One Of Us – Sky Clad – Interview

One Of Us

Sky Clad (Eye Music)
An interview with John Eye (vocals), Christian Gilbert (guitar), Keith Martinelli (percussion), Steve Pavao (keyboard), Dave McFarland (drums), and Alex Milne (bass)
by Angela Dauthi
photo by Lisa Gourley

When you discuss Goth Music in Boston, it’s usually a pretty short conversation. But inevitably, One Of Us is brought up. Using multiple percussion on top of guitar, bass and keyboards, singer John Eye stands like a musical warrior, his deep voice booming. They just released their debut CD Sky Clad, which sounds surprisingly gentle compared to their live shows. I had a chance to talk to the band after a free show at Tower records, over some Chinese food.

Your live shows are usually very loud, concussive, but Sky Clad is almost gentle.
Christian: Yes. That’s actually the nature of the group. If you played the CD at club level (very loud), it would have a very different texture. It’s a very dynamic album. We’re very different between the stage and the studio.

John: That’s really what I wanted to do, ever since the first One Of Us recordings. It’s sometimes disappointing to see a band live because the album was so brilliant, textured, with dozens of track layering, and all that. I want to have quality in the CD too, but when people see us, I want them to be blown away.

Christian: On a CD, you have to squash the sound. We miked the drums from the top giving it a high end, sharp attack sound.

Alex: We didn’t want to spend months in the studio. We wanted to limit ourselves, to let the dynamic of the band come through.

Christian: We did sessions pretty much live, except we re-tracked the guitars and vocals, to reduce mic bleed. “Eclipse” was live, and “Dance of Parting Circles” was definitely live. That was something that happened when we were checking the mic levels. We had drums in front of us and it’s very hard to control yourself and all of a sudden you’ve got a new song.

Dave: At our rehearsals, we usually just go off for the first hour or so.

Do you have a revolving lineup? I remember you saying earlier that so-and-so was going to play a gig with you.
John: What you see here (Christian, Keith, Steve, Dave, Alex) is the core of the band. We have Zack Sherzad (Digeridoo) on a couple of performances, we’re bringing more people in.

Christian: Making it more of an orchestral experience, giving the music textures that we couldn’t.

What would you call your kind of music?
All: Tribal.

Christian: So many times when someone says they’re tribal, they’re not.

Dave: Killing Joke is sometimes referred to as tribal, but I can’t figure it out.

What’s with the hidden track?
John: That track doesn’t fit with the others. The whole thing is a memory of recording the CD. What that was weeks on end of being cooped up in one room, all working pretty much around the clock. Under those conditions, everybody was cracking up. We were all doing strange things by that point. We’re all pretty much strange as it is, but we were getting stranger. So we decided to do an acoustic experiment. We had a hand drum, so we were running around the building just to get out of the studio, testing out the acoustics of hallways, stairwells, stuff like that. We ended up in this very old, big, tiled bathroom. It was Keith, Christian, and myself. We were running around, going nuts in the bathroom, the sound bouncing off the walls, as well as us.

Christian: It was a great bathroom.

John: It was the best bathroom I’ve ever worked in. So Keith is marching back and forth with the dumbek, and we started jamming in the bathroom – (laughs) I think I’d rather say “improvising” – So Keith gets the idea to get the DAT player and kept going, with Christian slamming the door.

Keith: John’s on the the hand towel dispenser, slapping it, and he looks over at the soap dispenser, and he starts playing that, too. On the first hit, the thing drops down and hits the ceramic sink, and it makes this perfect woodblock sound. We look at each other, and he goes with it, switching between the hand towel dispenser and the soap dispenser-

John: It’s unfortunate that we didn’t list it. It would’ve been fun to list the instruments.

Christian: So there’s this memory, the stress release for the album. To put that on Sky Clad makes it pleasurable ’cause when you go back, you have all these songs you worked so hard on, and then you have this… thing. We called it “W.C.”

Are your drum patterns planned out, or do they come from improvisations?
Dave: A lot of it comes from me and Keith and John not being able to control ourselves. We’re like little kids at Christmas coming downstairs and seeing these drums. We just start playing, and we keep about 8% of what we do.

Christian: But that’s followed by a heavy period of orchestration.

John: Keith is the most trained percussionist in the band. He understands the rhythms, and what works and what doesn’t.

Keith: I’ve always taken lessons, whether it’s for marching band, or jazz, or whatever, but I’m finding out that it doesn’t mean a thing. There’s such a natural thing happening in the band, I’m not thinking theory, or how things should or shouldn’t go, it just gels during jamming. From there, I can see what would be good counterpoint, but I don’t think about that initially.

Lyrically, one of the tracks that stands out for me is “Beethoven Was My Lover,” simply because I wonder if you mean something in the first four lines (“Beethoven was my lover/Tchaikovsky knew his fate/Ravel dropped the ball/But Puccini knew all along”), or are you just name dropping?
John: The song was written in 1992. The story behind that… Well, let me preface this by saying the lyrics are very tongue in cheek. I think some people take us more seriously than we do ourselves. There’s actually a second song that follows up – well, let me just tell you the story. There is a narrator who has lived throughout time. He’s lived with all these famous composers, and he’s just dating himself in the first lines. Then he explains that he knew these two children, Peter and Kate. And to him, they were impressive enough to tell their stories, because they were two little kids who did things their own way. It’s not much of a story, but that’s pretty much it. The second part of it is a single that was put out at the same time, called “Wishes,” where Peter grows up. It’s a limited edition of about… oh, 100 or so.

But were did Peter and Kate come from?
(What follows next is a long discussion of an admittedly silly Goth comic book that their publicist Kyra drew several years ago, along with references to sledding, pizza, Peter and Kate stationary, and good-natured self-effacement.)

John: It’s funny that such a silly story can turn out to be a historical point in a band’s career. And it is a historical point, because at the time that song and “Riverflow” were written, there were a lot of different styles happening. We were musically schizophrenic, doing a lot of strange things. But when those two songs were written, I realized that that was the direction I wanted to go in. “Riverflow” was tribal and though “Beethoven…” was humorous, it was sarcastically humorous.

Keith: Tribal Sarcasm?

Alex: Aboriginal Irony.