Damon & Naomi "Invisible Jukebox" conducted by Alan Licht, January 2004
Reproduced by kind permission of The Wire

Drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang founded Galaxie 500 with guitarist/ vocalist Dean Wareham in Boston in 1987. Their three albums, Today (1988), On Fire (1989), and This Is Our Music (1990), immediately won them a cult following. Indebted to the softer, melancholy side of The Velvet Underground, The Modern Lovers and Big Star, they pioneered a starkly beautiful, slow-tempo approach to indie rock that set them apart from the nascent Grunge scene and which can still be found in groups like Low.

The group split up in 1991, with Wareham going solo. In 1990 Damon & Naomi had founded Exact Change, a publishing imprint dedicated to reissuing lost works of experimental literature or creating new and definitive translations of the same, with Damon handling the editing and Naomi doing the design and layout. They released an EP under the name Pierre Etoile, but increasingly dissatisfied with the music industry, they considered retiring from music making. Thanks to the urgings of Kramer (who had produced Galaxie 500), they began recording and performing under their own names as a folk duo, with Damon switching to acoustic guitar and both doing vocals. More Sad Hits (for Kramer's Shimmy Disc label) was released in 1992, and in 1993 they joined forces with Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar, formerly of Crystalized Movements, to become the rhythm section of Magic Hour, a loud, psychedelia drenched rock group known for playing sets of two 20 minute songs.

With Magic Hour's demise in 1996, they've devoted their musical energies to Damon & Naomi, recording The Wondrous World Of Damon & Naomi (1995) and Playback Singers (1998, both on Sub Pop). They also made an album with Japanese acid folkies Ghost, Damon & Naomi With Ghost (2000), and have toured consistently with Ghost and White Heaven lead guitarist Michio Kurihara, as documented on Live In San Sebastian, and a new studio album scheduled for spring release. Damon has also been the poetry editor of The Baffler and the classical music editor of Pulse. The Jukebox took place at their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Yoko Ono, "Mrs Lennon", From "Fly" (Apple) 1971

Damon Krukowski: It's Yoko. It's beautiful, I can't place which record.
It's from Fly.
DK: Oh, I haven't heard Fly in so many years.
Naomi Yang: Do you remember it now?
DK: No. The cadence is very Beatles-ish, there's a song it reminds me of very strongly. It's really beautiful. In my memory Fly is a much more abrasive record.
You were probably one of the few people to cover a Yoko Ono song, when Galaxie 500 recorded "Listen The Snow Is Falling" On This Is Our Music in 1990.
DK: Yeah, we found that song on the B side to "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". We were on tour in England, we were stuck in a college town and found a little cache of John & Yoko 7"s. It was all songs we knew by him on the A sides and songs we didn't know by her on the B sides. So we bought a bunch of them, took them home, and listened to the songs. Somehow it seemed to fit.
NY: It just seemed like a great song.
DK: It is great. When she let herself just do those pretty songs they're really lovely. And then you have John's spirit behind it as well. Those records have continued to grow with me, The Plastic Ono Band records I just go back to constantly.
NY: Our cat runs to the other room when we put on the loud Yoko stuff.
DK: It's true, we can't listen to that much Yoko at home, our cat just has a reaction to Yoko Ono, it's hilarious [laughter], something about her scream, the cat just goes berserk.
In "Lennon Remembers" John says she was a great rock vocalist, as great as Little Richard, and interviewer Jann Wenner was probably scratching his head when he said it, but when you listen to her it's kind of true.
DK: Well, making do with the instrument you're given has definitely been our credo.
NY: We're not sure our cat likes our vocals either. [laughter].

