Leisure Birds
Leisure Birds soaring with the synths; photographed by Alex Achen.
Welcome back our Minneapolis, MN high-flyers Leisure Birds, as they present the grand premiere & unveiling of their Library Music commissioned project titled Zoom Lens. Prepare to witness the sky-swimming/synthesizer tricking birds Jake Luck, Collin Gorman Weiland, Bennet Johnson, Cory Carlson, & Alex Achen re-imagine & recreate entire moods, vibes, & new set of synth soundtracks put to educational films & travelogues of the late 70s to early 90s.
Leisure Birds introduce their Zoom Lens album of library music made for Black Label Music with the “Black Label Music Bumper Reel” advertisement video trailer made by Jake Luck who introduces their new multimedia undertaking with the following insights:
Since the beginning of time, we have dreamt of flying free and soaring into the clouds. Day by day and night by night, Leisure Birds has worked to make that dream a reality. It’s called Zoom Lens, and its powered by every color of the rainbow.
Each track is crafted with yesterday’s finest synthesizers and recording technologies to bring you the sounds of our universe: from the outer-most stars to the inner-most brain waves; from the furthest desserts to the highest mountain peaks. Discover how wonderful it is to leave the noise, hustle, and bustle of the Earth far below.
Join Leisure Birds as they take you on an all access trip through science, math, history, leisure and beyond. The magic moment of flight has almost arrived.
Following up their much beloved album Tetrahedron (TGNP/Moon Glyph/The Great Pop Supplement), they join the rest of their Totaly Gross National Product label mates (aka Andrew Broder of FOG, Nona Marie Envie of Dark Dark Dark, RONiiA, Chris Bierden of Polica, Invisible Boy, & Makr of Marijuana Deathsquads, RONiiA) in working with Black Label Music’s artist in residency program that challenges artist to create music that pushes into a dimension other than our own. It is our pleasure & privilege at this time to encourage you to fasten your safety belts & harnesses, move your tray into the upright & locked position as we prepare for takeoff with the world premiere of the Leisure Birds videos for “Return Flight” & “Occult Cargo Freighter”. From here vintage media visions become transformed through analog & digital devices and means to transport your entire senses to a new state of being.
“Return Flight” takes you on an unrestricted flight through the friendly skies, where Jake combines images that show off the past forty years of avian instruction & instructive videos where the conventions & coordination between pilots & control tower teams are seen juxtaposed with aerial photography. Constantly adding chromatic effects to the equation, Leisure Birds’ non-stop flight takes to new heights propelled by a dedicated team of aircraft experts & specialists. You can even hear the way the Birds bend & blend their own synthesizer sensibilities to match the throwback nature of the project where spliced sections of modern media becomes re-appropriated for new mediums of discovery & narrative depictions.
“Occult Cargo Freighter” begins with the sound of bassoons met with synths as Leisure Birds take you to the shoreside with visuals pertaining to where the water meets the edges of earth. Shifting from sky to sea, the film moves from kids playing on the sands of the beach to world map footage of the seas patrolled by massive freighters. Given the cryptic nature of the track name and ominous electric organ delivery, all the ships seen sailing these rough seas and chopping waters have something of a mysterious quality to them. Recycled imagery of the sun glittering off the water’s surface is seen juxtaposed to footage of these megalithic tankers that float like ghost ships lead astray from their homeland harbors.
Catching up with the Leisure Birds; photographed by Jake Luck.
Leisure Birds own Jake Luck also provided us the following expository preface & behind the scenes peak with the following words:
Last November, I got an email from Black Label Music, a music house in Minneapolis, MN, with the header “Can you make this?” I opened the email and there was a link to this video.
The idea of a music licensing company contacting us to see if we can make music that sounds like catalog music from the 70s was mind boggling. Library Music had certainly been an influence for some time. But when a music library commissions you to make an album of vintage Library Music, it’s an excuse to fully embrace a genre without the fear of feeling contrived or detached from reality. Not that you need to be grounded in reality to make music. Simulation of worlds that never actually existed seems to be a running theme throughout all of our projects, Leisure Birds or otherwise. Last year, Cole and Bennet (amongst others) released an album under the name Night Court (Not Not Fun). As Night Court co-founder Chris Hontos put it, life imitates fiction less than fiction imitates life. Exactly. But with Zoom Lens, the line between fiction and life is blurred in multiple ways. Black Label was looking for an album to add to their library that embodied the spirit of late 70s and early 80s library music. While the term “music library” isn’t really en vogue any more, that’s essentially what Black Label Music is. Music houses now tend to favor the term catalog, but it’s still the same concept: a voluminous collection of albums that are solely meant for commercial purposes. It’s music that is just generic enough to attract the largest amount of licensees. The same song could appear in an advertisement, instructional video, tv show and video game—all in the same day. It’s hard to find a discipline where the creative output is essentially to make vague simulations of concepts; e.g., a 70s jazz album or a 90s trip hop album or whatever. In the case of Zoom Lens, it’s a simulation of a simulation; a return to the good old days of library music.
The luxurious world of Leisure Birds; photographed by Alex Achen.
Which begs the question, were there ever really good old days of library music? No. Because record collectors basically invented Library Music as a genre. Sure, music libraries paid musicians to make songs and albums back in the day, but to insert the modern construct of library music into the original day to day output of these albums is probably a misnomer. So. What exactly does that make Zoom Lens then? I suppose it’s an over-simplified and idealized approximation of what my memory chooses to remember of that era. I believe they call that simulacra.
