Futurism Restated #82: Belong Are Back
The Kranky veterans on their new album, the power of drone, and the pesky question of shoegaze
For whatever reason, I came late to Belong. I’m a Kranky lifer, but nevertheless, there are gaps in my knowledge of the label, and Belong long constituted a blind spot. Maybe it’s because the New Orleans duo has put out so little music, despite being active for more than two decades—just two LPs until now, and a couple of EPs. After their 2006 debut, October Language, the duo of Turk Dietrich and Mike Jones waited five years to release 2011’s Common Era (with the Colorloss Record EP and a single-sided Table of the Elements 12-inch both arriving halfway between the two LPs) and then… nothing. I was aware of them, though, and of their reputation as a noisy, drone-oriented post-rock outfit—aware enough, at least, that when I listened to their recent third album, Realistic IX, I was immediately surprised. The sound of the new album has little to do with the Tim Hecker references I had seen cited, and though there is plenty of distortion, all that fuzz takes place within a context quite unlike the blown-out expanses you might expect from a Kranky record: The crisp crunch of their guitars is framed by a backdrop of empty space, and perforated by some of the most mechanistically precise drum machines I’ve ever heard. Closing my eyes, I imagined crumpled metal and beveled edges; iced-over snowdrifts bisected by glinting knives.
As I began spending time with Common Era and October Language, I was struck by the enormous leap between those records and the new album, not so much stylistically as sonically. Realistic IX blasts away the cobwebs of their debut and shatters the post-punk moodiness of Common Era, rendering everything in a kind of pristine hi-def.
One other thing stood out to me: The new album reminded me quite a lot of shoegaze.
Now, as we’ll see from my interview with the duo below, this is not exactly a popular idea at Belong HQ, but I’m hardly the first person to hear it in their music. In fact, you can find references to the genre attached to them as far back as their debut album. Particularly in the context of the current shoegaze revival, it’s hard to hear elements of Realistic IX—certain rhythmic cadences, the gummy heft of the low midrange, a pastel twinge in the swoony vocal melodies—and not immediately be reminded of key touchstones of the genre, namely My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. I wasn’t the only one to pick up on these things; Louis Pattison’s review for Pitchfork largely frames the album as an homage to MBV’s classic.
But I also knew that Belong didn’t consider their music shoegaze, and had previously bristled at that comparison. Around the time of Common Era, Dietrich told FACT, “People have been citing shoegaze a lot in reference to the new album and that actually took us a bit by surprise. While we love My Bloody Valentine as much as the next guy, we never once, when producing the record, thought we were making a shoegaze album. We thought of the album in an entirely different light. We don’t feel any relation in aesthetic, harmonically or sonically, to most of the artists from the early 90s shoegaze movement.” That resistance made me all the more curious to learn about the ideas behind Realistic IX, and to find out how Belong envisioned the direction they’d taken.
Read on for the full interview—which was conducted, as is their custom, over email, with multiple rounds of follow-ups—in which they discuss the evolution that led to Realistic IX; the reasons for their 13-year break between albums; their unswerving commitment to drone music; what they find wanting in contemporary music-critical discourse; and the reasons they don’t hear the shoegaze in the new record. And a happy surprise: They also offer hints of a new EP not far off on the horizon.
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Philip Sherburne: You’ve never been the most prolific band, but 13 years after Common Era, it was easy to think Belong were over. Why a new album now, and what took so long? Could you talk a little about the evolution of the album?
Turk Dietrich: Well, we actually never stopped working on music. We pretty much kept the same routine that we had when we first started working together back in 2002. The not so fun answer is that in the interim we made a lot of music that we were never completely happy with, so we never released it.
Mike Jones: We do work slowly but there really isn’t a good answer to why it took so long. We have been working on music together without any significant breaks for the past 13 years. The best and simplest explanation is that between 2012 and 2019 we didn’t come up with an album’s worth of songs we wanted to put out, so the new album started with a group of songs written around late 2019 early 2020.
What was it about the material between 2012 and 2019 that you weren’t happy with? Was it in a radically different style than the new album? Having finally completed the material that became the new album, in retrospect, can you sort of see where you were going wrong with that material you didn’t end up releasing?
MJ: Part of the reason we become dissatisfied is because we work on material for too long. I think a lot of people, not just us, throw away good songs because over time you just get tired of them. Nothing was in a radically different style, the only real change I can think of between 2012-19 is that we moved away from guitars completely and then back to being very guitar focused.
