Morgan Henderson Of Fleet Foxes
(WATCH): Fleet Foxes "Third of May / Ōdaigahara" (Official Video)
STEVE ELKINS: When I first asked you to score a scene of “Echoes of the Invisible”, I actually didn’t realize that you’ve been busy working on scores with Paul Maroon of The Walkmen in recent years. How did that come about?
MORGAN HENDERSON: I don’t recall exactly what I was thinking when we started, but maybe I just liked his mustache. [Smiles]. Fleet Foxes toured with The Walkmen. That’s how I met them. It’s funny looking back because I was the sole member of Fleet Foxes who was not interested in touring with them. But seeing them night after night, they wound up being really influential on me, both working with them and having conversations about music with Paul in particular. Paul and I worked on their singer Hamilton’s first solo record “Black Hours.” And then their drummer Matt played with Fleet Foxes. Somewhere in the midst of our bands’ many collaborations, Paul and I simultaneously had this idea to work on scoring projects. He thought that between the two of us, we could cover almost all instrumentation. We pair together on all the projects we can, but with your film I didn’t get him involved, because it didn’t seem necessary for the instrumentation you and I had discussed.
(WATCH): The Walkmen "The Rat"
ELKINS: Aside from the initial guidance I gave you for the score, what was your approach to composing the music?
HENDERSON: Well, the scene you had me work on was about Paul Salopek’s extreme foot journeys across the Congo, Afghanistan and Mexico leading up to his current global one...
[Note: Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek is currently walking across the globe retracing the migration routes of our stone age ancestors who first discovered the planet, known as The Out Of Eden Walk: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/].
...so I was imagining open landscapes, and a driving energy that reflects how strenuous those journeys must have been. I remember you and I were looking at circular breathing, textured woodwind music. So I went straight to the bass clarinet and tried to infuse as much air and texture and drama into the sound as I could possibly get from that one instrument.
ELKINS: Yeah, I love how you focused on cyclic rhythms based in breath. It conveys some of the raw physicality involved in these kinds of pilgrimages.
Paul Salopek's Foot Journey Across Papua New Guinea (Photos by Sterling Trantham)
HENDERSON: I love that whole story. It really spoke to me because I’m a pretty active runner myself. I know people from the long distance running community who have run across America. But to do that on a global level like Paul, it’s just amazing. And obviously, he ran into trouble. It wasn’t without its problems. Aside from just like water, eating, motivation to keep going, there’s the real dangers that he faced.
ELKINS: And there’s so much he's had to figure out on the fly. A journey that colossal can’t be planned entirely in advance. He has to get visas for various countries as he goes, because the walk is on such a long time scale - decades - that governments, regimes, and local immigration laws can change by the time he gets there. Not to mention, he’s doing all this during a period of increasingly restrictive international border laws, that have become a touchstone in this time of global displacement and mass migrations. Some countries like Iran haven’t let him in, so he’s had to re-route by walking around the entire country. I’m curious: the people you know who run across the U.S., how long does it typically take them?
HENDERSON: Months. The fastest time, from New York to San Francisco, was 121 days, I believe. There’s this guy I know who ran across America, and he had to have a baby stroller in front of him that he could run with.
ELKINS: For supplies?
HENDERSON: Yeah.
Morgan Henderson
ELKINS: I guess if you have to take a stroller with you, it limits where you can realistically go. I imagine the route has to be meticulously planned in advance, because if you’re crossing the entire country you’d probably have to be on roads the entire time, right?
HENDERSON: Yeah, but there are some parts of the country where you can run on freeways. I’ve run in Marfa, Texas for example, where it’s like that. So they probably end up routing themselves through areas like that whenever possible. Didn’t you once tell me you have some ultra-running experience yourself?
ELKINS: Not running, but I have walked across two countries. Spain and Corsica. Politically speaking, Corsica is not its own country, but I prefer to recognize their long-sought autonomy from France, as they have nothing to do with them ethnically, culturally or linguistically.
HENDERSON: What was the distance?
ELKINS: Spain was about 500 miles and Corsica about 125. Those 125 miles were much harder though, because it involved 10 to 15 miles a day of mostly mountain ascents. How did you get into ultra-marathons?
HENDERSON: I was introduced to it through Jessica [Tjalsma], around the time the "Born To Run" book had come out. So the trajectory of awareness about extreme distance running was exploding.
ELKINS: Is that the book on the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico that runs hundreds of miles at incredible speeds?
