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| Credit: Karl Otto |
Back in 2022, Detriot four-piece Saajtak released their LP For the Makers on American Dream Records. Built primarily on improvisation, the 10 tracks on the album present a flavorful and exotic breath of cosmos-spanning operatics and sinewy, sweat-and-blood stained pit-orchestrations, with the vibrance and chaos of a clique of early '80s post-punk musician squatting in a dilapidated machinist's loft. Somewhere between Bjork's '90s work, found sounds collections, clambering echos of post-industrial-folk, the local philharmonic, and the brazen, worn-heal boogie of Primal Scream, For the Makers crystallized as a singular axis point of clear and constant creative energy.
I was able to get in touch with the band for an interview about their LP around the time of its release, but for various reasons, I wasn't able to post it until now. For the Makers is still a wonderful album, and I think the life of everyone who hears it is slightly richer for having encountered its strange and incongruous grace. Anytime is the right time to let an album like this one fill your ears and preoccupy your waking mind with dreams.
AK: Alex Koi
JBT: Jonathan Barahal Taylor
BW: Ben WillisJBT: Jonathan Barahal Taylor
SAA: Simon Alexander-Adams
How did you settle on the name Saajtak, and what does it mean?
JBT: There’s some amount of mystery enshrouding the origins of the name, and that’s kind of the point. The sound of it (pronounced sahge-talk) rolls off the tongue and to me elicits a feeling of deep presence, like a sacred space. On its own it means nothing but in the context of our music it somehow describes everything.
Tell me a little bit about what it has been like for musicians in Detroit these past couple of years.
JBT: I don’t think it’s been appreciably different than in other cities: Everything ground to a halt [during COVID] which was hard for everyone, then after a few months people started to emerge and there were all of a sudden a slew of lovely and creative performances in non-traditional spaces. I participated in and witnessed some really wonderful shows in various public parks that drew a much broader slice of the community than your typical club or performance space, which was very refreshing. Detroit is a place where you can make your own opportunities, and I think the pandemic reinforced that conviction. I also noticed, at least among those closest to me, a clarification of purpose. Detroit values the hustle and musicians in particular can really spread themselves thin, so it was nice to see what could be accomplished when people finally had time to figure out what matters most to them. A lot of friends abandoned the things that no longer served them and devoted themselves wholly to making the most affecting, impactful and personal work that they can.
What is your favorite place to play in Detroit?
BW: Trinosophes has an energy that can’t be beat, it’s been a special place to me over the years, and playing there is always a treat.
AK: I like Trinosophes also - they have great programming. We haven’t played at Third Man, but I’ve enjoyed going to shows there.
Where do you like to play in Chicago?
BW: There are many lovely spots in Chicago. My favorite shows with Saajtak have been at the Hideout and Empty bottle, where the sound and vibe were really excellent. I’ve also had many great experiences at Elastic Arts – and sharing shows with Chicago bands is always fun and surprising.
JBT: Also have had great experiences playing at Cafe Mustache and Constellation. Always floored by the number of amazing spaces to play in Chicago.
How did you get connected American Dreams?
BW: I believe we first met Jordan at a bill we shared in Detroit with ONO at the Strange Beautiful Music Festival. We stayed in touch over the years, and set up some shows for each other in Detroit and Chicago – I remember Jordan telling me he was starting American Dreams when we played with him at Cafe Mustache, on a really cool bill he’d arranged. I’ve admired the work that Jordan’s done platforming and creating interesting music, and he’s built up a real nice team of folks at ADR. It was a real honor that they had room for our project by the time we had For the Makers to offer.
Which "Makers" is For the Makers dedicated to specifically?
BW: For me, the time we were writing the music of FTM was a time of deep reflection on those people who’ve kept me going over the years, and who have been examples of the kind of person I’m aiming to be. There have been numerous times for me when life has felt like a slog, and some creative person empowered me to push through: bandmates, inspiring performers. The first person to do this for me was my first role model, my sister. She’s now an educator and mother in Detroit.
AK: Our album is for the Ancestors, to those who came before.
JBT: We started working on this music at the height of lockdown, when there was really nothing going on. I felt extremely fortunate to be engaged in this project with people I loved and to have meaningful creative work to take my mind away from the crippling uncertainty we all faced. So many friends and artists experienced profound pain without that kind of outlet, and they were also the “Makers” that I had in mind.
What are some of the music reference points and influences for this album in particular?
SAA: We all have relatively diverse music tastes and influences which all come together when we collaborate on our compositions. At the time we were writing this music I was listening to a fair bit of Floating Points, The Comet is Coming and Amon Tobin’s side project Only Child Tyrant. I’m sure there are subtle elements of these artists that made their way into my own contributions to the album, though it is always difficult to point to specifics in the way such things go.
