Khanate – James Plotkin
Posted on June 16, 2009 at 12:00 am by admin
I’ve always been a fan of Khanate for awhile now, and I was saddened to hear about their breakup in 2005. I’d been awaiting the new album hoping to hear it in 2007, and it’s finally here today.
If you go looking for Khanate interviews on the net, you might be disappointed, as most people seem to ask the members about all their other projects, but no one seemed to focus on one band. Derek at Solid PR was cool enough to hook me up with Khanate bass player James Plotkin – though he did much more than just play bass in the band.
Way Too Loud!: How did “Clean Hands go Foul” come about?
James Plotkin: We had a bunch of time left over from the recording session for “Capture and Release”. At rehearsals we’d improvised before, so we were interested in recording and seeing what would happen, and we had the tape and we had the time, so we figured we’d fill up all the tape we had and see if we could come up with anything usable. That’s basically the core of the record. We didn’t record anything that we didn’t use, so everything we did is on that record. It was strange, because I think that sound quality come off better than “Capture and Release” as far as I can tell. It was much more conducive to mixing and getting a better live sound, and a nice crisp sound
We recorded it within a day of “Capture and Release”, so it wasn’t what some people though, like an after the fact recording or lost tapes or something. I was glad we did it.
I was actually going through some old hard drives a couple of weeks ago and found a handful of improvised records from our very first session that we recorded our first album from. I don’t know if that’s a possible release for the future, but it’s funny because I completely forget they existed, and I’m sure everybody else did too.
James: Well, it would need to be fully mixed and there’s no vocals or anything, so it’s a longshot, but you never know what could happen 10 years down the road! I might come up with some use for it.
WTL: What were your contributions to Khanate? I know you played bass, but you did a lot more than that, like studio production and more.
James: In the beginning before the first album, we had only been together for a couple of weeks before we started recording our first album, so everybody’s role was a lot looser, and it wasn’t as determined as it became in subsequent recordings.
I basically did most of the arrangements, someone would come into the space, or Stephen [O' Malley, guitars] would have a riff, and someone needed to piece everything together, so I was almost like an interpreter between the members and their ideas. For example, Tim [Wyskida] didn’t have as much experience with that type of music as Stephen and I did, or maybe Alan wasn’t sure how to structure his vocals or phrasing and things like that. I guess the role of producer in Khanate was more than just recording and mixing the records. I wrote some riffs myself. There’s spots on the first album where I played guitar and Stephen played bass. It was much more unpredictable in the beginning on what my role was going to be. As time went on it was much more arrangements based, production, and sound effects. I spent a lot of time working with the vocals in Khanate building these walls of sound. I think the most important role was just pulling everything together and making sure it fit and creating songs.
Bass was sort of just me filling a gap that needed to be filled. I’m a guitarist by trade. An all-around janitor type role I guess! (Laughs)
James: It wasn’t so much to hide them, just more to embellish tracks. A good example would be the Beatles when they had incidental sounds in the background. I hesitate to call it “filler” because what was going on was meticulously chosen sound-wise and what space needed to be filled on certain tracks. For example, in the second movement of “No Joy” it sounds like horns almost and you can’t really tell if it’s bass or a synth or something. In “Capture and Release” there’s all sorts of hurricane type sounds, like sonic tornadoes happening, and things similar to that. It definitely wasn’t up front.
I also approached vocal mixing from two different directions. Basically one would be the actual core of the vocals, and after the fact I wanted different layers of things happening, and take chunks of Alans vocals and treat as more of an instrument to make the tracks a bit more detail oriented. If you have four people just hammering away and there’s no shift in the minor details it can get pretty boring. I’m a pretty detail oriented person, and I like to have a lot of subtle shifts in details and textures. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me interested.
WTL: Did you ever discuss the lyrics with Alan?
James: No, that was completely Alans role, with Khanate especially. I’ve worked with Alan before and I’ve always really enjoyed his lyrics, but Khanate I think was sort of his peak… (Laughs) Sometimes he’d bring the lyrics with him to the practice space, and you know how you get a cold chill down your spine? I’d get that when I’d read his lyrics because I could totally empathize with what’s going on inside his head. Alans got a couple of different sides, and most of the time he’s a funny guy and entertaining in a number of ways, and then there’s this completely darkened, hateful side that comes through mostly through lyrics, which is a pretty big contradiction to the Alan that I know. He’s sort of a lyrical genius when it comes to the dark side of life.