Tarahumara Running In Copper Canyon (Chihuahua, Mexico)
HENDERSON: Yeah. And once I started running, I just really loved it. Eventually I signed up for a hundred mile race, and kept going from there. So when I saw Al Arnold’s scenes in your film, it was incredible. I had never heard his story, and had no idea that Al was at the very beginning of the Badwater Ultramarathon, which I’ve been interested in practically since I first got into running.
[Note: Al Arnold attempted to be the first to run 150 miles from the lowest point in the Western hemisphere (Badwater) to the highest point in the continental U.S. (Mt. Whitney), crossing one of the hottest places on Earth (Death Valley) along the way in peak summer temperatures of 121°F. He was also blind. The Badwater Ultramarathon is an official event held each summer, retracing Al’s original route across Death Valley, but stopping at the base of Mt. Whitney rather than its peak. It’s known as “the toughest footrace on Earth.”]
HENDERSON (cntd): Jessica actually served as support crew for someone running the Badwater Ultra-Marathon.
ELKINS: How did I not know this?!
HENDERSON: Before I even saw your film, I was actually considering what it would be like to run the Badwater race, but outside of the Badwater event.
ELKINS: You’re kidding! That’s a pretty wild synchronicity. I’m wondering if you learned anything from Al’s story that you can connect to your own practice.
HENDERSON: Absolutely. It broadened my idea of finding out what’s important to me, and how to accomplish it. Because what the Badwater ultramarathon has turned into is something that’s basically impossible to get into. You’re doing it self-supported. They don’t have aid stations for you. You’re supplying a car for your support crew. You’re supplying your own place to stay. You’re doing everything. So I was thinking, what’s the point of going through their hoops? If all you want is the challenge of completing that distance, then what’s to stop you from just doing it? Like Al Arnold, who decided to try to accomplish this totally crazy thing, before it ever became an official event. I don’t need the Badwater T-shirt. Finding out through your film that that’s how it all started, I realized I wouldn’t be the only one. So I may try to do my own run down there.
Al Arnold Running Across Death Valley (1970s)
ELKINS: Well, the training for Badwater is truly insane. Months of acclimating in 200 degree saunas...peoples' shoes melting as they run. What are all the hoops that make it so impossible to get into?
HENDERSON: One: it’s really expensive. Two: they require you to write an essay. Three: they can only have a small amount of people do it relative to other races, because of permits. And four: they encourage you to run their other races to increase your chances of getting into that race. I understand that modeling, but I feel like they’re just keeping it so in-house.
ELKINS: Are the other in-house courses as extreme as Death Valley?
HENDERSON: They have one in Cape Fear. And the Salton Sea. And a 160-mile race from Armenia into the Republic of Artsakh.
ELKINS: Artsakh?! Never heard of it.
HENDERSON: "Formerly known as Nagorno-Karabakh during the Soviet era," according to the website...if that helps! [Laughs]
ELKINS: The Salton Sea is definitely extreme. Have you ever been out there?
HENDERSON: No
ELKINS: It’s an experience. Some of its shorelines are made up entirely of decomposing fish and bird bones. The stench is almost unbearable. And the temperatures are comparable to Death Valley.
HENDERSON: They’re all NOT fun. [Laughs]. I can only imagine how difficult it would be.
ELKINS: Do your experiences running impact your approach to music in any way? The physicality of it, or the mental space you have to bring yourself to? Or the discipline of it?
Blood Brothers (left), Fleet Foxes (right)
HENDERSON: Well, there’s a muscle aspect to both music and running that you need to develop. But if I’m working on something and I’ve gotten too close to it - to the point that I feel like I’m losing all perspective on it - I usually go run because it wipes the slate clean.
ELKINS: That’s funny, I do the same thing. When I feel stuck in my creative work, I often find that shutting my brain off and simply moving my legs unlocks parts of myself I can't access when I think about the work consciously. I remember Paul Salopek told me about a Punjabi folk singer he spent time with in Pakistan who was inspired by the Sufi tradition, which has a long heritage of accessing creative depths through movement. Most famously through whirling dervishes. She was going into an altered state, a trance. Later when Paul told her about his global walk, she said, “oh yeah, you’re doing the same thing as you’re walking.” Likewise, when I was filming composer John Luther Adams in Alaska for my first feature “The Reach Of Resonance,” one of our daily pleasures was the walk to his studio, which he deliberately set up a half mile through the woods from his home. He said a lot of his creative problem solving took place on that walk. That’s where much of the composing was actually done, not in the studio itself.
HENDERSON: I can definitely relate to that. When you give yourself space, it allows ideas to come in.
ELKINS: I know you’re an experienced free improvisor. I’m sure it’s helpful for that too.
