ANDY SCHIAFFINO OF BODY / NEGATIVE
channelling love and loss through the cathartic filter of music, Everett, the resulting work by los angeles artist andy schiaffino is a deeply personal yet highly relatable masterpiece. everett is more than THE county seat and largest city of snohomish county, washington, it is the embodiment of lives past and present. providing inspiration and solace, the temperate rainforests of the pacific northwest gave rise to the record’s namesake and comfort during some of life’s most tumultuous times.
Music has the cathartic ability to allow one to process and channel grief into traumatic relief and also a tangible outlet. In experiencing this firsthand and the time spent with your father in hospice, how did music for you play a role in managing this period in your life as a daughter and a musician?
I spent a lot of time at my piano, playing away my free minutes. One of the most cathartic things I can do in moments of melancholy is to sit at my instrument and play until all my feelings finish pouring out. When my father still lived in his home at the end of his life, I lived there for his final year, helping my brother take care of him. Our dad’s bedroom was directly beneath mine. Due to our absurdly thin walls, he could hear nearly everything taking place in my bedroom, including all of my solitary moments of music-making.
There was an instance where I had been playing for quite a while—I think I was recording the piano arrangement for 'Persimmon'—and I received a phone call from my father. (It took less strength for him to just dial my number than to try to shout loud enough for me to hear him.) I was expecting him to tell me I was disturbing his rest and to turn the volume down, but instead, he asked me if I was listening to music. I told him I wasn’t and that it was me recording something I was working on. He then told me that he thought it sounded beautiful and to keep playing. That is a moment I will forever hold close to my heart.
Selecting certain instruments to capture certain sentiments can be a challenging task. Was there (albeit posthumously) a correlation between the use of a handheld tape recorder as the primary microphone on the record, its sonic similarity to a phone conversation, and that of a reflective memory for times gone by when you had physically spoken to your parents over the phone?
I adore this thoughtful take, but the reality of my process is that I am simply a worshiper of all things analog and lo-fi. I've been on a journey of experimenting in recording techniques, which led me to use handheld tape recorders and a modded landline phone mic. I value texture above everything else, and falling deeper into the realm of lo-fi has brought me closer to my desired sonic textures.
However, you aren’t too far off - after my father’s passing, I chose to keep all of my phone voicemails from him. Currently, I am writing a piece that incorporates those recordings. It would have been nice to include his voice on Everett, but I just wasn’t ready to listen back to those voicemails.
Also featuring heavily throughout the record is your beloved Wurlitzer 200a. What textures and signature style did you try an harness by using it and it's selective application?
Wurlitzer electric pianos—the real thing, not a digital simulation—have such a dreamy built-in sound that doesn’t even need to be manipulated further to evoke the kind of ethereality I strive to summon in my music. From the first time I ever heard one played in person (which directly led to the cover “Figure 8” on my last record, Fragments, recorded on the very same Wurlitzer that ignited my vintage electric piano love affair), I just knew that it would be my signature instrument. They are so warm and soft, with a timbre like no other.
I did a lot of recording of my Wurli straight onto one of my handheld tape recorders—no external microphones, just the tape player’s built-in one—onto vintage deadstock cassette tapes. This process made such an already nostalgic-sounding instrument sound even more sentimental. I’m really pleased with how the final recordings came out, perhaps most notably on “Everytime” and “Flowers (The Proverbial You).” On the latter track, I randomly came across that piano recording on one of my many unlabeled cassette tapes lying around my house. I don’t have any memory of recording that melody, but I fell in love with it after listening to that tape, including my many mistakes and re-starts in the recording. Those imperfections make music so much more human, and keeping them in the song was more than intentional on my part. There’s no reason for a recording to be perfect.
Mixing your own work with that of others including; Amulets Randall Taylor and Ancestors Justin Maranga, what was your collaborative approach and what was it that you were initially seeking from their addition?
