baby and Paul Simon’s new “Stranger the Stranger” album is among my favourite things to listen to at the present moment. Morrissey and REM struck a chord with me in high school. Vic Chestnutt and Charles Ives have been huge for different reasons in recent years. There’s something arbitrary about the choice of covers to be sure, but most of these tunes I or someone else in that band has loved for years, if not decades.
EMILY: I love hearing Damon sing Paul Simon around the house and I’ve always loved the words to “Think Too Much” so I requested that one. Also, Bjork. Because she’s just a badass and I wanted someone female represented (we thought about Kate Bush but didn’t think we could do any of her songs justice).

We finally come to the present days and to your new album, "Repetitions of the Old City - I". You have gone back to brighter atmospheres and have reached your artistic maturity. Can you tell us about this latest work?

DAMON: Sweet, we’ve reached maturity!
Emily had been wanting, particularly after Night Loops, to make some recordings that really represented the live band, and this seemed like the time to do it. We had a lot of material we’d been playing live for a few years; it was pretty settled-in, arrangement and performance-wise, quite the opposite situation from Night Loopsand we just had to lay it down. Most of the epic pieces here were composed collaboratively, built bit by bit over the course of six months, a year, even two years in one case (I think that’s how long it took to get “Doughboy” written and rehearsed).
Then I cajoled Emily into letting me put a couple new acoustic tunes in there to improve the flow of the album and give it some diversity of density, and here we are. I couldn’t resist some production touches, but the live band sound predominates.
And as for the sunniness, I don’t know, I think I’m a bit happier these days than I was when I was writing a lot of that darker material which made it onto the older albums. And I think the band’s collaborative work too by and large has a brighter, more upbeat presence than my more solo-oriented acoustic songs and studio experiments.
EMILY: See my previous comment about sunnier/ brighter material. Also, I approve the acoustic tunes but I’m happy we captured some of our very rehearsed “live” band sound, which has been the product of over 7 years of rehearsals and playing together.

Fred Frith is a great fan of yours and he expressed much appreciation for your work. How did the cooperation with him start? How was playing at his side? What secrets did you "steal" from him?

JORDAN: Many of us met Fred at Mills College in Oakland where he teaches. Jason and I began playing regularly with him approximately 5 years ago. Working with Fred has been an incredible learning experience. He consistently is open to new approaches and champions being one’s self. The biggest “secret” I’ve gleaned from him is to play/write with intention and conviction.
JASON: Fred’s influence on me, on JOTC, and on a whole community of musicians in the bay area is crucial. Primary lessons for me from him include learning to be prepared and decisive without losing flexibility or the spirit of free exploration. Also, the delicate art of throwing musical wrenches into conceptual gears.
Jordan, Fred, and I will be on tour across Europe in February 2017, on our first record “Another Day In Fucking Paradise” released on Intakt. (See below for Italian dates)
DAMON: It’s hard to overstate Fred’s influence as a musician and open-minded spirit. His melodic sensibility and the way structure meets wildness in both his composing and improvising have always appealed to me on a deep level.
When he came to sit in on “Videos of the Dead”, I don’t think he’d heard it yet. He did a lyrical pass, adding some lovely atmospheric melodies, and then I asked him to do a second pass and be more abrasive. I kept much of both takes in there, panned left and right.

How long do we have to wait for “Repetitions of the Old City – II”? and what have we to expect from it?

EMILY: Scary clowns. Just wait!
DAMON: The clowns are down in the basement slaughtering a fatted calf. I hope to finish it by next fall (2017). “Repetitions II” is darker than “Repetitions I”, perhaps heavier in places, and will be a little more produced. It is generally concerned with an earlier stage of life, adolescence and the early 20s. Much of the music is older than the music on Repetitions I. It includes a couple of longer pieces which are quite complex that we've been playing since 2010 or so, “Miracle Car Wash” and “A Sick Boy”, plus a lovely dulcimer song that Kate sings called Island Time, and a few newer band pieces. I'm also thinking of doing a set of mostly acoustic shorts in the middle, some of which are revisions of very old songs of mine, focusing on the themes of love and isolation. I'm right in the middle of it now, we'll see!

