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| (Alex & Greg) |
Greg and Alex Bortnichak are two New Jersey natives who have developed their own unique brand of experimental rock 'n' roll. The brothers have been performing together as The Sparta Philharmonic for over a decade now and have toured the country a few times on their own dime, booking their way from coast to coast and packing all their equipment into one medium-sized SUV (at one point it was a mid-sized station wagon). It's hard not to admire the dedication these two brothers have for their craft. They have done things DIY since they first formed, driven not by any strong desire for wide-scale success and popularity, but rather an undying, immense passion for the music -- and a love for each other. Their music is formed through a bond that exists only between brothers who make music for themselves, first and foremost. You'd be hard pressed to find two men so invested in what they do and so passionate about expressing themselves through music.
I had the chance to sit down and chat with Greg and Alex a few weeks back just as they had kicked off their summer tour in support of their new album, (trans)migratory birds. We discussed the band's beginnings, their intense live performances, the significance of the new album title, the transcendence between life and death, and much more.
Interview by Quinn S.
Mixtape Muse: Was the band name chosen to be a reflection of the music, or vice versa?
G: Well actually, the band name was a joke. We basically were playing noise punk, and we had not yet been to high school and we couldn't get any gigs playing our noise punk. So we figured if we changed our name to Sparta Philharmonic and then sold it to the old fogies who ran the town fair they would book us thinking we were classical music -- which is what they did. And then they pulled the plug 15 minutes in and kids thought it was cool for once. That was the first time we ever had a good response, so the name just kind of stuck after that.
A: It's also a joke in the sense that a philharmonic is the representative orchestra of any given place or city. So we thought that the town would never want to be represented by us, so therefore we would be calling ourselves The Sparta Philharmonic.
G: But I feel like it's funny now because if you think of the Spartan army it was just 300 people and they fought real hard. And I feel like that’s how it’s kind of ended up with us. Just two people, who’ve strangely moved into more classically-oriented music. It fits the music now; the music grew into it.
MM: The band’s been around for over a decade now. Was this the first real band for both of you or were there bands before this one?
G & A: This was the first real band.
G: We were a 3-piece before called Elysium, playing a lot of the same songs from ’98 to 2000.
A: First it was Ground Zero and then it was Elysium, and then it was The Sparta Philharmonic.
G: June of 2000 was when we changed the name.
A: At that point, it was just the two of us. Sparta Philharmonic’s always been the two of us, there’s never been a third member.
G: Dropping the third member coincided with us no longer being able to get any gigs, and then us getting that first gig as Sparta Philharmonic.
We actually, at that point, were playing all of the same songs, and still do play all of the same songs from the late ‘90s period, because kids back home request them sometimes.
A: We’re a ‘90s band.
G: [Laughs] ‘90s revival here we come!
MM: You mentioned that you used to have a third member back in the day before you became Sparta Philharmonic. But the music’s always been really grand in scale, and then you think, Wow, it’s just two guys. So how do you approach the songwriting process?
A: I’d say that Greg usually comes up with these things to jam on. Greg is really the master songwriter in terms of the harmonies and melodies. Where I come in is maybe streamlining those harmonies and melodies, and what we ultimately present as the song. The songs usually come about through jamming, just kind of working it out. Greg comes in with a lot of intricate things and I find my taste in music is what really helps to streamline the stuff he puts out so that it’s somewhat manageable and coherent.
G: From my end, most of it happens with an acoustic guitar or just poetry, like free writing and stuff. Alex and I will jam it out, and that’ll sort of form it again.
What I’ve discovered actually is that the recording process is really now become kind of important to the writing process, because in recording we’ll bring in different textures or even completely different parts that we’ll have to learn how to play live afterwards. The progression is very much bedroom, basement, we’ll play the songs live for a while, and then we’ll take them to the studio. Then, after that’s all done, then the final songs come out.
A: A lot of times, like with this record, we were playing these songs live before we even recorded the record. So the first takes of the songs were as we would do it live. You listen back to those early recorded takes and it sounds awful. You realize that you just don’t get that same sound you get at the live show. So, at least with my stuff, the songs had to be not so “balls-to-the-wall” as the live thing would be. It was more this is the rhythm we want to go for. Live, it translates differently, so we have to refine it.
I think it’s a good thing to have the recordings be different from the live show though. Who wants to see a band live where it’s exactly the same thing as it is on the record?
MM: Going off of that, you mentioned what you listen to is different from Greg’s tastes. I think trying to pigeonhole your sound is kind of foolish, because I think you guys incorporate a lot into your sound. So, what would you say your primary influences are?
