Lovely Murk: In Conversation with Oxbow

If ever there was a band that captured the chaos of someone trying to escape from a burning building, it’s Oxbow.

While fitting that their new album, Love’s Holiday, includes a song referencing such scenes (The Night the Room Started Burning), the San Francisco four-piece – vocalist Eugene Robinson, guitarist /pianist / arranger Niko Wenner, bassist Dan Adams and drummer Greg Davis – have spent an eternity in the ire of mayhem. And while this moment directly paints the image of disaster, sonically there have been many moments throughout their illustrious canon that are as close to the mark, perhaps none closer than The Snake &… The Stick – the sibling tracks from 2002’s An Evil Heat.

Dislocating the essence of noise-rock and jazz in unhinged ways, Oxbow have always been uncompromising, shifting the paradigm where the mood takes. Their basic tenet: no rules. Chief exponents of abstract expression, through a maelstrom of white-hot noise they have bastardised every well-informed idea of blues and rock music as we know it.

Through decades of the creative friction that always produces the best art, Oxbow began their journey with the mind-fuckery of 1989 debut, Fuckfest. Fan favourite King of the Jews followed in 1991 before Oxbow forged a path with Steve Albini for Let Me Be A Woman (1995) and Serenade in Red (1996). At the turn of the century came the screaming, foul sorcery of An Evil Heat, and after 2007’s The Narcotic Story, the band released their high watermark 10 years later with Thin Black Duke.

Following last year’s excellent live release with the late German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, the moment ended a five year absence, which saw the members of Oxbow plotting Love’s Holiday whilst also pursuing other endeavours – most notably Robinson whose involvement with Buñuel saw the band release the final part of their trilogy, Killer’s Like Us, which included a barnstorming performance at the 2022 edition of Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival. Oxbow are set to perform at this year’s event in support of Love’s Holiday.

Love is never simple. Through the imperfections and ruins of life, it’s never a sure thing – a constant challenge in piecing together broken fragments of the past, and Love’s Holiday sees Oxbow drag us across those fault lines.

Resuming with long-time producer Joe Ciccarelli, Love’s Holiday is staple Oxbow. Wenner’s arrangements alongside Robinson’s narratives dance on a knife’s edge (Icy White & Crystalline and album centre piece, All Gone). Through abrasive textures and contrast, on Love’s Holiday Oxbow ride across the underbelly of their esoteric sound world in what is yet another forceful statement over a reign that has produced many.

Opening track Dead Ahead sees Wenner leading the charge, his serrated, swerving guitars careering towards the eye of the storm. Which is where the majesty of Lovely Murk awaits. Featuring Lingua Ignota’s Kristin Hayter, Lovely Murk sees Oxbow intersecting beauty and brutality like never before. Anchored by Adams’ hefty bass weight and Davis’ militant percussive blasts, 1000 Hours captures a similar essence, as Robinson wails “Life has lost its taste without you / I don’t think I can live without you”.

Once again, Robinson’s performance is rich, soulful, and deep in the grooves, juxtaposing tenderness with the debauchery of The Night the Room Started Burning and Million Dollar Weekend. The latter mirroring a James Ellroy protagonist.

And while Wenner’s searing harmonics during The Second Talk is the hairpin turn of Love’s Holiday, it’s fitting that the album concludes with Gunwale. A grand, lumbering statement that evokes the imagery of sailor, alone and deep in combat with the high seas. In many ways, it ties the story together.

At the beginning of June, the members of Oxbow agreed to talk about Love’s Holiday. No-nonsense and a band with a reputation that (quite rightly) doesn’t suffer fools, it’s perhaps one of the most daunting encounters I’ve ever had with a band. And of course, the nerves aren’t helped by the time difference across the Atlantic, which sees us convening over Zoom at the interesting time of 7 a.m….

Some Gift: An Interview with Enablers

Sun 13: The band has been together for so long. With you all having different creative backgrounds and outlets, do you see Oxbow as the core to your creativity? 

