The Ex Models
from CP7 pages 110-111
Pen: Kenny Johnson
Lens: Larin Rosin
Design: Someoddpilot, Co.
Click image to download PDF of the Actual layout.
The Ex Models are the above, more and not. That's a first impression anyway, and rock n' roll journalism is good at being wrong and inflicting the writer's ideas on the band. Words are easy, the Ex Models are not. They have ideas about what can be done to urge rock music forward and make it rock again. By the time you read this, their Ace Fu Records debut will have been out for months and they'll be "sweating between bouts of diarrhea," as bass player Mike Masiello puts it, while on tour.
Not often do you come across a band at 3:30 a.m., while gorging on MP3.com, that adheres to your eardrums as fast and stays stuck as long the Ex Models. Fresh exciting rock n' roll is something that seems to roll around every ten years, and the Ex Models fit that description like dirt on a dog. You'd think that'd be enough, rock for the sake of rock that plants a well-aimed kick on the backside of a sleeping art form, but it ain't the only thing this Brooklyn, NYC, based quartet has going for it. They got smarts too, and looks, and a tall drummer. The whole bag. Dag, it can't be real, but it is.
" Yes we do," guitarist Shah Motia says when asked if they intentionally try to confound the listener with complex short songs. "I think Other Mathematics doesn't altogether abandon the principles or fundamentals of rock music, but we have made a concerted effort to break as many traditional songwriting rules as possible."
Vocalist, guitarist and brother Shahin echoes that statement, "Our aesthetic goal involves de-centering the listener, yes, but also using this de-centering, hopefully, reveals something very familiar and fundamental about rock music, namely that it rocks."
And that it does. As Other Mathematics' thirteen songs speed by in under twenty-five minutes, you are inoculated with the cure for lazy music. At first the Ex Models "Hyper-Rock" sounds like a sugar-crazy explosion of pent up rock tension, but soon (really soon) you realize what they attempt, they accomplish. Complex, concentrated, compelling rock n' roll mostly under two minutes flat. A breath of fresh air. As Strunk and White say, "Brevity is a product of vigor."
Drawing influences (humor included) from such diverse sources as fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gang of Four's Jon King, Talking Heads and radical French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (the fountain of the Ex Models simulation theories) the Ex Models have a philosophical half-stack from which to drop kick, or just fidget uncontrollably off of.
" The music of the modern rock n' roll jim-jim is an act of pure signification. The music and image have meaning only insofar as they appeal to cultural archetypes, themselves now de-historicized and almost completely meaningless. Hence, the music has lost a certain kind of reality. It has become pure sign. It has, in short, become simulation," Mike says.
Rock n' roll simulation is the point. In the song "Supersex" Shahin belts out a few "Oh Yeah"s with sly sincerity. Every time I hear it, I think two things (and laugh out loud), "Man, that rocks," and "God damn, that's funny!" I asked Shahin if his lyrics are meant to satirize standard issue rock music. "Not satire, simulation, KJ," he said. "That you can't tell my meaning is not only the point of the Ex Models' existence, it is a fantastic compliment.
" The lyrics apply this kind of speculation to a broader range of cultural phenomena, which include, but is not limited to art, media, love, amusement, economic exchange, fashion, work, relations of power, relations of subjectivity, the proliferation of the rock n' roll jim-jim and other things French people think about while masturbating," Shahin says.
" Normal people write songs about pussy and cocaine. Only a true nerd forms a band in order to analyze certain recent strains of continental European philosophy and social science," Mike says.
Some of the songs on Other Mathematics were written on "cheap" sequencing software by Shahin while band members were living in different states. Writing new material is a bit different, more organic. Shah says that, sometimes, it is almost like scoring a film script that Mike and Shahin bring in, and other times it is a "completely group-oriented process," with Mike and Shahin writing "commentary that complements the chaos we're making with our instruments."
" Ninety-percent of the time, the subject matter of the song, if not the title, has already been established," Shahin says. "Next we spend a great deal of effort trying to answer the question, 'What might "song x" sound like?' The challenge being to answer the question in an artful manner. During this period, you're likely to hear many elaborate arguments both for and against the final snare hit of the verse figure falling on the "and" of beat eleven or the "e" of beat thirteen. Nine months later, you've got yourself thirty-second's worth of new Ex Models material. Three months after that, we're ready to play it."
" We try to view each song (individually), put it together as a film or piece of art. Most rock bands (especially punk rock bands) revolve around what the guitar is playing. With those bands, you could strip away the bass and drums and the guitar player could play the song. That's not the case with the Ex Models," Shah says. "All instruments have a symbiotic relationship." Mike calls the songs "scored compositions." "Any one part played in isolation from the others, sounds absurd," he says.
" On many songs, the guitar parts are like bits of syntax or punctuation in a sentence. If someone asks me to play one of our songs on guitar, it would bore them to death, because I only play a collection of well-timed dissonant scraps and fragments," Shah says.
Shahin adds, "Shah's guitar parts are usually the last thing completed before the lyrics. By that time, our usual commitment to the rhythmic division of labor leaves only so many holes in a score for Shah's guitar to have sex with, so to speak, and he has a unique talent for finding them."
While the brothers Motia are erupting with guitar spasms, Mike and tall drummer Jake Fiedler are digging in to form the framework of the songs. "Jake and I discipline ourselves. We play for the greater good of the song and restrain our musicianly impulses to play fills. The discipline is that of minimalism, I would say. I play exactly one note in "The Birth of Disneyland,"" Mike says.
Jake was unavailable for questions about the Ex Models brand of rock n' roll simulation, because he was serving time in Federal prison for tampering with government property (that and this writer's late delivery of questions before they left for a tour). "It's an ongoing battle with the fucking Feds. Those bastards wiretap our van and Jake lets the air out of their tires. It's an endless cycle of meaningless activity," Mike says.
With Other Mathematics, the Ex Models handled the recording themselves at Shahin's recording studio, MetaTechnik, which mainly scores advertisements and independent films. "I think it's the only way we can work. Anytime we've recorded ourselves and received minimal assistance from outside studio hands, we've been happiest," Shah believes.
Other Mathematics was recorded track by track. That fact is transparent, because the record sounds as close as it can to their live sound. Shah says that at the time, it was the most practical way to do it, thanks to available studio time at MetaTechnik, and time off between gigs. But, he adds, that they prefer to record the band live and dub vocals later. Offers Mike, "Some of the usual interactivity is lost. One has a sense of miming spontaneity." You wouldn't know it by listening to CD.
In the several emails, few phone calls and one live experience that went into this story, the Ex Models constant is that they rock with enough vitality to jolt awake those lulled asleep by MTV over the past twenty years. And if Other Mathematics wasn't compelling enough, Mike says this about their new material: "As wacky as (Other Mathematics) is, expect the next one to make it look like a soft, melodious stroll through pleasant gardens. I'm not aware of any serious drug use among my bandmates, and would probably know about it if I had been huffing butane lately, but some sort of collective psychosis seems to be setting in. We just wrote a new song. It's forty seconds long and moves something like 666 beats per minute."