Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust: In Conversation with Robert Poss

It’s funny how artists from so-called ‘different’ sound worlds often align. Speaking to Roger Clark Miller last month, and while better known as the spearhead of definitive proto-punks Mission of Burma than for his solo works, the very same could be said of Robert Poss. One wouldn’t normally draw a line from Miller to Poss, but they actually should, for their end destination is the same, arriving in the world of experimentalism from punk.

Like Miller’s endeavours in Mission of Burma, Poss is better known as the chief orchestrator of the legendary Band Of Susans. A band that straddled the orbits between noise-rock, post-punk and the avant-garde, this collision saw the New York band deliver some of the most memorable moments in guitar-based music of their time, led by the metallic flash and bang of Hope Against Hope (1988) and Love Agenda (1989), through to what many consider the band’s golden period in The Word and the Flesh (1991), Veil (1993) and their final LP, Here Comes Success (1995).

Since calling time on Band Of Susans, Poss has forged a solo career by marrying up ideas from left field places. And in true fashion, he has made them work in completely unique ways. With a plethora of collaborations and solo albums, including Distortion Is Truth (2002), Frozen Flowers Curse the Day (2018) and his most recent release, Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust (2024), Poss’ work ranges from fractured, guitar-based explorations to straight up rockers, inspired by everything from avant-garde to The Rolling Stones.

“I make no apologies for being confused,” smiles Poss, as we speak over Zoom. “For a confusion of interests, I can go and listen to the most extreme, like Pan Sonic, or I can listen just pure drone, pure noise, pure electronic stuff and be perfectly happy and get the same visceral enjoyment that I get when I listen to rock stuff. I’m still cursed with a desire to put on some record by the Kinks from 1967 and think, ‘Oh, that’s so great, I’m going to write something like that’,” he laughs.

Talk pivots to Poss’ solo canon where he has worked alongside some of the most prominent voices in experimentalism. Firstly, the late Phill Niblock, who Poss was introduced to in 1979 by his Band Of Susans bandmate, Susan Stenger.

“His stuff is pure drone, much more in the world of La Monte Young,” says Poss. “Phill died last year, but he’s been a major influence and a mentor of sorts. I engineered records for him, played on his records and played gigs with him, all over. He wrote a piece for Susan and me called Stosspeng, which we premiered at the Donau Festival in Austria in 2007 when we were guests of Throbbing Gristle,” says Poss, before recounting his time alongside New York touchstones, Suicide, where he did the duo’s front-of-house sound, also working with Alan Vega on one of Stenger’s music projects.

It’s this wide array of influences that are largely responsible for the Robert Poss sound. One that is all about texture and tone, sinking its hooks in from the very first note. “You’re not going to get me to play jazz or something else. I originally started out as a bass player, and then I became like a blues guitarist,” says Poss, opening up on his formative years. “When I was a teenager, I would learn the Dwayne Allman parts off some Allman Brothers record, or I would learn the Eric Clapton parts off a Cream record. I can still play all that. I seldom do it, but it’s still back in there somewhere.”

These moments are evident on Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust, too A coalition of Poss’ ideas, seamlessly rolled into one release. “There was one track called Hagstrom, Hagstrom Fragment… it’s basically me playing lead guitar. I mean, why not? It was fun, but it’s me sounding like Mick Taylor or something,” he says. “It’s so different than what you’re used to hearing, but this is the advantage of being old and really not having a high-profile career. I’m not some rock star, so I can do whatever I want.”

Poss’ ability to blur the lines between extremities is a feat few others have matched, and it’s probably what sparked John Peel’s interest, which eventually led to the band’s Peel Sessions EP in 1992. “I put the first record in an envelope, and I went to the post office and mailed it to England,” says Poss, recounting the first Peel hook-up. “I had no connection. I had no manager. John Peel just liked it and played it. That’s where the British labels heard of us,” he says.

A veteran of New York, while Poss is talking to me from there, it’s only a fleeting visit – after 45 years as a New Yorker, he is in the final process of re-locating to Boston. “I moved here in 1980 in the East Village, and we’re selling our apartment now that I’ve lived in since 1985, so it’s a little traumatic,” he says. “I’m such an urban person, and now I’m going to become suburban. We’ll see what happens, I might have to change my hairstyle or something,” he laughs.

