SEISS & SEISS – MAGNANIMOUS

Across several fields and over the railroad tracks from the charming arts colony of Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in a quaint two-story country house, Curt and Daniele Seiss (rhymes with peace) not-so-quietly toil over their magical music visions.

Eclectic and prolific, Curt and Dani as musicians have played in jam, atmospheric and indie rock bands, created film soundtracks, scored and performed music for plays, accompanied dance troupes, and performed live sound design at art installations; and as co-founders of Magnanimous Records they have created a home in the ambient genre of electronic music for Paradigm9, their live ambient band, and other artists whose work is in sync with their vision.

In their cozy home, decorated with a wide array of musical instruments (banjo, cello, harmonium), which they share with three cats, Curt and Dani, in blue jeans, sit across from each other, listening intently as the other speaks. The Seisses are serious and modest, often dropping self-deprecating jokes that lead to infectious fits of laughter.

Curt, raised in Graceham, Maryland, north of Frederick, is next to the youngest of five children. His mother who worked at their school and father who worked for the phone company, listened to Elvis, Roy Orbison and the Beatles. Curt took piano and trombone lessons and played in the school band. Dani says, "My favorite story about your childhood is skipping school when you were 8 to watch the Baltimore Symphony." "I occasionally feigned being sick to watch the orchestra on TV," Curt admits. When he was 12, he got an acoustic guitar. Hearing the psychedelic songs on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band," "was a defining moment. I distinctly remember realizing music is actually very important." At 15, he bought a pick-up for his guitar and ran the sound through a distortion pedal for the first time.

After high school, Curt played in New Wave and Goth bands "that never got out of the garage," and started listening to experimental music. "The first real band I played in was when I met Dani. I was playing with a bunch of people. We needed a bass player so we put up fliers. Dani was the only person to respond. She called and said, I don't have a bass, and we said, come over anyway. She brought an acoustic guitar and for twelve hours she played over 100 songs and I am still amazed to this day. We decided to schedule a practice." "And I promised I'd have a bass," Dani laughs.

Dani was born in Spangler, now Northern Cambria, Pennsylvania, and has one younger brother. Her father was an electrical contractor and her mother an electrical engineer. Dani grew up listening to the Doors and Beatles, and "lots of folk-y stuff." "My mom's brother had a bluegrass band. When he learned to play banjo, he asked her to learn guitar so he'd have company, so when I was little I watched her play old folk songs, bluegrass and Appalachian." Dani took piano lessons, played piccolo in the marching band and flute in the concert band, and during band sectionals taught guitar. "The sectionals were never very structured," she laughs, "and I ended up teaching other kids how to play guitar." Dani started making up songs when she was small and remembers jamming on guitar with her brother who played bass.

When Dani was eleven, her mother rented a house from a professional musician who became Dani's stepdad. "His band played everything from bluegrass to show tunes, Top 40 and jazz. There were musical instruments everywhere and they let us mess around so we would play these old keyboards and drums, and record on reel-to-reel tapes." After high school Dani pursued science at Penn State for three years, "Then I got kind of lost. I played in some bands. At one point I dropped out because a modern folk group I played 12-string guitar with got pretty good." But they disbanded and she moved to DC briefly, returned to school, got an English degree, and moved to Frederick with her boyfriend at the time.

"We broke up. And I answered the ad for a bass player," she laughs. "The first conversation Curt and I had on the phone before I auditioned, we talked about bands and what we wanted to play. I liked this band, the Verve, and had the idea of starting a band that sounded like that but at the time nobody had even heard of them. Curt said, I really like this band, the Verve. I was sitting on a stool and almost fell off!"

"We always connected musically, right from the start, and became close friends right away," says Curt. "We were both supportive of each other," Dani says. "We'd both just gotten out of crappy relationships," explains Curt. "We spent a lot of time together and a romantic relationship developed naturally."

"We fell in love with Shepherdstown while visiting friends and moved here in 1997," says Curt. "That's when Dani and I started thinking about taking music more seriously and making our projects more creative." "We set up a studio and experimented and recorded a lot," says Dani.

Electronic artists that Curt and Dani admire include ambient pioneers Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Broadcast, Stereolab, the Orb, and Boards of Canada.

Unlike most contemporary electronic music now primarily or partially created on ProTools and similar software, Curt and Dani's electronic music is hand-made live on real instruments and morphed via effects processing. Why so far off the new beaten path? Says Curt, "We are most interested in the process and final product. Our fascination with music comes from the joy of the exploration."