Dan Adams: “No. I think Oxbow is one of the primary recipients of creativity of a certain type. But the reason we can create in Oxbow is because of all the other things in our lives, which are also outlets for our creativity, which can include everything from figuring out how to feed yourself and your family to figuring out whatever you need to do to stay alive and stay content. I think we’ve all got different pursuits, and that makes Oxbow an interesting channel for all of us to create together. I would hope that’s true for bands in general. It’s an addition of what everybody brings to the table. The creativity is a sum of what happens outside that band.” 

Eugene Robinson: “I remember Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the San Francisco publisher and poet. He just passed away recently, but I was a huge fan of his, and had the occasion to both interview him and socialise with him. At one point, we were at his studio, and he says, ‘Hey, I want to show you something’. And he walks me over to an easel and pulls off a cloth and showed me some of his painting. And it was really terrible! (laughs) It was substandard and not very good despite him being a great poet. But I maintain the thing that Meister Eckhart would talk about: ebullitio, where creativity is this kind of this wellspring. And everything that I do that doesn’t include the stuff that Dan described as feeding myself – and even that is done with some measure of creativity – is all creative to me. So, I’m not really bifurcating as long as I can keep busy, because idle hands are the devil’s playground. As long as I can keep busy with something that engages the mind, I don’t have a strong preference for it being this thing or that thing. 

“Of course, writing is the easiest of them all because it’s something that you do fundamentally alone; it’s not a collective activity. But they all answer the dictates of our souls, I would hope. That’s the essence of how creativity works through us, or through me, at least.” 

Niko Wenner: “Yeah. I think about it in this way that there’s always lots of things to say, and that some of it makes sense for the collective that we have – the four of us – and some of it doesn’t. I think the core is within each of us, and Oxbow is one window into that basic creative – as Eugene said – wellspring. It’s pretty fun when our interests align, like a key in a lock and the key has to hit all those different tumblers correctly to satisfy all four of us. When it does, it’s a pretty special thing. But we all have lots of other things that don’t fit in that same keyhole.” (laughs) 

DA: “It’s funny you use the word wellspring, because I was thinking about one thing that is really nice about Oxbow. It’s this defined pipeline, so maybe similar to a wellspring. I think what you’re getting at is when things are in this pipeline, it’s a very pure creation environment. And when we’re all in the rehearsal room playing, or when we’re on stage, it’s very fluent even in the process of struggling to make sense of something new. It’s very familiar, and it’s very comfortable to just explore and be creative. So, in that regard, it is an important and rare type of creative outlet.” 

S13: Niko brought up a point there, which got me thinking as well. Having worked together for so long, there’s a consistency with the new music that you release, every five or six years. Is there like an unspoken telepathy between you guys when it’s time to get together to make a new record? 

ER: (Laughs) “No.” 

NW: “They happen as soon as we can make them. And it’s like this constant, long-distance race, on my part. Record after record. I imagine when records appear, it maybe seems something like, ‘Oh, they got together last week’. I know you’re not saying that Simon, (laughs) but I also know that when a record I want to hear appears in a way it does feels like a magical thing. In reality, in fact, what I did today was work on songs for our next record. It’s just constant writing, recording, working on the recordings, working on the songs, scheduling the studio, more recording, scheduling people, writing out trumpet parts. And then life intervenes. Sometimes it takes a really long time to get the record across the finish line, but it’s always happening. Always ongoing. This last record Love’s Holliday has songs that are 20 years old, 10 years old, and a song that was written maybe two weeks before we recorded it. We take everything good that comes and I’m always working on this stuff.” 

S13: I didn’t realise there was material on Love’s Holiday that had spanned back that long. When did the whole album start coming together?  

NW: “A bulk of the songs were begun writing and rehearsal in 2016/2017. We started recording in Fall 2019. Then we had maybe a five-day session in March 2020. And then the lockdown and nothing happened again until we recorded vocals for all 17 of those songs and started one new song, I think July of 2021. And then it’s, you know, always working, always thinking, always doing something for the recording. [A] long process.” 

S13: It feels like Oxbow’s most personal record to date. I don’t know whether you see it like that?  

ER: “How are we being personal in this instance? Because a claim could be made that all of them were personal. How are you hearing that?” 

S13: It feels more overt. Oxbow have always written love songs, but here it feels like you’re doing it more directly.  

