If you’re spending any time in Los Angeles, be warned: Not careful, and you might end up on the next Califone record without even knowing it. The Chicago-based band has always incorporated field recordings into their albums, and since the band’s lyricist, co-songwriter and founder, Tim Rutili, moved to the City of Angels last year, he has had plenty of fodder for these ambient snippets. To collect them, he stays perpetually alert to the surrounding soundscapes and is ready to capture them at the drop of a hat.
“I just walk around with a portable DAT machine, and I carry a mic,” Rutili explains. “I just record stuff, and if anything kind of sticks out as something that you’d want to hear again, it usually finds its way into the record somehow.”
The band’s eighth disc, the diverse and expansive Roots and Crowns, is filled with equal measures of found sound, acoustic guitar tinkering and lush orchestration using horns, strings and scores of unusual music makers that pairs spare austere dirges in the vein of Will Oldham with enough dissonant computer-generated glitches to satisfy disciples of Xiu Xiu. This is all complemented by Rutili’s abstruse nonsequiturs (“de-sung ribcages shelter wound river languid husk of old jet”).
It’s the kind of fervent experimentation and diverse instruments fans of Chicago’s post-rock lineage have come to expect. But even though Califone’s front man strayed from his hometown in favor of the Pacific, Rutili doesn’t think it’s affected the final product in the least. In fact, he could have moved anywhere and the album would have essentially been the same.
“As long as we took our time on it, I think it would have been pretty similar,” says Rutili. “We pretty much approached it the same [as our other albums]. The most important thing was actually working hard on it for a few weeks and then taking a month and a half off to basically think about what we just did and let it bake a little bit. And then coming back to it really, really helped give the recording some space.”
And it’s a record not lacking scope, partly due to the sweeping atmospheres wrought from Rutili’s catalogue of field recordings. And with the entire city as his palate, it makes you wonder how he separates the monotonous drone of daily life from the aural gems fit for mass production. “Usually,” he reasons, “Things just strike me.”
Nov. 9. Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E.4th St. & Astor Pl.), 212-539-8778; 9:30, $15. (also Nov. 10 at Southpaw)