On the back of two recent collaborations, firstly alongside Ed Cornell for last year’s Definitive Spaces, then earlier this year with Polish artist Opollo for the excellent Otago, Poss confirmed that he and Stenger also continue to collaborate. “We’re probably going to do some kind of duo. I do various remixes and have a lot of stuff on Bandcamp,” he says. And while it will no doubt be adjacent to the pair’s work together in Band Of Susans, naturally the latter is where our conversation begins.

Sun 13: What are your earliest memories of Band Of Susans?

Robert Poss: “This was a group that came together, in sort of a strange way. I had been in other bands in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut… Tot Rocket, which was sort of a punk band, and we put out three seven inches. That morphed into a group called Western Eyes, which was an outgrowth of Tot Rocket but then we had an electronic music composer, Nicolas Collins, remix our stuff. This was around 1984, and then briefly I was in the band Public Image, which is a whole story in and of itself.”

S13: Wow…

RP: “Basically, I auditioned and was in the band for about two weeks, and then they decided they didn’t want to have me learn all the material, so they rehired the old guitarist. But it was a very funny episode, because I was going to start graduate school in journalism at Columbia University. Like a lot of people, when you don’t know what you want to do, you [think], ‘Go to school!’

“Around ’85 and ’86 I did a solo cassette called Sometimes, which was sort of the roots of Band Of Susans. I was playing around with some digital delays which were still new at the time, and I would set up a drone on one digital delay, and I would set up a repetitive riff on the other digital delay, and then I would play along. So it was inherently a three-guitar situation. I had written off any attempts to do anything other than what I wanted to do, meaning there was no sense of what stylistic niche I was going to fill or what I was going to try to do… something that’s just my ideas, no collaboration.

“At some point I decided to have a band to play this material, but I was going to get friends who don’t even play! Susan Stenger was a very accomplished musician, but she had never played bass; she studied flute at the Conservatory in Prague, so I got her on board to play bass. And then I got two other friends of mine who happened to be named Susan, and I basically taught them how to play guitar, meaning I taught them how to play only my weird, specific stuff… one was playing open tuning drones, and one was playing simple riffs. And so the provisional name of that group was, ‘Hey, how’s that band of Susans going?’ (laughs) We were not smart enough to pick a really good name. If we had picked a better name, I would probably be talking to you from my guitar shaped swimming pool on the Riviera. (laughs) We kept the name, which always sounded kind of lightweight and had connotations of the opposite of what we were.

S13: That’s true…

RP: “I was doing drum machine with three guitars, then I got my friend, Ron Spitzer – an incredibly talented musician who’d played drums, bass, keyboards and could sing, and was my best friend – to do a little to augment the drum machine. So the band came together in this very odd way. At some point I thought we’ll make a record, so I got the money together on my own little label, Trace Elements Records, which was a label that Tot Rocket had been on, and we went into a studio and recorded these four songs. I produced it, and it was very basic. I got my friend, Alva Rogers, to sing some backup vocals, and we put out this 12 inch with a really hideous looking cover that was pink and green that most people have not seen outside of the US. It was designed to be hideous… a sort of a play on the Sex Pistols artwork.

“I sent a record off to various people, and one day on the way to my day job – at that point, I was working at a law firm as a legal assistant – I opened the New York Times, and there is Robert Palmer, who was the premier rock critic of the day in New York City, and it said, ‘Robert Poss has done a bunch of stuff, but this is a cool thing, this Band Of Susans’. I called my mother up and told her check out the New York Times on page C-5. (laughs) I had gotten press for the other records I had done, but never something like this. When I came home from work, there was a literally a telegram, from A & M Records, saying, ‘We read about this Band Of Susans, could you please send us a copy’,

“I talked to various people, and a friend of mine involved in the music business named Cheryl Payne, said, ‘Send it to Rouska Records and to this guy, Paul Smith’ who had a label called Blast First. Ultimately, he signed us and that was the beginning of our real ‘career.’ We played our first gig on January 31, 1987 in the basement of a local bar, but we never intended to be a real band: it was sort of like my project. But what was so cool was that for the first time in my life, I had done exactly what I wanted to do, without any concern of commerciality or acceptance or even fitting in.”

