Words by Sean Victory
Sean Smith’s project, LFZ has been a remarkable look into his growth as an artist. At the most basic level, Smith reveals the emotive force nested within a small handful of notes, but on Raveled Veiled Known, Smith digs deep into his arsenal and weaves his most rewardingly complex music to date.
Through nine years of releases, no two albums sound alike. After speaking with Sean, it’s clear that the musical journeys exist for the listener because he is tirelessly exploring new territory. His collection of EPs, Sketches of Jupiter, bear the marks of his excursions into the unknown. Limiting himself to a single synthesizer, he finds all the ins and outs of the machine by creating a musical map of its sonic capabilities.
Raveled Veiled Known is a dazzling display of both his skills as a multi-instrumentalist and his vision as a composer, finding the right place for all the individual elements he creates. He’s not content to relegate this music to an album, but he finds a way to take control of all these instruments—on his own, in a live setting. He is as ambitious as he is humble, and I for one am in agreement about his opinions on fresh approaches to live performance and a much needed recalibration of audience expectations.
Off Shelf: The birth of your daughter’s a central focus to the music. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’ve been up to in the years since your last big release [Name Plus Focus (2018)]?
Sean Smith: I think that if I had a label that wanted to do more than one record ever, I would release a lot more music. Between Name Plus Focus and the new one, I was still making tons of music. I did a bunch of tapes for Sketches of Jupiter. I was tired of trying to reach the masses. This was as local as I possibly could get and it was great because I could connect directly with people who were interested. Everything was very hands-on because I dubbed all the tapes myself and made all the covers and so on.
I’ve also never been in the rhythm of write, record, release, tour. It’s always been way out of order. That process in relation to this record was more like perform, record, perform, perform, record, perform, perform, release. I’ve finally got this record out and I’ve probably done more performing of that music than I ever would if I had put the performing after the release. A lot of that music I started putting together and playing live seven years ago — because my daughter’s six. I didn’t want to be like my daughter’s six I recorded this music mostly before she was born, right? Then people would be like oh it’s not new… I don’t know.
The main part of the process of this music was performing live, where I would have a bit of something that I improvised into a recording. All of these songs, I had many, many, many, versions along the way that I performed live like hundreds of times, you know. I got better at performing them then the recordings got a little bit better. And it all kind of came together, I suppose, in the end. Just a few months ago, I finished up, finally putting some finishing touches on it.
OS: On “Extinction Burst,” there’s this Tangerine Dream feel to it where it’s this very full spectrum thing. It starts mid to high range, and then you have the bass stuff coming in. It’s very deliberate in the way that it unfolds. I think that speaks to the creative process where I can feel you pushing and pulling the song forward as you sculpt it out.
SS:Things do get more specific over time. As I get more experience with the music, it does reveal itself to me. Even if it’s like I gotta do this, and I gotta do this, and I gotta do this, and it has to hit these exact marks. Every section still has this wildness that I’m improvising. Which is nerve-wracking sometimes, but then I also think that it can be exciting. I think it’s more exciting for the audience than it is for me, because I’m making sure that I’m actually going to be able to do this. Disaster still happens a lot. When I’ve played something over and over, I kind of prepare for all contingencies. So then it’s all about the recovery.
For example, a couple of weeks ago I played the second song from the album, “View from Here” live for the first time ever. I just never got around to that one because that was a deep well of improvisation. I hit some snags that I hadn’t hit in rehearsal, and it was difficult to come back from. I was just sweating, and it was really hard for me to get through. Then people I know very well, who know my music, they were like, “that was amazing! That was the best thing I’ve ever seen you do.” When I was like, “Oh my, it was such a disaster.” I think it’s just like, you get familiar with your gear, the music, and when things are flying off the rails, you can recover.
OS: How do you play all this live? That’s a lot of gear to interface with. You know, these are really rich compositions.
SS: It is very complex and I think that I managed to keep it fairly simple working with what I have. The center of it all is the Electro Harmonix loopers, like, the four track loopers. The 22500 or the 45000. Anything that I have ever performed has been on this sort of generative-decay-loop thing. That I maybe picked up from Brian Eno. You know, talking about tape loop techniques.
OS: Frippertronics, sort of thing….
SS:Yeah, where things can come and go and you basically set its decay. So on those, they’re not feature rich devices. They’re kind of like one thing. When you set the loop it’s like cutting the tape and then that’s like the length you’re going to be working with. I don’t often change the length of the loops.
OS: That’s cool because you find a way to take the studio setup with you. It’s rudimentary, but really works, right? It’s super basic equipment you said.
SS:That looper is always the center of everything. So, it’s not drums, bass, like layering loops. We’ve all seen that a thousand times. Four things and then play over it and then the song’s over. It just builds up and that’s it.
