Album by album

Three aliases; one long, strange trip…

MANY artists have side projects, but few lead three great bands simultaneously, as Ripley Johnson has with Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo and Rose City Band. Recently he’s been concentrating on the latter, his psychedelic motorik-choogle project, who have just released their third album Earth Trip.

“Rose City Band is where I can follow only my own ideas,” Johnson explains on a call from ‘The Shed’, his garden studio in Portland, Oregon. “I’m definitely someone who wakes up in the morning with a song in their head. Because I can be obsessive and prolific when it comes to wanting to produce a lot of stuff, it’s nice to have an outlet that’s my own thing.”

During our trip through some of his catalogue’s highlights, Johnson recalls his gradual journey from San Francisco to Portland and how he’s evolved from fuzz-drenched guitars and smelly carpets to crystalline synths, cosmic country and the inspiration of the natural world.

“It’s cool because I’m an older person and there’s still growth. I still feel like I’m figuring everything out, especially when it comes to making sounds and recording and working with other people.”

TOM PINNOCK

Lunar tunes: with partner Sanae Yamada in Moon Duo, 2017

JOHN JEFFREY

WOODEN SHJIPS

WOODEN SHJIPS

HOLY MOUNTAIN, 2007

The drone-rock quartet’s garagey debut, recorded in San Francisco’s Soma district

JOHNSON: It’s been a journey from this record, for sure. This was the first LP I’d ever done with any band, so it was a new process for me. John Whitson from the Holy Mountain label contacted me after hearing our early releases and said, “Let’s do a record.” So I had to come up with the songs and we bought a tape machine and mixing desk so we could record in our rehearsal studio. The bass player, Dusty, works in sound recording and he bought the tape machine on Craigslist from someone who was trying to get rid of her son’s gear because it was taking up too much space in the house!

Dusty knew what he was doing, but I had no idea –a lot of it was recorded in the ‘wrong’ way, but that adds a certain charm. I had this ridiculously loud Fender Quad Reverb amp. I wanted to get a super-oversaturated fuzz sound, but instead of using compressors and preamps and knowing what I was doing I was like, “I’m just gonna turn my amp up all the way!” Our rehearsal studio was a dark, dingy, very dead room, with no separation. There were lots of beer spills and lots of cigarette smoke, the carpet everywhere was really stinky. This was in Soma, before it became condo city – back then it was one of those areas that had a lot of warehouse spaces and a lot of nightclubs, because people didn’t live there. There’s been a big exodus from San Francisco since then, for sure. I still have friends there, but a lot of musicians and artists left as it became harder to work a part-time or flexible job and still be able to pay the rent.

MOON DUO

MAZES

SACRED BONES, 2011

Johnson’s new project with partner Sanae Yamada. The pitch? “Suicide with guitar…”

When Wooden Shjips had some success, we started getting a lot of offers to play shows but we couldn’t really tour much and we weren’t that career-minded. But I was regretting getting all these offers to go to Europe and having to say no. Sanae, my partner, she grew up playing piano but had never been in a band, so I said to her, “What if we start a band that’s just the two of us? Then

we could travel really easily and we don’t have to worry about conflicting schedules. We’ll just do it together, one hotel room, we can fit all our gear in our car, it can be really economical.” We were both big fans of Suicide, still are, and Silver Apples, Cluster, Royal Trux, all these great duos. So the way I pitched it to Sanae was, “What if we had a band that was like Suicide, but with guitar? You be Martin Rev, I’ll be Alan Vega but with a guitar…” We did a couple of EPs and then the first record [2010’s Escape] was our trial by fire, it was a real struggle. Mazes was recorded on Pro Tools at home.

A good friend of ours, who was also our tour manager, facilitated us going to Berlin to work with these two Finnish guys who ran a studio called Kaiku. Jonas Verwijnen became our main guy for mixing records. We really gelled with him because he was coming from a European electronic and pop background that we didn’t know anything about, but he could apply his skills to our scuzzy recordings and bring clarity and a balance to them that worked really well.

WOODEN SHJIPS

WEST

THRILL JOCKEY, 2011

The Shjips embrace some classic rock vibes as they recognise their Californian heritage

One of the things that has come back to me more and more over the years is the influence of the music I listened to when I was a teenager and first got really into music. I never strayed too far from that, but starting with West, there was more of an acknowledgement of our shared classic rock influences: Neil Young, the Stones, The Band, the Grateful Dead, Zeppelin, the Faces, whatever. This was the first record we did in a proper studio. We recorded with Phil Manley from Trans Am and The Fucking Champs. Lucky Cat [in San Francisco] was a cool studio – it had a band apartment and it was right next to the train tracks, so we’d be woken up at 6am by the first train of the day – it’d feel like there was a freight train going right through your apartment. To do anything quiet, you had to time it with when the trains weren’t going by. It did feel a bit high pressure, and it wasn’t my favourite experience. It was great working with Phil because he’s a friend of ours, but everything we were doing was on the clock, which is one of my least favourite things. You can just feel the money burning away. I like to do guitar solos first or second take – now I do it at home when I’m relaxed, I like to do things in the morning, and all of these things run contrary to the studio style. We didn’t have enough material for the whole record, so for the last track, “Rising”, we took the first track and turned it backwards and did some different stuff with it. We were talking about the Neu! 2 record, where they just reversed a bunch of tracks and changed the speed. It worked, so that was cool.