ER: “Yeah. You know, I think maybe the only movie that Martin Scorsese won Best Director for was this movie The Departed, and a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed until about the last 30 seconds. It ruined the entire movie for me. If you remember the camera pulls out and from this apartment where this crime is taking place. You can see the State Capitol in the background and a rat runs along the balcony. And I’m like ‘Jesus Christ. Do we really need that? Do you think that we did not understand that? How stupid do you fucking think we are?’ And of course, that was the one that won him the Oscar. So, I would say to a certain degree, lyrically at least, that Love’s Holiday is our rat across the balcony (laughs).  

“One, it became an overwhelming preoccupation in the life of times of at least the person who was writing the lyrics. But then, on the other hand, it was getting nettlesome that people never understood or weren’t getting, or I was somehow too opaque to get across that these were all… the Wire came the closest where they talked about the motivating principle behind Oxbow as being some unspecified disaster. And I was like, ‘Okay, we got somebody who’s getting warmer’. But I think Love’s Holiday was a very succinct attempt to not conceal but reveal. So, in that sense, yeah, maybe if that would qualify personal, you might be right in that characterisation.” 

[Greg Davis joins the interview] 

NW: “I would say that the records have always been incredibly embarrassingly personal. And yes, we’ve made a move towards clarity. Now you can just tell, that’s the only difference.” (laughs) 

ER: “There’s also a struggle. We’re humans and have the same senses and emotions as anybody else. Going into it there was a real consciousness of the fact that most people do this – in my mind, lyrically what was trying to happen when discussing love – was happening poorly. In some cases, fine, there’s no pretence. I Want to Hold Your Hand, it feels very simple, and in that way, it succeeds, lyrically. But there’s a shitload of stuff from the rock canon that is embarrassing or poorly focused, or dishonest when love is the subject at hand, so the key was always to be able to say one true thing and have that be something that was being revealed without fear. Like, ‘What if people don’t like it? What if the person I wrote about…’ None of that. This is a last will and testament, the most honest thing you could ever say. And that was an attempt to do that.” 

S13: With Love’s Holiday the music was done before the lyrics, Eugene. Do you specifically have a pipeline for Oxbow lyrics, or is it more abstract, like pulling ideas from your poetry and journalism work? 

ER: “If I think back to it pretty carefully, I’ve said before that I view the first novel as Fuckfest through Thin Black Duke. To me, you could take the lyrics and lay them from beginning to end and it would tell a story as cohesive as anything that William Burroughs has done. So, the land, Terra incognito, the land beyond Thin Black Duke, I had nothing! But I wasn’t afraid of that nothing. And so there started to be a talk of when Joe [Ciccarelli] was available to record, and there started to be songs that were cropping up in practice, and I just start writing to the song.

“There’s always a narrative linkage, like all songs in Serenade in Red. But this was purely motivated by the music. It’s interesting, of course, that there still is a constancy to the thematic lyrical content, which seems to be an extended meditation on the nature of finitude and love. But how the songs came at me was completely random. They didn’t come to me in the final order that they appear on the record. But the lyrics even mixed up seem to drive home a certain point of view. So, it’s interesting. It’s compelling. It’s something I wouldn’t mind doing again.” 

NW: “I think the change in methodology, the change in how we make these records, does keep it fresh. For example, [with] Thin Black Duke, the music was written in the order that it was intended to appear on the album. And then at Joe’s suggestion we ended up moving the third song, Cold & Well Lit Place out of sequence, to be the very first song. This time, for Love’s Holiday it was fun; we had a group of 18 songs, and we just drew nine of them, again with help from Joe. That was really different to not have a sequence in mind. It was really refreshing. We’re a little bit too grim to be playful (laughs), but the process was not as deadly serious and certainly exciting.”  

“It’s good to change things up. Out of all our records, the third record that we made, Let Me Be a Woman, was somewhat the same way in that we went in without a sequence in mind, and recorded it from top to bottom with Steve Albini in four days. Four 12-hour days in San Francisco in 1993. We tend to work more quickly again now, for Love’s Holiday, and not be incredibly laboured. Whereas Thin Black Duke, writing in order required thinking about the trajectory of an album; what you need to begin, what music you need to start side two, or what music you need to finish ‘an opus’, a long 40-minute piece. Because we think about an album, we are making all-together as a whole. This writing and recording was much more song by song, and I think it’s strong in a different way because of the differences. I enjoyed that.” 