It is difficult, in the current prog scene (but also in music in general), to find bands that surprise me with something new and effective at the same time. You succeed by merging two seemingly irreconcilable worlds as American folk and avant rock with a disarming simplicity and spontaneity, what is your secret?

JORDAN: Don’t over think it… Don’t worry about labels/genres... Just write/play what you want to hear.
JASON: I’m not sure any of us “know” what the secret is, or I don’t think we’d be able to articulate it. I’m not sure we’d want to reveal it if we did know! We all do seem to understand when we arrive at “the sound,” but there’s no sense that we are under pressure or obligated to satisfy any predetermined style or listener expectation. We all respect each other as musicians and people, and we’re all interested in reaching for something just on the edge of our understanding and abilities. And what Jordan said - don’t over-think it.
DAMON: Thank you for saying that. The trick to melding disparate musical worlds convincingly is probably not to try to do anything of the sort, but to make music that draws on all you’ve authentically internalized without worrying about how the constituent parts relate or don’t relate. Folk and avant rock are simply two (among other) sound worlds I’m genuinely hungry for - each draws me out into a different field of moods - and I’m not interested in compartmentalizing my creative life anymore.
So what comes out in my contribution to Jack O’ The Clock is a fairly unfiltered cross-section of what I want to hear in music and in many cases have not been able to find. It’s like speaking a pidgin language, I suppose: the most efficient and immediate way for me to communicate is to use whatever words spring to mind and to leave it at that. To quote Momus, who might have been quoting somebody else, “stop trying to cut off your feet so you fit your bed; make it larger instead”.

In your music I can find a certain link with the music of ”Pop” artists such as Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom who reinvented the folk in a modern way. Do you feel somehow related to these artists?

DAMON: I do feel an affinity for both of those artists. Sufjan Stevens is a master arranger and orchestrator, and his instrumental palette is similar to my own. His sense of melody is also downright inspired, there’s a real haunting in a lot of his work. His lyricism is so developed that his words sometimes lack precision; he’ll almost always favour rhyme and meter over meaning, and maybe once or twice an album he gets a little too cute for me. But I listen to him all the time, there’s no one else like him.
I get a strong sense, listening to Stevens (as well as Elliot Smith), of the early days of cheap home recording. My world changed when I borrowed my friend’s cassette 4-track in high school and discovered how wonderful two acoustic guitars and two vocals could sound, with simple panning and EQ.
There’s an intimacy to both of those artists, with doubled vocals performed sotto voce as if they’re being recorded while other people in the house are trying to sleep, which flies in the face of the balls-out, extrovert’s world that was the rock performers of the 70s. I’m frequently inspired by the emotional depth and gutsy vulnerability of both of those guys, though Smith’s world is dark and trapped, not a place I like to go as often as Stevens’.
Joanna Newsom is close to home too. Emily actually played for a stint in her band back in 2010 alongside our frequent collaborator, trombonist Andy Strain. Her songs, particularly from that great triple album “Have One On Me,” have great depth, and her lyrics are vivid and labyrinthine in the most rewarding way - you can really live with that album for a while, grow into and through it. Ryan Francesconi’s pairing with her as a co-arranger is brilliant, and as you might expect I really dig the band’s instrumentation.
EMILY: I love Joanna Newsom and I was honored to join her band for a couple of mini-tours. I especially love her long, winding epic ways of telling stories in her songs and I could see a parallel with our music in this way. People used to label her music “freak folk” but to me it’s just where folk music could, and should go. She’s also a kind, lovely person who has not let her success diminish her artistic integrity, as far as I can tell, so that’s hopeful!

What kind of music does Jack O’ The Clock listen to?

JORDAN: Recently… Horse Lords, Battle Trance, Michael Coleman.
KATE: Melt Yourself Down, Perfect Loss, Neil Halstead.
JASON: Vangelis, Ramones/Misfits, Miserable, Them Are Us Too, Black Spirituals, Kowloon Walled City, Neurosis, Johanna Borchert, Scott Walker.
DAMON: I’ve mentioned a bunch of folks already, but I’ll add what’s been on the playlist lately: Joaquin des Prez’ clavichord music, Faun Fables, Kronus Quartet’s “Early Music”, John Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes”, Punch Brothers, Elvis Costello’s “Juliet Letters”, Jeremy Flower, Scott Walker, Ghazal, Jon Hassell, and a phenomenal collaboration between poet Franz Wright and David Sylvian called “There’s a light that enters houses with no other house in sight”.

