I've been aware of Bardo Pond for several years now -- their intriguing, drug-reference-laden albums on Matador and the wonderful Drunken Fish Records, their collaborations with Roy Montgomery as Hash Jar Tempo -- but in the last year or so, I've found myself increasingly intrigued by their music and their mesmeric live performances. Their improv-friendly, sprawling, psychedelic songs, though all too often lumped into the (mostly one-dimensional) "stoner rock" genre, have proved to be inspirational to many of today's indie rock sensations -- including Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor, both of whom chose Bardo Pond to support their recent tours.

Dilate, Bardo Pond's latest album, is their best effort to date, and has been winning them new fans in the US and Europe. As I'd been enjoying Dilate for some time, I jumped at the opportunity to interview Bardo Pond when they passed through Chicago with Mogwai. In keeping with the band's improvisational style, I did my research, but didn't come up with any questions in advance, the better to facilitate a free-flowing conversation. Other than my embarrassing failure to ask about Take the Green Over the Red, the newly released album from their previously live-only offshoot, Prairie Dog Flesh, things went pretty well.

As you know if you've ever recorded an interview with several people -- some of whom are related -- in a poorly soundproofed room, matching voices to faces can be challenging. We've done our best to reproduce each member's statements accurately, but it's possible that statements attributed to one band member were actually made by another (though we think we got all of Isobel's stuff straight). If we got 'em wrong, we're sorry!

Splendid: I want to start out by asking about Dilate. You guys take quite a while to record albums. How does your recording process work? What did you spend all that time doing?

Michael Gibbons: The last two records stretched out. I don't know quite why...it just seemed like that much time went by -- almost two years. That's a good question. We were working.

John Gibbons: We were working at our jobs. We rehabbed our studio.

Michael Gibbons: Plus we went through a drummer transition that was really kind of strange. We were working on some songs and then our drummer really couldn't practice with us much, and when Ed Farnsworth started drumming with us it was so different that we almost had to change the material, because we were used to certain songs going certain ways... That whole thing played out at the same time that we were fixing the studio, and kind of learning all this newer material. Somehow time got stretched out.

Splendid: It doesn't seem to have hurt the music.

Michael Gibbons: No, I think it was good, for this one especially.

Splendid: How does your songwriting process work? I mean, with more members and with freer-form songs you write, I assume you can't just sit down and say "This chord, that chord."

Michael Gibbons: Usually somebody will come up with a riff, and it kind of gets going, and we record everything, so we'll have all these different jams, and we'll listen back to 'em. The ones that stick out in our heads, we'll go back and work on them again. There are some songs we really know we're going to work on, but others just come right out of improvs.

John Gibbons: And a few older tunes we brought back. "Two Planes" was an old song, and we tried to play it a little differently, a different arrangement.

Michael Gibbons: Some songs take a long time, years to arrange. "Two Planes" was one of our oldest songs that we never could find the right arrangement for. Same with "Sunrise"; that was another one that was really old and we finally came up with the arrangement. We learned a lot of things in the studio, too, so that kind of changed the way we thought about songs. Now we're adapting our live shows to that.

Splendid: The last time I saw you play was when you were touring with Godspeed You Black Emperor. I don't know how "interactive" that experience was, but did anything they did affect your own approach? I know you finished working on Dilate right around the same time.

Michael Gibbons: When was that, last October?

Splendid: Yeah.

Michael Gibbons: Dilate was pretty much in the can by then. We knew about Godspeed before then, of course.

John Gibbons: Yeah, that was a great tour. We loved going out with those guys.

Michael Gibbons: I couldn't really say... That's a good question. We stole some...some pretty poignant things about them. (Laughs)

John Gibbons: (Joking) We had a violin on the last record.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, we were doing that stuff way before... That's such a question.

Splendid: Now that bands like Godspeed and Mogwai are really getting attention, do you find yourself thinking "Hey, we basically did this first?"

Michael Gibbons: Well, they give us credit. That's why they asked us to play those shows, and that's why Mogwai wanted us to come with them. They say that when they were getting their ideas together, they definitely liked us. You know what I mean? I don't have any problem with it. I think a lot of our material is more difficult for people to get in a mass way -- to respond to. I think it's more intense in a way. I think their music is very intense -- maybe more noisy or something. Something about it is less, umm...

Splendid: It seems like they build to something more often, whereas you guys coast. Or rather, like you hit some point and sustain it for a while and explore variations.