Classical influences: (l–r) Nash Whalen, Omar Ahsanuddin, Erik “Ripley” Johnson and Dusty Jermier in Wooden Shjips, 2011

PAUL CARLIN

MOON DUO

OCCULT ARCHITECTURE VOL 1

SACRED BONES, 2017

The first of a pair of albums that blew open the Moon Duo sound

We had more material than we needed for one record here. I’ve done many records and for most of them we have just enough for the record. But in the process of making this, one of the things that became apparent was that some of the songs fitted together better than others, so a solution was to split them up into two records. We were also playing with the idea of darkness and light and one of the conceptual ideas was a dark side and a light side. So we expanded that whole concept to having two records, a dark and a light one, as opposed to giving people a double album, which is a lot of music to ingest. So we recorded all of it at the same time, but working with Jonas at Kaiku Studios in Berlin we decided we would mix them separately – we mixed the dark one in Berlin in the winter, and then we mixed the second one in Portland in the summer, which is almost guaranteed sunshine. Seasons affect my music so much and geography as well. That became more apparent when we left San Francisco – just having seasons in Oregon! We didn’t have seasons in California – when you’re living there you get used to it, but when you leave you realise how much that affects you. It’s hard to mark time when the seasons don’t change, there’s not this obvious cycle of life.

WOODEN SHJIPS

V

THRILL JOCKEY, 2018

The final Shjips LP to date, rehearsed and recorded in eight days

This was our second album recorded up in Portland. Omar [Ahsanuddin], our drummer, also lives here, so we tend to do things up here because there’s space and it’s cheaper and Omar has a child and no-one else does. We have basements here in Portland, we have a PA and everything set up ready to go. After [2013’s] Back To Land, the band hadn’t really been doing much but I wanted to do another record – people didn’t have a lot of time, so what I proposed was we’d rehearse for two weekends and then record for two weekends. We’d keep it really succinct, just focus and do it really quick and not belabour the thing. So that’s what we did, at Type Foundry with our friend Jason Powers. With West, the classic rock influences started coming in, but it became more prominent on Back To Land and V. For me the last two records were my way of trying to connect with the other guys in the sense that these are our musical roots and we all go back so long together. It’s hard to have a band that doesn’t live in the same place, because as you grow and change and everyone’s into different things and different music, how do you find that connection? After Back To Land I wasn’t sure if we would ever make another Wooden Shjips record because it requires so much preparation and momentum. But I think it worked really well –I enjoyed having more spontaneity. Will there be another one? I have no idea. Never say never. Maybe we’ll all live to 120 – you know, you gotta do something with your time.

“Seasons affect my music so much and geography as well”

ROSE CITY BAND

ROSE CITY BAND

JEAN SANDWICH, 2019

Johnson’s latest project, jammy and propulsive porch music

I’m really into private press hippie countryrock, stuff like Kenny Knight and Jim Sullivan and Kathy Heideman. That ’70s cosmic country stuff in general and then all of the goodtime summer records I like to listen to, became more and more a part of my summer experience in Oregon. Things like Creedence or Van Morrison or Lucinda Williams, stuff that has more of a country rock feel, I call it porch music – you’re sitting on the porch and you put on Eat A Peach or something. That was the main influence for the vibe of the record. There’s a trope of cosmic hippie country stuff but there’s not that much of it and as far as the more extended improv stuff I like to do, at least in parts of the records, there’s not a whole load of that outside of the Dead and Mighty Baby. I was recording at home, though I did some stuff at Type Foundry too. I had mixed the record, but it had drum machines on it and not real drums. It was cool, but it was missing something, it just didn’t work. So I asked John Jeffrey from Moon Duo to come and record some drums – he’s just amazing at doing stuff like that, he’s got such a good sense of time and feel. I wanted this to just come out and see if I could get some reaction from people before it became, ‘Oh, the guy from Wooden Shjips has a new record.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I like the idea that people can hear something without any preconceived notion of what it is.

