By Keith Walsh
In less than two weeks the new supergroup Static will release their debut single and video “S Blonde.” These four friends, working remotely from their homes in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, created a project that defies convention by imposing limits on the technology that will be used. Specifically, Static will use only technology available in the 80s to craft soundtracks to a dark, dystopian “used future,” as it was described to me by Darwin Meiners. Let’s meet the four members of this innovative collective from California.
Darwin Meiners Darwin is businessman who in addition to his prolific musical career manages David J of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets. In Static he plays bass, guitar, synth and background vocals. I asked him about the collaborative process of creating music for Static.
“It was supposed to be creating a different sort of world,” says Darwin Meiners,” and having Julian play in it.” Julian is vocalist and lyricist Julian Shah-Tayler, who along with Darwin’s cowriter and co-performer Dustin Heald works with visual artist Mark Gleason to craft the sound and visual image of Static.
“It really is an art project, and we want to treat it like that,” Darwin says. “And it’s very much just four of us being authentic and working towards the project, not our own individual accolades or getting credit for anything. That’s not really what we’re interested in. Because the truth is we have meetings about mixes that Mark will give us feedback on. Mark doesn’t play anything but he gives us feedback. Everyone has a part in it.”
“We’ve got about 20 fragments,” Darwin continues. “We would just send them out to Mark and Julian and then they would they would kind of go ‘oh yeah, well that was really cool.’ And we kind of see who is reacting to the one the most and then we would go with that one, or maybe Julian would say, ‘oh, I got an idea for that one, right, you know character wise or what have you?”
Of Shah-Tayler, Darwin said “He’s used to having his hands on everything. And so this frees him up to sort of just go, ‘okay, I’m just going to react to the music instead of knowing what I want beforehand, instead of being completely involved in its creation.”
Mark Gleason Gleason is a classically trained artist who finds inspiration in the work of Titian, Rembrandt, and Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. In addition to his prolific painting habit, he teaches graphic design to high school students and is an avid music lover. In the early 80s, while a university student in New York, he DJ’d at clubs alongside electronic music artist Moby before he hit it big. I asked him about his role in sculpting the look of Static using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
“I was absolutely head over heels in love with a lot of album cover designs, especially anything on 4AD,” Gleason tells me. “There’s my painting and stuff, but there’s this other whole aspect to this — I want to ‘make.’ I want to do these things and so, you know, I guess that same approach applies to music just as easily as, as to more fine art stuff. And the nice thing about doing the design stuff is I can work with photography, I can work with typefaces, I can you know, decide does this look good in tone and in blue, or is this a good just as black and white? I’m doing all the switches very fast.”
In Zoom meetings the four members of Static would discuss the look of Static. “We wanted it to look a little more retro,” Gleason told me, “a little more like DYMO tape rather than nice fonts and stuff like that. And we were looking at things like any of the artwork from Peter Saville who did the Factory Records things, the look of Kraftwerk, we were talking a lot about making sure things were really, really Lo-Fi and glitchy any of the imagery that comes up with Suicide, any of the downtown New York, punk scene, you know, early Swans, early Sonic Youth kind of stuff. And I was trying to throw in a little bit more of a factory (of Andy Warhol) kind of look, you know? “
Dustin Heald Heald is a musician and a special effects artist for TV and films whose work has brought him to Hollywood and Cairo, Egypt. For Static, Heald plays bass, guitar, synth and backing vocals. Heald and Darwin trade audio files to create the sound fragments that are shared with Gleason and Shah-Tayler. Heald also directed and edited the video for “S Blonde.”
As Heald explained: “We initially picked a set of limitations so that we would face the same sort of walls that you would (encounter) when you’re limited by the technology that you have. Even though, you know, the sort of problem is that that we have an overabundance of technology. You can pick any one of hundreds of thousands of sounds.”
“Back in the day you’d be looking at just one or two synths that are sitting in the rehearsal room and that’s what you have to work with. So totally, you know, we chose our set of limitations early on it to work within those. Both Darwin and I produce music and I think we both have a tendency to you know, do really thick full lush layers of things.”
Heald told me more about the collaborative process of Static: “Darwin and I have worked on the initial parts of songs. Where were sort of equal in our input at the seed stage of the song, so all of the programming and keyboards that you hear are coming from either or both of us and then the guitar and bass stuff that’s going on top of that — Darwin’s mainly the bass player and I’m mainly the guitar player.”
Julian Shah-Tayler With Static, vocalist Julian Shah-Tayler, who has made a name for himself as a solo artist, and as an interpreter of David Bowie and Depeche Mode tunes (as a keyboard player in role of Alan Wilder in the band Strangelove) has a chance to focus entirely on vocals --a departure from his usual duties writing, performing and mixing almost everything.
In the case of Static’s debut single “S Blonde,” the performance is rather visceral. “Some of this stuff is (designed to be) as simple lyrically as possible and leave it as oblique as possible and let people draw their own conclusions,” Shah-Tayler told me during a phone conversation. “Darwin and Dustin send me over basically completed pieces of music — they sent me over grooves and vibes and then I do a pass over the top without listening to it and, you know, rant. Whatever comes out and I see it as a bit of automatic writing or subconscious speaking or something like that. So I don’t even hear this. I don’t listen to it first. I just start recording press play and start recording –I mean, this is the first take.” The end result is a vocal performance that’s powerful and frightening at the same time.
Given the cultural environment of the time, that’s not an unexpected result. Shah-Tayler told me that the lyrics and performance of “S Blonde” were informed by the chaos and riots going on in the nation following the George Floyd murder. “I don’t know where it derived from….it pushes you to do something that derives directly from the subconscious.”
Stay tuned to Synthbeat.com for more from my phone interviews with the four members of Static.
http://www.darwinmeiners.com/
http://www.dustinheald.com/
https://www.markgleason.org/
https://www.julianshahtayler.com/
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