Isobel Sollenberger enters the room

Michael Gibbons: In the beginning we "built" a lot. I think a lot of songs on Amanita and a lot of songs on the first album were about building to these peaks and coming back down. Then, like, with Lapsed and Set and Setting we got more... It was weird, we kind of turned our backs on that to explore... what would happen was in the jams at home, we'd get to these points, and have these peaked songs, and what happened was that we got really interested in starting them in the middle, when it was already peaked, and just going from there, and staying in that zone. So that's what we tried to do with Set and Setting and Lapsed. I think with Dilate we came back to the old way -- having things build, parabolic stuff.

Splendid: What songs on Dilate are you happiest with? I know that sounds like kind of an "interviewing 101" question, but I mean in terms of overall representation of the band.

Michael Gibbons: Every song! Really. On every song we tried to push what we did as hard as we could, and have the whole record be kind of cinematic. There are parts of every song that are exactly what we wanted.

John Gibbons: We got some great takes, I think. "LB"...

Isobel Sollenberger: "Inside".

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, "Inside" we really liked.

Splendid: I'd planned to ask about "Inside", because your vocal comes out so differently from a lot of the other stuff.

Isobel Sollenberger: In the past?

Splendid: It seems like there's more variation on the album as a whole. With your vocals, you're really getting heard more -- you're not getting stuck between two layers of sound, and you're coming out and working more variations of your vocals.

Isobel Sollenberger: Thanks a lot. I think that's just from playing live so much, which builds confidence. And also Michael has just kind of edged me up a little bit in the mix.

Michael Gibbons: I think all the instruments on Dilate we really investigated the same way -- the guitar, the drums, Isobel's voice... We really tried to get each one, pushed it. Like, acoustic guitar was used. We had it before, but it was kind of down in the layers, but now we've really got that going. So we really worked with those acoustic textures, and Isobel's voice. There aren't many effects on her voice.

Isobel Sollenberger: We really reached a point, musically, and spent a lot of time exploring it in the studio.

Splendid: And when you have your own studio setup you have that much more time to explore.

Michael Gibbons: (Enthusiastically) Yeah!

Splendid: How big is your studio?

Michael Gibbons: It's not that big a studio. We have a couple of A-DATs, and a couple of small boards, some pretty decent microphones. It's pretty rudimentary, but good enough that it sounds good when we listen back to it.

Splendid: So you have the freedom not only to explore as much as you can, but the meter's not running.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, exactly.

Splendid: That has to be really nice from a creative standpoint.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, you can find a lot of happy accidents that way.

Splendid: So in that case, how many unreleased Bardo Pond records are already stacked up?

Michael Gibbons: Well, we do so much improvisation that we're releasing these things like Volume I, Volume II, that are all improvisational. They're all improv things that we probably won't work on as songs. There's a lot of stuff on tape -- hours and hours and hours.

Splendid: So some day there'll be, like, Bardo Pond Volume 97? (They laugh)

John Gibbons: I need 97, 103...

Splendid: Not having played an instrument "actively" in a few years, when I see bands who rely on improvisation, I always wonder what's the trick to getting the song recognizable and the same every time? Is it just that after a certain number of times, you've got it solid in your head?

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, by the time we play the songs live, they're not really improvisational anymore.

Splendid: They're grown from improvisation.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, they're created out of improvisation, with the whole band. By the time we play 'em again... There are parts that are built in that we can really...go.

Splendid: Play with.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah. But mostly they're constructed so that we can go through those parts and come back down. It's pretty tight. Just the way the songs are, they have this built in "unknown" to them. They never get too dull.

Splendid: Isobel, haven't you always made the lyrics up on the fly?

Isobel Sollenberger: Yeah, for the last couple of albums.

Splendid: And on Dilate they're actually, formally written and sealed in stone, because they're printed in the CD booklet...

Isobel Sollenberger: Yeah, they're probably a little different from what's in the booklet, because things change. I'm pretty locked-in now, because we've been touring behind the material for a while, but they do change.

Splendid: So the booklet lyrics might be what you'll hear in the live songs, but...

Isobel Sollenberger: Well, I pretty much try to keep to the recording. It's tough.

Michael Gibbons: She doesn't really improvise lyrics on stage unless the whole band goes into an improvisation...which happens sometimes.

Splendid: Let's get away from Dilate for a few minutes. I've been fascinated with Roy Montgomery for a long time, and I want to ask you about working with him. You hooked up with him for the Hash Jar Tempo records. Is anything else coming out of that collaboration?

Michael Gibbons: Well, he rarely gets to visit and we rarely get to go to New Zealand, so those occasions are few and far between. Both of those CDs are from just one night when he came by and hung out. It's like a dream, playing with him -- we just fit together. It was an accident; he was over with our friend Darren from Drunken Fish Records. He wound up having his guitar with him, and he plugged it in. That first record came from that. He sounded so good we all just started joining in. It's amazing. Then after we thought it would be good, we were almost afraid to listen to the tapes. He and I both; I listened to it and I was like, "I think it did sound good." And I gave it to him, and he was excited about it.

