Pete Feigenbaum mentions no fewer than nine genres when describing Dinowalrus, and enough influences, interests and inspirations to send your head whirling hard. He gets stoked about optical theramins and “totally haywire laser noises”. Loves the grit and attitude of New York’s musical past. Has a knack for tangential theorizing on the music “indiestry” at large, but is intensely lucid about his own band’s place within it, for better or worse. In other words, he’s just as boisterous and, like, addictively interesting as the New York trio he helped create.

Or maybe the word’s encyclopedic. Dinowalrus’ debut % is a real Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole experience; a full-on tour through psych, noise, no-wave, drone, rock (pick your poison) that skitters in a new direction just when you’ve cottoned to the current one. And Pete, plus bandmates Kyle Warren and Josh Da Costa—vocals, bass and drums respectively, though each handles a mish-mash of synths, drum machines, clarinets, et al—are totally content to embody this contradiction. To exist outside traditional confines, even if it means some listeners (see: Pitchfork’s 5.9 rating) can’t necessarily wrap their heads around it. That is, after all, what makes Dinowalrus Dinowalrus.

Check out Pete’s musings on the band’s genesis and its process below. Dinowalrus plays tomorrow, April 16, at Death by Audio with Fiasco, Pterodactly and Daniel Francis Doyle.

Why, how and when did you guys decide to do this band? Did you have a concrete idea of what you wanted Dinowalrus to be, or did it just sort of evolve?

Kyle and I met in late 2006 and started jamming. We had a pretty vague notion about wanting to do something visceral and guitar-based, but also futuristic. We were both highly inspired by the crop of Social Registry bands that were making waves at the time, including Gang Gang Dance, Psychic Ills, Growing, Excepter.  Also Liars, Health, Japanther, Lightning Bolt, These Are Powers, Aa and Parts and Labor really captured our fancy at the time with their raw power and hypnotic textures, [but] things really went downhill in 2008 when the lo-fi garage sound took over, much to our chagrin.

On some level, Dinowalrus allowed us to try styles and concepts we had listened to and digested but never really attempted to utilize in our actual bands before, hench the “kitchen sink” approach. Some of these things included shoegaze, psychobilly, krautrock, ambient, disco, no-wave, spazz, thrash. The thrill of trying new styles really helps us stay energized! But mainly, we wanted to create songs that led to compelling performances above all else. The emphasis is on live experiences rather than narrative or melody. Perhaps the Boredoms or A Place To Bury Strangers take this experiential mentality to awesome extremes!

So your recorded material is an extension of your performances? How much does playing a song live influence what it becomes on record?

We’re pretty religious about sticking to song structure [live], but the recordings are, on some level, stylistic interpretations of our live sound. With the record, we aren’t necessarily trying to accurately capture the live sound of performances—we’re trying to create a parallel but independent sound world, as far as our use of drum machines, reverb, et cetera.

Several writers, myself included, have compared you to Sonic Youth, specifically Bad Moon Rising. Was that an intentional reference?

Yes, Sonic Youth is the most important band of the past 25 years in our book. Though sadly, every time I see them, I am less impressed. But half the songs on % are written in a droney tuning, FFGGCD, that is closely related to some of the tunings Lee and Thurston may have used on Evol. I actually once had an email exchange with Aaron Hemphill from Liars about Sonic Youth derived tunings. I’m assuming this sound is what compelled Glenn Branca to purchase our 7″ at a show he saw us play at Less Artists More Condos last May!

Did you chat with Branca at all?

It was a very brief exchange. I sent him an email a few weeks later to say hello, but he never wrote back.

We’re referencing a lot of things beyond Sonic Youth though, from early British industrial music like Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA to ballsy proto-punk like the Stooges and MC5, 70s art-rock like Hawkwind, Brian Eno and Roxy Music. I think we are more willing to embrace electronic sounds than Sonic Youth are. Though perhaps a listen to the Ciccone Youth Whitey Album might hint at what Sonic Youth might sound like if they took a Dinowalrus approach to their work!

But above all else, we’re proud to be a New York band, and we continually aspire to embody the deep-seated renegade spirit of madness and ambition that was found in New York bands ranging from the Silver Apples to Suicide to Liquid Liquid to Ex Models. All these chill bands rollin’ in from New Jersey to Brooklyn lately totally miss this quality, for better or worse.

Why do you think that is?

Probably growing up in close proximity to New York causes these folks to not romanticize the history and mentality of the city as much. Also, they probably don’t have the mindset of “I’m paying an insane amount of rent to live here, so I better hustle hard and challenge myself to operate at a very high level aesthetically.”

Was there a solid concept for %?

It’s not a concept album the way, say, Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor is. But there are a lot of abstract formal themes that have manifested themselves as we put it together, such as the juxtaposition of claustrophobic noise and wide-open sonic spaces. Also there’s the perpetually contradictory genre hopping. There is also a fixation and false nostalgia for the bygone NYC era of liberating decay and wildness. The % references the blending of genres, as well as the recession—with the thought that perhaps the recession could force us all back into a 1980s artistic mindset. The concept was to avoid being pigeonholed into any genre-based scene and to avoid having our vast knowlesge of pop and rock history reduced to a market-oriented theme. Complexity and contradicton is the concept, as this is the only concept for an album that we feel is appropriate in this era.