How would you define your music to someone who does not know you?

JASON: I tell people we write songs that draw from broad influences, I describe the instrumentation, and that they’ll have to listen and decide for themselves what it is.
DAMON: Ah, the infernal question! Artisinal post-shoegaze-core. We used to call it “majestic junk folk,” now we usually put an “avant” in there, and sometimes begrudgingly a “prog,” depending upon who we’re pitching ourselves to. Taking suggestions!

From your answers it seems you don't feel comfortable to be labelled as "prog" band. So I’d like to know your relationship with this genre.

DAMON: Jason and I have both spent some time listening to early progressive rock, among other things, but it has never been a big thing for the rest of the band - broadly speaking, Jordan is coming from jazz and Emily and Kate from the classical and folk worlds.
The first wave of progressive rock - Jethro Tull, Yes, Gentle Giant, Crimson, early Genesis, Zappa, the "Canterbury" and "RIO" stuff - and Echolyn too, was a big part of my musical life when I was in my teens and early 2000s. But it lost its edge for me, became too familiar, and I had to seek new things, mostly outside of rock. But I'll always come back to the place where the rock band meets creative art music, because that's my home ground - when it's good, there's nothing better for me.
I think it's significant that that first wave of progressive music grew out of psychedelia: there was an ethos of mind-expanding, immersive journeying and soul-searching. I don't really care that it sometimes overreached, I'm glad it happened. Contemporary "prog" is not where I find that excitement - most of the stuff that calls itself Prog is a derivative genre which mimics the surface elements of the original "progressive rock" - fetishizing mellotrons and playing in seven, for example - while missing something of the radical energy that drove those early bands to try doing those things in the first place. I'd feel similarly if it were bluegrass we were talking about - genres are boring, curatorial crafts.
I should say, though, that people reared on progressive rock are my people - people that really want to immerse themselves in an album, grow with it over time, love absorbing the details, want to be taken on a journey, even a sometimes nightmarish one. It is not a background experience, it is a ritual - you give something to it, you get something back. I'm utterly grateful anytime I discover that someone has listened to our music with the level of interest and attention that I like to listen to music myself. I make albums according to the way I like to listen to them, which certainly came from absorbing music that was rich enough to do all this for me during my formative years. So it's not as if it's inappropriate that "progressive rock" is where we've ended up.
Right now I'm really excited by the new albums by Esperanza Spalding and Faun Fables, and find in them an energy similar to what initially excited me about the early progressive rock bands years ago.

Another feature that I really appreciate is your taste for melodies and your ability to put them into complex musical structures, succeeding in making them easy to be assimilated. How do your compositions take shape? Do they arise from a melody line, and then you built the enclosure around, or...?

DAMON: Thanks a lot! Melodies have always been crucial. They are the place where the words meet the music, the place the ghost inhabits. Yeah, I’d say the songs really take shape around the melodies. Sometimes I’ll have developed some lyrical images in prose or fragmentary form, but I usually don’t sit down and flesh them out into a song until I have the basic melodic content in my ear. Then it is just a matter of hanging the words on the melody, deciding where the words have to take precedence and break away from the hook of the melody, where the melody itself must call the shots, whether a rhyme scheme is appropriate to the mood of the thing, etc.

In your music lyrics seem to play a very important role. Which topics are your favourite and where do you get your inspiration?