HENDERSON: Yeah, because in that context, giving yourself space is all about becoming a better listener, which helps you become more receptive. If I have a thirty minute improv set, I feel like the last five minutes are usually the successful part. Because it took me twenty-five minutes to run out of all my ideas, and now I’m present in the last five minutes.
(WATCH): Fleet Foxes "The Shrine / An Argument" (Official Video)
ELKINS: You draw from so many influences that I'm sure it's challenge to hold back. Which is evident just from the diversity of your bands alone...Blood Brothers, The Cave Singers...I remember how exciting it was to hear your clarinet improv freakout in that Fleet Foxes song "The Shrine / An Argument," because it’s so outside the band's usual sonic vocabulary. It's nice hearing your diverse musical background bleeding into the music.
HENDERSON: Yeah, that’s the “argument” part of the song. It was actually Robin’s idea.
ELKINS: That’s funny, because for some reason I just imagined you springing it on the band mischievously. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because the band’s influences seem to point in a lot of directions that aren’t always on the surface. Case in point: my interest in Balinese gamelan music was sparked by a conversation I had with Robin [Pecknold] and a friend of his when I saw you backstage at the Greek on the “Helplessness Blues” tour. And on your “Crack Up” record, there’s that moment where you hear a fragment of a Mulatu Astatke recording.
HENDERSON: Robin was listening to a lot of music from Africa. Before that, he turned me on to this Ethiopian nun, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who just had some of the best solo piano music.
(LISTEN): Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou "Homeless Wonderer"
[Note: Guèbrou's inspiration comes from the ancient modal chants of the Ethiopian Orthodox church fused with honky tonk and western classical. She sang for Haile Selassie, raced horses around Addis Ababa, was the first woman to work for the Ethiopian civil service, the first to sing in an Ethiopian Orthodox church, and the first to work as a translator for the Orthodox Patriarch in Jerusalem. Three members of Emahoy’s family were killed when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1936, which ultimately led her to Cairo, where she practiced for nine hours a day in the Egyptian heat. For more on her work: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/apr/17/ethiopia-93-year-old-singing-nun-emahoy-tsegue-maryam-guebrou]
ELKINS: I noticed you have a Spotify playlist up, with a lot of amazing music from Africa I've been wanting to plunge deeper into. I knew Francis Bebey from Cameroon…
HENDERSON: Bebey’s great.
(WATCH): Francis Bebey On The Genius of Pygmy Hindewhu Music
["The Electric Futurism of Cameroonian Trailblazer Francis Bebey": https://thevinylfactory.com/features/electric-futurism-francis-bebey/]
ELKINS: …but I didn’t know anything about Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang, from Sierra Leone.
HENDERSON: It’s basically Gang Gang Dance members playing with Janka.
[Note: Janka Nabay was a local star in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, during the country’s decade-long civil war. Bubu music was until then only associated with witchcraft ceremonies. And later, with the arrival of Islam, in religious processions to mark the end of Ramadan. But Nabay modernised bubu by pairing its percussive bamboo cane flutes, wooden boxes and metal pipes (often made from repurposed parts of cars) with synthesisers and drum machines. For more on Janka: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/04/04/599485289/my-friendship-with-janka-nabay-genius-of-bubu]
(WATCH): Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang — "Somebody"
ELKINS: My friend Ted was totally on the hunt for this kind of stuff when we were filming in Ethiopia for “Echoes.” Are you familiar with the Awesome Tapes of Africa website?
HENDERSON: Oh yeah, sure.
ELKINS: We did a lot of filming in the Tigray region, near the border of Eritrea. There had been a border war going on there as far back as the Ottoman Empire. We had to have a private military escort in some areas, because there had been kidnapping and killing of tourists, and the year after I filmed there 300 or so people were killed in the conflict. Ted wanted to know what the music of the region might sound like, and found an amazing cassette of revolutionary songs from the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front on the Awesome Tapes site [which can be heard here: https://www.awesometapes.com/tigrean-peoples-liberation-front-tigray-90-tigrean-revolutionary-songs-no-27/].
Tigrean People’s Liberation Front Tigray 90, Tigrean Revolutionary Songs
ELKINS (cntd): Meanwhile, I was busy attempting to make contact with Bahitawi monks I could film — who live for years alone in the Ethiopian wilderness — so I went spiraling down the rabbit hole of Ethiopian sacred music. Thanks to Awesome Tapes, I discovered a phenomenal Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mezmur recording by Yilma Hailu. Both this and the Tigrean People's Liberation Front are windows into really different social and musical universes.
(LISTEN): Yilma Hailu - Tewahido (Ethiopian Mezmur)
[The full album can be heard here: https://www.awesometapes.com/yilma-hailu-tewahido/].