TD: It’s not like the material is of poor quality either. We’ve gone back to some of those songs over the years, and a lot of the time it ends up being a nice surprise when we listen. But it’s stuff that will never be released because the majority of it is unfinished.
Philip: Are you both still based in New Orleans? What are the logistics of your collaboration like?
MJ: We both still live in New Orleans, been here the whole time. I have no plans to leave. The collaboration works basically the same as it did when we started, which is that we work on our own and get together at least once a week at Turk’s home studio.
TD: Mike will do things on his own at his house, as will I, but we typically meet up one day a week at the bedroom studio, going on about 22 years now. This has never stopped for any significant portion of time since we first started getting together.
Do you have other ongoing musical projects? Turk, I know you’ve had Second Woman and, more recently, First Tone; are those projects continuing? Are you able to live from your music, or do you guys work in other fields as well? I know that making a living from music has become nearly impossible for most artists working on the fringes.
TD: In regard to the other projects, Duane Pitre and I are slowly working on new material for First Tone. Second Woman hasn’t worked on any music since our release on Tresor.
I do not make a living from music. Even if I had spent a ton of time touring with Belong, Second Woman, and First Tone, there is no way that it would be enough to sustain any kind of viable living. I’ve maintained a job since the ’90s. Also, I know there is the dialogue out there that this is all due to streaming, but, honestly, this seemed to be the case for most underground artists going back at least 25 years to the pre-streaming era. Most every American musician I know had to have a job outside of music, or maybe a side gig in music like producing/engineering other bands, and even then that was barely enough
MJ: I don’t have any other musical projects, just Belong. I also make a living outside of music.
Realistic IX obviously is part of the continuum that stretches through your work, but it also marks a major shift, to my ears—maybe even a greater shift than the one that took place from October Language to Common Era. If the debut was a noise record, loosely speaking, with Common Era you added both a rhythmic dimension and an almost gothic sensibility, particularly in the vocals and bass. This time you’ve retained the rhythms of Common Era and the squalling fuzz of October Language, but sonically, it’s like everything has crystallized in extreme hi-def. How intentional was that development?
MJ: The sound of this record isn’t a reaction to the previous release. We never say, “We need the new record to sound like this because the last one sounded like that.” With the older records I can better map out the progression because I can remember the tracks we were working on in between releases. The songs we made after October Language would’ve made Colorloss seem like less of a jump. Same with the progression of Colorloss to Common Era. How we came to the “new sound” would probably be clear If we had been releasing the recordings we made from 2012-20.
TD: The only real sonic intent on this album was to have everything be more up front. Sonically it’s almost like the flipside of Common Era, where everything on that album is muffled and dulled. It’s funny that you mention hi-def, though—in my mind Realistic IX is perhaps the most raw and skeletal release of ours.
Could you talk a little bit about how you’ve achieved the sound of the new album?
TD: Not much has changed for us in the studio since we first started, meaning that guitars and computers are our two main tools. I will say that even though the record is more upfront sounding than our previous efforts, I think that it still holds true to many of the ideals we love about drone music. This record is going to fall flat for some people and that’s because these “songs” do not work as proper pop songs. They don’t have the tension and release that you get from pop song structure. This is 100% intentional on our part. A lot of times while working on these tracks we listened to them on loop because the goal was, even though it might only be a five-minute song, if we wanted to, we could loop the song and zone out listening to it for an extended period of time. And that’s what I mean when I say that drone music informed the album more than anything else... We are more interested in that effect. There was even a moment when we were working on the album that we joked about having the loop points at the start and at the end of some songs to be exact, so that you could hit the loop button and they would loop perfectly and infinitely.
What were you trying to do with the drums here? Because for the most part (with the exception of murkier tracks like “Crucial Years”) they’re among the brightest, crispest sounds on the album. They really contribute to that extreme repetitive effect, and even the drum fills (“Souvenir,” for instance) are clearly programmed and not played—they almost go out of their way to sound artificial, as it were. There’s an almost rapturous sense of rigidity to them.
TD: The main thing that we focused on with the drums was that we wanted them to be very up front and propulsive… taking a bit of influence from dance music. The idea of the percussive rhythms carrying the tracks was important and the repetition illustrates our focus. On Common Era the approach to the drums was very different because we wanted everything to be ghosted, for a lack of a better term. While R IX is not a direct reaction to that idea, I think with time we became interested in things being a bit more present.
