Guitarist Steve Tibbetts Creates Beautiful Chaos

You are unique among ECM artists in that you work alone in your studio in St. Paul, then deliver the album to the label. What is your process?

It’s just chaos, all coming from here in my little studio. I arrive around 2.00pm and stay working until 8.00 or 9.00pm. Why? I want to avoid all the crazy, aggressive rush-hour drivers who are amped up on coffee or their medications (laughs). Avoiding traffic has determined the flow of my creative life. I experiment and cast about to find a loop or a melody that works. If it’s not working, or when I’m confused, I’ll take a nap on the couch in the corner, then get up and try again to find something worth keeping and building on.

Let’s talk about the new album, Close. It seems more of a unified piece than your past work, which jumps around in mood from track to track. You mention in the press notes that Laura Marling‘s 2013 album Once I Was an Eagle inspired it.

Has it ever happened to you to hear an album once and then realize you haven’t been listening to anything else for the past month? It stays in your car, and you listen to it over and over again because it got stuck in the CD player. That used to happen when I took the kids to school, and every turn and stoplight would be forever bound to a particular turn or phrase in the music.

That happened to me with Laura’s record. I listened to it again and again, for the production and the sequencing. It seems like it was born whole. It all hangs together so well that you don’t know where you are, but in the land of Laura. That made me feel that if I had one nice motif, I could use it again. I thought, why not find one nice loop or motif and improvise over it again and again in different ways and see what happens. That was the philosophy behind this record.

The foundation of your work is multitracking and, increasingly, the rich sounds provided by your MIDI guitars. What artists in this arena inspired you?

Years ago, when I started multitracking, I was intoxicated by the work of Mike Oldfield, Jimi Hendrix, and Todd Rundgren, and I thought that if one guitar worked, 30 guitars would sound even better. That changed when I was standing in a hotel lobby with Manfred Eicher (founder of ECM Records), and he played me a cassette tape of Arvo Pärt‘s quintessential piece, “Fratres”. It got me thinking about what it would be like to work with just one well-tuned, well-mic’d guitar, but one with rich sonic capabilities. That also played into my work with the Tibetan singer Choying Drolma.

So, this led to the creation of your MIDI guitars?

It was a matter of desperation. I came back from Nepal, worked with some solo recordings of Choying singing, looking for something to complement her pentatonic melodies. I had a Roland MIDI guitar pickup and mounted it on my 12-string, thinking it might work, even though it was meant for a six-string. My incredible luthier, Ron Tracy at St. Paul Guitars, got it working. I ran that into a sampler to trigger drones and samples and made the record. Then we got an offer from Joe Boyd and Hannibal Records to go out on the road, and it worked. I could stand up there with a single, 12-string guitar and make an orchestra. I used the Tibetan long horns I recorded on the bottom strings, along with wine-glass samples on the upper strings, to produce a vibrant, resonant sound.

You also mention the sarangi player Sultan Khan’s influence on your approach to and touch on the acoustic?

Have you ever been to a concert where you walked in completely ignorant and walked out a completely different person? Marcus Wise, a great tabla player I had studied with and played with, called me and said, “You must come to this concert being put on by Minneapolis’ Indian Music Society.” I went and was forever changed. A sarangi is played like a slide, and he was like Duane Allman from some seventh heaven. It also has drone strings, which resonate with what he plays. The idea is to make it sound like a human voice. His playing was unbelievable; the whole audience, which was all musicians, I might add, just disappeared. The auditorium melted away, and it felt like I was sitting on the banks of the Ganges with the sun going down.

Now let’s talk about your electric guitar and how your famous Marshall amp, which is so much a part of your sound, got “accidentally” modified.

At a gig way back when in Irvine, California, we asked the audience for some help loading out. There were a couple of guys there on mushrooms who dropped my Marshall JCM 800 between the loading dock and the van. When I plugged it in at the next gig… it sounded fantastic! I made the mistake of getting it fixed a few years ago… and shouldn’t have. If something sounds good, don’t fix it.

