Dizgo Explores New Dimensions On Vance Powell-Produced Album ‘Innerstate’

Emerging from the music scene of Bloomington, Indiana, up-and-coming jam quartet Dizgo continues their rise with a new album, Innerstate, which arrived on Friday. The cleverly titled Innerstate is an examination of highways and byways, both physical and mental.

JamBase had a chance to speak with the band — Andrew Pickel, Kevin Hinnefeld, Justin Clark and Jake Evatt — about their new album and more.

Meta ideas, cycles and feedback loops abound on Innerstate. Think about the concept of the fractal, an infinitely intricate geometric pattern where each part is a smaller-scale clone of the whole.

“We’re exploring our place as individuals, and our place within the human experience, and then our place in the universe,” Dizgo keyboardist Jake Evatt told JamBase. “All this stuff is interconnected and we’re telling that story through our experience of traveling and playing music and connecting with our fans.”

Spatial and atmospheric, the Innerstate sonic aesthetic mirrors its thematic concepts. To help Dizgo achieve their vision sonically, the band worked with renowned producer/engineer Vance Powell (Phish, Jack White), recording at his Sputnik Studios in Nashville. Powell’s expertise in Dolby Atmos spatial mixing was well-suited for Dizgo’s intent for Innerstate.

“Something that really worked in our favor is that Vance is really well-versed in Atmos mixing,” guitarist Andrew Pickel said. “So he’s doing the three-dimensional stuff. He had done the first show for Phish at the Sphere and put together all the music throughout the building: the walk-in stuff, even the stuff in the bathrooms… And he’s actually gone back and done the Atmos mixes for a ton of old classic rock songs.”

Phish is a common connection between Dizgo and Powell, who also co-produced Phish’s two most recent studio albums, 2020’s Sigma Oasis and 2024’s Evolve. Dizgo’s journey to working with Powell is one of the many synchronicities that populate the creation of Innerstate. The journey began through a chance meeting with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell's tech Eddie Piotrowski.

Following a show in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Dizgo connected with Piotrowski, who invited the band to check out McConnell’s rig at a Phish show. While Powell had actually been on Dizgo’s radar as a possible producer, things got real ahead of a Phish concert at SPAC, as Evatt explained:

“We asked Eddie, ‘Hey, is Vance here?’ He’s like, ‘Yo, he’s in the trailer doing the mix.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, can we just get a one-on-one with him, or just meet him?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, of course. I’ll hit him up.’ And Eddie goes, ‘Hey, these guys said they’ve been emailing you about an album.’ And Vance is like, ‘Send them on in.'”

After sealing the deal, Dizgo found themselves at Sputnik in Nashville. One of the most important aspects of being in the studio is feeling comfortable, and Powell made sure that Dizgo felt welcome.

“He had us over to his house and everything,” Pickel said. “We stayed at his house and met his family. It was a more personal experience, I think, than a lot of working with somebody in a studio is.”

Powell also availed his vast arsenal of gear, some of it historic, for the band to employ on Innerstate.

“We ended up using quite a few different pedals that The Dead Weather and the Raconteurs were using on some of their records, because he produced, I think, most of their records in that studio. And Jack White’s got an ear for those gnarly, huge guitar tones.”

“He had a cool snare drum that [Phish’s] Jon Fishman used a bunch and [Vance] won a bunch of Grammys with and I put it on a few [songs],” drummer Justin Clark added.

Being in a studio like Sputnik can be exciting, but there is always downtime while recording, especially for a drummer, once instrument tracking is done. Clark, however, made the best of this time.

“I beat Trey Anastasio’s high score on Space Invaders… I spent three days straight after I was done tracking, while they were finishing their vocals,” Clark remembered.

Powell also gave the guys the space to experiment, another key part of the recording process. Evatt recalled an instance where he was playing keys and Pickel was tweaking knobs on an effects pedal.

“I’m playing the Fender Rhodes through a Space Echo tape delay machine, and Pickel’s tweaking those knobs: the time and the feedback, the rate and the feedback amount. So I’m playing with two hands, and he’s tweaking it because he can hear the track too, so everything’s moving in time together.”

“It’s a whole kind of crazy-sounding thing,” Pickel said. “You can really only get that exact type of feeling with two human brains going at it at the same time.”

Evatt added: “The end result becomes greater than the sum of the parts when you’re collaborating with other musicians who have the same level of passion and care that we all had when we went into that studio and made that record. So you get something that nobody individually was expecting or hearing in their head.”

But no matter how free and comfortable a band gets, ultimately, there are tough decisions to make. Powell put on his producer hat to help Dizgo execute.

“More than anything, he had this unbiased, fresh view on everything we were doing,” Clark said. “He had this term that we still use. He’d ask, ‘Is this career-breaking?’ ‘Do we need to spend an hour on this?’ And we’d all be like, ‘Oh, you’re probably right. It’s not that big of a deal.’ He had a good sense for that. And in the end, whenever you go back and listen to it, he was right.”

“The other thing he would say was, ‘If it sounds good, it is good,'” Evatt recalled. “And you need that decisiveness in the studio that a producer can drive when we’re living deep in the creative element of how we play this song for 14 minutes live.”

However, as Powell ultimately told Dizgo, “You guys are a live band. I want it to sound like you’re playing [live].” The material on Innerstate is a mix of road-tested staples with fresh material. The quartet plans to unveil some of the newer tunes on their current fall tour. Stream Innerstate below and scroll on for Dizgo’s tour dates.