BW: When writing and working on music I tend to explicitly avoid drawing specifically from any particular influence, because I feel like it’s important to allow the music to lead me into its own space. While we were writing this album, I was not listening to much music, but when I did, I was almost exclusively listening to the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. A few artists who I have found really inspiring musically and otherwise over these past few years are Ingeborg von Agassiz, Annika Socolofsky, Anna Meredith, clipping., and My Brightest Diamond.
How do you think you've grown as artists since 2017's Spokes EP, and how do you feel that growth manifests on For the Makers?
BW: Over the years, we’ve continuously grown and evolved our voice as a band. There is some consistent musical language from Spokes EP through the present, but to me, For the Makers feels significantly more mature and intimate than our previous music. As we crafted this album, I was consistently surprised and impressed to hear the best work that I’ve heard from my companions: Alex’s lyrics and melodies, particularly (for me) on Leak in the Shielding and For the Makers, have reached new levels of wisdom and personal expression. Jon’s explorations of timbre and orchestration, adding electronics and vibraphone on tracks like "Mightier Mountains Have Crumbled," and "Oak Heart," extended the emotional reach of the worlds of these songs in new ways. Simon’s part writing was really essential to heightening the impact of the forms of these songs, and his instincts for crafting sound worlds is ever sharper. Working with this band always makes me reflect deeply on my musical practice, and makes me challenge myself to reach for more.
JBT: Our group dynamic, both musically and interpersonally, has developed so much since Spokes. Back then we were just starting to understand our group sound and figuring out how to work with each other. Collaboration requires so much patience, compassion, clarity and compromise, and can be fraught with tension without open communication. Crafting For the Makers was a very long process that included a lot of deep, passionate, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations. It could be frustrating at times for all of us, but I have no doubt that it made the music stronger. To me that reflects the profound trust in each other that we’ve cultivated over the years.
Are your compositions still largely based around improvisation? What is it about this writing style that suits you?
AK: Improvisation serves our music most when we’re composing together in the same room and when we’re performing. When we’re improvising, our four voices are simultaneously establishing the atomic structure and characteristics of the sonic elements in a song. Because For the Makers was recorded and composed remotely, we played individual executives in one-on-one time with each track, and could make personal decisions on the very nature of the song’s elements. FTM became thus less improvisational as a whole than our previous work. Improvisation has suited our music because it supports every member’s authentic voice to be heard. The flexibility of improvisation has taught us to be truthful and thoughtful in each moment, which lets our songs be malleable in a live setting, which is more fun to me than playing a song the same way night after night.
JBT: For me it comes down to intent and sincerity. From a process standpoint, I don’t see much distinction between a spontaneous and immediate improvised musical setting and plotting out a composition over the course of days, weeks or months. In either case I’m focusing on making decisions that resonate with me emotionally in the moment and that I feel genuinely compliment the surrounding material. The only real difference is temporal. Improvisation is at its core the practice of being present, which is extremely powerful in all aspects of life. Musically speaking it (among other things) keeps ideas from calcifying and to that end, I think one of our strengths as a band is our willingness to change our material, sometimes drastically, to better suit the energy of the moment.
BW: For me, the process of writing this album felt like a protracted improvisation lasting the entire year. I’m probably the only one, haha. Improvisation is the core of my musical practice, and so it is the starting point for anything I would try to do.
Do you see For the Makers as a different sort of album in terms of your general discography, and if so how?
SAA: Before this release our method of writing music relied heavily on composing music together in a room. We would improvise together, and through multiple rehearsals and performances slowly hone the form of our songs. Even after recording them they would continue to shift through improvisation and exploration in performance. Because of their fluidity it always felt challenging to fully capture them in the recording process. The songs were created for live performance, and felt best in live spaces. With For the Makers, we were pushed to write music remotely out of necessity due to the pandemic. The change in process led to music that was created as a recording first, and I personally think they are our strongest recordings for this reason. It also allowed us to explore the songs individually for longer periods of time, which meant we could each craft our parts extensively outside of a group rehearsal setting. We’re now in the process of arranging these songs for live performance. It’s been exciting to find creative ways to pare down these songs for a live setting.
BW: Beyond the process being quite different, For the Makers feels to me like the most complete work we’ve been able to make, for the reasons Simon cites. While I’m still quite proud of our other recordings, they were recorded with limited amounts of studio time–and I feel like in some ways they are documentations of songs whose energy was really conveyed in a live setting. With FTM, there were certainly challenges to being separated, but since we were each working in our own studios, we could take the time to state exactly what we meant, and negotiate things to the point that we were sure we were saying what was intended. It was also awesome to have Chris Koltay mixing this record; it helped to have someone we trust to really “get” our music to send these sessions to. We’d started recording a different album in the studio with Chris in 2019 (still finishing that material up!) so we had an established rapport and appreciated his wavelength.