HENDERSON: I met the guy who started Awesome Tapes at a festival.
ELKINS: No kidding!
HENDERSON: Just in passing. Enough to tell him how much I appreciated him exposing me to Ata Kak from Ghana. Who wound up playing shows because of Awesome Tapes, maybe 40 years after he did his tape, because people loved it so much.
Ata Kak: The Mysterious Ghanaian Dance-Rap Enigma
[For more on Ata Kak: https://www.factmag.com/2016/05/13/ata-kak-interview-awesome-tapes-from-africa/]
HENDERSON (cntd): Sometimes I feel like if there’s any interesting dance music happening in the world, chances are there’s something even better happening in Africa. And that’s been a big influence on me, even in Blood Brothers. People usually categorized us as a kind of screamo outfit, but we considered ourselves more of a dance band.
ELKINS: Wasn’t your last Blood Brothers record produced by Guy Picciotto from Fugazi?
HENDERSON: And John Goodmanson, who worked with Bikini Kill. He had done a record of Sleater Kinney’s where I really liked the drum sounds on that.
Fugazi
ELKINS: As someone who’s been a lifelong Fugazi fan, I’m curious what it was like working with Guy.
HENDERSON: The best [smiles]. We would play dice every day. And he was absolutely the worst dice player. He would lose his money constantly. He had just had his first kid, and sometimes came into the studio with all these quarters, and we were like: is that your child’s laundry money? Where are you getting all these quarters?! And we just cleaned the floor with Guy’s money every time. So that was really fun.
I mostly remember kicking his ass at dice, and his overwhelming positivity. It was one of the most fun records we did. I recently met Ian [MacKaye] when I was in DC last. He was incredibly gracious. Also full of amazing stories. The Dischord House is the office for Dischord Records and has all the archives and everything. To see that in person and the effort to maintain all these VHS and BETA tapes, and formats that don’t exist anymore….because people sent things to them, and he’s kept everything that they ever had. And I mean everything: he even showed us his journals with records of what Fugazi spent on gas in their early tours. They kept track of all that stuff. Ian actually worked with somebody he knows at the Library of Congress to learn best practices for keeping all this stuff maintained. It’s really incredible.
ELKINS: So who are some of your other influences? Duke Ellington is huge for you right?
HENDERSON: Well Duke is my absolute favorite. I just can’t get enough. “Money Jungle” is from one of my favorite eras of his music, which tends to be overlooked. Charles Mingus does this amazing one-note bass solo in that tune that really personifies his attitude. He was known to be very bratty sometimes, kind of a pain in the ass.
(LISTEN): Duke Ellington's "Money Jungle"
ELKINS: Mingus is so good at channeling an impish quality. Some of my favorite jazz recordings were spawned by that kind of temperament. There's that fantastic Miles Davis record “My Funny Valentine + Four and More,” where Miles's band was so pissed when they found out they weren’t being paid right before they went onstage (it was a benefit concert for voter registration in Louisiana and Mississippi when the civil rights movement was reaching a fever pitch), that they played all Miles’s ballads ferociously fast, like some kind of speed-thrash-jazz. The performances it brought out of them are just mind-blowing.
Another record I have to thank you for turning me on to is Rupert Clervaux’s “Studies I-IVII For Sampler and Percussion.” It reminds me of West African balafon mixed with Shona mbira music.
HENDERSON: I came to that record through Beatrice Dillon. She’s active in the NTS world, an online radio station based out of London. She’s just got a great range of left-field-house-dance stuff. The only record I could find of hers was this record with Rupert Clervaux.
Rupert Clervaux Album Artwork + Notebooks of 19th Century Polymath Giocomo Leopardi
ELKINS: I've dug a little deeper into Rupert's work, which is a treasure trove. He’s got this series of records based on the notebooks of the 19th century polymath Giacomo Leopardi, a kind of sonic hopscotch across a cosmos of interests. I also noticed he was involved in “Disarm” by Pedro Reyes, who took guns seized by police in Ciudad Juárez and turned them into musical instruments. I saw it when I was in Mexico City as a guest of the MUTEK Festival of Digital Creativity and Electronic Music in 2013.
The festival brought together artists, architects, policy makers, and urban developers from around the world to discuss innovative new ways that public space can be used for art and creative events to revive economic and cultural life in 21st-century cities. They brought in Reyes after another project he did in Culiacán, a major drug trafficking center that is one of Mexico’s most violent cities, where residents were asked to donate weapons that were then melted and made into shovels to plant trees. He received 1,527 guns which were steamrolled and transformed into as many shovels. The idea was rooted in the function of alchemy, that physical change in the environment would be accompanied by a psychological change in the children using former instruments of death to cultivate life. There was a kind of gun-flute instrument that came from this. I'd love to hear what you could do with it. Who are your inspirations for flute?
