Putting Words To Music

Perfection drives Kent, Ohio's The Six Parts Seven. When T6P7 played Seattle's Graceland with local favorites Carissa's Wierd, part of the reason that they took extra time to set up was that guitarist Allen Karpinski switched shoes with his brother in order to help him play as well as he could.

Drummer Jay Karpinski's soles were wearing thin, and hewas concerned that he wouldn't be able to play his set with damaged footwear. Allen obliged, taking the time to re-lace before the band officially took the stage. T6P7 then gave the audience what seemed like a flawless show, but Allen expressed dissatisfaction afterward. He cited his unfamiliarity with the shoes as something that detracted from his performance.

Regardless of Allen's perfectionism, T6P7's third Seattle show in August was testament to the band's ability to create and perform beautiful soundtracks to introspection. T6P7 is not just a technically excellent instrumental band but also an organic group dedicated to performing their mellow compositions with feeling.

T6P7 seduces listeners with a four-guitar approach (including a lapsteel and a bass) filled out by drums, piano, and samples, and in a live setting the band members sway and writhe with their rich and spacious sounds. With their live performance and their latest album, Things Shaped in Passing, T6P7 makes it obvious that a vocalist is not necessary to make a band work.

Fueled by more than a perfectionistic attitude, T6P7 also seems to be motivated by mystery. The band can allow itself to seem anonymous and obtuse due to its refusal to let lyrics easily communicate the meanings behind its songs. And beyond this, T6P7 songs almost never explode in catharsis; they linger like (and stimulate) daydreams, sometimes feeling like they have no defined beginning or end.

Before their excellent Graceland show, T6P7 provided some insight into their perfectionism and mystique. The band also described some of the milestones and bumps along the road to its current position in the independent music communities of northeastern Ohio and the rest of the country.

Interview conducted in person by Jeff Locher.

Names: Tim Gerak (guitar), Allen Karpinski (guitar), James Haas (lapsteel, guitar), Jay Karpinski (drums)
Band: The Six Parts Seven

BettaWreckonize: This is your second evening playing in Seattle, and you've played an in-store as well. So that's a pretty significant amount of time in one city. Any particular reason for spending so much time here?

Allen: Certainly. Our record label is based here, Suicide Squeeze, and our booking agent lives here in Seattle too. Besides that, a lot of it has to do with Carissa's Wierd. They had their two record release shows, and we did a tour with them for ten days about a year ago now, I guess. So this is just one of those things; everything's come full circle, and we're back here playing with them again. Our label really pushed it. They made up posters specifically for these three shows.

BW: I didn't know there was that relationship between the Six Parts Seven and Carissa's Wierd.

Allen: They actually played our record release for our second album in Cleveland with us, so it's just always this back-and-forth thing.

BW: So what's it like to play live as an instrumental band? Is it any different, engaging the audience than it is for bands with vocalists?

James: We tend to mumble a lot, and a lot of times I speak and I have no microphone. It is kind of strange; I don't know if people get offended if you don't talk… I think they expect that if you're an instrumental band that you're going to be dead silent, and I feel awkward just sitting there and tuning my instrument. I just feel like I should say something, especially like last night. It depends on how the crowd is. I mean, sometimes we are dead silent, I guess.

(Bouncer interrupts: "Hey guys, while you're all here, let me get IDs…")

Allen: I'll go on with that question too. I think because the band doesn't have a proper or identifiable frontman, so to speak, that the audience has a hard time. It's hard to get a real connection with the audience. A lot of times I feel like there's audience [makes a gesture to show division] and then us playing music. So sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes to play what we play, especially in a bar where there's a lot of people talking, it's almost a bewildering experience.

BW: Beyond just being instrumental, your music is pretty mature, for lack of a better word, and last night you were playing to an all-ages audience.

Allen: Which was great.

BW: I wanted to ask about that, because I wondered if the younger kids had a harder time engaging, or maybe an easier time.

Jay: It's all over the place.

Allen: I think it depends on the venue more than anything else. Whatever happens to be going on in that moment in that space is either conducive or non-conducive to what we're doing.

Jay: A funny side note to that too: A friend of ours took a CD to a nursing home, played it… and we sold a bunch of CDs at the nursing home.