Your music is very easy to move to. In your opinion, is this an intentional by-product or a secondary effect of your music?
AK: Thank you for saying this! I call us a dance band all the time.
SAA: I would say this is an intentional effect of our music. As a performer I’m always moving to the music, and I think to a degree this is part of the process of musical expression (not trying to make any absolutist statements here, just speaking from my own experience.) Some of our music uses odd-time signatures, but it’s important that it’s never done solely for the sake of complexity. The music needs to feel right and at least for me being able to move to it is a sort of subconscious litmus test. If I can’t move to my part—if it doesn’t feel right—then something needs to change.
Tell us about the collaborations and features on For the Makers? How did you approach these partnerships, and what did each bring to the album?
BW: For the first couple of months we were working on these tracks, I don’t think it was apparent we had an album on our hands. The idea to include other friends and collaborators came naturally – Marcus Elliot is a good friend, and we had previously done some live collaboration: he was the first we included in a rotation, and Jon took contributions from Marcus to compose the framework for Borders. Then these songs grew into a set of works, and a title emerged: For the Makers. It was really special for me to have Pat Reinholz play cello on this record – he’s one of my oldest friends, and someone who helped shape a lot of my musical processes and priorities–we lived together and wrote music as a duo for four years in Madison, Wisconsin. For this collaboration, I wrote a poem score dedicated to Pat, that he interpreted while tracking to "Oak Heart." As the tracks continued to take shape, I took all of his tracks off "Oak Heart" and composited them into the layers of sound instead on "Queen Ghost Speaks." Alex had the idea to work with the incredible David Magumba on "Oak Heart," and she worked together with him to craft their amazing duet on that song. Kaleigh Wilder and Kirsten Carey are some of our favorite musicians who we are lucky to have as friends, and we enlisted them to improvise and play with some layers of sound to flesh out "Big Exit" – they both did some amazing work that wound up fitting into the final track. Can’t wait for future opportunities to work with them.
With all your expressive prowess, Saajtak still strikes me as primarily a rock band. What is it about the dynamics of a rock band and rock music in general that is so accommodating to your artistic vision?
AK: Electricity is crucial to the meaning of this band. Electronic processing, manipulation, distortion, echo, delay… There’s a bending of sound and a bigness of sound that makes Saajtak a rock band, absolutely.
BW: The sound of the band has definitely been shaped by the spaces we played and the bills we played on. Most of the spots we’ve played have been rock clubs, DIY spaces, places that it felt right to play loud. In terms of the interaction of our parts and the way we listen as a group, I think we play a lot like a string quartet. But Energy and Heaviness are a big part of what we like to relay, and rock music is great for that.
Would you describe yourselves as avant-garde? Do you think the term is overapplied?
BW: As a band playing music that is more or less outside genre, it is a term that is hard to avoid. It can be a double-edged sword, in that while some find a search for “newness” to be exciting, it can turn off people who connect it with pretentiousness or a kind of adversarial weirdness. And maybe there is something a bit pretentious in describing your own music as “avant garde” because that’s a distinction that might need to be made over time. I think our music is often seeking to find new sounds, timbres, rhythmic combinations, so in that way it’s fair, I think, to describe it as experimental–but these ‘experiments’ are always in service of deepening our expression, and playing off of communicating with each other.
JBT: I don’t find it particularly accurate or helpful. There are so many musical territories that we explore because we feel it makes a stronger album or more complete song, but calling that avant-garde feels like a convenient way to avoid actually dealing with the music. If one song has frenetic textural elements in between a four on the floor repetitive dance groove, does that make it part pop and part avant-garde? At that point it’s easier to just talk objectively about what’s happening in the song and how we respond to it emotionally. I recognize the utility of genre classification for marketing purposes, and if I hear someone describe themselves as a “jazz” artist or a “rock” band or an “electronic” musician, as incomplete and problematic as those terms are, I at least can ground their music to some facet of a particular musical culture and tradition. That would have been the case in the distant past for “avant-garde,” when it connoted a social movement within the arts, but now most people that use it to describe themselves or their work are, in my experience, coming from a place of pretentiousness and exclusivity (on the other hand, terms like experimental music or creative music are more grounded to a vibrant culture, lineage and community). I view it as a reductive catch-all to dismiss something as weird and alienating, when we should instead be speaking about music specifically and on its own terms.
