Catch them if you can

Chasing the elusive SF-by-way-of-SD duo Skaters

By George Chen

a&eletters@sfbg.com

I have made one official attempt to interview Skaters, in the same way one attempts to enact a New Year's resolution. After about 15 exhausting sit-ups, it seems like a good idea to just lie down for a while and then have a tub of ice cream to reward yourself for the initial effort. Just nights before the appointed date, I ran into Skaters' housemate Karl Bauer, who performs and records under the name Axolotl. "Good luck," he offered obliquely at my announcement that I'd arranged an interview. He said something along the lines of them being very particular about press, even antagonistic. This seemed out of character with their friendliness in casual, noninterview encounters.

My first interaction with Skaters' James Ferraro was a group jam we were part of in Woodland over the summer. He was exceedingly chill to hang out with, but I honestly couldn't tell what he or I were playing in the mess that we had brought to the inaugural Operation: Restore Maximum Freedom Festival. His instruments were a microphone, boom box, and some delay pedals.

Prior to this meeting I'd seen Skaters a few times. In some small circles of Internet chatter, the duo, recently transplanted to San Francisco from San Diego, were being hailed as godhead. I usually approach such matters with a healthy, if not overly harsh, skepticism, wanting for once for the hype-sters to be right but accustomed to disappointment. Still, it was intriguing to hear about this group that appeared out of nowhere: Culturally speaking, San Diego is best-known for its border patrol enthusiasts, fair weather, disgraced politicians, and Ron Burgundy. Long gone were the days of Gravity Records and Crash Worship. Skaters' energy seems counter to all of this, and definitely more at home in the fried dusk of psychedelic SF.

Given this abundance of expectation, Skaters' handful of live shows were given this extra weight, a burden of importance on next-generation noise-making that could easily have come crumbling down on its bearers. Instead, Skaters performances were unassuming affairs: Ferraro's and Spencer Clark's plumbers' cracks facing the audience, drenching their spooky voices in a Line 6 feedback marinade, little clusters of tambourine or keyboard breaking through the surface skin of a gelatinous sound wall. It's as if Ferraro and Clark share a private language, collaborating based on a vocabulary and syntax that is being built with each practice, recording, and show. I pick up the LP Dark Rye Bread (Humbug), wondering if there was some intended metaphor behind baking and, you know, baking. Nothing more substantial to be learned from that disc either, just more swirls of infinite, genderless voices doing the hall-of-mirrors distortion behind a vanishing point somewhere in the center of your ears.

Rock block

That may be the point, after all: the subjective experience. When I show up at the Skaters pad one Sunday afternoon, Clark tells me the music should speak for itself. I hope so, because they aren't doing much talking. At the appointed meeting hour, Clark is in his underwear, hungover, and watching football. I had originally proposed we play music together, a gimmick for the article and also a way around this nonverbal blockade. Ferraro was off somewhere, picking up a VCR as it turns out.

Clark lets me know how he feels about the press, how Skaters are not really a live band, how he hates the term "moan wave," and how they really planned to blindfold me, play records for me, and have me write about that. He seems insistent on defining what the group is not, a definition via negation. Ferraro finally shows up, as does Glenn Donaldson, a neighboring musician and friend. Everyone is too hungover to jam or to talk.

Clark also tells me he hates it when band interviews turn subjective, with referential self-indulgences that make the writer the center of the story. Unfortunately, he can't have it both ways. I get the sense that I am being viewed as the enemy in my role of trying to pry this mystery open. Vague allusions to a follow-up interview are made, but it never materializes. The reasons are unclear and fall into a pile of unfinished business that gets bigger by the day. Sometimes I look back at the lost opportunity like a jilted lover trying to autopsy a doomed relationship. Why didn't you return my calls, I wonder? Are you seeing a new interviewer now? The likely answer is no, so I know it's not just me.

Do the right thing

More unsettling is my feeling that Skaters are doing the right thing by dodging the interview. Not because either of us are unprofessional or incompetent, but that there really is no mystique or mythos to Skaters. They are dudes from San Diego who make music. There may be no point to reading these activities as anything more than their superficial soundscapes made for meditation or personal purposes, meant to be shared in limited editions of 100. What motivates young men these days to drape afghans over their backs and howl in public séances? Clark would rather not talk on record about such things, letting his dwindling stack of CD-Rs answer for him. They do tell us something, as on Rippling Whispers (23 productions), with a barely audible speech directive subsumed in the claustrophobic haunted house creep of looping, loping wails. Disembodied, genderless, bent voices make up the bulk of Skaters' sound. A ratio of effects to pure input cannot be discerned, and that organic confusion is part and parcel of their style.

Despite all their contrarian protest, or maybe because of it, Skaters have become even more of a "next big thing." Their "headlining" gig at a noise show in the Tenderloin a few months back was based on the notion that they had the biggest draw. This was assumed to be the case because Jim Haynes wrote a piece on the duo for experimental music magazine the Wire (August 2005), an endorsement rarely conferred upon anyone running in these circles. The narrowcasting of subcultural marketing has meant even a new group like Skaters accrues some credibility when anointed by such a highbrow publication as the Wire, but, as it turned out, only two audience members remained for the entirety of their set.

This discourse might affect the outcome or livelihood of a fledgling musical project, but it bears little on the actual music of Skaters. They are not careerists – this much is clear. They would be doing what they do whether I was there or not, whether anyone was paying any attention. They seem to be taking the attention they receive as a lark, but it's unnecessary. The potency of the music, the part that is supposed to speak for itself, doesn't refuse or protest the way its creators do. It is endlessly open and charged like a storm cloud, alive with chaos, pregnant with the possible.

SKATERS WITH DEAD MACHINES, RUBBER (0) CEMENT, AND 16 BITCH PILE UP Sat/14, 6 p.m. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF $6 (415) 923-0923