I sought out some field recordings from Randall, who is a mystical keeper of field recordings, to complete my song “Sleepy.” I envisioned it including a child’s laugh and, of course, rain. Randall, unsurprisingly, had the perfect rain field recordings on hand, which I layered to achieve the specific sound you hear towards the end of “Sleepy.” However, I didn’t have the saccharine sounds of childhood I needed.
Considering asking friends with children to lend me their offspring’s voices, I then remembered my collaborator and friend Lionel Williams (Vinyl Williams) had recently digitized a plethora of VHS tapes of childhood home videos. Almost immediately after inquiring if I could include the voice of his younger self on a song, he sent me audio of an adorable video of him and his father, Mark Towner Williams, running around in his childhood backyard, which worked perfectly with the song. I used the audio verbatim with hardly any cuts and just made it loop several times. “Sleepy” couldn’t have been completed without Lionel’s addition.
Lionel also played bass and drums on “Persimmon”—parts that he wrote himself, quite a long time after the song had been otherwise mostly completed. This wholly transformed the song into something entirely new that I fell head over heels in love with. Justin Maranga was involved in “Persimmon” from the early stages—we wrote and recorded his post-rock guitar parts together at his home studio. He also plays organ on the track “Faun and Fawn,” which is pulled from a recording he sent me of some ambient improvisation, a recording he had no intent of releasing. I wrote the song around the loop I created from his recording. “Faun and Fawn” is more an example of me experimenting with textures and eerie vocal harmonies than a proper song.
Midwife's Madeline Johnston played a starring role on the record. Most notably for her contribution to the stunning track, Everett, one of the finest in the My Bloody Valentine pioneering genre, but also on 'Sleepy' and 'Ataraxia'. Can you elaborate on how the tunes with Madeline developed and how the tracks meld into the overall album?
Madeline and I came to know each other due to her remixing a song from my last record - she remixed “Letterhead.” I find her remix even more compelling than the original, to the point where I incorporate her version into my live sets. Needless to say, I highly admire her music and process. After our friendship blossomed thanks to her remix, she approached me and asked if she could produce an album for me, inviting me to spend a few weeks doing an artist residency at her studio in Las Cruces, New Mexico. While I'm a bit too precious about my musical process to fully surrender my work to the hands of a producer, I eagerly agreed to a co-production role instead.
My residency was rescheduled twice due to some malapropos influenza I had contracted. It was then canceled indefinitely due to my father’s cancer becoming terminal. I decided to stay by my father’s side and cope with the tragedy by summoning all my strength into the sporadic forging of this record. Our remote collaborative efforts began with me bringing a series of recordings to Madeline in September 2022, all in various stages of completion. Madeline worked on “Sleepy,” “Faun and Fawn,” “Everytime,” “Fraidy Cat,” “Ataraxia,” and “Everett.” Her level of involvement differs with each track.
“Sleepy,” “Ataraxia,” and “Everett” are our proper collaborative songs. She played on, co-produced, and co-mixed these. Madeline also has writing credits on “Sleepy” and “Everett.” As for “Flowers (The Proverbial You),” “Faun and Fawn,” “Everytime,” and “Fraidy Cat,” those are all me. My final mixes just needed a tiny bit of extra EQ magic that I couldn’t cast myself, so she lent her engineering skills there.
“Persimmon” was something we attempted to work on together but it just wasn’t meant to be. I enlisted Megan Searl (Lillith 1181) to polish the track by co-producing and mixing it. Tracks 1, 4, 6, and 7 were already recorded by me and were intended to be included on the album from the start. Track 2 was a demo from my teenage years that Madeline and I reimagined. Track 7 is a reworked and entirely re-recorded song from my debut EP, Epoche. Tracks 3 and 5 I wrote and recorded while we were refining those aforementioned pre-existing songs. Track 8 was a demo that I brought to Madeline, and she and I ended up recording together remotely—her parts in her home studio and mine in my bedroom.
Blending traditional with the experimental, was there a balance you were trying to strike on each of the eight tracks off the record or do you see them as individual, standalone bodies of work?
