Q&A with Drum Major Instinct
- March 11, 2024 -
Drum Major Instinct (Jeff Arnal on percussion and Curt Cloninger on modular synthesizer) gives a special free performance at Citizen Vinyl on Saturday, March 16. Doors at 1:30, show at 2 p.m.
Jeff and Curt had known each other for a while, but it was only while holed-up during the pandemic that they began swapping sound files back and forth. Those sound files laid the groundwork for Drum Major Instinct. The Asheville, N.C.-based duo have honed in on a sound that encompasses waves of energy, patterns within patterns (within patterns), sounds from the natural world, and running the voodoo down. Their self-titled album was released in 2022.
Citizen Vinyl: The band name comes from the Martin Luther King Jr. sermon of the same name — what about that spoke to you?
Curt Cloninger: The moral of the sermon is to harness your natural human instinct to lead others / be out front / be seen, and turn that instinct into a will to serve others behind the scenes. Our band can be loud and abrasive, but hopefully people come away with an experience that benefits them in some meaningful way. Jeff and I aren’t like young rockers or anything. Live, we’re both sitting down, trying to listen closely to what the other one is doing. So even thought we are technically up front, we’re also kind of behind the scenes. Also, 50% of the band is a drummer, and the name starts with “Drum.” Also, you can call the band DMI for short, which sounds cool.
What inspired the project between you and Jeff Arnal, and why use drums and synths when even your own liner notes (by Byron Coley) point out this is not a popular combination?
During covid, I fell into the bottomless hole that is modular synthesis. I sent Jeff some audio, just so he could hear what I was doing, and he added drums. It turned out to be a fruitful combination. I’m a guitar player (mostly), so I built my modular system to sound doom or shoegaze rather than “electronic.” You can make a modular synthesizer sound like anything you want, so why would you make it sound like a synthesizer? My system generates complex polyrhythms that I can’t really keep up with as a musician. But Jeff is an actually great jazz musician, so he’s able to connect with and tease out rhythms that I didn’t even know were in the system.
While you and Jeff were swapping sound files, how much input / feedback did you give each other? Was each artist allowed full creativity or were there parameters?
Each is allowed full control of his instrument. As with all improvisation, some moments turn out better than others. With longer improvisational studio takes, Jeff is good at selecting the best parts and editing out the rest. We sometimes go back and forth about mix levels, but not that much. It’s like we each had already worked through a lot of possible approaches in our individual musical practices before we met each other, so there was less left to work out. If it hadn’t sounded good to us at the beginning, we probably would have called it a worthwhile experiment and left it at that. But the collaboration keeps yielding surprising and challenging (worthwhile) results. We don’t seem to have exhausted it yet by any means.
You released an EP in June 2022 — do you have other recordings in the works?
We have recorded several live shows since the EP, and several improvisational studio sessions. I personally want our next release to be a double live vinyl only project. I have a dream! (That wouldn’t be the name of it. I’m just saying, I have a dream.)
What led to the invite to play Big Ears Festival, and will DMI appear at any other upcoming festivals?
Jeff sent some audio and some video of one of our shows to Ashley Capps (Big Ears Executive and Artistic Director), and he invited us to play. We don’t have any festivals scheduled beyond Big Ears, but we are of course open to invitations!
Learn more here.