It’s interesting that the title refers back to unsteady economic realities. Do you think, because of that, we’re in a similar position artistically as we were in the 80s? Is it even possible in the same way now?

No, there’s no new artistic epiphany that’s happening, as far as I can tell. If anything, from the indiestry side of things, folks are playing it safer than they were three years ago. A lot of tours these days feature packages of equally prominent bands, such as the Big Pink/A Place To Bury Strangers tour. These bills are an easier sell to club promoters than a tour with a very obscure opener. That’s why we have still not been able to land a solid support slot on a bigger tour, I’m guessing.

So how long did % take to put together? It’s so dense and composed—did you know you were making an album, or were you just writing random songs?

Each song was written separately, with little regard for the previous one. Clever sequencing and ambient interludes turned it into an album. But I always liked albums with a lot of variety and tangents more than albums where every song sounds the same! The next one will be more consistent though.

How so?

I think we are moving closer to a more integrated sound and formula. We know what we’re capable of doing technically, texturally and stylistically. Rather than write separate songs for our garage, psych, dance, no-wave, ambient, tribal, noise, proto-punk and shoegaze tendencies, we’re finding ways to blend all of these gestures into a single song.

How do you write a Dinowalrus song? What’s the process?

The hooks and key moments are usually derived from jams that feel instinctively magical. We then let the jams stew for a month or so while we listen to relevant tunes from our libraries that might inform us as to how we might turn a few good riffs into a solid song. We also sometimes bring in some outside ideas to finish things up and perhaps create some background texture washes to put into the sampler. The arrangements are always a bit tricky…since we’re a 3-piece band juggling 5 key instruments, there are often structural elements to our songs that exist solely to allow us time to switch instruments or sync automated loops to live drumming.

Do you ever listen to your songs and think “Oh shit, I wish we would’ve added this thing, or taken that sound away” or whatever?

Since we self-recorded and mixed, we had unlimited opportunities to edit things to suit our fancy. That being said, there are still things that don’t quite sound right to me, such as the rack toms. But when I go back and listen to the tracks, I’m still moderately impressed. It would have been nice to have live drums on a few more tracks since Josh’s playing is so rad, but we weren’t well-equipped enough to do this. Structurally, perhaps the ambient parts could have been shortened. But other than that, there’s nothing I would change.

Was there anything you wanted to accomplish technically or thematically with % that didn’t quite work out?

I guess thematically, it would have been good to have a bit more consistency. And perhaps we could have shortened some of the ambient sections. But then again, if people can handle a Fuck Buttons, Growing, Spacemen 3 album, I’m sure they can handle “I Hate Letters”. But it seems that people these days don’t want their pop-rock mixed with their “out” music. We couldn’t help ourselves, though. We’d be unsatisfied putting out a record that consisted solely of 3-minute verse-chorus-verse songs. We really tried to push the envelope and avoid cliche songwriting formulas as much as possible, try to find alternative muses. There’s always a logic behind our unorthodox arrangements, but some people seem to get lost, especially when we frontload the weirdness and have long build-ups at the beginning of a song.

But honestly, does it matter if some people get lost? I mean, there’s a point at which it’s not about the songs but the attitude with which the listeners approach them. I guess I’m asking if you consider stuff like that to be a technical fault of yours or just the preferences of others.

Again, the complexities, contradictions, twists and turns were deliberate and highly calculated. Some people see this as a quality flaw—some see it as brilliantly inventive. We made these songs with the thought that we were summarizing and connecting the dots between a long narrative of rock history that we had constructed in our minds. We really had no idea or concern for how people would react.

Though, on some level, I think we were also aiming to create a collection of songs that would appeal to underground Brooklyn loft audiences we anticipated playing for rather than the approval of indiestry movers and shakers and bloggers. From a career perspective, perhaps we focused on appealing to the DIY underground scene a bit too much. While being cryptic and complex has been rewarding intellectually, it has also made it very difficult for us to get hype, big breaks, other “career” opportunities. Bookers, managers and critics just don’t know what to do with us. We’re more communicative as a pummeling live act though, so we just try to play as often as possible and convert people one by one. And I’d still assert that each of the songs on the album is catchy or memorable in its own way.

It’s almost fitting that we got a 5.9 from Pitchfork but garnered words of praise from noise-rock legends like Shah from Ex Models/Knyfe Hyts or Glenn Branca. I would also say that % is no more evasive than the universally praised Sisterworld by Liars, but Liars have earned the attention of fans and critics over the past 8 years to the point that people will invest the extra time to really attempt to understand their albums and give them the benefit of the
doubt.  In contrast, I think we were naive in thinking that most people would have the time and interest to probe the depths and complexities of a new, unknown band such as ourselves. Unfortunately, for emerging bands such as ourselves in 2010, people generally want things wrapped up in a neat, pithy, marketable package. But I’ve played in much more straightforward bands before and just couldn’t bring myself to backtrack conceptually with Dinowalrus and be overly reductive. Even if that might’ve been a smarter career move.

- Rue Sauvage