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Jess Kahr - bass, Rasmus Rasmussen - keyboards, Jakob Skøtt - drums & Jonas Munk - guitar

One of the most revered and prolific psychedelic rock acts today, Causa Sui, have released a new album, the 3rd part of the Pewt’r Sessions. Straying from the summery vibes of most of their LPs, these spontaneous collaborations with Ron Schneidermann are rather haunting and the most free-jazz oriented volumes in their catalog. It is very interesting to listen to the intense chemistry between the members, as they lay to tape various segments chopped off long jamming sessions. In an attempt for me to gain more insight into the band’s creative process and their thoughts on the music industry today, I contacted guitarist/El Paraiso Records co-owner, Jonas Munk. Luckily, he found some spare time to answer a few questions for SputnikMusic:

So, new year, new album! Tell us more about the latest volume of the Pewt’r Sessions. How did it come to fruition?

We first started doing improv sessions with Ron Schneiderman back in 2006. Since then we’ve played live with him several times and recorded a handful of sessions throughout the years. Some of the sessions from 2009 were eventually released as Pewt’r Sessions 1 and 2 in 2011, and now we’ve just released the third record in the series which was recorded last year in September. It’s the result of an afternoon of improvisations. We recorded roughly four hours of music, I mixed around two hours of it and from those two hours we selected 39 minutes of music we all thought had something really interesting. There are no overdubs of any kind but plenty of edits, putting different segments back together in a new way, taking out a lot of the stuff that initially sounded very musical and leaving in a lot of the “trash” that would normally be filtered out. That’s what’s so interesting about ‘Incipiency Suite’: it’s fragmented, there’s room for a lot of the stuff we would normally filter out. That piece is about rhythm and texture, not about builds and riffs. It’s not the kind of piece that’s going anywhere, more like a series of snapshots put together in what I consider an interesting way.

This time I wanted to edit out all the material that sounded like something we’d done before and leave more room for rhythmical elements, weird experiments and electronic sounds. The two first Pewt’r Sessions are more guitar-freak-out oriented, this one has more an early 1970s electric jazz vibe. There’s a heavy influence from free jazz artists such as Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders as well as electric period Miles Davis – not only in the way we play, but in the way it’s been edited. People who are into records such as Big Fun and Live Evil will dig this one, whereas some of the people expecting a stoner rock record might be disappointed. Or maybe they’ll learn to love it and expand their taste, who knows.

From what I read, the 3rd part was created during the Euporie Tide sessions. How did you guys manage to juggle between them both?

We always work on different projects in parallel, personally I usually have 4-5 album projects simultaneously at any given time including the stuff I produce for other bands. Euporie Tide was a major activity that we worked on for more than two years and like I said the Pewt’r Sessions are really improv sessions which are done super quickly, very fun to do and healthy for us in a way. It’s liberating to have different projects with completely different mindsets. It’s important for us to have some kind of balance. I would go crazy and lose perspective if I only focused on one project for several years. Perspective is more important than anything.

I believe jamming is your primary source of new ideas, right? Do you guys come up with stuff from home too?

Usually it’s a combination. For the Euporie Tide material I would bring some kind of idea from home for a lot of the tracks, sometimes having almost full tracks worked out (as was the case with ‘The Juice’ and ‘Ju-Ju Blues’), and we would jam and work on the open-ended parts together. Other times I would bring some chords, maybe a couple of riffs and an idea for groove (‘Mireille’ or ‘Eternal Flow’ for example) and we would see where we could take it by jamming them out endlessly, recording lots of different versions. And tracks such as ‘Echo Springs’, ‘Euporie’ and ‘Boozehound’ originated entirely from jamming. Sometimes it’s a matter of gradually giving structure to something we’ve been jamming on, other times it’s a matter of jamming on something that already has a well defined structure. Continual recording and listening plays a big role in the process of writing the more “proper” Causa Sui material.

Is there any difference in approach in between the Summer Sessions and Pewt’r ones? Do you plan on reviving those with a new volume too?

Yes, they are very different in nature. Initially we started the Summer Sessions to open up the band and get into a good creative flow where we could try anything we had in mind, in contrast to the more determined way of working with Free Ride (which took ages to create), but most of the material on the Summer Sessions was rehearsed and dubbed and everything. It certainly wasn’t just a couple of jam sessions. ‘Visions of Summer’ took a full three weeks to create and there was more than 60 audio tracks in the mix. Even the more free-flowing tracks such as ‘Tropic of Capricorn’, ‘Red Valley’ and ‘The Open Road’ was rehearsed quite a lot, and we did lots of different takes of each track. Exceptions were ‘Portixeddu’ and ‘Rip Tide’ which almost pure improvisations – like:  that jam was interesting, let’s try something like that again and I’ll hit record this time. But even those had some overdubs and edits. The Pewt’r Sessions are certainly more anarchistic and really has that blazing fire of in-the-moment improvisation. They really are improv-sessions.

And no, there won’t be any more Summer Sessions, but the style we created during those albums have been incorporated into what kinda band Causa Sui is now, and we have even recorded with Johan Riedenlow (saxophone) again recently, so I’m sure anyone who’s into the Summer Sessions will feel right at home with some of our forthcoming material.

