More Like Expanding: Growing

IN THE PAST, it was hard to know how to react to a Growing concert. Were you supposed to stand up or sit down?

Up until recently the Olympia, Wash., turned Brooklyn, N.Y., drummerless duo performed music so soothing and tranquil that the natural impulse was to lie down on the ground, close your eyes and think deeply about episodes of "Planet Earth." But the places Growing used to play — art spaces, lofts, rock-clubs — were not particularly conducive to such meditation, unless you wanted to be doing lotus pose in a puddle of stale beer and cold cigarette ashes.

But with "All the Way" (The Social Registry), Growing has finally embraced rhythm, or at least made rhythm a more overt force within its pleasantly droney compositions.

At the very least, the driving pulses, abstract beats, and minimalist momentum will give you a reason to stay on your feet when the band performs with Hot Chip on Oct. 8 at the 9:30 Club.

Guitarist Kevin Doria recently spoke with Express about Growing's newfound not-quite-dance-ability, not knowing anything about "intelligent dance music" (IDM) and hecklers.

» EXPRESS: "All the Way" has a much greater emphasis on rhythm than your previous records. How did you give drone a beat?
» DORIA: Technically, we just used different machines than we have in the past. We used drum machines as sequencer gates; it's a boring story really. We're basically just running our guitars through drum machines. That helps with the rhythmic parts of it.

» EXPRESS: Had you ever used it that way before? What made you decide to plug your guitar into a drum machine?
» DORIA: I used it that way [as a sequencer gate] for other things, but I had never run my guitar through it. While we were recording, I decided I would just try to run my guitar through it and it worked really well. But we weren't using it to its potential. That was 2005; we have more fun using them now. We found ways to do a lot more with them than when we initially started.

» EXPRESS: What kind of drum machine is it?
» DORIA: It's a Korg Electribe, the first run of those. Really, they're like toys, but they've got a nice audio-in function. You can run any instrument you want through it. It's a Korg ER-1 Rhythm Synth. The internal sounds are pretty bad, but that feature is really nice.

» EXPRESS: Do you think you'll ever get around to using drum machines for their intended purpose?
» DORIA: I'd love to, but I'm just really bad at it. Also, the sounds in the one I use just aren't really any good at all. They're really awful. I just got something else, but it's really complicated and the manual is really complicated.

» EXPRESS: What is it?
» DORIA: It's a Roland MC-505. Most people would laugh that thing off as a piece of shit. It's made for people who make techno and house music. It's not the best thing but it was cheap.

» EXPRESS: Sound-wise this record has a lot in common with dance and techno music? Did you have that kind of music in mind when you were writing the songs?
» DORIA: I've always have been into that stuff, but nothing really flighty or smart or anything like that.

» EXPRESS: What kind of stuff were you into?
» DORIA: You know, just like those 4/4 beats that go on forever. The kind of thing you hear coming out of some European's car, like things that come out on Roule Records, the Daft Punk guy's label. But even shit like Madonna's "Confessions on the Dance Floor" is awesome. Any older '70s dancehall from Jamaica, that stuff that has these real crappy basic beats. It definitely comes from more the idea of electronic dance music and not necessarily the rave thing.

» EXPRESS: None of the cerebral or minimal dance music?
» DORIA: No, not so much. Ten years ago I liked a lot of 20th-century composers, but I was never really into minimal dance or whatever. It was more stuff like Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, John Cage, David Tudor — things that were highbrow. There's definitely no fun in most of that stuff. IDM? I don't know anything about it.

» EXPRESS: Do you think of the music on "All the Way" as dance music?
» DORIA: Me, personally? No, not at all. I suppose you could dance to it. I guess. I just don't think about it like that really. I just think about it as what we're making. For a long time people would come to a Growing show, sit down, watch and then clap politely. But I feel like it's a lot more fun now than it might have been in the past. I'd love it for people to freak out and dance, but I wouldn't say we've mastered that by any means.

» EXPRESS: How much of your music is improvised and how much of it is composed?
» DORIA: We never improvise, ever. Things are always written out. When we're recording there's a lot more room to figure out what we want to do. Maybe we'll write a whole song in the studio, but once it's written we definitely don't improvise at all. We know whether the other guy screwed up. I think a lot of people are usually surprised about [that]. When we first started we tried to improvise a few times and we just hated doing it.

» EXPRESS: You're on tour with Hot Chip right now, a dance band with pop hooks. Are audiences generally willing to get into what you do?
» DORIA: Well, usually we've been opening up for more metal bands. In this situation people seem a lot more interested. People are more open to things; they aren't thinking of it in terms of pop. There's also a lot of people who are into it or are glad that it's happening — at least it seems that way. There's not as much booing as when we opened up for more metal bands. Almost no booing, which is nice.

» EXPRESS: Almost no booing?
» DORIA: We've only had one boo-er and we had a confrontation.

» EXPRESS: Like, a fight?
» DORIA: No, no. He just told me to go home, so I told him to fuck off. Then the crowd turned on him. At the after party we bought beers for each other and talked about it.

» EXPRESS: How did you wind up buying beers for each other?
» DORIA: Forgive the story. I'm walking into the bathroom and he's like, "Hey, man, do I know you?" He's just that wasted. He had no idea that two hours ago we had been screaming at each other." To be honest, I don't know what he said; he just wanted to introduce me to all his friends and then he bought me a beer. It worked out. I got a beer out of the deal.

» EXPRESS: You said that you used to open up for a lot of metal bands? Did you resent being lumped into that scene?
» DORIA: I don't like being lumped into anything at all. Immediately you're pigeonholed and that limits bands more than it helps them creatively. There's a lot of pressure to be a certain kind of thing and then when that doesn't happen it's very disappointing to people. A lot of that has to do with the way things are described [in reviews] and the expectations that come out of it. Not to compare us to Dylan, but you know Bob goes electric and then [Pete] Seeger tries to cut the cord. If you're expected to be a drone-doom-metal band and you never have been, but somebody described you as that in a publication, then it comes back on you.

» EXPRESS: Have people been having that reaction to "All the Way"?
» DORIA: I guess so, yeah. We had one review in the Village Voice that told us we needed to move out of New York and go back to Olympia. He got all of our personal information wrong — said we're trying to rip off all these bands and it's just not the case at all. That's show business right? They flog you for being right, they flog you for being wrong.

Written by Express contributor Aaron Leitko
Photos courtesy The Social Registry