Hackamore Brick, "Oh, Those Sweet Bananas", From One Kiss Leads To Another (Kama Sutra) 1970

DK: Sounds like Lou Reed but I don't recognise the song. Although… maybe not.
It's Hackamore Brick, who cut only one record in 1970. It was produced by Richard Robinson, who did the first Lou Reed album. They were from New York, and really sounded like The Velvets at that time.
DK: Except it's like Velvets with a chorus. [Looks at sleeve] I like the mismatched socks. Wow, I never ever came across this. It's funny to hear The Velvets' sound when it does leak out, because when we first came across those records I thought they were unique. But over time it's starting to settle into more of a context.
Galaxie 500 was probably one of the first groups to be compared to The Velvets' third album.
DK: I don't know how it started, but it was certainly accurate, we were definitely obsessively listening to the third album over and over.
NY: So we weren't surprised [laughs].
Before that, people rarely copied that album. Especially during the punk era, White Light White Heat was the one people pledged allegiance to.
DK: The third was definitely the one that captured us most at the time. It was that, and Big Star's Third: the sound of a band after it's been a rock band, in a way. It was something we could imitate.
NY: We were also very consciously compared to [The Velvets' third LP], and then we found all these other musical interests, so it became locked into that era; it's not something we've taken with us. I don't know if we still listen to anything that we were listening to at that time. We're doing such a different thing now - it's so much thinking about singing, whereas when we were in Galaxie 500 it was like, how to make a band sound, and the singing was put off till the last second, and the lyrics were like, whatever… it was an afterthought.
DK: It wasn't cool to really focus on it in that way. The vocalists we were listening to at the time were Jonathan Richman; we really liked Beat Happening; hardly voices that are necessarily imitatable, it's more about the quirky personality.

John & Beverley Martyn, "John The Baptist" from Stormbringer (island) 1970

DK: Is it Richard and Linda Thompson?
No.
DK: John and Beverley Martyn?
You got it.
DK: Wow. It's really nice. We went through those records, and there were only a few moments I really liked, but I guess I gotta go back to them because this is much better than I remember. [Song ends] That's lovely. I remember taking courage when I first heard these records because they were singing out of tune sometimes [laughs]. I never really got into his solo work, I know it went through a lot of different phases, sometimes I connect with it, sometimes I can't.
You guys were some of the first people I encountered to start referencing British folk, I remember you covering COB's "Spirit Of Love" several years ago.
NY: We were introduced to all that by Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar, while we were playing with them in Magic Hour, which was so…
DK: Yeah, it's true, we joined a crazy psychedelic electric band and came out with an education in English acoustic folk [laughs].
NY: And Magic Hour covered The Trees song "Sally Free And Easy". During those years with Magic Hour we started to think that we would continue to do our work as a duo, and started getting interested in singing again, or for the first time, really. And those English folk albums were just so inspiring.
DK: Vocals in general had been such a downplayed aspect of the scene that we all came up in, but I think we turned around and started to get intensely interested in vocals, and went back through the 60s and pulled out a stack of records that we never had before. So someone like Sandy Denny was of intense interest, and if you go back to those Topic records there's nothing on it but a voice, unaccompanied, like Anne Briggs or Shirley Collins.
You're doing a tour with Bridget St John and Espers, a group who draw heavily on the 60s British folk scene.
DK: Yeah, we did a show with them and they also covered COB. We were really shocked. Someone who I really enjoy who's working in that vein is Richard Youngs, who, as you're pointing out, has a background in experimental music, not the same overdriven rock band thing, but improvisational, noise experiments, and similarly turned to the folk tradition.
NY: I think it's actually a really exciting moment, there's an incredible energy in the underground again, and it's so great because in the early 90s it was so depressing, the underground had been stomped out.

Dredd Foole & The Din, "Hard Rock (Absolution)", From The Whys Of Fire (Ecstatic Yod) 2003