John Gibbons: The same thing happened the second time.

Michael Gibbons: We were all just like, "What did we let ourselves do?"

John Gibbons: They sounded so good, and I was playing something and I was like "Aww, does this sound good?" and I looked over at Darren and he was like, "Yeah, keep going!"

Splendid: Montgomery can do more with one guitar than a lot of people can do with an orchestra.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, he's amazing. He plays farfisa on the second CD and he plays it just as wonderfully. I couldn't believe he was gonna play that. We were like "Maybe he should play guitar." But holy cow, it was just amazing, whatever he was doing.

Splendid: Maybe you guys can talk Matador into bringing him over here to tour with you.

John Gibbons: Or Drunken Fish.

Michael Gibbons: I don't know. I heard a rumor that he might be able to come over, so we're getting our hopes up.

Splendid: That'd be great.

Michael Gibbons: He's got, like, a job, though, and it's pretty serious. Is he getting his Ph.D. or something? He's tied up for a little bit, but he's almost done.

Splendid: I didn't mean to take the emphasis off of you guys; I'm just fascinated by Montgomery and I've never had a chance to see him.

Michael Gibbons: I haven't even talked to him in a while. I should e-mail him when we get back. He's a great guy -- really funny.

Splendid: So with the last couple of Bardo Pond tours, it seems like you've been exposed to...well, as slightly more mainstream indie rock audience. How has that worked for you? Are they responding well?

Michael Gibbons: In the live shows?

Splendid: Yeah.

Michael Gibbons: Did you see us with Godspeed? At Metro?

Splendid: Yes.

Michael Gibbons: What did you think of that?

Splendid: I expected to like you, and I liked you more than I figured I would. You also really surprised the people I was with, who were on the fence about it.

Michael Gibbons: Really? So everybody dug it?

Splendid: I think so.

Michael Gibbons: I felt like the crowd was really great that night. It's been great to play in front of a nice big room of people. It's definitely been good.

Ed Farnsworth: Yeah, people really seem to be into it.

Isobel Sollenberger: They do seem to be responding well.

Splendid: I always wound up missing you when you were here in the past, so I have no frame of reference. Is it better now than in the past?

Michael Gibbons: Oh yeah!

John Gibbons: Yeah, we played smaller clubs before.

Michael Gibbons: We played the Empty Bottle a few times, and Lounge Ax back in the day. We like playing on our own, but it's nice to have a band that's doing a little better come and take us out with them, because we really haven't had that many opportunities to do that. It feels good, even at this stage in our careers. Mogwai -- Stuart -- has pretty much resurrected our careers. In Europe now we have more attention than we ever had, and Dilate has been really good there too. There's been a nice reaction.

Splendid: And I guess you're doing a little member-sharing? When I talked to Stuart, he said you guys might all play together tonight.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, we have -- it was so weird, because there was no talk of that. Then we had a couple of brief things, and then it was just like "Awwwright!" I feel like I've opened Pandora's Box. So we'll see.

John Gibbons: You played bass on one of their tunes.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah, they had me play bass the other night. I'm going to play on their first tune, and they might come out in our set if we can work it out. But they have those stacks, man...I won't be able to hear myself.

Splendid: Those are amazing. This is the loudest soundcheck I've heard in a long time.

Ed Farnsworth: The show's really loud.

Michael Gibbons: They have insane stage volume, and those PAs are really up there. It's the loudest band in the world.

Splendid: I guess last time they came through here, when they played Metro a few months ago, they couldn't bring all that stuff, because I was down in the photo pit in front of the stage when they started playing and I was kind of surprised I still had a head. This is louder.

Michael Gibbons: Yeah...

Splendid: So what's up next for you guys? You do this tour...then what?

Michael Gibbons: We do this tour, then go home and see what kind of...opportunities arise as far as playing more shows. We might try to tour again in the fall, just on our own, and get to work on some new songs. And try to not take another two years. I think we definitely have to have another record out in the next year.

Splendid: You don't want to lose momentum.

Michael Gibbons: Right, we can't lose that.

Splendid: So one last thing -- Mogwai are notorious partiers, and you guys are too, in your way. Is it rough being on tour with them from a "recreational" standpoint?

John Gibbons: It's been a pretty busy tour.

Michael Gibbons: All work and no play. It's been fun. Actually they're very professional lads and they've been an inspiration to us. Everyone's been in tip-top shape every day. (Much loud laughter) You can imagine...