Allen: They loved it.

Jay: So it's kind of a good experience with all ages, really.

Allen: Moms like it.

BW: I hear that the people at NPR like it as well.

T6P7 in unison: Yeah!

Allen: We were really lucky that somehow Bob Boilen, who is the guy who actually created "All Things Considered," that program that has been on for like 20 years on NPR, got in touch with us and asked us to do a piece for "All Songs Considered" [National Public Radio's online music program]. I was so happy. We all listen to NPR, so it was just perfect.

And for me, that was a great chance to put something up on the Internet. We don't have a really large Net presence, so here's something that is a great introduction to what we do. Better - to me - than someone just buying a CD and listening to it. A lot of what we do, I'd like to think of it as multimedia. I mean, even an album is a multimedia piece. There is art, there is music, and it's all connected - at least how we do it.

BW: What do you think about how some critics and magazines have categorized your music as "post-rock"? Does that mean anything to you?

Allen: Oh please… Everyone else hates the term, so I'll go the opposite route. We'll embrace it. Why not? It's like any other label. Negative press, positive press… It's all good in some way.

James: I never really understood the term "post-rock."

Allen: The question is, did rock ever end? I don't think it has. It's been constantly moving. Sometimes it takes a step back, and sometimes a step forward.

James: We're not a rock band. Do they call country artists post-rock? I don't know…

Jay: The comparisons to Tortoise and Mogwai get a little tiresome.

Allen: And Tristeza. Those are the big three, and we really don't feel any relation to those bands at all.

Jay: [Seattle newsweekly] The Stranger here, they actually [compared T6P7 to] Mogwai, but they said… What was it? Their more subtle parts? And that's fine. But when they just say Mogwai, we never get that.

James: The last time we saw Mogwai, it sounded like jets blowing up. It was cool, but it was very different from us.

Allen: And you've got Tortoise which is this rhythm unit, pretty much. They're great. And we're just this linear, layered… It's very different.

James: Exactly. And we're really classically… just two totally different worlds.

BW: Can I ask you guys about how you write songs? Is everybody involved?

Allen: Pretty much. Usually one of us will bring in a piece of music. Usually I start it, and then it will just evolve. The finished product is something that we all have a hand in, certainly.

BW: Some of the songs flow into one another, and there are even explicit ties between songs and across albums. "Spaces Between Days," for example. Any significance to that?

Allen: The albums are built conceptually to be that way, to run from start to finish almost as one piece of music. They're really only broken up because it's conventional, for lack of another word. People are used to hearing music that way, and it is nice to have the little breaks there. But really they're one big movement rather than separate pieces.

James: I'd say the new record seems to be a little bit more away from that.

Allen: To me it's like that, still.

James: With the last record, I could definitely see that. My opinion on that: The writing style is pretty much uniform throughout, but I think the new one seems to be a little bit more separated.

Allen: The "Spaces Between Days" songs that you mentioned, they're kind of a foreshadowing on a record to a piece that will come afterwards. Either that, or they're an afterthought to a piece that came before. That's a thing that we're going to continue to do thematically throughout all of our albums, just to have that interrelatedness. I always like that when bands have… You can put all of their albums on a table and if you really pick them apart there are these little secret things that keep them all in one world.

BW: So they're kind of like expanded interludes?

Allen: Kind of. They definitely have something to do with the piece of music, like one shouldn't or couldn't exist without the other. But I wouldn't necessarily say they're songs unto themselves.

James: They generally contain a piece of material from whatever they're related to…

Allen: … shown or played in a different way.

James: They're always either in the same key, or some theme, or some other tie that would lead into or come out of…

Allen: Think about this: Any music that you listen to, if you took an element out of it or change just a rhythm element of it, it could probably change the mood of the piece of music. I think that's something we play with a little bit.

BW: I wanted to ask about any meanings behind the songs. I've read that you like to keep your songs open-ended in terms of what they mean, but is there anything that inspires the music that you create? Emotions, situations, or people?

Allen: I think so. For me, the actual song titles, those hopefully will push someone in the right direction of the mood we're trying to achieve with the song. But it's, like you said, I like the open-endedness of it. They can disregard all that and put whatever feeling they have into it. Because that's what I always liked about instrumental music. Lyrics sometimes, just to go with the word that we've been using all tour - at least that I have - are almost fascist in a way.