There’s lots of audio and visual cues that immediately came to mind when we first started Zoom Lens. The Bruton Music library seems to encompass an entire parallel world that is essentially the same as our world, but with slight mundane differences. Here’s a personal favorite:
A Google image search of Bruton Music Library really lets you see how serialized this music was, on top of just being visually amazing—every album cover is a winner. It exists in a very contained world. That’s how we wanted Zoom Lens to feel: an entire music catalog whittled down to one album. The idea of the “catalog” is a driver behind the whole project. Perhaps that’s because catalogs don’t exist to the extent they used to. An obvious example is the idea of the album as a sort of mini catalog. Only the most hardcore of listeners still listen to albums. That’s not meant to be a grandiose statement; it’s just kind of a fact. Singles far outperform albums and we live in a world that’s more geared toward playlists than albums. We’re now more concerned with curation than with catalogs. The internet also killed the need to have a drawer in your house the has a manual for every household appliance you own. We don’t rely on neat and tidy catalogs, manuals or encyclopedias the way we used to. So an excuse to make an album that looks and feels like a catalog was comforting. Which is odd.
Interested in hearing about the sound and vision gathering and organizing that went on to make Zoom Lens.
Zoom Lens is a concept that I’ve been talking about for years. The idea was to make a series of albums that create very specific worlds and encompass very specific geography: the band playing at the house party in a 60s biker movie, the octopus theme from a score to an 80s educational film about shallow seas, the one left-field love ballad from a 70s Italian sexploitation film, and so on. Throughout much of the 60s and 70s, when directors wanted to score a film, they often hired on-staff composers to make niche genre music like psych, prog jazz, disco, etc. And the result was usually none of those things. Or at least, it was often a strange simulation of those genres that seemed to have no ground in reality. And it sounded amazing. That’s the space I wanted Zoom Lens to exist in.
The bumper reel is meant to be sort of a companion piece to Zoom Lens. It’s 15, 30 and 60 second audio blips that are essentially meant to be transition music. It’s mood music for news breaks, test screens, and quick, action packed teaser commercials. Turning the bumper reel into a a series of commercials for Black Label Music that go back to the 70s, 80s and 90s felt appropriate. Black Label was established in 2014.
What challenges did you all find in the process?
We had to write, record, mix and master the album in just a little over a month. If you look back at our catalog, you’ll see that Leisure Birds averages about a record every other year. I guess a lot of that has to do with typical album cycles. Certainly, a release schedule of every odd year leaves plenty of breathing room, but it’s still a timeframe most of us are used to within the context of Leisure Birds. Having to turn an album around in a month and a half was certainly a challenge and forced us to conceive and record these ideas in new ways. There was no process of sitting down as a band and writing an album. The process looked a bit more like: 1) clock/sequence/program synths and drum machines 2) Press the record button 3) Start playing what ever comes to your head. After a long series of doing this, we made our way to what felt like complete songs. I realize that this is how many people make albums. In fact, this may be how the majority of the world makes albums. But the key factor for me is that while we’ve basically recorded songs in this fashion before, the difference here is that when we pressed record, we had no idea what we were going to do. That fact is a major departure for me and from how Leisure Birds conceives and makes albums.
Leisure Birds at work; photographed by Alex Achen.
What sorts of breakthrough discoveries did you all discover?
Cole and I have vastly different natural skill sets. I think the restraints that were put on us for this project forced us to embrace what we’re naturally good at and run with it. In the context of Zoom Lens, when you strip it all down, Cole is responsible for the sounds and I’m responsible for the notes. We certainly give each other plenty of opinions, and, from time to time, the rolls were reversed. But, for the most part, we found a rhythm of how to work with each other and tried to not look back. I really only say this because at those times when I do look back, I’m forced to acknowledge that without Cole, this entire project—and Leisure Birds as a whole—would be impossible.
What ways do you feel Leisure Birds have grown through this process?
To some extent, the sense of a standard Leisure Birds formula and instrumentation has been reevaluated. That’s perhaps one of the most important lessons. We have three official studio albums behind us now and that tends to be the point in a band’s life when it begins to become formulaic and often boring. But it’s tricky. You don’t want to go too crazy. It reminds me of 60s garage bands, who then turn into blues psych, then into raga, then into prog rock, then into free jazz, then into new age, and then they return to radio-friendly rock in the 80s with an album that actually sounds more like the Lion King soundtrack (love Elton John, though). I don’t want to turn into a monster that was once Leisure Birds. So the key is to figure out how to remain true to the original intentions of the band while also moving forward and trying new things. I think we figured out how to do that with Zoom Lens.
What sort of lasting impact do you feel this experience has had on Leisure Birds?
Our last album, Tetrahedron, was about a place in the universe so far out, that there is nothing but floating geometric shapes everywhere. So if you’re gonna hate us as a band, you probably already do. As each record goes by, I’m becoming more and more comfortable with the fact that some people are gonna get this and others aren’t. Zoom Lens is not pop music. It will never be played on the radio. But someone out there is going to get it. And that’s all I really care about. While I’ve sort of viewed Zoom Lens as music for a parallel world, I think the disambiguation of who this album was made for has helped me work through some of these issues. A music library asked for it, so we made it. There’s something liberating about the simplicity of that.
What will the next Leisure Bird flight entail?
We’ve been recording for the past year and a half. Expect a few more albums this year.
Leisure Birds’ Zoom Lens is available now from Black Label Music / TGNP.