I have things coming and going and I’m changing it. I can drop it by an octave or move it up by an octave. I can change the length by half or double or whatever. The most gear I ever have in a show is two synthesizers, guitar, with a couple pedal boards, and then I have bass pedals. The MIDI bass pedals I use to control one of the synths for the most part. The [Sequential] Prophet 6—that’s the synth, and I play guitar and bass along with it. The bass pedals have made things a lot more interesting because I can at least have some textures going underneath, or if I need to make a transition I’ll be stepping on a bass pedal where I have a synth sound happening while I’m changing something else. Then I can come back to it, or whatever. It’s not like I have six synthesizers.
OS: That is inspiring to know that it is just you. I enjoy watching somebody interface with an instrument and be like, “How do I make this work for me?” There’s little idiosyncrasies that show up in the way that people will approach composition.
SS:I think over the past couple of years I got to a comfortable place. This is the gear I use and it’s more polished than ever. I’m able to hide behind it a little bit more. I think many years prior were me figuring it out. There’s been shows where I’ll have paper all over the table or all over the synths with notes on things. Then it’s much more like seeing me in my studio.
I envy stand-up comedians. It’s expected that you go and you do all these little things. You see what works and you figure out what doesn’t. Then you try again. I don’t mind doing that. I just think the audience is like, “What is this guy doing?”
OS: Yeah. Who would want to do that?
SS: I mean visual artists too, have studio visits. They can talk about what they’re doing, hear about what other people are doing, get some back and forth, feedback, and inspiration. With all of us solo musicians, we’re just at home alone. Then you’re supposed to be, like, perfect when you hit the stage. I think I’d like the idea of sort of laying some things bare. I don’t mind playing a show and fucking it up and then fixing it. That’s all part of it.
OS: It’s almost like an olive branch. You’re going to go up there and be like, “I’m going to be weird.” I’m going to try to do what I’m going to try to do, and maybe it’ll work. I think that changes the expectation of the audience.
SS:I think it’s really connection building. I think it takes down that barrier between performer and audience. I think music is also so undervalued, devalued, and you’re supposed to be making music just for the love of it, you know? You don’t make it for anyone else, but that’s just not true. Performers of any kind or artists of any type, creators, we’re making things for an audience. So it’s like, you have to connect with your audience somehow. You don’t want to pander to them or only do what you think they want you to do. I think that we’re just expected to just do it on our own, you know, with no feedback. And just show up, like, fully formed.
OS: So how did you get into synthesis? I know you’ve been playing guitar and stuff for a long time.
SS:That was a slow, very slow development. I kind of quit playing electric guitar in bands. I played solo acoustic only, just doing finger style stuff like John Fahey. Then I got asked to join Cite. Do you know that band? It was an indie-dreamy-pop-folk band, with Iron Maiden dueling guitar leads. They were pretty cool.I mean, there’s some trappings of mid-2000s in there. Lots of glockenspiel—that dates it to that time, but it was so fun to be in that band.
Joining that band, I had to put together a pedalboard, a very specific pedalboard that was basically prescribed by the band leader. It had to have a Phase 90, had to have a Metal Zone, it had to have an overdrive pedal and a slapback delay. All of this stuff was very new to me. It was kind of a different way, because when I was a kid I was not trying to make a specific sound. So that’s where the beginning of sculpting a sound into something very specific started. All my music interest was sort of blossoming into this whole other area. Like Fripp and Eno were a big part of that, thinking about the looping stuff. It was still a while till I got to the looping stuff but that was on my mind, thinking of music in a bigger, more conceptual way. Wanting to make textures that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with the guitar. I was also broke. It was kind of like working with what I had and trying to manipulate sound. I got a [EHX] Superego pedal. It grabs a second of a sound and drones it out, and I was like okay, well, that’s a tone. Then I put that through a delay, phaser and stuff. Then all of a sudden it starts to sound like a synthesizer.
I really pushed the limits of what I could do with the guitar and the looper and then droning things. Then I was like, I’ve got to get a synthesizer. So I started out with one of those little tiny Korg, like miniature—I can’t remember what they were called, but it did have a pretty amazing filter in it. That was kind of fun but it wasn’t enough. Then I got an Arturia Mini-Brute and read this book that came with it that was all about subtractive synthesis. That’s how I learned how patches work and how to manipulate a synthesizer. I got into some Moog apps and things, but it still wasn’t enough so I was like, okay, I’m gonna save up a bunch of money.
That’s right before I got that Jupiter module [Roland JP-08]. So in size and cost and capability, I was just up, up, up, a little bit more. The Prophet is so amazing, I will admit that I hardly ever twist knobs on that thing. It’s got 500 presets, I go in and I find what I’m looking for and I work with it. I modify things a little bit, but usually I just save it in the preset and that’s it. I got a [Moog] Grandmother, and when I was like, that’s not enough, I sold that and got the [Moog] Matriarch.