G: I think my primary influences would be late Romantic classical music first, because that’s what we kind of grew up on – like a lot of Wagner, Maller, and Elgar. I was first and foremost a classical cellist before I got involved with this. That’s huge, and that’s why I think our songs probably sound so depressing [laughs]. But then after that, Nirvana changed my world. And then all the great ‘80s indie bands like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Mission of Burma, as well as a lot of cool ‘90s indie bands like Dirty 3, Polvo, Unwound, and Fugazi. In college, I got into a lot of folk and a lot of improvised music. I became obsessed with John Coltrane and also, kind of obsessed with the girl who sings on our record, Flora Wolpert Checknoff. I just listen to her stuff all the time.
A: You can never put it down.
G: Listening to her changed the way I approached music.
A: I used to play trumpet, as well, so we have a big classical backbone – that really dark German stuff like Wagner and Mahler, who’s Czech. There are three musicians who really shaped my style and the way I play drums, the way I approach things. They’re more contemporary artists: Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Jimmy Chamberlain of The Smashing Pumpkins. I can never put that stuff down. I’m constantly listening to that stuff, drawing influence from them, learning stuff year after year after year. I’m always hearing things I didn’t hear the first time. I also like oldies music a lot. When Greg was listening to all of this obscure stuff like Yo La Tengo, I was listening to Buddy Holly and stuff in that style.
I like a lot of singer-songwriters, too. So, we like all this loud, abrasive stuff, but then I really like very relaxed, soft music. There’s a singer-songwriter from New Jersey but he calls Vermont home. His name is Patrick Fitzsimmons. There’s something about his style of playing and voice that really influenced me. It’s interesting to me because despite the fact that these musicians play different instruments, they influence the way I play drums.
MM: Because your records are really layered and have a lot going on, have you ever considered adding a third member? How difficult is it to translate the music live, do you even try to translate it live, or do you just reinterpret it?
A: I don’t think it's too hard to play live – though some stuff can be – but then we change it to accommodate the circumstance. I’ve never thought about adding a third member. I mean sometimes we have people on stage playing with us to sort of feel something out. But I think the whole schtick is it’s the two of us. It’s kind of like a Local H thing.
G: Well, the songs were a lot different when we had them in their first incarnations. So, honestly, when I was thinking about all of this I was thinking about how it would work and was even thinking about bringing Jonathan Badger in who’s an ambient composer. He plays live guitars through sequencers and stuff, and he can do all the harmonies and stuff with the guitar, very orchestral. I thought that would be really cool, but I guess, when push came to shove, the thing about it is it really gets in the way of the energy flow.
A: The bottom line back in 2000 was it was just too inconvenient to have someone else come over to the house to practice. You have to work around other people’s schedules. It was just easier: go in the basement and play. It’s still too inconvenient.
G: The thing that’s hard now though is that I try to approach the songs tonally in a way that I know is not going to be the same as it is on the record, but that will also leave the listener hearing everything they want to hear, just morphed. But it’s really proving to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be to pull these songs off live. Honestly, I feel like I’m still getting used to playing them. The fact that I have to sing on top of it makes it all the more difficult. There’s the physical issue of getting to the pedals on time while trying to remember the vocals. I’m still having a hard time with it, but I feel better about it every show.
MM: I want to return to something you mentioned about the convenience factor. You guys are located in Philadelphia now, right? Do you guys live together in Philly?
A: No, I live there, but Greg doesn’t.
G: Yeah, I live back in New Jersey. I moved out of Philly to save money for the tour, actually.
MM: So, how, if at all, does that affect you guys? That is to say do you try to keep up that brotherly connection, if you will, and keep a correspondence going? I imagine that would affect the way you guys perform live as well as the writing process.
A: It takes a long time to write. Maybe we’ll pseudo write a song, and then we’ll play it live for a year. It’s not like we sit down together for a jam session and write like that.
G: Yeah, we’re lucky to get 2 to 3 songs a year. After that, it’s usually a very long editing process. Some of these songs on the record we were revising probably almost the whole period of the recording process, which was about four years. It’s tough. I wish we could do that more, but that’s good for us, too. We have separate lives, so when we come in and we want to do it, we’re really focused. We know we can’t dick around because there’s not really time for that.
MM: Do you guys set aside time to get together and write, or is it really just Greg has an idea and you say, “I’m free this weekend. You’re free this weekend. Let’s meet up”?
G: Yeah. I think pretty much whenever we’re both free and at home we have “killing time.” But for the most part after that, we make plans.
A: Yeah, definitely. We try to make plans in advance.
MM: So, you guys are releasing (trans)migratory birds. The album is a bit more cohesive than your first LP, Paper Mache Mountains. What was different about the writing and recording process this time around and was there a conscious direction with the material or was it more of a natural development?