The entire album revolves around analog tape recordings, with each track differing in fidelity. Side A of the album leans more heavily into the lo-fi territory, especially on track 4, “Fraidy Cat,” which represents my most experimental recording to date. Meanwhile, Side B leans a bit more towards the 'traditional'—sonically clearer—though it remains experimental in its execution. Despite this clear-cut division into 'part one' and 'part two' of the record, I see each track as standalone bodies of work. They all sound completely different texturally, but they share a common thread of experimentation with tape.
By looking backwards to see forward, how has Fragments informed Everett as a chain-link, and having Everett as a finished product for some time now, has your feelings towards it evolved?
Everett represents my venture further into the sonic territory I first explored on Fragments, particularly with disintegrating tracks like my cover of “Figure 8.” I aim to delve more and more into this world with each new album, aspiring to explore avant-garde compositions and musique concrete tendencies. My feelings towards Everett transformed rapidly throughout the making of the album itself and even more so now that it’s been completed.
In fact, a couple of days before writing out the answer to this very question, I listened to the record in full for the first time since approving the visionary Simon Scott’s final masters. I experienced it in an entirely new way. It accompanied my moonlight-lit drive to my friend Kyle Bates (Drowse)’s house, located in a remote area in the outskirts of LA. The surroundings consisted of enormous droves of crows preternaturally perching on telephone wires, faintly illuminated rolling hillsides, and empty desert one-way roads. Listening to Everett in this context made it feel disconnected from my identity and from my lived experience making this record—it was like listening to a stranger. I much preferred that to the usual self-listening session, which typically consists of fretting over the minutiae of sounds and perceived mistakes.
From one medium to another, how do you incorporate the visual aspect into your work? Are the visuals and video clips you make a product of a completed work that can only come from conceptualizing what is ready made or conversely, do you derive creativity and inspiration from visual cues that make their way into the work you produce?
It's funny—I had the image for the album cover in my head before Madeline and I even began working on Everett together. It might sound far-fetched, but the image came to me in a dream. What's even more ridiculous is that, despite my friend Audrey Kemp and I perfectly capturing what I had envisioned in my dream, we ended up not even using that image for the final cover! However, that photo and the general visual creative direction I had in mind for the album informed a lot of the music.
Inspired by the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest (home of Everett, Washington), evergreen trees, delicately fading Polaroid photos, and easily startled fawns, the visual elements played a significant role in shaping the music. One kind compliment I sometimes receive is that my music is cinematic, easily evoking images in the listener's mind's eye. An imagined scene, shared with me after I had sent someone an early recording of “Faun and Fawn,” was described as sounding like looking out of a car window on a night drive. This prompted me to shoot handheld camcorder video out of the passenger’s side window as my best friend Megan Henderson drove me through the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, where I was born.
I also made a pilgrimage to various important locations of my early childhood in Washington, such as the first two homes I grew up in and my preschool. I took photos of each of these places on a very old Polaroid camera, which Megan gifted me, and they are incredibly sentimental to me. Everett is undoubtedly a record heavily intertwined with its visual accompaniments. The best example of this is the video for "Sleepy," which features footage of my parents’ wedding from a VHS tape that I discovered hidden among my father’s possessions when I was given the task of going through his things after his death. That tape is the first and only home video I have ever come across and is profoundly meaningful to me. I insisted on its final resting place living alongside these songs that were already wholly devoted to my parents.
Over your musical career and journey, what have been some of the most meaningful moments you have gleaned from this time?
Something that meant a great deal to me after completing this record was when Madeline (Midwife) shared with me that she had 'learned so much' from our collaboration. She mentioned that working on this record had changed the way she records and thinks about music. It is beyond heartwarming to hear that I made a positive impact on someone whose output I admire as much as I do hers—especially considering my fully self-taught, DIY, experimental background. The feeling is mutual!
In what ways does Everett pave the way for your future ventures, in so much that there may have been unintended and unexplored sentiments and sounds that are only now coming out of the birthed creation?
Everett inspired a multimedia piece I am currently working on—an entirely intimate reflection on watching my father die and on the sudden death of my mother.