S13: A friend of mine still speaks fondly of Band Of Susans’ U.K. tour and your show in Leeds…

RP: “That Leeds gig was in 1988. Blast First had us tour with Dinosaur Jr. and Rapeman…. worst name in the world, but a great band. I became good friends with Steve Albini. We were sort of thrown into the deep end. Prior to that, we’d done a quick US tour with Wire. We were introduced to them because, at that point, Paul Smith was sort of managing them. That was also in ’88, but the personnel of the band kept changing. Susan Lyall was a costume designer, and Susan Tallman was an art critic. They weren’t musicians, so they weren’t going to give up their lives to play in a band. (laughs) We played a few gigs with them, but soon enough, we needed somebody else, so we got Karen Haglof, who I had known because she played in the Rhys Chatham group with me; fantastic woman, fantastic guitarist. And then we got Page Hamilton, who went on to form the band, Helmet.

“And so we went on tour with Wire with Karen, Page, Susan Stenger, myself, and Ron Spitzer was drumming. The tour with Wire was fantastic, and we became really good friends; I had a long relationship with them for many years. And then we did that U.K tour. We released five CDs, a couple EPs, did extensive touring in the US… I think we played maybe 42 out of 50 states. We played in 12 foreign countries in Europe, and the band was together from really, I would say ’86 to ’95.

“I have a theory that unless you are the Mekons or a few others, bands just stay together for about 10 years, and then you start getting diminishing returns. So we had our nine or 10 years and then broke up. Susan moved to England, and then Ireland, and I retreated into my own world and started doing solo stuff.”

S13: Speaking of that, you recently played a show with Chris Brokaw. You’ve both had similar trajectories over the years, albeit at slightly different times. How did you two meet?

RP: “We played some shows with the band Come with Thalia Zedek, so that’s how I met Chris. The funny thing is that long, long ago, I think Chris actually wanted to audition for Band Of Susans, but I think he was in Boston. I didn’t know who he was, and I sort of blew him off, which is sad, although he went on to do great things. He’s one of my favourite guys and favourite guitarists. He was drumming in Codeine, and then with Come, and in Thalia Zedek… his guitar playing was just fantastic. He’s done a variety of things, from more pop to some ambient stuff. Moving to Boston, I thought, ‘Who do I know here?’ Chris, who’s lived both in Boston and New York, was in Boston, so we put that gig together.”

S13: Going back to Band Of Susans and saying how you sort of orchestrated the band, it got me thinking about Glenn Branca, because in some respects, the band feels more like an accessible version of that idea…

RP: “The funny thing is, I never played with Glenn, but I played with Rhys Chatham. There was this dichotomy in that world of… it was always Rhys versus Glenn, and there was sort of this competition, and each one claimed that the other one taught the other one everything they knew, which is not true. With Band Of Susans, I always thought – and this is the story of my life – I’ve always been torn between rock and then so-called serious music. I had a lot of background with Rhys and with Phil Niblock. Susan introduced me way in the ’70s to John Cage and David Tudor and Christian Wolf and Julius Eastman. I studied at Wesleyan, and Alvin Lucier was there. So I’ve had a great interest in what was then called new music, which was sort of the term for avant-garde and experimental music of the ’60s and ’70s.

“With Band Of Susans, partially because it’s orchestrated as you say, like the Branca and Chatham stuff, I had one foot in more serious music, and one foot in The Rolling Stones or punk and The Clash and all that stuff. I think Band Of Susans did walk the line between the two. Sometimes I’m torn, like, ‘Should I just do ambient, drone, crazy stuff, or should I just do pop songs’. I never can bring myself to do just one or the other, so I combine them!