DAMON: I derive inspiration from anything in life that creates an experience of the uncanny: situations or specific psychological states in which the world seems tilted in a particular way, some of them troubling, some of them closer to ecstatic. Very often vivid dreams supply the germ of an idea, and discussion of dreams has been a part of our band culture for a while - particularly between me and Kate and Emily. The song “Disaster,” to give one example, narrativizes a dream of a plane crashing in a suburban landscape that both Emily and I remember having had as children.
I like concision and clarity, but never want to close the circle completely: there has to be some wilderness, some parts where you’re in a thicket of possible meaning, where your imagination can run around. I think I’ll go for it and say too that there has to be a spiritual component to even the most pedestrian, slice-of-life song for it to be interesting to me. Political overtones and social commentary are secondary phenomena.
Within that framework, themes that recur are isolation, wonder, love, a sense of awe, a steady desire for specificity of setting… Setting is a big one, sometimes it seems like a song doesn't need much more than a voice and a strong sense of the environment that voice inhabits, its specific place and time. I’ll think “is this enough? Shouldn’t I say something here?” And then, as soon as I try to say something, I ruin it.

Why did you self-produced all of your albums?

DAMON: I’m sure I’m a little stubborn in this department. If I’m going to put a lot of energy into a creative project at this point in my life, I’m going to get the end product as close to my ideal as possible. These albums are organic, whole-born objects, the title hooked on the music, the images of the cover hooked to the title, and we work on the various aspects all at once. There’s an urgency to keep learning and developing, one to the next, and I’m not sure what a small label would do for us in this micro-niche except slow the process.
If I felt we’d really reach more people and could retain creative control though, sure! Not that anyone’s breaking down the door. I’ll probably have another look around after Repetitions II.

A question for Damon: I noticed that you released a couple of solo albums, but I haven’t got to listen to them. Can you tell me a little about them?

DAMON: My most realized non-Jack piece of work is probably the experimental trilogy “Curiosity Cabinet” (which I have up on Bandcamp as a little EP) in which I made extremely detailed, labor-intensive shorts using limited sound sources (by "limited sound sources" I mean I played only glass objects for the "Glass Floor" piece, rubber bands for the "Rubber" piece, and plastic objects for the "Plastic" piece). The three I completed are “Plastic”, “Glass Floor” and “Rubber”. The idea was that I’d take a single substance and see how many different musical sounds I could get out of it. I never meant to restrict myself to substances: I was inspired by the funny way Medieval “cabinets of curiosity” categorized objects. I thought I would just add to the project from time to time until I had an album, and started a couple others in more capricious categories like “Grass” and “Garbage Trucks” but I haven’t had the time to put that much time into any extracurricular activities since Jack’s been underway.
I also have one pre-JOTC solo album on CD called “Anxiety” which represents my earliest sound-collage recordings and a couple of my chamber pieces. I was literally learning to use ProTools. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I didn’t even know how to do any EQ-ing in the program, how to use compression, really basic stuff. That said, the sounds I used were unique and self-contained: I would record environmental sounds like birds, wind, and city noise, and also make recordings of myself playing objects in the world like fences or pieces of trash. A lot of these sounds weren't pretty, but they stuck in my ears because they were unique. There was a sort of John Cage ethic, a love of and present-moment orientation towards all the sounds of the world, instrument-derived or otherwise. When I went back and listened to that album recently, expecting the worst, I was pleasantly surprised and proud of it. Don’t check it out if you’re looking for proto-Jack O’ The Clock songwriting, though. I have three and a half old solo albums of songs too, but I’m not about to subject anybody to them.
I also have a few pieces here and there which other ensembles have recorded. I surprised myself by writing some “heavy chamber music” for the electric-guitar/drums duo Living Earth Show a while back. Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson - these guys can play anything at all, and they kept working on my piece for years, refining and refining. We produced the final recording together, and I’m totally thrilled by how it came out. Hopefully they will release it in the coming months, it’s been a long time coming.

Besides "Repetitions of the Old City - II" what are your future projects?

DAMON: That’s as far as we’ve gotten at the moment. It’s been kind of a halting year for the live band, and I’m antsy to do some more shows.

Is there any hope to see you” live” in Italy?

EMILY: Please please please! I would go to Italy in a heartbeat.
DAMON: If there’s money to pay for our plane tickets, I’m there! In the meantime, you can see Jason and Jordan on their tour as 2/3 of the Fred Frith Trio this February:

18.02.2017 FERRARA/ Torrione San Giovanni – Jazz Club Ferrara
19.02.2017 FORLÌ/ Area Sismica