DK: Sounds like Gong playing Ligeti. Is this new or old?
New.
DK: Really! Now that I'm hearing the voice - is it Dan Ireton, aka Dredd Foole?
Yes.
DK: I recognise his breathing.
NY: Really [laughs]?
DK: Is this the thing he did with Chris Corsano and Thurston [Moore]?
Yeah.
DK: Sounds great. The recording's beautiful too, because you can't tell how many people it is,. It could almost be like a Scratch Orchestra thing, there could be 100 people in that room, making tiny little sounds. Dan was always an amazing performer, he stood out on that Boston scene, for us, when he was fronting a band as well, it was always so exciting when he took the stage.
Who else from Boston do you feel a camaraderie with?
DK: We first started seeing Dredd Foole when Galaxie 500 was starting and then it was a very post-Mission Of Burma circle of experimental things that were going on at the fringes of rock here. Which definitely held more interest for us at the time than the generic college rock bands, as we all were known at one point. Also Thalia Zedek and her various bands - I love what Thalia is doing now as well. Thalia and Dredd, they were certainly the standout vocalists of our era in Boston, for sure. Corsano sounds great on this too, sounds like AMM. That kind of thing where you can't put your finger on any of the sounds coming off the drums.

Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Codine", From Maiden Of The Cancer Moon (Psycho) 1984, recorded 1968

DK: Is it Quicksilver?
Wow, you're batting a thousand today.
DK: Live, maybe?
Yes. Do you recognise the song?
DK: No, what is it?
"Codine" by Buffy Sainte-Marie. You guys have done a lot of covers and this, I think, is a really good example of a cover version. Like Galaxie did a band arrangement of Jonathan Richman's a cappella "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste".
DK: Right, from a semi-official bootleg. We love playing covers.
NY: Yeah, you just learn so much. It's a way to get out of yourself and in somebody else's head or at least what you think they're playing, because you're trying to figure out what the chords are [laughs].
DK: Back in the Galaxie days we did other people's songs just to learn how to play. But it's still a great pleasure. If we sit around for kicks, we often pick out a song and go through it. And it's always been a fun way to let loose when you're recording, to not have to be yourself, to have the subjection of another personality from outside the band.
NY: It's like a collaboration. Sometimes you'll hear a lyric and it'll just be so beautiful you want to sing it. It's fun to play something you wish you'd written.
DK: The guitar is pretty unmistakable. [Quicksilver's John] Cippolina sounds great. You probably know [Ghost/White Heaven guitarist Michio] Kurihara is a big Cippolina fan. The best story we have about that is a really wonderful moment we had on tour, we went to the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland with Kuri. They had Cippolina's amp in the lobby. He just froze in front of it and was studying it, thunderstruck that it was there. We wanted to take his picture in front of it, and the guards wouldn't let us. Have you ever seen the amp? It's this crazy custom figuration: two amps hinged together with horns at the tops. And they also had his custom pedalboard with lights from trucks on it.

White Heaven, "Cold Hour", From Levitation (The Now Sound) 1996, recorded 1988

DK: It sounds like Wayne [Rogers]. Is it Twisted Village?
No, it's White Heaven.
DK: Oh my god. Is it a bootleg or released?
It was a pretty limited record.
DK: [Looking at sleeve] Wow, this is fantastic. I love how Kuri lets himself go live. The studio versions of White Heaven is so much more restrained. I wonder what Kuri thinks of it. He's very self-critical. I can't believe Kuri was doing this in 88 and here we all were in our indie rock bands and we didn't know.
When was the first time you heard him play?
DK: We really first heard Kuri when he came over with Ghost, the second Ghost US tour. The first Ghost tour was without Kurihara, that was 1995 and Magic Hour toured with them. They then came back and Kuri was in the band and our jaws dropped. We were unprepared, totally. The Ghost orchestrations have their moments of explosion, but they're also very carefully arranged, everything has its role in the band's sound. So there were only moments in that show where he would let go like this. But he also excels, as you know, at incredibly controlled playing, at fitting into an arrangement, which is what he does with us.
NY: It's something I've learned so much more about from playing with him, just listening how he answers our voices. It made me think much more about playing bass, because I'm never playing bass and singing at the same time, but now as I'm singing more in the studio, I'm using the bass differently, instead of just sort of ploughing ahead under the singing [laughs].
DK: He's also extraordinarily careful, which is why you only hear him rip totally loose like that in certain contexts, because he's so careful to work his tone, his sound, everything, into what's happening. We've seen him make minute adjustments in tone, or technique, in order to better fit his guitar part with what we're doing, or with Ghost. It's phenomenal, this fine, fine tuning that's going on all the time. You only get to see those moments live, which was partly why we wanted to make a live record with him.
NY: I don't think he ever plays the same thing twice.