"It's about time and place," Dani says. "That's the essence. Once it's gone, it's gone. You can record it, but it's not the same. The philosophy evolved out of our experiences playing off of things. We threw away structure. We played improvisationally, interpretations of cars going by or films we were watching or dancers performing. With dancers it became interactive, playing off of each other, and once we added that dimension, it was something we wanted to keep and it became the focus, where the true nature of the music was ephemeral, not music you could package in a normal way."

Travis Miller aka Greenie, a film maker and an original member of Paradigm9, describes its genesis: "I met Curt and Dani shortly after I moved to Shepherdstown around nine years ago, when I saw them perform with Transceover Soul at a coffee shop. I'd been making electronic music on my own and their experimental mindset struck me as kindred with my own. Our common interests led to friendship, informal collaboration and eventually my membership in the group. After it disbanded, I continued getting together with Curt, Dani and their new collaborator, Jim Pilato, for impromptu recording sessions, and those experiments became Paradigm9.

"Between Curt, Dani, Jim and myself, we've played on acoustic and electric guitar, bass, flute, vocals, sitar, synths, drum kit, hand percussion, trumpet, harmonica, melodica, didgeridoo, samplers, turntables, cello, upright bass, bagpipe chanter, electric and acoustic piano, children's toys, drum machines, esraj, berimbau, bullroarer, and assorted household junk. Not that we played skillfully on all those instruments, but conventional virtuosity was never our aim. If a classical violin performance is like a perfect soufflé, our approach was more like a trippy stew, all guided by good musical sense.

"Magnanimous was originally formed as an outlet for a Paradigm9 single called 'The Halo Effect.' My involvement gradually tapered off due to other demands, but I continued to play a role in the design and production of Magnanimous releases. I also designed and programmed the label's Website, contributed a couple of tracks to compilations, and helped out with the general activities of the label."

Says Curt, "The weird thing about bands that you don't realize until you're in a good one is that there's a magic you can't explain but you can feel. Before Paradigm9 I never felt this synergistic quality where we were all on the same page. Dani and I started to really work creatively when we were able to relax the baggage of the past, just be in the present and focus on the work. We recorded our first album on New Year's night of 2000. It was a nice time because we were beginning to be asked to play shows, had a circle of friends who always came out to see us and started getting a sense of working toward something. Once we started the label we were able to release music, which served as an umbrella for our different projects and gave what we were working on an identity. Instead of this thing where we drank a beer and did it on weekends, it became something we did every day that we're serious about."

As a new century dawned, Curt and Dani were married in the spring of 2000 in an outdoor ceremony in Shepherdstown overlooking the Potomac River (a bagpiper for the ceremony, bluegrass for the reception). Magnanimous Records' first release, " The Halo Effect" by Paradigm9, followed soon after.

Says Greenie, now in Baltimore, "Curt, Dani and Jim are really great, thoughtful people, the kind of friends you can have brilliant, wine-fueled conversations with late into the night. As artists, they bring tireless energy and open-mindedness to their work, and always put the integrity of the music before all other considerations. They're healthily oblivious to the artificial boundaries of genres and scenes, which I think accounts for a lot of their music's appeal. How many other ambient/psychobilly/post-rock/indie-electronic/quasi-world-music/shoegazer/IDM bands do you know of?"

"All the bands Dani and I wanted to emulate," says Curt, "were bands using textural songwriting approaches such as shimmering guitars run through delay pedals and effects processing, like the Verve and Low. As far as I know we were the only band in Shepherdstown doing far out weird music, so people making student films and modern dance could find us very easily. In a bluegrass town, a band that shows up with a Ryder truck full of equipment and makes racket for two hours stands out."

Says Dani "When Paradigm9 formed we decided to try to do more with the third dimension, incorporating different media with the music. We played lots of art installations because we wanted to make mood music that fit only that particular place and time."

One artist who took notice was David Wanger, Shepherdstown film maker who won the 2004 Surrealist Film Festival short film award: "I met Curt and Dani in 2003 when Paradigm9 was performing at an art event where I had a video installation on display. A few months later I got to work with Paradigm9 on a theater project called the Performance Group, which featured their live music and my video projections as accompaniment for several monologues and one-act plays. My favorite part was the 15-minute pre-show segment where I had a Tetris-like video montage going and they would improvise ambient music that could range from energizing and trance-inducing to subtly ominous.

"My collaborations since then have been with Curt, as part of my Mamba Fever Pictures endeavor. The most notable so far is a trilogy of experimental short films called 'Nebulous.' They're sort of in the tradition of Stan Brakhage and the 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite' sequence at the end of 2001. I provided Curt with the rough spacey visuals from an early rough cut and he came up with the music. I like how he used a base of unusual sounds (weird gurgling noises) to create a warm immersive environment, and then gave it a distinctive rhythmic quality that connects the audio with the video editing and keep the audience alert. We're currently in pre-production for an unconventional feature film called 'The Fluid Dripped Twice.' Curt will be doing the score, and I'm directing."

