Tussle

By Spencer Owen

Photo by Alison Childs

“I was working in this design studio,” begins Tussle’s resident electronic musician Nathan Burazer. “We did Flash games and stuff, and this guy Henry was a game tester. He was a really oddball guy that was driving everybody kind of crazy. He asked me about Tussle one day, and I told him and he’s like, ‘I wonder if you’ve heard of my friends Liquid Liquid.’ And I was like, ‘...Yeah, they’re awesome.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I grew up with Dennis [Young] and Sal [Principato] so if you want to get in touch with them, let me know.’“ Thus began the participation of two of the members of Liquid Liquid — one of the most influential NYC dance groups from the early ‘80s — on Tussle’s song “Pow!” It’s the closing track on the band’s most recent LP, Telescope Mind, out on Norway’s Smalltown Supersound.

Tussle, a beat-heavy, four-on-the-floor instrumental group from San Francisco, has been making waves in the hipness intelligentsia for a couple of years now. The band melds influences from all the right eras: ‘80s New York, ‘70s Germany and present-day Japan (among others). Tussle has been parroted by British tastemakers, such as Wire Magazine and the late John Peel, and the band continues to share international stages with both peers (!!!, Gang Gang Dance) and luminaries (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Rother). Yet Tussle’s relationship with the members of Liquid Liquid was born not out of the band’s burgeoning connectivity to the “scene,” but from a coworker at Burazer’s nine-to-five.

Burazer is a web designer by day, bassist Tomo Yasuda serves coffee and sushi, and drummer Jonathan Holland works in hydroponic gardening. Other drummer Warren Huegel seems to be the most “professional musician” of the quartet — in fact, Holland says modestly that he, not Huegel, is the “other drummer.” Notes Holland, “When we started, [original member] Alexis [Georgopoulos] and I were just starting out playing drums. It was just us filling up each other’s space. [We thought,] ‘Neither of us are good drummers, so maybe two drummers will make one good drummer!’“ But with the addition of Huegel and the improvement of Holland’s skills, it became less of a necessity than a chance for exploration. “It’s way easier to just be creative. Warren’s role is to stay solid, and then I can pepper it up.”

Tussle’s essential focus is to craft a groove as a team — a complete song with bass lines in lieu of lead melodies, and percussion fills and samples or synthesizer ambience for the arrangement. On Telescope Mind, all of the songs were written last year, and the band toured with them before they were ever recorded. The songs were then recreated with producer Quinn Luke in a Pro Tools recording studio last July. “It was all to a grid and everything was quantized,” recalls Burazer. “All of the record is looped, except the interludes. I think that was one point of contention as we were recording the album: is it going to sound too digital, and take all the human touch and feeling out of the music?” Actually, the album does not sound mechanical, but rather quite live and organic, with a full-bodied warmth. “I think it really came down to mastering,” says Holland. “Kit Clayton did a phenomenal job. I heard stuff coming out that I didn’t hear before.”

Now that the record has finally been released, Tussle has moved on, and no longer plays any of the material from Telescope Mind in concert. But Burazer suggests that the recording experience has nonetheless influenced the band’s performances — “The beats are locked in together [live] way tighter than they used to be before we recorded the album.” Another aspect of Tussle‘s live show that has evolved is the visual element, designed by Alison Childs, whom the band met through Phil Manley of Trans Am. Grids and dark neon colors are projected onto and around the band members as they perform, a sort of club Tron.

Tussle is a beat band, but it has gone to great lengths — with concert visuals and attention to sonic detail — to assure that it’s not exclusively a dance band. “Personally, it doesn’t really bother me when people aren’t dancing,” says Burazer. “It’s always nice, but it doesn’t mean we’re complete failures. A lot of times people are just processing it.” More people are processing Tussle with every album, every collaboration and every show the band plays all over the world. “It’s all been a bunch
of baby steps that you never could’ve dreamt up,” Burazer says, and he’s right.

www.tussle.org