“I’m obsessed with pedal steel”: Johnson in 2021

RIPLEY JOHNSON

“My fuzz got toned back and it opened up all this mid-range for Sanae’”

MOON DUO

STARS ARE THE LIGHT

SACRED BONES, 2019

Johnson and Yamada team up with Sonic Boom to record their more colourful, breezier latest

We wanted to switch it up after Occult Architecture. One of our ideas was to work with Pete Kember. We’d worked with him on some remixes, played shows with him and are friends with him. For so long, mixing was such a big part of our album process – it was almost as important as the recording – but we thought, ‘Let’s remove ourselves from that a little bit’. Our trial run was this 12” we did – “Jukebox Babe”, an Alan Vega track, on one side, and The Stooges’ “No Fun” on the other. Kember produced and mixed that in Portugal, he did a great job, he totally got what we were going for. So that gave us the confidence to try that with a full record. We decided to record here in Portland and take it to Sintra [in Portugal] and mix it with Pete, but let him do some pre-mixing too. After Occult Architecture 2 we thought, ‘How light can we go?’ My fuzz got toned back on the guitar and it opened up all this mid-range sonically for Sanae to do stuff with the synths. Pete is a synth master too, so the two of them did most of the work really! The collaboration between Sanae and me has grown as we’ve matured as people and also as Sanae’s become just such an amazing musician. She has such a good ear for sounds. We’re at the point where we’re now writing songs together for our next thing.

ROSE CITY BAND

SUMMERLONG

THRILL JOCKEY, 2020

The bright second, once again inspired by the easy-going Oregon summers

When I get little ideas I just record them on my phone. With Rose City Band sometimes it’s stuff I’m playing on my acoustic, just sitting around. I’ll keep coming back to a particular phrase and eventually I’ll just record it. When summer comes around or when I get the time to make a new record I’ll just gather all of that stuff and comb through it – usually 80 per cent of it is terrible – then I take the good stuff and develop it from there like a book of short stories or a film. I’m a big film fan. I’ve been thinking about records more like films and giving myself that permission to make something that’s its own special thing – because if you’re Kubrick you can make a gangster film and then a sci-fi film and then a period drama. You can be exploring similar themes but the individual films stand on their own. The summer thing has been consistent – with the first one I was like, ‘OK, this is gonna be a summer record’, and the timing just lined up for this one. When I’d finished it, the thing that was on my mind was, ‘I wanna tour this Rose City Band stuff.’ At the end of Summerlong there’s the two songs that are joined, there are some longer parts, but the pandemic hit right when it was supposed to come out.

ROSE CITY BAND

EARTH TRIP

THRILL JOCKEY, 2021

The excellent, darker third record, featuring guests including North Americans’ Barry Walker

If Summerlong was bright and forward-moving, Earth Trip is kind of the letdown record, more in place, more earthy. When the pandemic hit I thought I’d do a winter record, ’cause it was kind of a downer time. But circumstance intervened and it didn’t happen, summer did come and it was really weird and pretty traumatic but also beautiful in a lot of ways.

I took a lot of solace in nature and in going into the woods and to the lake and having some solitude, but at the same time nature was pushing back and saying, ‘Hey, things are not alright.’ It was an Earth trip, basically, it felt like the Earth was trying to communicate something very forcefully to human nature and culture. It still seems like a lot of humans can’t get the message – it’s amazing, I don’t know what it’s gonna take!

With the pedal steel and the harmonica and the mandolin on these records, I’m careful with it because you can very easily veer into cliché. They do signify something, it’s not crass like, ‘Here’s our country record because that’s what people are supposed to do these days’. These are things that I enjoyed from the things I listened to when I was a teenager and have always wanted to incorporate but never had a place for in my other projects. I’m obsessed with pedal steel; I don’t have one because I know you really have to dedicate yourself to playing one well.

[Bitchin Bajas’] Cooper Crain mixed this record. He’s an old friend, so I just sent him the tracks and some notes and he got it right away. I told him I wanted it psychedelic, but not overly psychedelic, more like when you take mushrooms in the woods and things just start to get a little weird, you just start feeling it. A little blurry on the edges. He knew exactly what I meant.

Because I couldn’t put together a band to tour Summerlong, I thought I’d put together a kind of virtual band for this record just to get some fresh blood into it. It really did help – Sanae played some piano on it, John was on the drums again, Ryan Jewell was on percussion and Barry Walker plays pedal steel on half the record. It adds such an amazing vibe. I’ve got a band together now, so we’re working on trying to get some shows lined up. I don’t wanna speak ahead of myself, but I do like this run of a new record every summer, so we’ll see. I have the whole summer ahead of me and I’ve got nowhere to go and nothing to do basically, so we’ll see.

Earth Trip is out now on Thrill Jockey