Erik Friedlander, "I Am Filthy", From Maldoror (Brassland) 2003

DK: Is it a cello? Only? I don't know the player.
It's Erik Friedlander.
DK: Oh, is it the Maldoror record?
Yes. I was wondering if he contacted you, as he uses the Exact Change translation of Maldoror.
DK: The label wrote for permission to quote from it.
Would you ever think about recording something in response to a work of literature in this way? Has your work with Exact Change impacted on your music?
DK: Not any way that's obvious to us…
NY: Maybe just the spirit of artistic experimentation.
DK: We do our share of lifting from books [laughs]. But that's just theft, that's not a response. I think we take a lot of inspiration from things we read. Maldoror, for example, is a book that I have to keep at arm's length a little bit, because it is an absolutely terrifying book, a pure investigation of evil and the dark. And that's not something that I'm personally drawn to do.
Even though you're wearing all black.
DK: Right [laughter]. But it's a work that I admire, it's a work that has been inspiring to so much other work that I do feel even more personally attached to.
It's interesting that a lot of the stuff Exact Change has published is by people who were not necessarily writers, like Cage, Feldman, de Chirico...
NY: It's been happening more and more.
DK: It wasn't a conscious plan but we've noticed it too. I'm not sure where it comes from but we definitely feel a great sympathy with a lot of those artists who have come to their genres at oblique angles. Even Maldoror, I feel, is sort of a masterpiece written by a non-writer. It's so singular, it's not a novel, it's not a memoir, you can't say what it is. And I am continually drawn to books in particular, but maybe other forms of art too, whose form can't be easily defined.

Kazuki Tomokawa & Kan Mikami, "Medley", From Go En (PSF) 1994

DK & NY: [As singing starts] Oh, it's Tomokawa.
NY: The last time we went we got to see Tomokowa play live, it was fabulous.
DK: It was just him and a pianist, in a very small club. He's an incredibly powerful performer, you can imagine. He incorporates that whole acoustic guitar tradition that we were talking about before, but he incorporates this whole other element of emotional projection, a raw projection of his energy, into the songs, just incredibly intense. It's funny how you can hardly say this is a folk song, and yet I feel it's very connected to the folk tradition, and I guess somewhere where that crosses is that aspect of acoustic music that I love so much. That doesn't translate when you say to someone 'folk music' - obviously they're not thinking of Tomokawa, they're thinking Joan Baez.
NY: They're not thinking 'acid folk'.
In Japan, do they relate you to the acid folk thing?
DK: No. I guess a certain aspect of our audience receives us as coming out of the American indie rock... I hesitate to call it 'tradition' [laughs]. And then there's the aspect that understands our relationship to Ghost and to the local underground music. And that's of course small. The Japanese underground is an underground. We expressed enthusiasm for Tomokawa, which bewildered everyone. We wanted to see his show, which surprised even some of our friends.
NY: Even the underground [laughs].
DK: Mikami is received more solidly in the underground. But Tomokawa's reputation separates him from it. People were taken aback when we went to see him.
NY: And there weren't a lot of people volunteering to come with us [laughs].
DK: But he's really really nice. I think of him as a very Alfred Jarry-like character, he leads a mysterious life. We've been told he makes his living as the tipster for bicycle races in Japan. My understanding is he writes the odds and bets himself. He's a professional gambler, singer and poet, and he paints - those are his paintings on a lot of the PSF covers. I asked him if he like Jarry, and he gave the most Jarry-like answer: 'I've never heard of him, I don't read any books. I have no use for literature, I know nothing about it.' I took that to mean yes, he loves Alfred Jarry.

