Rubblebucket: Keep Your Light On

By: Dennis Cook

Rubblebucket is currently on their Fall 2011 Tour. They play October 10th at Cosmic Charlie’s in Lexington, KY and October 11th The Basement in Columbus, OH. Check out full tour dates here, and clips of the band in action below the interview!

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Rubblebucket by John Margaretten

If someone had told you in 1977 what the Talking Heads would become or whispered in 1993 what Radiohead would evolve into, you’d likely have dived into both bands with unbridled gusto. The steady evolution and intrinsic, base-level quality of everything Rubblebucket has done in their four years together exhibits the same zeitgeist-capturing uniqueness that the Heads or the band they helped name have shown. What the Brooklyn-and-Vermont-based band is up to scoops up modern times and refracts them through a prism that unleashes things both joyful and a touch disturbing, a perfectly appealing muddle of anxious End Times energies and enduring ancient vibrations that freely borrows elements from disco, reggae, pop, and jazz. Rubblebucket’s music plays on some great, cosmic frequency with Lester Bowie, Bob Marley, Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson, Bjork and other iconoclasts who soundtrack the flight of angels and other invisible celestials.

Built around the core of Alex Toth (trumpet, band leader) and Kalmia Traver (vocals, saxophone), the group makes movement music, tantalizing to body and mind, a catalyst to dancing and thinking that leaps off the soapbox and into the upraised arms of anyone human and savvy enough to respond in kind. Unlike a lot of brainy bands, Rubblebucket isn’t hard to like. In fact, it’s only after one has fully masticated the full meal of latest offering Omega La La that the density and toothiness of their fare comes through. The first response is to sway and then perhaps allow one’s limbs to ripple about, followed by…well, that depends on the individual. Rubblebucket, like the forebears mentioned, is likely to be something slightly different to each person BUT able to be that for a LOT of people.

We spoke with Kalmia about the musky roots of Rubblebucket and the challenges of getting good music across in 2011.

Rubblebucket by Peter Dean Rickards

JamBase: What does the name Rubblebucket mean to the band? I like how evocative it is but it doesn’t conjure up a single, specific image other than the group itself.

[Laughs] Well, hopefully that will be true for more people than you. It is an actual tool, an about a 10-gallon bucket. I’m looking at some on my balcony [in Brooklyn] with herbs growing out of them. It’s used in stonemasonry and construction.

JamBase: The association with building things is nice and vibes well with the band’s general nature.

There’s a DIY thing that’s always been running through the band, from not having a manager initially to making our own posters and merch to writing our own music, and so on. Craig [Myers], our percussionist, does a lot of stonemasonry and construction, and he’s the one who introduced us to the word rubblebucket. When I first got the impression of it as a potential band name it felt like an enticing, hip thing that was mysterious, and now that I’m overly saturated with it, I’m sort of embarrassed [laughs]. The other thing that’s developed with the name as it’s gone on is the association with the earth and us being from the earth – and just us being a big, mangy group of people. We’re not anything special is the understanding.

Earthiness is part of the character of this band. I sensed an earthy sensuality from the first time I saw Rubblebucket perform. It’s in the music and the way you carry yourselves onstage…

…if I have anything to do with it!

Rubblebucket by John Margaretten

There are spiritual elements to your work – the reach of your music – though I couldn’t say it’s tied to any particular tradition.

Totally! That’s a thing I carry in me. My parents are Unitarian Universalists, so I grew up with a constant reminder that there’s not one answer. It’s important for everyone to find their own answers. That’s also true in the musical world, and I’m hearing SO much right now! We’re listening to these crazy old field recordings from the earliest days of recorded music and I’m hearing SO much spirituality in this music. Sometimes it’s overt and refers to a specific tradition, but the thing that runs through all of it and speaks most loudly to me is just the vibrations and rhythms and harmonies that can transport people. That’s the thing that brings it all together and I’m most excited about playing and transmitting to the world.

You tie into this spiritual bent very subtly. A song like “Came Out Of A Lady” or “Silly Fathers” deal with ancestry in a way that’s playful, but at the same time, you’re acknowledging the human family and its universal roots.

Definitely, and it also refers to the family of Earth and the Universe. It’s where I often find myself going lyrically because of this self-conscious, apocalyptic time we live in. And there’s the more optimistic view of it, which is dancing on the edge. That’s an image my dad talks about a lot; I think he got it from a poem or something [Editor’s Note: Mayhap it was this Leonard Cohen tune?].