ER: “It’s only old people anyway who listen to albums. (laughs) For my kids, album is almost a word that they’re not familiar with…”  

S13: You’ve been through so many decades and seeing the landscape of music, art and the industry change so much with streaming and the like. Bands like Oxbow have such a cultish following that you’re almost immune from those elements in some respects. I’m not sure if that’s something you think about? 

ER: “Actually when we played Moers with Peter Brötzmann, I was as pleased and happy and amazed that we did that and could do that, as when we [Whipping Boy] played with King Diamond. Because King Diamond and Peter Brötzmann don’t play together; there are no circumstances in which you would reasonably expect to see them in the same venue, the same show, same festival, even. But somehow the common point between them is us. We’ve been in that situation a number of different times. It’s kind of a gift. (laughs) To use common parlance here, I feel fairly blessed that we are not genre bound.  

“I’ve got friends who are in Agnostic Front. They got a good thing going, and I love them and what they do, but I can’t honestly think without getting panicky about me doing hardcore now. It would feel weird for me to jump up and start singing America Must Die, which was a Whipping Boy song in 1981. It would seem very strange to me, and uncomfortable and not desirable.” 

NW: “Having been involved for decades, I think about changing things. A lot of that change is due to release format; the way people can consume music. As you know, going all the way back, the original commercial, music release format, wax cylinders, are very short in length. And then 78 RPM, shellac records, then you could make longer and longer bits of music with each new format. For example, the LP, the Long-Playing record format. Same with film, which were tiny little short loops originally. Eventually they were able to make long-form films, and include sound on the film so you could have a synced sound, etc. Technology advanced, and now, you know, back to Tik Tok and really short forms, both music and video. What that of course means is that the pendulum goes back and forth.  

“I myself really enjoy making long-form things like albums. But also, it’s super fun to make these brief interstitial pieces for the albums, too. That’s always been interesting to me. We did a bunch of 20 second improvised recordings a good while back. Overall, what I’ve realised after all these years is that we can sort of funnel ‘us’, what we do, into a lot of different formats. But we do really like long-form 40 minutes pieces, as a good amount of time. I think An Evil Heat, because of the drone piece Shine (Glimmer), ended up being 76 minutes. That was planned, to reach the max length that fits on a Compact Disc comfortably without the playback skipping.  

S13: Yeah, …Glimmer is like 32 minutes!  

NW: “Yeah. Again, specifically that length because of the format. For that record, An Evil Heat, we were running the tape recorders at 30 inches per second on two-inch tape. One roll of tape at that speed gives 15 minutes length. So, to get the length of song we stuck together two rolls of tape (laughs), and we were able to get… not 30 minutes, but it turned out that they happened to have a little extra on each roll. So, using all the resulting time, it’s 32 minutes and change, a few seconds. That was due to the limitations of tape format at the time. We couldn’t go any longer. To go that long, splicing two rolls of tape together to make double-length tape, was yet another challenge. Because we had to find rare, special reels that were 14 inches in size. The way the reels come from the factory is 12 inches. Anyway…  

“Short is good, but we love long-form.”  

DA: “I was going to put it another way. Since we’re immune to making money – we can do whatever we feel like doing and can do things in a way we feel comfortable, including to make a certain format which we feel serves the music best. There are enough people who will be interested in listening that it’s not a problem. It’s true, there are different ways media is consumed. There are still pockets of people consuming it in the same ways as they always have. So, I feel, like many things that we do, we’re going to choose the path that seems right to us and assume that some people will check it out and enjoy it as it is.” 

Light Up the Stars: Remembering Rick Froberg

S13: People may think that the terms beautiful and Oxbow shouldn’t go together, but Lovely Murk is one of the most beautiful songs you’ve written. Can you tell us about that one? 