Matching Mole, "Signed Curtain", From Matching Mole (CBS) 1972

DK: [Immediately] It's Robert Wyatt. My guess is it's the Matching Mole radio sessions that came out recently.
NY: His voice just destroys you.
I know you're huge fans. Is it the singing, the songwriting, or all of the above?
DK: And also the drumming - he's an absolute hero of mine in every respect. It's like when we were talking about Velvet Underground's third record, the kind of sync you can get into, you just feel like you're absorbing it thoroughly, and we've definitely gone through that with Robert Wyatt's records. But it's all aspects of his music making. I understood that he had his jazz vocabulary but was playing pop music, and that's something I relate to. I can't play jazz, but it's very much what's in my ears from my childhood, and then we were playing simple pop songs. I relate to something about that collision in Wyatt's music.
NY: And then we basically had to reinvent how we played music after Galaxie 500 broke up. For a while we thought we'd skip it, but then as we just couldn't help keep doing it, there was no way we could keep doing it the way we had been in Galaxie 500, and it took us a very long time. Each time we make a new record… you have to find out what your voice is in the present, not your singing voice but your way to express yourself. And he had to do that in such an extreme way.
DK: Definitely. But I think he also continues to do that. Every time he makes a record he has once again readdressed the question, 'Why make the record?' and I think he keeps answering it, in a new and a positive manner, which is why I look forward to every single thing he does. I think every Robert Wyatt fan always fears that he won't find a reason to make the next record. But that's something we live through ourselves, we're always asking, Do we have a reason to make another record? And it takes us time to reconcile that.
NY: It's a very different thing when people are making a record because they have something to say, rather than, you know, you're in a band and you have to make a new one every year, and you have to stay on tour…
DK: He also has the capability to use a very silly lyric, which is something I really admire. That Matching Mole song is among the silliest, which is why I think he called a song "Moon In June", to poke fun at that. I can enjoy a lot of nonsense in songs. My mother's a jazz singer and I grew up with all the jazz standards in my head, and those songs are the opposite of high mindedness, they tend toward silly and goofy rhymes.
NY: But you're always demanding that our lyrics have a logic and a meaning, and if they don't make sense to some internal logic…
DK: The logic I do swear by, in that regard, it might be obscure to anybody else. But I love weird logic, I love Kafka, Joseph Cornell's logic, artists who adhere so strictly to their sense of what would follow next.
Are there any lyricists who provide a model of sorts?
DK: Naomi might disagree but for me, Dylan, especially The Basement Tapes, where I think Dylan really was the surrealist poet that Allen Ginsberg thought he was. It was not, I think, in the great, weighty songs, it was in the nonsense songs of The Basement Tapes.
NY: This is where it veers into theory for me [laughs].
DK: The Basement Tapes are an example of that kind of internal logic. They make no sense whatsoever, they're total strings of puns and nonsensical jokes. They veer toward the clever, and we have a fear of the clever.
NY: But you have no fear of the cliche.
DK: No, I love cliche. And The Basement Tapes are filled with cliche. But Dylan in that period is using a logic that I recognise from literary heroes as well.

Elizabeth Cotten, "Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie", From folk songs And Instrumentals With Guitar, (Smithsonian Folkways) 1958

DK: I don't recognise it.
It's Elizabeth Cotten.
DK: Oh. I've never heard this. You know who told me to listen to this - Devendra Banhart.
That makes sense. Dylan covered this song.
DK: Actually the instrumental intro, I thought it was Dylan, something about the fingerpicking.
Her voice is all over the place but it really works.
DK: That's something I relate to - I think we've always had that gap between the reality and what we're playing in our heads. You reach for things that you know you can't do, but you reach for them anyway, and I think sometimes happy accidents fall out. I think there's a lot of illusion necessary to get yourself up on stage at least if you have the kind of self-doubt that Naomi and I carry with us as performers. There's a way that you can use that. It's not just something that cripples you, you can reach past your ability all the time, and I think what you come up with is not what you were dreaming about, but you come up with something else that you needed the dream to come into existence.
NY: There's a tradition of that in lots of arts, people painting and they think they're painting one thing and it's not at all, but it's something in and of itself. It's a way to actually do something.