James: Pretty much. Some of the phrasing and the audio oriented portion as opposed to the actual content he let me get on with what I needed to do with arrangements and making additional sounds out of his vocals. He never had any problem with anything that I was doing. We’ve also worked together for a long time too, so we both understand how we work together with sound and words and being comfortable with the stuff we’re going to do.
WTL: One thing I’m wondering is how did you actually manage to keep time playing that slow? It seems to be something that if you’re going that slow, it would become extremely difficult.
James: There was really no tempo in Khanate. There were one or two sections that had a semblance of actual rhythm or a meter going on, but for the most part there was no tempo going on. It was more of a visually based system. I don’t know if you ever saw a live gig, but there was just constant visual communication going on with everybody. It was more like a game of tag than anything else. It was so loose that it wouldn’t have worked any other way. If there’s 4 people in a band communicating, they can do anything, any tempo or non-tempo. As long as people are communicating they can keep things together.
I think there’s this predetermined way that most musicians are trained to work, and it’s a lot harder to break away from that and try something different than it is to play it at zero tempo. I think anybody can do it. For example, people tell will tell me to listen to a band that sounds like they’re trying to do the Khanate thing and there’s always a tempo. There’s never an absence of tempo, and that really is to me sort of the defining character of Khanate. I think it’s more about abandoning the way people have come to think about music and metal and the way it’s supposed to happen. That’s the difficult part. Anyone can do it if they know what they’re doing and communicating with the other musicians they play with. The lack of communication between musicians in the same band is just incredible. I don’t really understand how a band can function without that concentrated communication that we needed for Khanate.
WTL: Have you heard many of the bands that are bring in a Khanate influence? I can think of one specifically, and a few that might have a little bit of Khanate influence.
James: I don’t want to name any bands because I’ve enjoyed some of the stuff that was supposedly Khanate influenced, but I never heard one that made me think that they obviously know what’s going on or what they’re doing. It’s always very slow, and maybe there’s some shrieking vocals and extremely down-tuned dissonant chords, but there’s never the sort of abandonment of tempo, and that’s the defining character that made Khanate so different. There’s all sorts of minor details, or even significant details like the chord progressions that Stephen would come up with, or Alans voice and his lyrics. Everything was a combination our approach and the individual characteristic of each musicians style that made us what we were. If we were following rhythm and tempo, then it would’ve been a lot less of a departure than what we managed to come up with.
WTL: I think you’re giving away the big secret there!
James: (Laughs) Well, there’s theory and then there’s putting it into practice. There’s so many people out there with great ideas that are just unable to get it to work in the real world. The work is all there for anybody to mimic, and personally I don’t think anybody has do it yet. If someone can actually dissect their influence to the point where they can do their own thing with it and create something that’s their own take on it, then I think that’d be pretty cool actually. I’d be pretty interested to hear someone take the Khanate formula and push it a little bit further or take it in different direction or something.
WTL: When you guys decided to call it a day, I was always hoping that there’d be someone there to at least try to pick up the torch and carry it along.
I’ve mentioned Jodis vaguely before, and there’s a sample on my website [at this location], and on my MySpace page and whatnot. If you want to check that out you should be able to find it pretty easily. I think Hydra Head will be releasing it at the end of the summer so far. That’s the tentative release date, so it shouldn’t be too much longer before that hits the shelves.
WTL: How did you feel about the positive attention you were getting as you released albums and toured more? From a relative standpoint of course.
James: Obviously it’s good. It’s always a relief to know that there are people out there that can find a use for extremely unconventional music, and occasionally we’d find people that are getting the same thing out of the music that we are, and that’s something that’s powerful because there’s not a lot of people in the world that can relate to that type of music.
I’m honestly more interested in using that kind of attention to be able to work more. I’ve been making difficult music for half my life, so I start to get used to the small amount of people who follow what I’m doing, and its great to get positive reinforcement from something you really love doing. In the end the best part is having people saying “I’m doing this, and I really liked what you did in that, so why don’t you come and work with me on this project”. That’s where the real payoff comes as far as I’m concerned. I feel much better when I get subsequent work from what I did in Khanate as opposed to the people that would come up to me after the gig to express their gratitude to what’s going on. I could take that or leave that really. (Laughs)
WTL: Do you think that you could’ve taken Khanate further in terms of popularity? It seems like you got more attention on every album, which I especially noticed when you released “Capture and Release”.