“The other thing is that Band Of Susans – unlike most rock bands that we’re grouped with like My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth – we didn’t jam and figure out stuff. I basically wrote the stuff, or Susan wrote the stuff. I would record the parts on a four-track cassette, and I would teach them to the band, and this even included drum parts and bass parts. Susan started writing songs later, and she did the same thing. It was literally composed in a precise manner, and I would get my long-suffering musicians to like play stuff exactly the way I wanted it. (laughs) So in that context, yes, it was much more similar to Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham. When I went to start doing my solo stuff, again, I had no constraints. I had rediscovered analogue synthesisers and I had a big module set up, and the first record, Distortion is Truth, was really a mixture of electronic music, drone and more ambient and instrumental stuff. There were only one or two songs on that with lyrics or singing. So, in a sense, after the demise of the band, I failed a certain freedom again to just do whatever I wanted.”

S13: Having one foot in both camps of serious music and pop as you say, Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust, kind of encapsulates that in a way. What were your ideas behind it?

RP: “Well, that was really intentional. I still love to write rock songs with a verse and a chorus or with lyrics. The last record I had done was 2018 and the prior two records had done a lot of music for dance. A lot of that material was music I had written specifically for three different choreographers, Sally Gross, Gerald Casel, and Alexandra Beller. This record, why I called it Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust was that I wanted to do some straightforward kind of drone and ambient instrumental stuff. But I had a few ideas kicking around that were really like rock songs, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to put those on’. If you were to listen to just to those rock songs, there’s three or four of them, you would think, ‘Oh, there’s another Band Of Susans kind of rock thing’. If you were to listen just to the inner-mental stuff, you would have a different impression.

“I always wonder whether I’m undercutting myself by mixing and matching, because it makes me as an artist harder to characterise, as different people focus on different elements. I was joking with somebody the other day, and said the next record I’m going to do is going to be pure noise, pure, drone stuff, and maybe I’ll do a second record that’ll be rock songs. So then, maybe I’ll choose a different name for one of the records, so I won’t give this confusion of heterogeneity. But I’m quite happy with this recent record. I do feel that the rock stuff works with the other stuff, you know? I feel there’s a consistency of sound and sonics and guitar playing, and I really enjoyed making it.”

S13: Splicing those two elements together, did you have that concept in mind before you started writing these songs, or is it a bit more flexible than that?

RP: “It’s very flexible. I call my process  ‘improvisation into structure.’ I will just put on a tape recorder and I’ll just start playing. Maybe I’ll start with the bass line, or a drum part, or a guitar riff, or I’ll start with a chord progression. I record very quickly; this is the way I did all Band Of Susans stuff. I record something, and then I go back and don’t listen to what I’ve recorded. And then I play something else on it, and I don’t listen to that, and then I go back and record something else on it. I want each part to be spontaneous. Of course, I may go back and clean things up… if I play the wrong note, or I don’t change chords at the right place. With this record, it was just a series of ideas. In other words, I don’t set out to write a record, I just write each piece individually.”

S13: That’s interesting…

RP: “A lot of the Band Of Susans stuff was all first take arrangements. I had a very creative period, and I was able to just sit down and create this stuff without thinking. As I’ve got older, I’ve become extremely lazy, so I don’t have the patience to refine stuff. Which is funny, because for most of my life, I was so concerned with that final five per cent of quality and recording. Now I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s good, let’s move on’. I don’t fixate on minutia as much as I used to. I’m 69-years-old, I’ve been doing it since I was 12, so I kind of know what I’m doing. If I don’t, I shouldn’t do it anymore, you know?” (laughs)

“Whether it’s ego or whatever it is, I have a certain faith in my own ability to just do this, so I just do it! A lot of it’s improvised, almost like I’m jamming with myself, in the sense that I just play something and I play something else. It’s almost as spontaneous as if I was working with another musician. So I sort of have like Robert Alter Ego bass player, Robert Alter Ego drummer, Robert Alter Ego guitarist, and we’re all playing together, just not simultaneously.” (laughs)

S13: Speaking of first takes and chords, how important is tone? Because when I listen to something like Sin Embargo from Love Agenda, straight away everything just feels alive in your head…

