The Cave Singers

By Kjersti Egerdahl

Photo by Fel Pajimula

Somehow, after a few short minutes with Seattle’s The Cave Singers, everything in the mix starts to make sense: Fresno, washboards, hot-air balloons — and incidentally, how the bassist of Pretty Girls Make Graves and Murder City Devils switched to folk guitar. Derek Fudesco of the former bands, along with Pete Quirk (vocals, melodica) and Marty Lund (drums, washboard) put together The Cave Singers more or less accidentally, and now they’re just savoring a good thing that’s starting to roll.

All of their past projects draw on a similar strain of post-punk experimentation — Quirk with Hint Hint and Lund with Cobra High — which makes this new brand of stomping folk so surprising. It started with housemates Fudesco and Quirk trading sketched-out recordings back and forth. “We just kind of both wanted to do something different,” says Quirk. “But how this music came to be, I don’t know. It was a surprise to us too.”

The Cave Singers’ songs get slow, but not mellow. The band pounds the downbeats like a chain gang — the beats are wide apart, but the next ones are always on the way, so nobody drifts off. The songs are headed somewhere. Quirk’s reedy, Dylan bleat hangs on tight to Lund’s drumbeats, and Fudesco is right there with them, long limbs doubled over a guitar, with bass pedals that look like the bottom half of an organ at his feet.

The Cave Singers recorded with Colin Stewart (Black Mountain, Pretty Girls Make Graves) at The Hive in Vancouver last fall, and experimented with all-live recording for the first time — no overdubs. It was a natural decision for them to make, not a purist’s abstinence from all things digital. “I mean, the songs come from all three of us playing the songs at the same time, and also the excitement that we have gotten from playing these songs, so we want that to be represented in the recording,” says Quirk.

The notion of togetherness didn’t stop with the band members — Stewart’s friends in the extended Black Mountain clan stopped by to help out on a few tracks too. Since then, The Cave Singers have played several shows in Vancouver and Seattle with the Canadian crew.

They’re eager to talk about the community they’ve discovered up north, but conversation lags when Seattle comes up in comparison. “This is just like, the mix right here,” says Quirk, pointing to the three of them. “We just played music to play music together.”

“Seattle’s a pretty big city,” says Lund. “I always am under the impression that there are really cool things happening here that I don’t even know about.”

But people are starting to find out about The Cave Singers. They’re playing more, to more people, and getting out of town once in a while — they just ran over to Philadelphia and New York for a few shows this spring. They aren’t pushing for major national tours right now though. In fact, having a home outside the tour van is a new and exciting thing for them. “It’s different than anything I’ve

ever done in my life,” says Fudesco.

With the hollering and foot stomping that goes on at their shows, sticking close to home can’t be the only thing they have in mind for the band. What do they want to do next?

Fudesco: Could we work on the mix?

Quirk: And the tone.

Fudesco: And the zone. The zone is where we’re looking forward in the future.

Quirk: I feel like the mix and the tone are pretty good, but the zone needs improvement. That’s where we need to put our focus.

Fudesco: What about precision?

Lund: Precision is under zone.

Quirk: And then there’s punctuality.

Fudesco: That’s under mix. Because the mix is punctual.

Lund: Oh my God, you’re going to point at me and talk about punctuality — that’s not under any of them.

Maybe the question wasn’t specific enough: What are The Cave Singers planning to do with their newest recordings? “We’re going to make a record,” says Fudesco. “But we’re still writing.”

“We’re just going to keep writing,” says Quirk. “And then we’re going to put out — a triple album. Gatefold.”

“It folds out and around,” says Lund.

“Like a dress,” Quirk adds.

www.myspace.com/thecavesingers