Invisible Oranges: In Conversation With Horseback’s Jenks Miller

Joseph Schafer of Invisible Oranges recently conducted an interview with Jenks Miller, songwriter and mastermind of American psych / drone rock act Horseback, and it discusses the past and present of the band.

Invisible Oranges: Horseback is one of the first Bandcamp release success stories, alongside perhaps Cloudkicker and Iron Thrones. How did the decision to use Bandcamp come about?

JM: I didn’t know that Invisible Mountain was one of the first records on Bandcamp. Relapse set all that up. I had heard about Bandcamp, and eventually I’m sure I would’ve moved Horseback’s online presence to Bandcamp from the trainwreck that is MySpace, but any success with the site is owed to Relapse’s staff.

When Relapse picked the record up and began their promotion, The Invisible Mountain had already been released on CD by Utech Records in 2009, and on vinyl by Aurora Borealis in early 2010. The Bandcamp thing came after all that. I honestly hadn’t realized until I read this interview question that Bandcamp was such a big deal!

Invisible Oranges: I heard some talk about how Invisible Mountain was a distinctly “American” record. People found it in some ways reminiscent of American folk music, as well as related it to the work of author Cormac McCarthy, who deals primarily with the violent heart of America’s past. Are these claims credible?

JM: I do consider Horseback to be American music in that it is entangled in a very complex mythology that precludes any fanatical, white-knuckled grip on “purity”. The violence you’re referring to is more metaphorical than literal. It represents the process of grappling with conflicting interests and influences in order to synthesize something new. That is “America” at its best, I think. At least, it is the America I’m inspired by.

You said that you’re interested in violence in nature, but Forbidden Planet is bringing in Speculative Fiction, or “super-nature”, for which we have no specific frame of reference. How did these more abstract ideas come into the music?

Good question. One of the things I like about Speculative Fiction is that it reflects its author. In the author’s imagination, what qualities characterize “super-nature”, and why might those qualities be important to him or her? To draw on a pertinent example: Why is an apocalypse so fascinating to folks of certain religious persuasions? And why is that apocalypse violent? What do these folks really want to change?

Of course, this kind of thing is tangential to the music itself. I do try to organize a few more abstract ideas in a loose conceptual framework as I’m recording each album, because such a framework provides an internal logic for the project, and helps me imagine what might lie ahead.

Continue reading:  Invisible Oranges: Interview: Horseback.

Horseback have just released The Gorgon’s Tongue: Impale Golden Horn + Forbidden Planet, a reissue of their first album, Impale Golden Horn, and last year’s cassette-only album, Forbidden Planet.

Tags: Horseback, Invisible Mountain, Invisible Oranges, Jenks Miller, Joseph Schafer, relapse records, The Gorgon’s Tongue

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 19th, 2011 at 10:15 am and is filed under 2011, Interviews, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.