A: I feel like with Paper Mache Mountains the writing was pretty much done, we just had to painstakingly record it over a long period of time. With this new one, we were even writing until the very end. A lot of the songs came together at the end. That was just by virtue of recording something and then listening to it back that we had the opportunity to do that. That was probably the main difference, the fact that we were writing to the very end.
G: Yeah, “Squawk” I think we finished writing an hour before we recorded it. “Maybe It’s Best” was the same way. Paper Mache Mountains was really about finding a way to translate the live show to record, whereas this album was just about making music for music’s sake.
There are two things that occurred to me as to why it’s more cohesive. Probably the most important reason is that all the songs were written during a certain period in my life. Lyrically, I was just about to graduate college when I started writing for this.
MM: Wow, so this goes far back then.
G: Yeah. I was just about to graduate college, and there’s a lot going on in my life. I don’t know where I’m going to live. I don’t know what I’m going to do. So much was happening then that I just needed to make sense of it all. I just drew myself to the writing process as a very spiritual thing. I sort of worked out some of my spiritual queries through it. So, there’s a lot of that kind of stuff in there thematically. It was all written during that terrible void of a three year period between knowing I’m going to graduate college and graduating college, wondering where to go or where to work.
We also recorded the new album all by ourselves, too. We built a studio which allowed us to have complete control over the recording process. I probably did more than 40 hours of premixing before we took it in with Jon Lorman, who mixed our last record, too. John, Alex, and I probably spent between 60 and 70 hours just mixing very, very tiny nuances to make it sound completely cohesive. We waited until the last minute to name the songs. We just picked little themes from the lyrics and then named them all to be a more cohesive body of work.
MM: So you guys were finishing songs up until the last minute, and you mentioned you were writing back around when you were graduating from college. In terms of lyrical content, is that what you were referring to or do the beginnings of these songs go as far back as your senior year of college?
A: Probably more the structure of the songs.
G: Lyrics are usually the last thing. Sometimes, a phrase will just come to me. For example, in “Homing” the first thing that we ever had was that refrain “How sweet it is…” and that came in at the end of ’07. We actually recorded that song in ’07. But then, of course, we developed it a lot after that.
It’s weird. I don’t find myself being disciplined about writing. It’s just sometimes I’m compelled or we’ll both just pull it out of the air and it’ll happen – and then it’ll be organic when it happens. But, I find that it’s something very hard to force.
MM: The themes on the new album seem to cover the past, transition, growth, and change. Would you say the album is a documentation of where you were or where you are…or both?
G: It’s sort of an internal dialogue between myself: where I was vs. projections I had for where I would be. It’s all about the interplay between the here and the there. It’s about embracing the middle space – find a way to get to that middle space before it’s on you.
I guess it’s complicated, because so many of the lyrics were stream of consciousness. As a result, it’s hard for me to know what exactly I was thinking until I really study them. It just sounds like conversations I’m having with myself, in my head. It’s also sort of like my conscience talking to me. There seems to be a fair amount of life/death dichotomy happening, too. But, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s about life and death at all. If anything, I think it fights to explore the middle ground between life and death and find out how that can be transcendent. It’s about embracing that space, that gray area. Nothing in life is simple or dichotomous, it’s all very complex. I feel like once you get cozy with that and take it as it is, you get new perspectives – a bird’s eye view if you will [laughs].
MM: I hope I’m not getting too personal here, but I read in the write-up for the album that a close friend of the band’s passed away while you were completing the album. Did that factor in at all when it came to lyrics, themes, titles?
A: Yeah, I think Greg can answer those specific questions, but, for me, what it did was give a certain meaning to the music itself and to the community that we come from in Sparta, NJ. The guy was a big influence of ours, liked our music a lot, helped us even with this recording, and it sort of just shaped one of the reasons for why we were even doing it, I think. So, music aside, it became more apparent after his death why it even existed.
G: I definitely feel that. Brian was a huge influence on us. We probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Brian. He was in that local band that was our favorite band.
A: Vertigo.
G: And he was also the one from that band that was closest in age to us and was the quickest to treat us like peers. So we really looked up to Brian. He had struggled with depression his whole life and he actually ended his own life. It was a big shock and really, really, really hard on the community. No one could have foreseen that happening, but Brian had always been on the precipice.
When we recorded the group vocals for the record, it facilitated everyone getting together. And the only time everyone’s been together like that was at the funeral. It was nice. It was a really momentous occasion to see everyone coming together over the music. And that’s kind of how our friends are back home. But we really miss Brian a lot and wish he could check out the album, because he was the harshest critic I ever met. But you always knew though that if your idea could past muster with him, it was a good one. And for him to be excited about the music while we were recording, it just meant the world to me.
A: Yeah, and as far as I know it was the last recording he did, so that gave a certain meaning to it, as well.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of 2 of my in-depth conversation with The Sparta Philharmonic.
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