RP: “I’ve always been fanatical about distortion and the sound of guitars. I have very specific guitars and pedals and amps. In the beginning of Band of Susans, I would sit there for hours upon hours plugging in different pedals and different orders and EQ. I’m looking for a sound, and I can sort of hear it. Then I find it and stick with it. But yes, Sin Embargo is another one of those where it’s very much a range. The guitar parts interlock and sort of play against each other. But yet I’m still obsessed with the guitar sound and timbre and texture. The funny thing is that I would buy a new guitar or pedal that would inspire me to write a new song. I’m so fixated on the gear that a guitar itself will suggest something. Two distortion pedals put together will suggest a sound, which is why I’ve accumulated so much gear over the years. But I still always come back to the same basic sonic signature, and it’s based upon certain guitars, amps and pickups.

“I can do other things. When I play with other bands, I do whatever they want me to do, to a certain extent, but usually the reason they want me is because they want my sound. I’ve played in a couple different bands in New York in the last few years, and I was asked to play because they wanted me, not because I’m a great musician in the sense of knowing how to play lots of chords. Now I am old, I can be an old blues guy, right? But when I was younger, I thought I was really more like Albert King. He’s got four riffs, and he plays them unlike anybody else in the world, but that’s enough! Same thing with Johnny Thunders. So with me, I have about half a dozen things that are me, and that’s what you get, and I’ll keep doing those same things till I’m dead, because that’s me!”

S13: How did your recent collaborations with Ed Cornell and Opollo’s Jarek Leskiewicz come about?

RP: “Those were really fun. Those people just approached me and said, ‘Do you want to do something?’ Anyone who wants to do something with me, I’ll basically do it. Unless it’s something that’s politically offensive. I love collaborating, and these long-distance collaborations are quite interesting because, I’m not in Poland, or I’m not in wherever he sends me something and I says, ‘What about this?’ And then he sends me something else, and I say, ‘Okay, here’s this’. It’s inspiring, and I’m really happy with those projects, because they just came out of the blue. It was their vision, and they asked me to contribute, and I did. I always said, ‘If you don’t like it, fine, I’ll do something else, or don’t use it’. I’m not precious about my own stuff when I’m collaborating. I hope I’ll do more stuff like that.”

S13: With something like Throne of Blood, politics played a part of your work in the past. Do they influence your more recent works?

RP: “There are a couple of things there. I was very influenced in the late ’70s by The Clash and Gang of Four. They really struck the right balance of polemic and fun. The Gang of Four songs are really political but they’re also kind of hilarious. Some of them are just really clever and sardonic and witty. I was just listening to The Clash on the radio in the car the other day with my wife… I think it was Tommy Gun, and he’s talking about kings and queens and all the stuff, and I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s great’. I’ve written a handful of songs I would consider to be political, but I have no illusions that I’m going to change the world. The world has become so screwed up that it’s hard to know where to begin.

“I’ve been reading a lot of spy novels. I get very involved in espionage and spy stuff, and I read everything, whether it’s John le Carre or Len Deighton. There’s a reference in one of the lyrics, which refers to MI5. It’s oblique, and I’m sort of making a reference to some espionage terms, but I didn’t print the lyrics, they are sort of obscure, and that’s fine, you know? I’m not a political person in the sense that I follow politics as disgusting as it is these days. I probably follow politics the way other people follow sports. I don’t really watch sports on television, but I will go to C-SPAN and watch some congressional hearing, which is kind of sad.

“But I guess there’s a certain intellectual quality that I don’t deny. There’s a book about Wire’s Pink Flag [thirty-three and a third]… which I contributed to. Part of the thing what I liked about Wire, they didn’t apologise for being smart or pretend that they were proletarian tough guys. There’s this whole thing in rock ’n’ roll that you’re supposed to be working class and poor and kind of tough and violent. There’s something to be said for that, but on the other hand, if you look at The Rolling Stones’ lyrics from the period of ’67 to ’69 – there’s some really clever writing. They’re not just writing about girls in cars. There’s that line from Salt of the Earth, talking about elections. ‘It’s a parade of grey suited grafters, a choice of cancer or polio’. That is a great line about the lack of choice in elections, and it’s also poetic. I like smart stuff. I also like Johnny Thunders and the New York Dolls. Again, [it] was smart in a different way.”