You also own the El Paraiso record label along with Causa Sui drummer, Jakob Skøtt. Was it conceived as an easier way to release your  and other artists’/bands’ music?

Not sure if it’s easier, there’s definitely more work involved now, but it was liberating to be able to make the products exactly the way we want to make them and to built a catalog of music we consider truly important. We’ve been talking about for years, and finally the idea was ripe enough to materialize.

Is it hard to run an indie label today? How do you manage to keep El Paraiso alive? Also, how does the physical format fare in the digital age?

Contrary to popular belief, CDs are still selling. Roughly we sell an equal amount of CD and vinyl, which is great. Personally I like the CD format as well. As long as our albums are selling and there’s music that deserves to be released we’ll stay active, but we don’t have any goal to keep going just to keep going, or for financial reasons or whatever. Today’s music scene is an overcrowded sea of bands and records, I don’t see any point in releasing anything into that sea unless it has an important place there.

Causa Sui has been active for a decade now and played some of the biggest festivals and venues in Europe. What do you think about today’s psychedelic rock/stoner scene? What are some of your favorite acts?

I thoroughly enjoy visiting each and every one of these festivals and it’s great to see that love for this kind of music is not only very much alive, but actually growing, with new festivals popping up all the time. As for the music itself I must admit I find it slightly disappointing that so few bands are trying to do something really creative and original with psych- and stoner-rock and that most bands instead are relying solely on tattered rock clichés from a bygone era. But in a way I understand it: there’s something strangely comforting about it – there’s something pure about this love for a specific period of time and a specific kind of music. When it’s summer and I’m on my fifth beer at some festival and some Swedish band with kool beards and perfect rock outfits is playing, nailing that Sabbath sound, getting the vintage guitar tone just right, I’m as happy as everyone else there. I dig it. But deep down I don’t understand why these people feel the need to escape to a long gone age and stick with a sound that excludes everything that’s happened since 1973. Same goes for most of the European space-, psych- and stoner-bands: there something ironic about a scene that celebrates freedom that much and yet limits its scope to a narrow set of very well defined set of clichés. It just seems really uninspired and tired a lot of the time, which is a shame. For me the importance of El Paraiso Records is to somehow participate in a sort of a liberation from these overly familiar things, and a record such as Pewt’r Sessions 3 is an important part of that liberation.

Of course there are exceptions. Colour Haze is a band that I truly admire, their growing catalog is a testament to personality, originality and ambition. Same can be said about Motorpsycho – they are masters of their craft. And to be honest I would rank Papir among them as well. There has been some great bands from the US in the last 10-15 years as well: Comets on Fire were incredible (they are sadly not active anymore), Bardo Pond as well, and Dead Meadow has also been influential on Causa Sui. But it’s important to stress that most of our influences come from other scenes and other periods in time.

If you had to erase Causa Sui’s existence and start playing a totally different music genre, which would it be and why?

Well, actually we’ve been (and still are) active in quite different genres throughout the years. Sometimes as far away from stoner rock as you can possibly get. More people should try that. It can be an eye-opening experience and a way to learn how to escape prejudice of any kind. We’ve always been outsiders in this scene because of that, but the way I see it it’s a good thing not belonging to the herd, cause it means we are onto our own path.

You are quite a venerable live act, yet we rarely see you guys perform. What are your thoughts on touring?

We do enjoy it and we try to get out and play at least a handful of shows each year, but making records is the first priority and we don’t just wanna play every show we have the opportunity to play. We want every show to feel special and rehearse a unique setlist specifically for it, have different guests appear from time to time and so on.

Any plans for a tour in the near future? Are there any countries and cities you’d love to play?

Working on it! Would be fun to hit the US at some point. Not likely though.

I know it’s still very early to ask, but is there any new music in the works?

We’re sloooowly working on new stuff. Long way to go though.

http://www.causasui.com/

http://elparaisorecords.com/

http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/63967/Causa-Sui-Pewtr-Sessions-3/





insomniac15
09.01.14
I'm happy I managed to pull this through! Also, watch the Duna Jam gig, it's awesome!

Mad.
09.01.14
Awesome interview Raul, I see he was much more cooperative than the guy from Seven That Spells...

insomniac15
09.01.14
True, and he gave some really interesting answers. I thought Pewt'r Sessions 3 was done in a few days, but not a few hours lol. That gives me a totally different perspective on the album.

jefflebowski
09.01.14
cool band, great interview

ExplosiveOranges
09.01.14
Sweet interview, Raul. Definitely gotta start jamming these guys more often.

insomniac15
09.01.14
Thanks! Hopefully, you guys will become obsessed with them, like I am!

jefflebowski
09.01.14
i've got summer session and euphorie tide but still need to jam pewtr

the euphorie tide vinyl is gorgeous

insomniac15
09.01.14
That's really cool. Some people have been turned off by Pewt'r Sessions because they're different. However, others prefer them over Euporie or Summer Sessions.

greg84
09.02.14
Great interview, Raul.

insomniac15
09.02.14
Thanks Greg. You should check out the album.

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