Rubblebucket by John Margaretten

It’s a long tradition in music – if the world is falling apart someone needs to fiddle a tune. People probably beat drums and sang songs when they knew a much stronger army or tribe was about to roll over the hill and wipe them out. Both tribes probably beat drums in that instance! We respond to music in ways that transcend language and neat understanding. It stabs down to our reptile brain. As sophisticated as we think we are, there’s still things we’re unable to respond to rationally. That’s something Rubblebucket chases down, particularly live. You’re an enzyme to get people to that place beyond language.

That’s a goal I set out very knowingly, and it’s fun because I get affected as well. I’m just as much a part of the crazy moment as everyone else, and having it be my job is amazing. I first became conscious of this dynamic when I joined John Brown’s Body. They have the most immense live drum and bass I’ve ever heard. They make the stage literally rumble. At my first gig with them in Baltimore, I wondered, “Is this how it’s going to be? Seriously?” There were notes that had me laughing as I tried to keep it together onstage.

The way you’ve built the layers in Rubblebucket gets at the same thing, that heartbeat rhythm.

Yeah but it’s different. We have bass and drums but we also have these almost proggy layers. When we’re doing it at our best I like to think we get that heartbeat rhythm going on.

Part of what I like about Rubblebucket is how – even in this atmosphere of total access to music from all over the world and from myriad time periods – the band avoids easy explication. One can’t say “this band plus this band minus these traits plus these adjectives” equals Rubblebucket. You’re unique. How did you go about developing this sound?

Alex Toth & Kalmia Traver

Alex, even more than me, has had this vision for band musically. He’s driven the band, literally and figuratively. There were basically two rules we had in mind musically from the beginning. The first was it be fun for us to play and perform as well as challenging and enjoyable for the musicians involved. The second rule was that it be danceable and fun for the people to get down. And maybe that isn’t always literal dancing, but it needs to be accessible.

You have really strong musicians in Rubblebucket. And while there are a lot of cool sounds coming from Brooklyn right now, a lot of these young bands, even the most celebrated ones, aren’t great musicians. I’m fine with three-chords and the truth as an ethos but the seriousness of the musicianship in Rubblebucket does set you apart from many of your peers.

I totally agree with you. My experience of being in Brooklyn, so far, is we do stick out like a sore thumb. I think the best bands mix incredible musicianship with really creative new ways of making music that aren’t necessarily technical; ways that tap into a more direct route from our minds to people’s ears.

Rubblebucket isn’t afraid of technology. You’re interested in what the studio and new hardware & software can do to effectively get your music across.

Omega La La Album Cover

Alex and I, as horn players, have had to work through some of our fear of technology. The next step [from horns] is voice, and you can’t get much closer to the body than that. With each album we’ve recorded we’ve been willing this to happen. With [Omega La La], we really just handed the reins over to Eric [Broucek (LCD Soundsystem, !!!, Holy Ghost)], who brought his extensive electronic experience with the DFA crowd. Alex and I just said, “We’ll give you the music and you take us there!”

Initially, you gave Omega La La away as a free download. This is a route a lot of bands are likely to follow given the current state of the music industry. How did it work out for Rubblebucket?

The atmosphere of albums becoming a free thing is emerging more and more; even the new Beyonce album was leaked for free. I’m not an economist by any means – I’m afraid of money [laughs] – but Bread & Puppet has this manifesto. I don’t know how I feel about it being a musician who needs to make a living off music, but the idea of art as a commodity in our culture is interesting, and the notion it should be free and everyone should be able to have access to it is valuable.

Rubblebucket by John Margaretten

That’s a noble concept but there’s the practical issue of putting bread on your own table. What’s happening is the rise of the generation after the ones that figured out how to wring a lot of money out of music. To make art now requires different strategies. You need to attract YOUR audience not some mythical general audience that doesn’t really exist anymore. Hopefully YOUR people will care enough about what you do that they’ll invest in it from time to time – buy a CD or t-shirt at a show or donate for the next download. It relies on personal responsibility, which is always hazardous, but one tries to be hopeful.

That resonates really strongly with me. When we first started out, I wondered every time we made a change, “Who’s gonna see this change?” I had this idea that the general public would see them but there were no faces to go with that. I’ve grown so much in the past four years, and now I know our fans and their names and faces. They’re the ones that always come to see us and get up front and smile at us. So, that’s who’s going to see the changes.

Every once in a while, things will snap into place with this band where we’ll meet a couple new people along the way and there’s an awesome connection – they get it and we get it and there’s a mutual love that happens. An overall spirit of cooperation is the only way it works. It’s making sure when you get to the club that you shake the hand of the sound person. It’s keeping a good face on everything you do everywhere you go. It’s a not a fight. We’re all benefiting from each other’s music and we get to follow in each other’s footsteps.

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