NW: “I wrote that for my mom. She was quite ill with Alzheimer’s, and I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be in that position. To slowly lose your mind, in the end to lose yourself. It was way too personal for Oxbow, so I kept that to myself. I had a vocal melody and the guitar line and showed it to Joe, [and] he really liked it. That was in 2011, and in 2012, Lisa Meyer from Supersonic Festival in Birmingham England called up and said, ‘We’d like to have you come out and do something’. And that inspired me to orchestrate this song to play at Supersonic with what ended up being Oxbow Orchestra. It was not the rock band.

“Moving to the present, by 2019 I was ready to put the song on an Oxbow record. What you hear in the recording of Lovely Murk is the orchestrations that I did for Supersonic. And the voice singing my original melody with choral harmonies, as you know, is Lingua Ignota, Kristin Hayter. I asked her to sing the melody that I had originally sung and to multitrack and harmonise in that awesome Lingua Ignota style. Eugene wrote new lyrics. I asked Kristin to sing just a portion of the lyric, and I took the key down by a minor third to be able to work better in Eugene’s range. So that was a song from 2011. It took a while to get there, there’s a lot of pieces to it. But I’m quite pleased with how that song came out.”  

Greg Davis:“It was a fairly easy song to come together. When we were rehearsing it, a lot of times they’re not, and I remember that one falling together relatively simple. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it was an older song for Niko. Even though, for me, it was fairly new just as we were preparing for the record.” 

DA: “To me, with potential to be so simple and such beautiful simple phrases I found myself trying to figure out what to do through to help build a longer shape or trajectory. I ended up playing with a lot of restraint and intention to withhold resolution. There’s a natural drive toward resolution in these beautiful phrases, and there are many places where the bass just holds off and doesn’t go there. Eventually, the bass line resolves at the end of a section rather than at the end of a line. Such a simple piece can be surprisingly challenging; ways to find more depth by playing structural tricks and so on. It’s one of the few songs where I’ve actually written out a chord structure and harmonical alterations because I wanted to make sure that these resolutions happened within the time frame but at the right times in the song. It was an interesting process for me.”  

NW: “You chose to play a different instrument, a different bass on that recording. Why was that on that song?” 

DA: “That’s a good question. It’s funny that this is the only song I think I’ve ever recorded with Oxbow on a fretted bass. You might think, ‘Oh, it’s a beautiful, lush song that would ask for a fretless’ (laughs). But the kind of bell-like quality of the strings on frets, the clarity was really nice. There was a bass sitting in the studio, an old Fender precision that was a little beat up and tired, but pretty nice sounding. I don’t know why. I was playing it and we just used it. It sounded nice.” 

S13: With 1000 Hours and All Gone, they really run into each other, and it feels like they are centrepieces to the album. Were these two tracks written early in the process? 

NW: “All Gone is one of the two 20-year-old songs. And 1000 Hours is right smack in the middle of the bulk of the other newly composed songs, so they were created disparate in time.” 

GD: “And in fact, 1000 Hours was not nailed down, at least for me, how I was going to play it until we were in the studio. That one was very new. At least new for me, because I played it in the studio basically in a way that I had never played it before. At Joe’s polite insistence.” (laughs) 

S13: The Second Talk got me thinking about the creative tension within your songs… 

ER: “When you say creative tension, you mean in the body of the song. How does one develop creative tension in musical interplay in the space of a song?” 

S13: Yeah. The final product, like there’s always been to me, sonically at least, a lot of tension in Oxbow, and I think that’s a big pull for a lot of listeners. 

NW: So, there’s musical tension. There are various ways of meaning ‘creative tension’, what do you mean? 

S13: You guys don’t really strike me as a band that has a lot of tension coming into the studio… 

GD: “Oh my god, are you kidding?” 

(All laugh)   

NW: “I made my peace with it a long time ago. It makes what we do better. But our creative process is a torturous route. We have a lot of things in common, but we have different ways of expressing ourselves. Different hierarchies of interest, and different goals, I’d say. To mix as many metaphors as possible: When we finally agree on something, it’s been gone through with a fine-tooth comb. And pulled through the eye of a needle. Like I was saying, any creative consensus has to hit every tumbler in the lock to actually work, and it can be a really long, vast and arid desert to get through.” (laughs).  

