Damon & Naomi: Avant-Garde Folk Stars Take their Art Very Seriously
by Joan Vich Montaner

First things first: Damon & Naomi are Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, and they have been writing and playing music together since 1987.

They are far from being the average rock stars. Not even the average alternative or indie rock stars. Or psych/acid-folk stars. You name it. My point is: they take their music and their art so seriously, with such deep dedication and love, yet they spread their subtle, nutty sense of humour in every single action they take. Basically, they are Artists with a capital A, with all the transcending weight of the word, but they are also what you would call "good to hang out with" -- great to hang out with.

No other reason -- well, they play music, and a very good one indeed -- would have made me cross my country just to meet them at that legendary concert in San Sebastian, that ended up becoming one of the cleanest sounding, warmest feeling live albums of this decade so far. Ok, you must forgive me if I go a bit over the top, Latin blood runs through my veins. And the credits say I recorded that show, even if my souvenirs are a bit blurry now. Must have been the red wine. But it is a great album, believe me.

Life doesn't happen chronologically, but I think a little bit of chronology will definitely help us shed some light on this story that's about to begin. By now you must know that Damon and Naomi were two thirds of the precious treasure that was Galaxie 500, the seminal cult trio that spawned a following that influenced thousands of sensitive indie-pop bands all over the world, in the same way that they were one of the million bands born under the influence of The Velvet Underground (who wasn't?). And if you didn't know, you should print this text and read it on your way to the nearest record store, where you'll buy the Galaxie 500 Box Set. There you'll find the band's story in Damon's easy prose (the guy's a poet, dude), from where we're going to take some of this prehistorical information. Such as that Damon, Naomi and Dean Wareham all met in high school, and started playing together in college. As Damon recalls: "My mother is a professional musician (jazz singer), and so I had grown up with some musical training, first piano, then guitar, but drums were a goof I picked up in the basement of our high school, just before graduation. At college I didn't have any drums to play, so we talked another freshman into lending me his kit (bizarrely, this was Conan O'Brien, who would later use his own TV show to employ drummer Max Weinberg). Naomi is younger and came to college with us the following year, but her musical days didn't start till later. She did start making us posters and backdrops immediately, however. She always said a band was a great graphic opportunity". Naomi -- who still does all graphic design for their books, music releases and ephemera, often using the photographs that she takes on their travels -- would end up playing bass in the band, recording three otherworldly beautiful albums with the invaluable help of producer Kramer. Between the four of them, they shaped the legend of Galaxie 500. But, as they say, that's a different story.

Our story starts, in fact, when the band breaks up in April 1991, much to the surprise of both Damon and Naomi. Dean's sudden departure left them as a rhythm section without a guitar player, wondering where to move next. And this is the moral part of the story (which is only starting, mind you): the way they reinvented themselves and their roles, not their music, so they were able to follow the path they had started and dive deeper into the creative space they had contributed so much to open. Not long before the band's demise, they had already experimented recording on their own with a one-off EP that they put out under the name Pierre Etoile (French for 'rock star'... I told you). The EP included three songs that were initially thought of as part of Galaxie 500's forthcoming repertoire, but for us they mean now the actual departure point for a new career in music, Damon & Naomi's career. Again, I've said it before: life doesn't happen chronologically.

On Pierre Etoile, Damon started singing and playing guitar, whilst Naomi added to her characteristic melodic basslines and heavenly singing. They had opened a new way of expression, finding a beautiful combination in the interaction of their voices, and when Galaxie 500 broke up, they were ready to head for a new direction. But, suddenly, their UK label lost interest in the Pierre Etoile project (not being something they could sell as a Galaxie 500 side-project anymore), and the US label went bankrupt, hence they lost most of the royalties they were due. As Damon put it on an interview for the Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine, "we decided we were finished with making music in public. That was our 'Dylan after the motorcycle accident' period". They concentrated instead on Exact Change, the publishing house they had started around 1990, devoted to reprinting and translating works of experimental literature, and artists' writings (authors include Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Morton Feldman, Fernando Pessoa, Leonora Carrington and my personal favourite Denton Welch, among many others). Exact Change was modelled on indie labels that their friends were all running at the time but putting out books instead, it's still going on as you read this, and a visit to their website and catalogue will surely provide you with many delightful moments.

However, fortunately enough, Kramer came to their rescue after some time, pushing them into recording a new album and changing their artistic name to Damon & Naomi. Thanks, Kramer. We salute you.

This wasn't a new start, but a farewell. "More Sad Hits" was supposed to be their last record ever, their swan song. Damon was reluctant to go back into the rock band routine, and Naomi just saw it as a way to leave the music business on her own decision, without anyone else forcing them to stop making music. So, ready to record their last songs and call it quits, they went back to Kramer's studio, formerly Noise New York, but now relocated and renamed Noise New Jersey. They rediscovered the magic of writing and recording songs, of channelling their creativity towards music again. Kramer produced the album and played a lot of instruments on it, as he would do on their second one, "The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi".