James: Through touring and word of mouth I think so. It’s hard to say though, because when I was listening to stuff like Napalm Death when I was a kid, I didn’t think there’d be as much as an audience for them as there is now, so it’s really anybodies guess. It’s possible. Anything is possible, but it’s such an extreme alienating type of music that there would’ve needed to be some sort of serious catalyst to push Khanate into some “mainstream” form. As far as it it went, I’m actually surprised we actually took it as far as it did go. A lot of people were showing up to gigs towards the end, and we were actually in a situation where we didn’t have to sleep in doghouses on tour and barely be able to pay for gas and food, so it did get to a certain point that I didn’t think I would’ve gone to, depending on the material.
WTL: How did you feel about Leonardo DiCaprio select one of your songs for his film, “The 11th Hour”?
James: That was pretty funny. It would’ve been nice if we actually got paid well for it! That’s really my main concern, but I’ll be able to tell someone at a party that Leonardo DiCaprio digs Khanate, which is about as much as that has done for us really! (Laughs) I actually did hear the way it was used in the film, and it was like why even bother? It doesn’t even matter. I’ve had music in other films before, and it’s usually the same thing. It’s usually 4 to 5 seconds of completely indistinguishable music that nobody will ever pay the slightest bit of attention to. So it’s cool, it’s funny, whatever. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference in the long term as far as exposing it to a larger group of people. That’s not how it works.
WTL: Did you put much thought forth on some of the negative attention you got in Khanate? I’ve seen some nasty comments on Blabbermouth for example.
James: Most of the negative comments that I’ve seen had to do with something that didn’t really apply. If someone wanted to bash Khanate it was easy for people to say there’s 4 guys who bash their instruments every 30 seconds. If it’s such a lazy comment that’s based on something that’s not really happening, it’s hard to take it seriously.
One thing I can say about most of the people in Khanate is that things maybe even feed off of negative comments. Everybody’s ego in Khanate was strong enough to deflect stuff like that, and to be honest, gigs where we would piss people off in the audience is a lot more entertaining, because there’s conflict, which obviously fuels things like Khanates music. That stuff isn’t made for feeling good or from feeling some sort of camaraderie with your fans, that’s not what drives the music. And there’s always the opportunity for some sort of incident to happen. I’ve played enough gigs in plenty of different bands to experience the violence that happens when a band like Khanate plays. There’s going to be a couple of meatheads in every audience that have never heard it before and really don’t have the mental tools to dissect what’s going on in a way that’s going to help them enjoy it, or at least make them curious or interested into how something like that can actually be happening.
If someone gets pissed off enough from what we’re doing to actually act in a violent manner, that’s something that I’ve always enjoyed! (Laughs) I know it sounds kind of perverse. I’ve played shows that’ve ended in fist fights, or at one point when I was with Alan in O.L.D., we started bring weapons to gigs because there was always a chance that skinheads were going to bum-rush the stage. I’ve always been sort of a sucker for conflict. The more people people we piss off, the more of a mission it becomes really.
People have defense mechanisms, but my defense mechanism doesn’t have to do with ignoring negative attention. I want to be entertained just like everyone else, so if you can take negative attention and turn it into an entertaining situation, then I think you’ve won on a number of levels.
WTL: Is there any truth to the story that you drove Martin Bisi out of his studio?
James: (Laughs) Yeah… we did our first couple of rehearsals in Bisi Studios, and it was pretty loud. I didn’t see him storm out or anything, but the reports say he couldn’t take it anymore and he fled his own building! (Laughs)
We’ve had the same issue anywhere we’ve rehearsed. We’ve spent a lot of time rehearsing between the building on 38th and 39th on Manhattan Avenue. Or is it 10th Avenue? I don’t remember, but every adjacent room would have a couple of people banging on our door asking us to turn it down, and the response was almost always slightly aggressive. I’m sure we annoyed a lot of people. At one point the building across the street called the police because we had our window open a crack, and it was rattling the windows of the building across the street.
