Ian Williams
What Strange Musik
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Ian Williams is the guitarist behind the band Storm & Stress, a parallel project of math-rock giants Don Caballero. With its second album Under Thunder And Fluorescent Light (Touch & Go), Storm & Stress stand as one of today's most adventurous statements on the future of rock music.
Williams talked to NATN’s Piero Scaruffi about the new disc, producer Jim O’Rourke’s impact on it, and his own signature guitar style.
NATN: Can you give me a quick overview of your life as a guitarist, including influences, models, teachers, etc.?
Ian Williams: I haven't studied with anyone. "Doing It Yourself" is something I took from punk rock, though I believe that's a pretty bankrupt myth, that one does it themself. When we all do it ourself, we're all doing it, aren't we? But on the guitar itself, someone told me once that they play their amp more than their guitar. I think when I began, I played distortion more than the guitar. Now I play the twang of the string, which is a lot closer to the source of the sound making.
NATN: Can you comment on Don Caballero vs. Storm & Stress? What prompted you to start a parallel project? What can you do with S&S that you could not do with DC? Is S&S now your main and only project?
IW: The idea of the band is becoming more of a foldable, interchangable and disposable idea. It was a big deal when Ron Wood joined the Rolling Stones, but I don't think anyone would notice if Pearl Jam got a new guitarist. Bands are now more like business cards. People have them as hobbies and identify themselves in the local community through them. I mean, no one works for one company anymore. You're somewhere for a few years, and then you leave. American commentators always ridicule the Japanese as being outdated because of company loyalty. 21-year-olds that work in coffee shops don't want to admit it, but their system of "being in a band" is working the same way.
NATN: How did you pick the partners in Storm & Stress? Can you also briefly comment on their skills/personalities?
IW: I think there's a lot of naivéte and hubris within our mix of personalities. That's probably our worst crime. I keep wondering what a "mature" record means.
NATN: I am not technical enough to ask you questions about your guitar technique but I would appreciate if you could elaborate on what makes your guitar so different from any other rock guitar I've heard in my life.
IW: I've always been a tapper, as in, on tables, school desks, my legs and chest. I've eventually been able to figure out how to move that to the guitar. Musically, there was that linear looping line playing on Don Caballero II. That's where I started writing with the band.
I didn't think of it as such at the time, but then i realized, "Oh, the minimalist composers in the ‘60s like Steve Reich and Terry Riley have already worked this stuff out, and it's been much more developed." I think that recently, African stuff has been seeping into my influence also. Hitting more neutral stances in terms of harmony and melody is more attractive than finding resolution and everything. It's got nothing to do with 12-tone serialism, but I see an affinity in that attempt to neutralize and this attempt to achieve a detached feeling.
So of course, there is intention on the part of the writing, though it wants to create the impression of tapping into a music that's already out there. It's a negotiation between being a human that can act, do anything, and create reality, and acknowledging that there is a reality out there independent of the human.
NATN: Did Jim O'Rourke have any influence on the new album? Why did you pick him to produce it?
IW: With his perspective on music, I think we're a band that's pretty easy for him to see. There's not the danger that the engineer will just say, "this is esoteric and I don't understand it, so I better disappear from the process of putting this on tape." His influences were mostly, "I liked that take," and being able to trust his opinion at moments like that when you're so close to the music that perspective gets difficult.
I remember on the song with Jim Black ("Meet Me In The Space They Stare At Leaving Their Seat During A Show"), we wrote it in the studio. O'Rourke said he thought my part was too jammy, and why not use a line that extends over several measures? So, I came up with one. That was probably the closest that the term "producer" came into play.
Comparing it to the previous record, Steve Albini has a positivist approach. The electrical-magnetic pulse you put on tape equals song, whereas Jim seems to take it as, each song has a mysterious secret within it waiting to be brought out via a special mix. I see no right or wrong in either approach. I feel lucky to have worked with both.
PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.