[All of T6P7 laughs.]

Allen: It's like, [shakes his fist] "Feel this."

James: I would say, one of the better things is that one bad lyric can blow a whole song. Even if it's a good song the rest of the way through…

Allen: And you just wince when they hit that line.

James: What about the nostalgia thing, though? There are some running themes [in T6P7's music]. Loneliness…

Allen: Yeah, loneliness… How to deal with memories that you maybe have not come to terms with yet.

James: Nostalgia causing loneliness is one of the ones that I pull out a lot.

BW: What about other bands in the Kent/Akron area? There's a lot of good stuff going on there obviously, and being an Ohioan myself, I can appreciate that. Party of Helicopters, Black Keys, etc.

Allen: It's exciting too because it's one of those music scenes where not all the music sounds the same. It's coming from all sides.

James: The Keys, the Party of Helicopters, and us are the three most different sounding bands possible.

BW: So do the bands in that community support, inspire each other?

Allen: Absolutely.

T6P7 in unison: Live with each other! [laughter]

Allen: It's very incestuous.

James: We don't exchange members much though… I saw the Black Keys' record today, and I've known Pat [Carney] since I was a little kid. It just freaked me out so much. I was like, "That's Pat, and he recorded that down the street from my house!"

Allen: His face is on the record, and we're seeing it in Seattle…

James: It's so odd… I love it, though.

BW: In Lines and Patterns came out on Donut Friends, and Silence Magnifies Sound was on Troubleman Unlimited. Is there any reason that you've been jumping around labels so much? Obviously, the new album is on Suicide Squeeze.

Allen: Donut Friends folded; it was Jamie [Stillman] from Party of Helicopters. He's starting a new label now. I don't know what it's going to be called yet - possibly Musical Adventures. His girlfriend runs a booking agency by that name, and I think his record label might be called that as well. He folded, so that took care of that.

Troubleman… It took him [Mike Simonetti] two years to put our record out after we recorded it. It almost killed us as far as momentum. And he just wasn't willing to work, at least as far as I was seeing it, as hard as we wanted to. And it's hard if you're out there touring and quitting your job to go on tour having no money, and then your label's not doing anything for you except actually putting out the first pressing of the record. His label's great, but he's so into the record he's doing, and then the next record he's doing, the ones after that… He might as well never have done them.

Tim: …it's two weeks or a month, and then he moves on to something new.

Allen: And Suicide Squeeze could not be farther removed from that. Dave Dickenson is the hardest working guy I've ever met. It's unbelievable. If he's trying to help us out with a show or something, he's on the phone every minute until he either gets a yes or no answer. You can't ask for more than that. As I've said to other people too, as far as the band being called the Six Parts Seven and being on that label, we're going to live and die by Suicide Squeeze. We're sticking with that. I think it's one of those situations that's ideal. Hopefully we can grow, and the label can grow at the same time.

James: It seems like Troubleman was a good label, but Mike takes on like 60 bands, whereas David takes on five bands, and he knows all of them very well. Not anything against Mike or anything. It's just an unfortunate situation, I guess, especially due to Al being friends with him.

BW: [To Allen] I also heard that you had some solo stuff that was going to come out on Troubleman.

Allen: It's not going to at all, again because we didn't do our third record with the label. We kind of shelved it permanently, which is unfortunate. It was one of those things where I actually went and letter-pressed all of the covers myself. It took a lot of time, and they looked really good, I thought. I sent them to him, and who knows what happened to them. They were probably in a trash can a year ago somewhere.

BW: Will that music ever see the light of day?

Allen: Not really. I have CD-Rs of it that I can give out to people at shows. But officially release? No, I don't think so.

BW: I heard that there were also some extremely rare cassette releases?

James: [Laughing.] We don't even have a copy of that!

BW: No chance of seeing that stuff either?

Allen: No… What we would do is we had a tape deck, and we would plug two mics into it and just hit record. We would take really basic tracks from the songs before the album came out, put them to tape, and give them out to people at shows. The first one had three versions of one song, and they all sounded as different from each other as you could imagine. I mean, completely different - nothing like the original song.