I’d come to rehearsal off the subway 5 blocks away and I could hear Stephen tuning his guitar. It was ridiculous.
WTL: What were the live performances like?
James: Most of the time, as far a showmanship goes we were pretty static. It’s only when things started getting tense, or when we started to fall into something good that there’d even be the slightest bit of movement from almost any of the members. Visually it was pretty fucking boring unless you were interesting in how we did stuff, like the visual cues and tip-offs or whatnot. As far as the sound goes, it was just always painfully loud, and I constantly had to use more amps just to match Stephens volume.
It’s hard for me to really understand what it was like form an audience members perspective, but I definitely remember some gigs where whether it was the alcohol fueling the gig or the music actually starting to come together really well in a live situation, but we’d get some real physical and mental release from what we were doing. I guess you could just watch one of the DVDs, but they never translate the physical aspect of the sound hitting you and the it effects your body. It’s obviously something that DVDs will never reproduce.
I would just describe it as a release really. I sort of hoped the audience would get just a degree what I would feel out of a good performance. There were a lot of opportunities for that situation to break down, and when it did it was anybodies guess on how it would end. There were shows where we stopped mid-song and called it a day, and there were shows where we managed to pull it together when maybe Tim and Stephen were playing one thing and me an Alan were playing another, so live shows were a real crapshoot. Sometimes you can pull yourselves out of the chaos if it’s going awry, but there were some real disasters and some real transcendental moments as well.
WTL: That’s funny how you put it – crapshoot.
James: Depending on how much we had to drink and how many weeks its been since the previous gig or how many hours. It was anyones guess really.
WTL: Where was the furthest you made from home when you were touring in Khanate?
James: We didn’t really take full advantage of the places would could’ve gigged. Whenever we’d toured we’d sit down and figure out which country it was we wanted to visit the most and booked a show there. Scandinavia was my favourite place to tour, so maybe certain parts of Scandinavia were the furthest. We were trying to work something out for Japan when we broke up, but at that point everything was moving so slowly that I just didn’t see anything happening, so I wasn’t about to stick around and wait for shows in Japan to happen. Northern Europe would probably be the furthest we journeyed out to.
WTL: Most of your shows were headlining, weren’t they?
James: By the end they were. We were always playing shows with Thrones. We did a small tour with Sigh very early on.
WTL: I think one tour you could’ve done would’ve been with Isis.
James: We did do a bunch of gigs with them here and there, but nothing as far as a tour goes. The one band I always kept trying to get Stephen to hook us up on tour was Bohren & der Club of Gore. I think that would’ve been a really great contrast, with both bands having sort of a lack of predetermined tempos and whatnot, but they’re on the extremely relaxed side of the spectrum as opposed to Khanate. I thought that would’ve been a great tour. I think something was in the works but never materialized.
WTL: What was the name of that band?
James: Bohren & der Club of Gore. I think Hydra Heads releasing their newest LP. People compare them to Angela Bottlentae [not sure on the spelling of the name]. It’s sort of peaceful lounge sounding stuff, but it’s almost the same form as Khanate where it’s extremely drawn out, and lots of use of space between notes.
WTL: Another band I’d like to have seen you guys on tour with would’ve been Immolation. I know they’re into a low of slow stuff, and when I mentioned Khanate to Ross Dolan [bass, vocals] he was really interested, since he was familiar with O.L.D., although I’m not sure how well that tour would’ve went over.
James: We were sort of from the same scene back in the day. But playing together isn’t really an issue these days! (Laughs)
WTL: Since bands get asked about their band name way too often, did you ever lie to people about what Khanate meant?
James: No, but we could never say “Khanate” to someone and get it right. “Coney? You’re band is Coney?”, “No, KHANATE”. We’ve heard all sorts of bastardizations of the named from “Contey” to “Kiantey”. It was ridiculous. Stephen would always spell it out to them C-O-N and the number 8.
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June 6th, 2009 at 10:36 am
“People compare them to Angela Bottlentae [not sure on the spelling of the name].”
It’s probably Angelo Badalamenti who wrote the soundtrack for Twin Peaks (which is a major influence on Bohren).
June 6th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Hey, thanks a bunch! I really had no idea where to start looking for that name, and every now and then when I hear something I’m not familiar with (usually a name or title) it’s so tough to track some of that down!