Guns from Ciudad Juárez turned into musical instruments
HENDERSON: Yusef Lateef is one. I hardly know anything about Indian music, but I do occasionally revisit the flute masters of the Carnatic tradition, and just kind of marvel and cry a little over what they’re able to achieve with the instrument. But sometimes, when I’m so busy working on music, I rarely listen to music. And that’s something I’ve been intentionally doing more of during this COVID quarantine we're in now. I used to listen to so much music, I mean you’ve seen my record collection. So this is great that we’re talking about this, because I’ve been craving new music. What have you been listening to?
ELKINS: Sub Rosa’s Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music. There’s a noise duo on there I’m obsessed with lately called D!O!D!O!D! Their “Ghost Temple” record is pure joy to me: https://cfimusic.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-temple
D!O!D!O!D! "Ghost Temple"
ELKINS (cntd): Their guitarist Li Jianhong recorded a record on a Peruvian label, Buh Records, which apparently focuses on a lot of outsider music in Lima and beyond…I’m just starting to explore that: https://daily.bandcamp.com/scene-report/buh-records-peruvian-experimental-list
(LISTEN): Excerpt From Henry Kaiser's "Garden Of Memory"
ELKINS (cntd): Henry Kaiser’s “Garden of Memory,” a box set of gorgeous musical translations of his experiences under the ice as a sea diver in Antarctica.
(LISTEN): "Milky White Way" From Goodbye, Babylon
ELKINS (cntd): Dust-To-Digital’s wooden box anthology of (mostly) African-American spirituals from old 78 records, “Goodbye Babylon,” which has been nourishing me for nearly 20 years.
Above: OOIOO (top), Saicobab (bottom)
ELKINS (cntd): One of my favorite records right now is “SAB SE PURANI BAB” by Saicobab, a kind of Japanese punk take on Indian ragas fronted by Yoshimi P-We of Boredoms: https://saicobab.bandcamp.com
Yoshimi's band OOIOO has a fascinating record called “Gamel” that incorporates Javanese gamelan into a kind of psychedelic pop context: https://ooioojp.bandcamp.com/album/gamel
Let’s see, what else…Anthony Braxton’s Creative Orchestra records from the 1970s.
HENDERSON: I love Braxton.
(LISTEN): Anthony Braxton Creative Orchestra "Composition 58"
ELKINS: I recently got a vinyl copy of Korean cellist Okkyung Lee’s “I Saw The Ghost Of An Unknown Soul And It Said…”
HENDERSON: She’s got this one recording I used to listen to all the time. It was the most violent cello I’ve ever heard. Not just because of the playing, but the way it was recorded.
ELKINS: Was it Ghil? The one that was recorded on a vintage tape deck in Oslo with a cheap mic that created natural distortion?
HENDERSON: That’s the one! Just brutal.
Okkyung Lee "Ghil"
[The full album can be heard here: https://ideologicorgan.bandcamp.com/album/ghil]
ELKINS: I met her in New York in 2003 when I was working on “The Reach Of Resonance.” I hadn’t heard of her when I arrived there to film, but she was the performer EVERYONE I interviewed was going to see. I can’t tell you how many times I wrapped up an interview with someone, and they said, well I’m off to see this amazing cellist!
HENDERSON: It’s cool to hear stuff like this, because it makes me want to figure out how to do this kind of noise with woodwinds. I’m trying to get outside of my usual range with my instrument.
Morgan Henderson (left), Paul Maroon (right)
ELKINS: So what are you working on now?
HENDERSON: I’ve been working on translating William Bronk’s poetry into music. At first, I wasn’t sure how to do it, but I devised my own way, turning the letters of the text into pitches…only to discover that it wasn’t an original idea. Many of the great composers did this, one of which was Shostakovich. You translate the name and get this collection of notes. He used the translation of his name as a motif all over the place. I told Paul [Maroon] straight away, because he loves Shostakovich. So I’ve already been considering that if you and I work together on your next project, since it’s about a writer, I could find areas of significance and see what that brings as a starting point compositionally: translating his literal words into pitches.
ELKINS: Amazing, I love that idea.
HENDERSON: I thought you might. It’s starting me off somewhere unfamiliar that’s new to me. And making me branch out into uncharted territory to discover new things.
Morgan Henderson, Robin Pecknold, Jessica Tjalsma
For more on the music of ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Making-ECHOES-OF-THE-INVISIBLE/The-Music/