It’s so funny. Like, almost every time anyone writes about me they call me a modular synthesist. If someone put a modular system in front of me I would not know what I’m doing. I need the knobs, I need to understand the signal flow. I just have not messed with modular.
OS: Yeah, well you went from small to bigger and bigger. You end up falling down a hole. It’s a different language. You’re reading through instruction manuals and you’re learning a new thing. It’s not just the same static instrument really. A guitar, you can tune it differently and do all these different things, process it, but at the base level, a guitar is still a guitar.
SS:It’s getting all these textures, the interconnectivity of things and all that. You have these steps that are going to take you somewhere. It’s like unlocking something in Legend of Zelda. I was never good at video games, but I would watch my friends. I would be like the map maker. I remember those combinations, like you do this, and then you do this, and then you get this, and then you do this. That’s kind of how that pathway feels to me. With synthesizers and all this is how you end up improvising more.
OS: Do you think the format of a synthesizer still being this sort of unknown factor— like it’s the shape-shifting thing—does that encourage you to improvise not only with it, but how you’re putting together compositions?
SS:Absolutely. I think there’s two parts of that. One is that a certain patch or a certain sound is going to inspire a certain way of playing it, right? So that always is the first thing. If I just set up a patch or whatever I’m like, how does this work? Then all of sudden it’s like, oh, I can do this on here. If it was a different sound, you might perform it in a different way.
Then sometimes you put two things on top of each other, and that’s how you end up with layers of texture. The other side of that is the unpredictability. I can’t say that I’m the most educated and I don’t always understand what’s going on. So when there are surprising things or glitchy things or something strange happens, working with that problem is what kind of makes things really interesting.
Like with that little Jupiter thing, it has very specific ways that it behaves, and that’s where I was able to kind of be with it, and respond to the instrument.
OS: So you’ve been doing this solo thing for awhile. Do you want to work with other people now that you’re getting this figured out?
SS:I think that I feel lonely a lot doing this, and it’s difficult. I have to carry all the gear, I have to make all the sound. I don’t have, like, a team! I record the music, I mix it, I do the artwork, I set up the shows, I carry my stuff, I set up my stuff, I soundcheck, I play, I break it down, I put it in my car. It’s all on me, and I can feel pretty overwhelmed by it. So yeah, I would love to play with other people. I think it would change the way I play. I think there’s probably a lot that I have going for me that I could do in any environment.
I think that playing with someone else—it feels a little scary sometimes because I won’t be able to rely on the same things. I can record 15 minutes of music [in a DAW] and just see the waveform and make mental notes while I’m playing. Then just go back there, cut out that section. I have all these sort of mental note/tab dividers going on while making music on my own. That doesn’t really make sense when you’re playing with someone else. You can’t just stop doing a thing for two seconds and then come back without explaining what you’re doing. I would love to play with other people. I would love to have a little more camaraderie and divide some of the responsibility.
OS: Sometimes it comes naturally. You end up playing alone as a result of the fact that you didn’t have anyone else around so maybe you’ve got some synthesizers and you have a DAW that can do all of these things. You have your own music studio, you don’t have to rent a practice space because you can kind of just plug everything into your computer or whatever. It’s different.
SS:I think a lot of this stuff came from that. It starts with working with what you got and then you get smarter. Then you get more gear or more capable studio elements or whatever it is. It’s funny because I have a very deep desire to collaborate, but if anyone comes up to me— they’re like “dude, let’s jam some time.” I’m like, “no.” I’m trying to examine what that is for me.
OS: So what do you have coming up? Do you have other plans? Like, working on new music, or some shows?
SS:The plan was to have more shows.It’s just that things get a little complicated. I’m going to play in Portland at the end of the month. I don’t have any other shows booked after that. I think that there’s part of me that feels like things are slipping out of my fingertips. I’ve been trying to turn some gears in my head lately, figuring out how to get more reconnected with the scene, or the community, or whatever. Whenever someone asks me to do a show, like I’m available.Especially if it is, you know, the higher incentive shows. I’ll be able to move things around.
It’s hard being divorced and having a kid. Things are complicated. I would love to tour, but I don’t think I will ever tour if I have to set it up myself. There will be shows.I generally play in L.A. like once every couple months. Sometimes I’ll do some out-of-town stuff in California, or like this, go to Portland.
I have a big backlog of recordings that sometimes get a little overwhelming. Like what will this be? I have a handful of songs that I am really, really happy with that I feel compelled to grow into an album but it might just stay as it is. I might just release an EP to keep this momentum going, put it out in three or four months or something like that. I have some ideas for the next thing or two. I always have some ideas, you know? I don’t think I’m ever going to stop making music or trying to put out records. There’s always going to be something coming.