eWire: Karate interview

Is techno something you want to do/record? Or are you already doing it?

I'm obviously coming from a guitar acumen, and I can't deny that as much as I'd like to sometimes, I don't think I'll be making any electronica records soon, but who knows. The Secret Stars and Karate both started as weird, fun experiments, and part of the reason I think they were successful was because of the playfulness, especially the Secret Stars. In any case, I'm just having fun and learning shit. I've talked to the Sorts about remixing some of their shit on hard disc, and I'm recording some of Jodi's stuff as well, so those are plans for the immediate future. As far as my own stuff, I've been making noise tapes forever and I'll continue to do so, even if they start to have cleaner beats and all that.

Eliot Shepard mentioned that you're "really into computers in general". Could you elaborate on this a little?

Yeah, I'm a nerd wannabe. I'd trade my life for a setup like Eliot's in a heartbeat. I am totally inspired by the possibilities of IT, especially for creative kids and punks and all that. It's just so fertile right now, and there's so much to learn, and shit is cheap. I learned HTML on my old Mac Classic, believe it of not. I had Netscape 1.0 or something, and it wouldn't even recognize the .gifs. I'm not a computer geek as much as I want to be. I hack away at stuff till it works, but people like Eliot and Eamonn are really graceful about it. They grew up staring at DOS screens while I was watching "120 Minutes" or something useless like that. I'm always trying to make up for that now, doing Web sites and making computer music and all that.

You seem to enjoy technology involved with recording (guitar amps, echo machines, reverb boxes, etc.). Are you a tech geek? How did you become interested in these?

Yeah, like I said, I'm trying really hard to be a geek. I've always been interested in the idea of fixing shit, or making gear do things it's not supposed to do. Unfortunately, I went to music school which required a lot of stamina, but not much math, so now I'm wading through old RCA tube manuals doing math to try and figure out why my amps keep breaking. I'm pulling off some stuff. I built an amp from scratch and I'm pretty proud of that. But really, I'm a hack. Guys like Eliot hate me because I bug them so much for knowledge, and then I go and do a Web site about the stuff that I have discovered, but it's really rudimentary to them. I put Eamonn and about ten other people through the same ringer. When I was learning the tube stuff on tour, Eamonn finally bought me a physics textbook at a thrift store and made me do all the electrical theory exercises. He corrected my homework for about a month, and low and behold, the RCA manual started to make sense.