James: Possibly the very first Six Parts Seven recording. [Laughs.]

Allen: There's a very first Six Parts Seven cassette that came out on Donut Friends… It came out in 1995; it was just Jay and I and another friend of ours, Damian. It was him on drums, I actually did vocals, and there were two bass guitars and that's it. At the time, we thought we were doing something completely different. We had no idea that things like Tortoise or Dianogah existed. We were like "Two basses; no one's ever done that before!" How wrong can you be? [All laugh.]

BW: Was that the Old Hearts Club?

Allen: No, it was the Six Parts Seven. We did that for a year and actually played out shows, and then we started doing Old Hearts Club. And then when the singer - guitar player from the Old Hearts Club went back to grad school in Virginia, then we started doing the Six Parts Seven again with a whole bunch of different people like Tim and Brad.

[A friend of T6P7 suggests that a demo of a band called The Visitors might still exist.]

Allen: [Embarrassed.] Oh yeah, that's something else altogether. The first band that we were in. It was a disaster.

BW: Did all of this happen in Kent?

Allen: Pretty much. Kent or Cleveland. We were always bouncing back between the two cities.

BW: Did everybody go to school at Kent State?

Allen: [James] Matt and I did.

James: I still actually go.

Allen: He's going to miss his first day at school on this tour.

James: It's like, "Play the Knitting Factory, or first day of school." [Laughs.] They can deal.

BW: Away from the history, and back to the present and the future. I think you said, Allen, in Pulse! magazine that the Six Parts Seven is always trying to perfect itself and that it's almost been achieved with the new record. If that's true, what do you see as really outstanding about this record as opposed to the other records that you've put out?

Allen: We spent so much more time writing the music - almost two years writing the music - and just getting every note just where it was supposed to be. That and the fact that we actually had the time in the studio and a little bit more money to have all that time in the studio to do the mixing the right way. The other albums, I'm happy with the songs, but they don't quite sound on the record like they do in my head. And this one is so close; it's right there for me. I think it's great.

Tim: It's as close to the music in our head as we've been so far.

James: It can definitely be perfected upon, though.

BW: That's what I was going to say. Where does it go next if it's almost perfect now?

James: After we did this last record, we went and helped [a friend] record his record, and we did a little more experimenting in the studio. I liked the looseness of that. That seemed to be a really interesting experience that might lead to something. We might leave it a little more open-ended before we go into the studio. It could be somewhat set but not totally set.

BW: An improvisational Six Parts Seven?

[All laugh.]

Jay: Not on the drums. Never.

James: Just adding the nuances.

Allen: We're all about having fun in the studio and trying different techniques to achieve sound, but with the idea that we'll be able to pull it off live - and actually play it live. I'm bored with the band that has all the stuff in a keyboard and they just hold down a button and all these sounds come out that they've recorded in the studio. That sucks. Everything we do in the studio is pretty much live. We play it, and then we play it the same way live or try to.

BW: That's all the questions that I have. Do you guys have anything else that you want to say about the band or the new record or anything else at all?

James: The tour's been going fantastic considering it's just us by ourselves.

BW: Have you been headlining at most of the shows?

Allen: Half and half. Once we get down South we'll be touring with the Mercury Program, who we've played with before. They're going to headline those shows. They have, I think, a much better draw than we will in most of those states.

BW: Who else have you been playing with other than Carissa's Wierd?

Allen: We played with Archer Prewitt which was great, and we really like his stuff a lot. And a band called the Prom that's from Seattle, they were really nice guys. In Chicago we played with Atombombpocketknife, another really good band. But Carissa's Wierd for us is it. For all of us, that's one of our favorite bands.

Tim: Favorite band of all time.

Allen: A year ago I got married and actually used one of their songs in the reception, so we like it that much.

Jay: One of the best surprises for us the whole year, the best experience that we were all a little reluctant going into, was the South by Southwest [Music Conference and Festival]. That was so great.

BW: I saw the little quote from one of you guys in The New York Times.

Jay: It was a great experience.

James: That was a really weird thing to be in The New York Times.

Jay: There was someone from a Japanese label that was there who was there who might put us on a compilation, which could open into one of our goals to tour in another country, which we'd love to do after the tour now, definitely.