My electric is set up for MIDI, too. Some of the samples don’t work with the electric. What works best is long swaths of feedback, which I’m happy to sit around in samples. You can create loops out of that, and all of a sudden, you have a super guitar, a God-like guitar. You have to be careful not to use it too much; you can easily overdo the drones. As for this new album, I thought I would have more electric guitar, but it just didn’t fit. It did in a few places. That’s where I thought, “This is where the volcano needs to come up.”

Let’s go back to the beginning and talk about how you became associated with Manfred Eicher and ECM Records.

It was good luck and chaos coming together. There was a guy at a college radio station in California who said you should send my record (Yr) to ECM Records in Germany, and Ricky Schultz, their liaison at Warner Brothers in the US. It happened that Ricky was going to Munich to meet with Manfred. He said he was going to present it to the group. What I wanted them to do was put out my record, but they said they were a production company, and if I wanted to do a record with them, I could.

At that time, I was already a fan of the label and its recordings, like After the Rain by Terje Rypdal and Cloud Dance by Colin Walcott, so I went ahead and recorded Northern Song at their studio in Oslo. I then asked whether it would be okay for me to record at my studio, then mix and master the records with Manfred in Europe. It’s just gone on from there.

Tell me about your decades-long partnership with percussionist Marc Anderson.

I was invited by another percussionist friend to see Marc play with a band called Clear at a virtually empty ballroom at the University of Minnesota campus in St. Paul. He was playing like he was possessed. I thought this would probably work out in the studio; if he was playing like this to nobody, he could do the same to nobody in my studio! It worked out great. It also works out because we get along, as friends. Going out on the road brings out the worst in everybody. Once you gas up the Ford Econoline van, you’re all stuck in a little cube, which can bring out the worst or, in Marc’s case, the best in people.

Our simpatico relationship on the road continued in the studio. With earlier albums like Safe Journey and Exploded View, we worked on creating a very tuned rhythmic basis so his congas could create melodies. My playing over it was effortless. All I had to do was elaborate, accentuate — to add the frosting to what he had already done melodically and rhythmically. These days, he’s a little busier, so I would ask him to come in and help me produce, to give me confidence in the direction. 

For this record, I would go in every day and cobble away, then after two months, I would ask Marc to come in and listen. This process went on for several years with Close. Finally, when I was ready, he would bring in everything — his gongs, his frame drums, his drum set, his hand pans, and his congas. We would try it my way, then his way… and we would always end up with his approach.

How has your time living abroad influenced your music?

I was in Indonesia on a travel and study grant to learn about Balinese gong kebya drumming, something that was, once again, pure luck. I had studied it when I was teaching at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in the mid-80s, and ran into my teacher, who was heading back to Bali. I came back from there with some skill in setting up grooves that had this manic, double drumming style of Balinese gong kebya – it’s two drummers playing alternating locking rhythms. 

That gave rise to my 1994 album, The Fall of Us All. I returned to Bali when the Naropa Institute made me the on-the-ground coordinator for their study programs there. I was invited to a gong pour, where they created these one-of-a-kind gamelan instruments. I was able to stay an extra day, and sample all those gongs which are an essential part of my MIDI setup and sound.

Let’s talk about Hellbound Train, the two-CD retrospective of your 40 years of work with ECM. How did that come about?

It was really a way to introduce my work to radio programmers who might approach me. I made my own “illegal” three-CD set for this purpose. I sent one as a gift to Steve Lake at ECM in Europe, and he called me up and said, “I think we should do this.” With ECM, the wheel turns slowly; that was about nine years ago, when we first discussed the prospect of the retrospective. It was fun to put together. The title came from Steve Lake as we were putting the finishing touches on the album cover layout. 

So, what’s next? Are you going to be touring or recording more?

Right now, the next thing up is tarring the roof of my little studio. There are lots of leaks, and I want to protect my gear, my mixing board, and guitars, and I’m doing it myself. I watched a lot of YouTube videos and feel pretty confident about it. My wife and I fixed our dishwasher by watching YouTube videos. The only thing I don’t like is the music they put behind them.