S13: Pere Ubu, too..

RP: “Yeah, David Thomas, all that stuff. I’m not really good about writing about cars and girls, I’ll tend to write about in some inner-angst or some social problem or some weird fixation on espionage. These days I’m writing fewer lyrics. I was thinking the other day that I’ve got to start carrying around a pen and pencil, because what I like are little aphorisms and phrases which I can turn into songs. These come and go, and I forget them now, so I’m going to start writing them down. I enjoy the lyrics with Band Of Susans… we never really hyped the lyrics, and a lot of people don’t even care about them, but there’s some good ones there. For me, it’s like poetry. I like poems and literature and language and turns of phrase. That’s always been a part of who I am, and I think it will continue to be.”

S13: Do you work on music every day?

RP: “Lately, I’ve been very lucky, because we moved to Boston, and we live on my sister’s property in a cottage that was the caretaker’s. There was an old painting studio on the property, and my big sister graciously let me turn it into a music studio. It’s just 100 yards from where I live, so lately I’ve been working on music every day. But when I say working, sometimes I sit there and want to see what this guitar sounds like through this pedal, or maybe I’ll rearrange my board or check out plugs. I don’t sit down and try to write every day. I’m not one of those writers who has to write every day or keep a journal; I’ll go for a week or two, and I won’t really [do anything]. Right now, I’m away from my guitar, so of course, when I get back to Boston, I’ll probably be inspired.

“It comes in spurts (obligatory Richard Hell reference). I suddenly get really inspired, and I’ll write a bunch of stuff, or maybe I’ll have a deadline. As I said, because I’ve collaborated with choreographers and some visual artists, occasionally they’ll need something in a week, and of course, then I’m totally on it. I don’t like to blow deadlines.”

S13: Comparing how people consume music these days to when Band Of Susans were active in the ’80s and ’90s, do you feel fortunate that the band was active at that time?

RP: “It’s a classic blessing and curse. The blessing is that anybody with a laptop can make music, anybody with an email address can send music to Slovenia where you used to have to go to the post office and pay $10 to send a CD. That’s really good that anybody can make music. The downside is anybody can make music, so there’s so much content and hype. When I talk to younger people, which is almost everybody these days, I say, ‘Listen, when I was coming up, cut and paste was not a metaphor’ (laughs). It was literally cut and paste with a pair of scissors and glue, and people are like, ‘What?’

“When we toured with Band Of Susans, there was no GPS, there was really no email. There were fax machines and there were maps, so when we were touring and we needed to do an interview, we would have to go to the side of the road to a phone booth and do an interview. When we were going from Prague to Bratislava, we had to pull out the map. When we were late for a sound check, we had to try to find a phone booth and try to calculate by taking a measurement how long it would take to go from Minneapolis to Chicago.

“These days you have the internet, and you can find almost anything. If I suddenly wonder what kind of pop music they have in Botswana, I can go to the 10 music sites in Botswana, and I can find out what it sounds like. So that’s cool. It’s a great education, but it’s also overwhelming.

“Back then, it was much more about discovery. It was a sort of a cult thing. Everybody knew each other. There were not that many record labels or journalists. There were maybe 75 fanzines that we knew about across the world, and you knew who each writer was and what band was on which independent label and different labels.

“I laugh not because every band in the world is reuniting, but the audiences these bands have in the reunion are 10 times what they were when they were out doing stuff, because not that many people knew about them. Band Of Susans will never reunite for a number of reasons. Ron had a serious stroke and can’t drum, and Susan lives in Ireland. I tend not to go to reunion shows, because I have a great memory of whatever band it was in its prime. I keep that memory. People have said, ‘You guys would be so big if you reunited’. Maybe we wouldn’t, but I don’t have the patience to re-learn all our stuff to make it really, really good. I wouldn’t want to do it half-assed.”

Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust is out now. Purchase from Bandcamp.