But that would still take three more years to arrive. First, our heroes had another chance at being an indie-pop deluxe rhythm section by joining Kate Biggar and Wayne Rogers, from a band called Crystalized Movements, to form Magic Hour. A short-lived psychedelic rock band that shined best live, improvising acid symphonies that could last half an hour or more, and that helped them meet Japanese band Ghost, the members of which would later play a significant role in Damon & Naomi's discography.

At that point they were still not playing out live as Damon & Naomi -- as a former rhythm section, it seemed unimaginable for them to be singing live and playing without a drummer! But while they were touring extensively with Magic Hour, Kramer (him again) invited them to Japan with him. Kramer's idea was that Damon would play drums with him, and since Naomi would travel with them as well, they would open up for him as Damon & Naomi. Another crucial decision, forced with Kramer's help again. They weren't looking forward to facing an audience or singing their songs in public, thinking as they were of themselves as a studio project -- but Japan! Japan was a gap in their passports since the break-up of Galaxie 500, when they were getting ready to buy their tickets for their first ever tour of that country. Japan deserved courage and strength of will. Damon & Naomi would play live.

Damon & Naomi's line-up on the Japanese tour with Kramer included a backing band, featuring three members of their much admired band Ghost (Batoh, Ogino and Yamazaki), but soon after that they were ready to hit the road on their own: "we took an acoustic guitar, a bass, and the sruti box (an Indian drone instrument). It was very folky! The best shows were when people sat down, and we had a rapport with the audience. Singing our songs in public made me realise how the lyrics can really communicate to people, and I started to give them more respect. Now when I think of performing our songs, I am thinking more and more in terms of getting the lyrics across".

Recording "The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi" they had already stopped having a band in mind. Instead, they wrote the songs together in their living room, and what came out of their quiet home jams ended up being the finished song. "Playback Singers", the next album, confirmed this new direction: it was recorded and produced by themselves at home ("compromising quality of reproduction for the sake of nostalgia"), and the whole record was made completely as a duo. It was also the first record that they made after they started performing live on their own and started to become much more interested in singing than they ever thought possible. In Naomi's own words: "I guess we had become open to the possibilities of making music as a duo rather than as a 'rock band'". The album, which included covers of songs by Ghost and Tom Rapp's Pearls Before Swine (another one of the duo's all-time favourites -- somehow they manage to end up working close to some of their heroes... or publishing their books), was released on infamous Seattle-based label Sub Pop, as the previous one had been. The label, better known for their worldwide success during the grunge rock years, went on to re-release "More Sad Hits," as well as their next album "Damon & Naomi With Ghost", an inevitable collaboration born out of mutual admiration.

Damon & Naomi had been playing with Ghost in both the U.S. and Japan, and after one of these shows in Tokyo in the fall of 1998, they decided to record an album together. Over the course of the following year, Damon and Naomi recorded the songs at home "and sent them to Japan on cassettes, with handwritten notes for Ghost to learn. What came back to us was cassettes with Batoh playing the songs - he sort of reinterpreted them - he added some bridges, changed introductions, put in some dramatic pauses" (Naomi). "He put in some chords that I can't play!" (Damon). Aside from Batoh, two other members of Ghost participated actively in the recording: Ogino on keyboards and Kurihara on electric guitar. After the record was released, Kurihara joined the duo on an extensive touring schedule that took them, over several tours, across the US, to England, Europe, Brazil and Japan. Touring as a trio, Kurihara's superb electric guitar arrangements perfectly fitting the duo's delicate, evocative sound, they felt they were achieving a level of understanding and depth that should be kept for the future, and were eager to capture the spirit of this work together as a trio. So they, well, convinced me to record their show in San Sebastian, Spain, and "Song to the Siren" was born. The two-disc set features songs from all four of their previous albums, although it relies mostly on the album they did with Ghost, and is packaged with a deliciously home-made 54-minute DVD tour diary that Naomi recorded and edited. In this album, all the music they have ever done before (their previous albums, yes, but also the pastoral indie-rock of Galaxie 500 and the acid jams of Magic Hour) is melted in with subtlety, harmony and sensitivity. Everything is here, in a magical concert that I still don't know how we managed to capture onto tape. And, on the DVD footage, they appear as sweet and nice as they are in real life, and you can see why I consider them to be great to hang out with.

The magical artistic collaboration with Kurihara hasn't stopped yet. The last thing we know from our avant-garde folkie couple is that they've been recording a new album with him, as always at home in Cambridge, MA. I haven't heard anything from this sessions yet. I know they will joke about it, give the album a witty name and tell funny stories about the recording, but I'm sure it'll be another amazing collection of pure snowflakey beauty in the shape of 21st century quiet psychedelic folk songs. They take their art very seriously, you know.

Joan Vich Montaner
April 3rd 2004, Palma de Mallorca, Spain