“Nothing stayed as long with me as the waltz we shared in Petersburg, 1893. And I could feel my weak heart tare, I’d of followed you anywhere. But now I’ve lost the way, in search of that one day.”
It’s hard not to get lost in the imaginary world Mt. Desert Island creates in song. It is however, easy to believe that the lyricist Jesse writes fiction in his free time. The other half of the whimsical duo Bennett, just released an EP under the cognomen Kuhn with Astro Nautico and was reviewed by Impose Magazine this past week. Mt. Desert Island is kind of Boston’s best kept secret. Not to mention they’re really, really nice guys.
Ginevra Shay – Where are you guys from?
Jesse Kohn – I’m from San Fe New Mexico.
Bennett Kuhn - That was Jesse, and I’m Bennett from Huntington, Long Island, NY.
GS – And, you guys are living in Boston now for school?
JK – Yeah, in Sommerville.
GS – So, do you go to school with Trevor is that how you know him?
JK – Yeah, Uhm, I was going to the Museum School I really go to Tufts I guess. I was taking some classes there and that’s how I met Trevor.
GS – Ok. What are you guys studying?
JK – We’re both studying philosophy.
GS – Oh! Awesome! Side Note – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Classical music at all but that’s the exam I’m studying for today and one of the composers from the Romantic period; that I’m being tested on is Wager who was really influenced by Schopenhauer. Wager is a very influential German composer but he is also really hated because he was very nationalistic and anti-Semitic – which got Hitler into him; just all this crazy stuff. I guess it’s weird when you find out that this bleak dark composer is influenced by Schopenhauer, you’re like ahhhh it all makes sense now. (laughs)
BK – It’s definitely a different age when musicians are influenced by philosophers.
GS – Yeah, isn’t that interesting?
JK – I don’t know whether that says something about musicians today or philosophers today… probably philosophers.
GS – Yeah, (laughs). Ok so could you tell me a bit about your band name, Mt. Desert Island?
JK – Sure, uhm. Justin who is one of our house mates here, and he plays guitar with us, is from Bangor Maine and uhm he was saying that he used to spend his summers or something at Mt. Desert Island. I’ve never been to Maine and I thought that was a really crazy sounding place. I couldn’t get a good visual of it in my head. It just seems like a really weird combination of things, Mountains and Deserts and Islands all in one.
GS – Yeah, it is pretty funny.
JK – Yeah, it just sounds really whimsical or something. Do you know Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy? In France?
GS – No.
JK – It’s basically like a mid-eval tiny town that’s on this one little island that’s on a mountain. That’s sort of the visual I have of it.
GS – Nice, yeah that’s cool. I like the band name.
BK – At first we thought it was a mountain. (pause) But it’s actually an island.
(laughter)
GS – So are you ever going to make a pilgrimage to where your band gets its name?
JK – Well I’d really want to.
BK – Ironically there is an Arcadia National Park in Maine on Mt. Desert Island. So Jesse and I are definitely going to go up there. I’ve actually been up there a couple times with friends from home from Long Island. I had no idea that it was Mt. Desert Island the first time I was going up. I had been in this band already with Jesse, we had already been making music for a couple months. And now I’m going up to this weekend retreat in Maine and all of a sudden I see a sign that says, “You’re now entering Mt. Desert Island.” And I was like – “WHAT?!”
GS – (laughs) That’s awesome. That’s funny how things work out.
BK – It’s beautiful there.
GS – Yeah I bet.
GS – So what instruments did you guys start off playing?
JK – In elementary school I had to learn violin. But I don’t play it at all anymore. Then I started taking piano lessons and I got bored with that so I started playing guitar. So I guess I play piano and guitar mostly.
BK – In 1st grade when they brought out all the instruments for everybody to pick from in my elementary school I decided to be a percussionist. A week before that I had been in Minneapolis with my dad and a bunch of his friends and one of them was a professional percussionist, who I now realize is a complete asshole, but at the time I was impressed by him playing drums all over the world. I’m a percussionist I played that all through high school.
GS – What instruments do you play now when you do Mt. Desert Island?
JK – I guess it depends on whether we’re recording or playing shows. When we play shows I usually play guitar and sing.
BK – I usually just play the drum set when we’re playing live. But when we’re recording things in the studio I use a lot of different instruments. In the age of when we can just record on our computer a million times until something sound good. You know you don’t really have to be good at anything, which is a weird anomaly. So in the studio I’m organizing a bunch of software and synthesizers to play along the parts that we record with Jesse’s guitar and singing and sometimes Jesse’s playing keyboard parts and we have other percussion instruments. Sometimes we use some old cassio keyboards that we have around.
JK – You got that little tape recorder thing.
BK – Oh ok yeah. Because some of the things we are using are computer generated we like to give a big f you to the computer generation – and computers in general – and try to use sometimes blank tapes that give the sound a little more dirt. Even though, you know, you could try and approximate what that would do to a sound with computers I always think it sounds pretty shitty because you cant really generate an error again. You can get close and lie to people but its better to just fuck the sound up a little bit naturally so to do that we recorded “before you go” with mini tapes that they use to do dictations in, for voice usually. The cool thing about that thing is that its so hand held and light weight and has such a small speaker on it that if you shake it really fast, physically shake it while its playing you can get sort of a Doppler Effect out of it so it sounds like it has a lot of vibrato. We record Jesse’s guitar coming out of an amplifier into that and then recorded that with a microphone playing back into my computer. So things like that, trying to use natural phenomena like that to add effects to our music.
GS – Nose Bleed Island who is also on the mix is really keen on recording with cassette tapes and 4 tracks. He’s really big on removing the eraser head of the cassette player.
BK – Oh yeah!
GS – Yeah, and so he’s been doing some lives shows where he creates the song live and the removal of the eraser head allows you to build layer upon layer. And then also what he does is press down on the cassette while its recording which allows you to have some sort of modulation and pitch bend.
BK – That is really cool.
GS – Cassette recording is awesome.
BK – Yeah I agree. I had a really cool time two summers ago. A couple of my friends who I had never made music with before but I knew were musicians went out to this house on Point Look Out which is sort of like this weird beach town for retired people that some house ended up on Long Island. The house was completely empty, because, well, it belonged to my friend whose family was selling it but they weren’t going to sell it for a little while until summer was all over. And it just turned into a creative retreat where everybody just brought instruments and I have a loop pedal that does some of that stuff digitally so I brought that and a couple of instruments and we recorded a big hour and a half long tape album. It sounds crazy because we had the volume up really high coming out of this looper so some parts will come out of the tape just out of no where and other parts will just die down. When say, someone is singing the whole thing, the rest of the whole mix will duck down and then will come right back up or you know, you’ll have one effect going that makes really weird rhythmic effects with other things that are going on because there is only certain room on the tape for things to come out and other things will just get squashed. So that’s a cool effect. Jesse and I haven’t really recorded too, too much on cassette. We’ve been trying to work mostly work with digital things. But…
JK – We haven’t had much time to record much of anything at all.
BK – Lately.
JK – Yeah…
BK – Especially…
JK – With school.
GS – Yeah that’s understandable. I’m taking a break from booking and playing shows in December and January for the road trip and also the bands are going to record so I’m looking forward to that. Hopefully things will be more mellow and less stressful.
BK – Jesse and I are thinking about having a real serious period after school where we sort of retreat to somebody’s layer and record an album there.
GS – Nice.
BK – It should be great. We’ve got more than enough material to that but you know because of school we just haven’t had enough time to produce it all.
GS – So tell me a bit about the song that I put on the mix – The Waltz.
JK – The Waltz.
BK – The Waltz…
JK – Uhm, lets see when did I write that one?
BK – You wrote that in 2007.
JK – 2007…freshman year? Or sophomore year?
BK - I think it was sophomore year right at the end of the year.
JK – No it was freshman year because we were both living in…
BK – Yeah.
JK – Yeah me and Bennett were living in the same dormitory. This horrible, horrible, fucking disgusting dormitory. I mean, it was fine but, no I didn’t like it. I don’t know everyone I knew was on crew or something. They were all really great guys, uhm they were really awesome, but like I didn’t have, I don’t know, it was strange for me to come from the South West to suddenly be surrounded by this New England kind of thing. It was really frightening.
BK – Jesse doesn’t know how people could ever row boats because he’s from the desert.
JK – Yeah there’s no water there. How are you supposed to row a boat? It just doesn’t make sense.
(laughter)
JK – But I mean, anyway, it was just a lonely time for me. Towards the end of the year, one of our mutual friends introduced us to each other and we realized that Bennett was just on the floor above me in this horrible place. It was right around finals so we were super busy but then towards the end I came out just to mess around with Bennett and play some music. It was maybe within 3 or 4 days we recorded our first two songs, which are Before You Go and The Waltz. I don’t know, its kind of silly lyrics about a guy who time travels and can do what ever he wants and time travel all over the world but he met a girl in Russia in… when was it? I don’t know he met a girl in Russia sometime when he was time traveling and was like in love with her and he can go where ever he wants but he cant find that one day when he met her. Uhhh, that’s kind of silly.
BK – (laughs)
GS – No! I thinks its, like I said, I think its great. Trevor put it on a mix for me, because we make each other birthday mixes every year. I guess it must have been right after you recorded it you must have shown it to him or he found out about it somehow and put it on a mix. Ever since I’ve put it on pretty much every mix I’ve made. I want everyone to hear it.
[ AND THEN THE AUDIO DIED. Sorry. The last question was answered via e-mail. ]
GS – What are your influences?
JK – I’m probably most influenced by Phil Elvrum, from the Microphones and Mount Eerie, Beirut (especially growing up around Zach, me and his brother Ross were in some bands together in high school, and were definitely highly influenced, and that means also by all the music Zach was into, Jacques Brel, