Words by David C. Obenour
Never to judge a thing by its name but that said, Human Error Club at Kenny’s House is a pretty succinct name for the latest album from the Los Angeles improvisational jazz trio, Human Error Club. Holing themselves up with all the gear and instruments found at producer Kenny Segal’s home studio, keyboardists Diego Gaeta and Jesse Justice along with drummer Mekala Session recorded two live sessions with a third that brought it all together. After Segal defined the jams more cohesively, the final orbit attracted contributions from k-the-i???, Moor Mother, billy wood, E L U C I D, Quelle Chris, Cavalier, and Shabaka Hutchings. Pretty decent for just a few days over at Kenny’s.
Off Shelf: Started as a one-off thing, what’s kept you coming back and playing music together as Human Error Club? What’s the same now and what’s evolved since those early days?
Jesse Justice: I’ve always found what we come up with in Human Error Club to be some of the most interesting and surprising music that I’ve been involved with. We’ve all agreed as a trio that we like surprises, and with our dedication to improvisation we often surprise ourselves! So you could say that our formula has stayed mostly the same but the results are always evolving. It’s nice to see that people like the music too, even though it’s not the reason for creating, it does provide some encouragement
Diego Gaeta: The spirit of the band endures because of our shared unspoken musical language. It is so special to be able to pull strange and exciting musical moments from the ether in the way that we do when we come together, the trio recipe. We continue to ferment and invent new permutations on the same chemical reactions that keep sparking us throughout the years. We have never written anything traditionally and are extremely limited in our control over the musical chemistry.
OS: Recording with Kenny Segal over three years, can you talk about your relationship? What excites you about each other as artists and how do you think that materializes here?
JJ: I believe we all met Kenny years ago around the same time but Mekala had grown the closest with him. So when we started recording that’s when I got to know Kenny. Being in his space, hearing his works and his process has always been inspiring. It’s not easy to create music for as long as he has and keep things interesting and strong, so that – along with his excitement about Human Error Club – made everything make sense.
Mekala Session: Yeah, I got hip to Kenny Segal through all his production credits. I particularly was impressed by his stuff with Jefferson Park Boys. He was just as inspired by the young LA jazz scene and that admiration of each other’s work led us to want to work together.
DG: I and we feel very safe to get weird and experiment at Kenny’s because he reaches far into outer spaces of music to pull out beauty in entropic forms in a similar way to us. We both apply pressure and tension to the music to almost break the form itself but have it hanging gallantly on by a thread.
OS: Without having to go too deep, can you talk about some of the gear you used? What you brought of your’s and what Kenny had in the studio? And was anything particularly new, inspiring, or that maybe you even found challenging?
JJ: One thing we like to do as Human Error Club is visit studios or spaces where there is a lot of gear already setup; synths, keyboards, drums, samplers, etc. We’ll go in with an entirely different arsenal. Recording with Kenny’s was no different, so we prioritized using his gear. His Rhodes got a lot of mileage, CZ-101, an old polyphonic Moog Opus, various pedals and more. Some gear was pretty dusty and got new life again! There were occasions where we brought some of our stuff in to include something specific, but it’s primarily Kenny’s gear on the album. Aside from us bringing drums too. There can definitely be challenges using new gear, but Kenny knows what he has and was twisting knobs and pulling things in and out as we went along.
DG: I remember that I mostly had an attitude of let’s play the house like an instrument and just use what Kenny has. I particularly loved using his Moog and the Rhodes that he described as janky but has a lot of tender beauty in it.
MS: I used Jesse’s drums day one, and two drumsets of mine day two and three. All of Kenny’s mics and pre amps made the drums sound crystal-clear, I wanted to take advantage of that by playing clear ideas.
OS: How did you know that the time was right and you had what you needed for this album?
Kenny Segal: This is always a tough question that is often answered by a combination of intuition and experience. In this particular case, after the first two sessions we were still struggling to put together a tracklist that was cohesive and everyone felt good about, which led to us doing the third session. After the third session we pretty quickly realized we had all the pieces of the puzzle now and just had to fit them together in the right way. I dont think anyone consciously approached the third session like this, but it felt like the guys knew what was missing and filled in the pieces we needed, even tho there was never a discussion like, “hey guys, we need x, y, and z to finish this album”. I think that’s part of the magic of Human Error Club is that all three of them are incredibly intuitive talents and can just collectively feel things as a unit.
OS: To you, what was the throughline for the material? What brings it all together?
DG: The throughline is the nature of our process being consistently only free improvised, composed in the moment for the moment. We have over the years become really familiar with each others’ taste, not only informing our decisions in the moment while creating music, but in choosing which improvisations to crop out of the longform to isolate as songs to be produced. Kenny really brings it together at that point by having the material and honing the arrangement and sonics, which really defined the outcome of this project while remaining true to the Human Error Club sound.
MS: To me, the album narratively is about its creation. We create a space where we can push the boundaries, explore music past comfort into new territory. It’s challenging but it’s fun. And it’s imperfect, real – it’s distinctly human
OS: With that much material to pull from, I have to imagine there were different evolutions or sounds explored that didn’t end up fitting for the album. Can you talk about some of what’s not here?
KS: Yes, the album took a number of twists and turns before it took its final form. Originally there were more longer form jam type tracks, 8 to 15 minute songs, and at one point the album centered more on those. As we did additional sessions we kind of coalesced around more of the shorter concise ideas and then once the decision to add vocalists came in, the vision of the album as it currently stands took shape. We still have lots of dope material from those sessions and most likely you’ll be hearing some of it either as another stand alone project with some of the long form tracks or even just as the basis of beats on other people’s albums.
MS: Kenny is cutthroat, man. The bar is set very high! Songs were cut not only just for quality, but also because they didn’t fit the overall album or even because the album was already too long.
OS: Were the guest spots recorded after the album was more formed? How did you pick the collaborators you did?
KS: All the vocals were done after the music was finished. At one point the album was gonna be strictly instrumental, or have very few vocals but as we started collaborating with people it worked so well that we ended up pursuing it further.
As far as who we chose to be on the album, between myself and the Human Error Club guys we have a pretty deep network of incredibly talented friends so it really came down to playing some of them the album and seeing who resonated with certain tracks. In fact, in a number of cases people we asked to collab chose completely different tracks than we intended for them! But it’s been my experience as a producer to let the artist follow their muse and get out of the way, and thats when the dope shit happens.
MS: People like woods and Shabaka were obvious. In the case of woods, we didn’t know which song he should be on until we got to the long, ambient one. I remember thinking Moor Mother would be great on that one and that there was room for two, so her and woods could split it. Kenny immediately agreed. We managed to record Shabaka during a brief stay in LA while he played some shows. I initially thought he would play on a different song, it was Kenny who assured me FROGTOWN was the one. He was right! The goal with the features was always to make the best full album experience possible.
OS: Did anything that was pulled here surprise you? Do you have any stories from the sessions that were featured?
JJ: A lot of times with Human Error Club we don’t remember what we recorded, and listening back it’s really like hearing something for the first time. I felt this a lot listening back to almost all of this album. One funny story is that the track “NIGHT TIME”, was not on the album until later, and was actually never shown to the band. Elucid had seen a video of us playing live and told Kenny that he needed some crazy tracks like that, so Kenny went back through the recordings and pulled the untouched track out.
DG: During the making of this album we periodically hung out in Kenny’s backyard with his chickens. One of them was named Jocelyn, and she unfortunately passed during the production of the album. Rest in peace Jocelyn! That’s why one of the songs is called Jocelyn.
OS: What do you think you learned from the recording and the production here? What lives on beyond this recording as you work on new projects?
KS: This project definitely stress tested my studio. I don’t typically record entire bands live, so I got to put all my preamps and microphones to use at the same time. Also since they were using most of my synths and other music-making devices. It’s always a pleasure seeing talented people go to town on my gear and often unlocks new sounds and ways to approach them that I may have never discovered on my own. There was also the aspect of managing three different people with often wildly divergent opinions on things… I’m more used to collabing with a single artist where the back and forth is just between the two of us. So there was definitely a learning curve of me having to both follow my vision but also appease and mediate the different opinions from the band.
JJ: Oftentimes Human Error Club projects are the result of us recording and then making decisions together about what to use and what to leave behind. This process can be long and there are differing opinions as with any group. Having someone choose what to throw in and out on our behalf was a welcomed route and it was interesting to hear what someone else picked out from our recordings.
OS: Talk about the album cover. What is the design there and what makes it significant as it relates to this music?
KS: Besides music, one of my other hobbies has been coding. During the making of this project I had been really interested in the concept of emergent phenomena and had coded up a program that lets you explore cellular automata, which are basically programs where you set up simple initial conditions – like a single black dot in a row of white dots – and then create very basic rules and sometimes very complex and unexpected behaviors emerge. The artwork for the album was all created by me in the cellular automata program I created.
I think it relates to the album in that by giving the band certain synths and keyboards and effects, I set up the initial conditions but then as they improvised, wildly complex and unpredictable results emerged. If anyone is interested in these concepts I highly recommend you google “Cellular automata”, “Stephen Wolfram” – a scientist who has worked extensively in the field, and “Conway’s Game of Life” as a starting point to explore the subject. I also plan on releasing the software I created sometime soon for the public to enjoy.