ER: “For example, we had three versions of Three O’Clock from Serenade In Red. There was the seven-minute version, the nine-minute version, the 13-minute version. We listened to them all, and it was like the analogy before about the key in the tumbler, it was aggressively clear that the least radio-friendly version, the one that Geffen would least be likely to say that’s the one you should do was precisely the one that we should do, and that was a 13-minute one. That’s the one we used. It just sounded better to all of us all at the same time. So that was a really nice example of things working the other way. Despite the fact the song itself has a whole lot of creative tension, it touches on both types of tension. And in that instance, we were of a single mind. At least that’s how I remember it.” 

NW: “And then we took the longest take and slowed it down, so it takes even longer. (laughs) I think we recorded it in E and took it down a whole step to the key of D.” 

GD: “It’s shocking that we’re not making any money.”  

(All laugh)  

ER: “They say what qualifies bands that are successful is they have the word ‘You’ in the title of their songs. Bands that have ‘You’ in the title of their songs make much more money than bands that don’t.” 

DA: “I don’t care about you. Fuck you.” 

ER: “I guarantee you that song by Fear probably made them more money than any other song.”  

DA: (Laughs) “I’m going to offer up that the invention of email and texts has not been a healthy contribution to the way Oxbow naturally works. Somehow, if we’re in a room together talking about stuff, it’s barely tolerable. But sometimes the threads get pretty disjointed and frustrating.” 

GD: “There’s a lot of push and pull between all four of us. And us trying to subvert what the other one is doing consciously, I think, sometimes. But that mostly takes place before we get to the studio. Usually by the time we’re starting to record, everybody’s pulling in the same direction, so I think that’s why we’re able to keep doing this. And while the records, in my opinion, keep getting better, or certainly are as good as they’ve ever been. When we get into that environment, we still agree that we’re not fighting our way through the studio, so there’s not a lot of tension between us. We’ve already worked that out by the time we’re recording.”  

“DA: Thinking about what Greg just said… I mean, I’ve never talked about it, but I think we’re thrilled with the process of making this stuff we make when it comes down to work in the studio. We have pretty good faith that what comes out is going to be something that we like, and so that process is just about putting the work in and really thinking to step through the process and make a great product from what’s in all our heads. It’s a really nice process, but like Greg said, when we’re trying to figure out what the songs will become [and] how they’re going to come together, that process usually takes a long time, and it’s hard.” 

S13: I could be totally out of the ballpark here, but with the sailor in Gunwale, could they be construed as the protagonist to all these songs, potentially making this a concept record?  

ER: “I wouldn’t disagree with you. But again, this occurred outside of the realm of conscious planning. You haven’t seen it and are not familiar with it, so I’m talking about something that you don’t know, and that’s the video that we’ve done for a Gunwale. It was eerie and accurate without knowing it, necessarily. Annapaola Martin, the Italian director, visually captured the essence of the captain (laughs). The record starts with nautical imagery and then ends the same way, so ample use of sea and ocean and spreads and space, in the end were themes that played throughout.  

“But if you say that, as you said it, it will make Love’s Holiday sound like the second record to Oxbow’s first, which is Fuckfest through Think Black Duke, which has strong characterisations. You’ll mistake the two and it’s completely whatever happened with Love’s Holiday, at least lyrically speaking, was like the old psychic phenomena, automatic writing. It was not consciously planned by me, like I was sitting in practice listening to the music and writing to the music that I heard.  

“But if it slipped into some kind of Jungian mind thing, if that’s what was happening, I think that could be what you’re getting at. But it’s a very different idea than sitting down and creating Frank Johnson for The Narcotic Story, or some such thing. One was planned, one was unplanned, though they might look very much the same.” 

Oxbow U.K. Tour Dates:

• Friday, September 1 – Broadcast, Glasgow
• Saturday, September 2 – Supersonic Festival, Birmingham
• Sunday, September 3 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
• Monday, September 4 – Exchange, Bristol
• Tuesday, September 5 – Studio 9294, London

Love’s Holiday is out Friday via Ipecac Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.