How much is done “live” (or live in the studio, anyway, in real time, hands on the instruments) and how much is a factor of tweaking, post-processing, etc.? Not that it matters, at all. I guess I’m just interested in thinking about ideas like spontaneity or perfectionism, because there’s an almost sublime kind of airlessness in the new album, like a very expensive, very powerful object—an engine, a weapon—in a vitrine.
MJ: There’s some spontaneity in the recording of the guitar and bass parts, which are mostly done in one take with limited editing to get some variation. The perfectionism comes in later, during all the time spent processing in post—hours and hours of tweaking.
Can you talk about what exactly that tweaking entails? I realize that talking about the nuts and bolts of process can be dull—you don’t need to, like, detail the settings on your filters for me—but I’m curious what general approach you take to get from the initial jam to the final product.
TD: Tweaking entails the whole process of getting the arrangement right and figuring out what the individual sounds need to be: synths, drum samples, guitars, textures, EFX, and the mix. This all pretty much happens simultaneously as we are always considering the overall sound and mix through the entire ordeal—it’s all one process. And we do this inside the computer, we always have. It would be boring to list off the gear and plugins we are using, but it’s pretty much all done in Ableton. And we sculpt all of our sounds via chains upon chains of EFX. If an engineer were to get a peek into some of these processes, they would probably think we are out of our minds.
To try to trace back the origins of this record—because it sounds like something you guys have been working on for a long time, something that evolved very gradually—do you remember what the first track you finished for Realistic IX was? Was there something about that finished song that helped point the way for what came next?
TD: After thinking about this one, we don’t really have a good answer. Mostly because the majority of the record was slowly worked on all at once.
This is a pretty basic question, but what does the title mean to you?
TD: We’d prefer to live this up to the listener.
I’m particularly interested in talking about shoegaze. I don’t want to pin anything on you, but to my ears, the new album is steeped in shoegaze references, particularly My Bloody Valentine: the quality of the distortion, the types of chord changes, the airiness of the vocals and the way they float in the mix, even the way you tease certain intervals. How intentional was that? Part of the reason that I ask is that shoegaze, or the shoegaze revival, has been one of the big stories in “alternative” music discourse over the past couple of years. (I wrote about it last year; now Eli Enis is writing a book about it.) How much are you aware of the broader shoegaze revival—for instance, the way Slowdive and Ride found new fans, and millions of streams, thanks in large part to zoomers on TikTok? And how does an awareness of that kind of discourse affect your thoughts about making a record like this? I’m phrasing this as carefully as I can because I don’t want to be misunderstood; I am well aware that there are a lot of mixed feelings about any revival, and bands don’t like to be pigeonholed. (Add to that the fact that for a younger generation of listeners, “shoegaze” has come to mean anything with a fuzz pedal.) But I do feel like you’re grappling in some sense with the legacy of shoegaze, and trying to put your own spin on a fairly narrow set of sounds. And I’m really fascinated by how that plays out on this record.
MJ: I know about the shoegaze revival now because it’s come up in other interviews and what other people have written about this album. But I definitely wasn’t aware of a renewed interest in the genre when we were making this record. I’m not completely out of touch, but it really hadn’t been on my radar until now.
I’m always reluctant to explain too much, but since shoegaze is regularly being named when people are talking about the new record I think it’s necessary to be clear that we didn’t set out to make shoegaze. What we were looking to make were songs built on a set of specific musical ideas that interested us: repetition, drone with cyclical chord changes, minimal/close chord voicing, no choruses, no builds, nontraditional song structure, neutral emotion… I know that MBV and probably other shoegaze bands have explored similar ideas, and I understand why a listener would say the result is a shoegaze record or why songs sound like Loveless. I get why. But this was the stuff we were talking about.
TD: To be frank, I’ve never been a fan of shoegaze. You can list off the majority of the famous names in the genre, old and new, and I’ve never had a connection with any of them. So for us, we never thought about the shoegaze revival or how we fit into that scene because we can’t relate to the songs that those bands write, nor can we relate to how those albums are made. Most of these bands are operating from a completely different mindset than us—it’s different universes. Some of these albums that are now being called “shoegaze,” to my ears they have much more in common with mid-’90s American rock music than “shoegaze.” I think this speaks to a larger point that you brought up above in reference to how shoegaze can now mean anything with a fuzz pedal and a whispy vocal. Shoegaze has never been a jumping-off point for us, drone has always been the one straight line through all of our releases.
I think one of the big changes of the last 12 years is that the dialogue around most music has been reduced to talking about things almost purely in reference to genre or via comparisons to other bands. This more often than not can lead to claims based on assumptions which are completely off-base. It’s different compared to the writing we saw in the ’90s or in the blog era. The blog era writers loved to talk about genre, they even liked to coin new genre names, but they also were writing about music on other levels; they thought about and described music not only on an emotional level, but on a physical level as well. Many would vividly describe how songs sounded, what they thought the intent behind those sounds were, and what listening to the music may do to your mindstate. Now, one may love or hate that kind of theorizing, but I think when that kind of dialogue is lacking, combined with the fact that the algorithm has become the dominant way most learn about or engage with the music, you end up with this lazier writing style... most likely because fewer people are participating in that kind of discourse, or even reading it at all. There seems to be less back and forth between the writers, and honestly, there’s less back and forth between the artists as well. This level of atomization is unique to this modern era.
I think you’re right there, but I can also understand why a writer might compare Realistic IX to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Even if your intent wasn’t to reinterpret or pay homage, to my ears there’s a clear connection between certain elements of your album and that album—the mechanistic snares, for instance, or the cooing/ethereal vocals. I’m thinking particularly of a song like “Souvenir,” compared to Loveless opener “Only Shallow.” Or the drum beats in “Realistic (I’m Still Waiting)” and “When You Sleep.” Or the contrast you establish with noisy drone tracks like “Bleach,” whereas they do something similar with “Loomer” or “Touched.” One of the things that intrigues me about your record is that it seems to be taking certain tropes and exaggerating them, making them somehow ultra-vivid or hyperreal. Sitting down and doing a back-to-back comparison between Realistic IX and Loveless, they obviously sound very, very different. But something about your album triggers my memories of Loveless in a way that I find fascinating. Whatever your interest (or lack thereof) in shoegaze, I think it’s notable that you’ve dug into this particular set of sounds and reference points precisely at a moment when shoegaze, broadly speaking, has never been bigger. (At the very least, I hope it’s beneficial to your streaming numbers!)
TD: I appreciate that it triggers memories of Loveless for you. That album is timeless and remains untouched even till this day. But again, this is not anything we discussed as a reference while making this batch of songs. If anything, we very intentionally avoid most of the MBV signifiers like using a whammy bar or reverse reverb. I get that sometimes we touch on some similar ideas, but we are very obviously moving things in a different direction. Like you said, if you listen to Loveless next to Realistic IX they are very much two completely different things with dissimilar objectives. And while I get that “Souvenir” or “Realistic” might be a faint echo of some MBV ideas, tracks like “Bleach” are coming from a much different place. Same could be said for the majority of the album.
The Pitchfork reviewer mentioned Basic Channel in reference to your closing track, “AM / PM,” which I found interesting—I’m not sure I would have thought of that otherwise, but listening to the wash of distortion and the steady boom-tick 4/4 beat, there’s definitely something there. Although, in retrospect, I’d be more inclined to highlight Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project, perhaps. Are those sorts of influences something you’ve discussed in relation to your own work?
TD: As a longtime listener of Basic Channel and GAS, I feel like that stuff is just embedded into my bloodstream. The Rhythm & Sound stuff was a super obvious influence on Second Woman. That being said, Mike and I never explicitly talked about Maurizio or GAS, but we do have a common interest in these droney/pulsey types of tracks. We’ve always wanted to make stuff in that pulse style just so we have it to listen to for ourselves. At some point Mike came up with the idea that those types of tracks could work next to the more “rock” style tracks on the album. While at first I was hesitant to this idea, I came to realize that he was 100% right as usual.
MJ: I don’t know the Basic Channel stuff enough to say if it’s a relevant connection but I think GAS is a good comparison. We are actually planning a release that will have a longer, alternate version of “AM/PM” and a couple of similar tracks that didn’t make the album. Hopefully it’ll be out by the end of the year or early next.
TD: I know we have said things like this in the past in regard to future releases, but this one is ready to go. It’ll be a digital and cassette release via modemain.
Hola , Excelente Entrevista. Un Saludo.
Great band! Great interview!