Paradigm9's numerous film credits also include "Animus" by Lars Wigren, and "The Case of the Canine Chase" by Casandre Cohn.

Another feather in Paradigm9's cap is their work as pit band with Shepherd University's Rude Mechanicals Medieval and Renaissance Players. Recalls director Dr. Betty Ellzey, to whom Curt refers as "one of my intellectual parents": "We first worked with Paradigm9 in the fall of 2003. Curt was a friend of my assistant director. She asked if they'd be interested in composing and playing for a medieval play called 'The Second Shepherds' Play.' They came to rehearsals to get an idea of the mood and action. They composed the music and also improvised during performance. Although the music was not actual medieval music, it had a medieval 'feel' to it. We [both] were so pleased with the results that we have worked together on seven subsequent productions – medieval plays such as 'Mankind' and 'Everyman' and Shakespeare plays including 'Hamlet' and 'Troilus and Cressida.' Curt and Dani are involved from even before rehearsals begin. They read over the script, come to an early rehearsal to get a sense of where music is needed or where it will enhance the action. Toward the end of the rehearsal process, we all work together.

"Audiences comment on how much the music adds to the performances and the actors find when the music is added it inspires them as well. The Rude Mechanicals company is devoted to making medieval and Renaissance drama more accessible to contemporary audiences, and working with Curt and Dani makes our mission much easier. I feel very lucky to have them working with us." The Seisses will perform "Everyman" with the company at high schools in Sondenborg, Denmark over the university's spring break, and back at the university in April. (Paradigm9 will also play gigs in Prague and Germany.)

Curt and Dani warm to the topic of their label. "Magnanimous's mission originally was to release our own music," say Curt, "but it evolved into a loosely knit collective of experimental recording artists. For example, Aaron Lennox is a local artist who goes around making field recordings, then combines those with recordings he does in his studio. He hears melodies in these atonal sounds, like the hum of a refrigerator, that he interprets into a guitar arpeggiation then combines the recordings so you're listening to these washes of sounds that create this mysterious place."

Aaron Lennox says, "I think Magnanimous, and other smaller artist-run labels, play a vital role in today's music scene. There is so much amazing music out there that needs to be heard and will only be heard through labels such as these. With Magnanimous, in particular, it's about music with a purpose, music with a concept. Music created for itself. Magnanimous 'officially' releasing my 'Sibilance' project has been quite interesting. I've been pleasantly surprised at all of the positive feedback I've gotten. It was a fairly conceptual album and I didn't expect most people to be able to fully understand it. Magnanimous understood it straight away and knew exactly where it needed to go to get to its audience."

New Magnanimous releases to look out for: Aaron Lennox's "From the Sun to the Heliopause," Paradigm9's film score "Animus," and an album by MAO II of New Orleans.

But talk about eclectic, about as far as one can get from ambient, the Seisses' alter ego is the high energy, complex indie rock band The N.U.R.B-S. (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines), the centerpiece of which is the unique, surreal extraterrestrial guitar of Chris Thatcher (a mathematician with a physics degree), complemented by Curt's neurotic, frenetic, perfectly synchronized drumming, and Dani's erratic, improbable basslines. On their debut album "Sui Generis," the N.U.R.B-S. shake, rattle, roll and bark through thirteen tracks including a few jiggy, hyper instrumentals. Chris's vocals are kind of a cross between Elvis and Fozzie the Bear, and Dani's predominantly backup vocals sound like Chrissie Hynde's histrionic younger sister. It's quirky and bizarre, but oddly engaging, like beach party rock for Martian teenagers. Recorded at Inner Ear Studios with Chad Clark and TJ Lipple, "Sui Generis," not nearly Magnanimous-sounding, had a new label created for its release, Non-Rational Records. This month The N.U.R.B-S. kick off their second tour including gigs in Asbury Park, New York, Baltimore and Waynesboro.

Asked what their greatest contribution is, Curt and Dani seem to agree. "I think I contribute the most with the label. We're sort of a jumpstarter for people. I'd rather be a stepping stone on someone's path than a wall. It's a fun mission," smiles Curt. "Just knowing you've helped somebody is good," says Dani. "When you see a sparkling review of somebody's work that you know they probably otherwise wouldn't have gotten is cool, and the sense of community you get out of it. Being united with people from all walks of life who appreciate a sound together is definitely something." --MIM

mary ishimoto morris

music monthly www.musicmonthly.com

february 2007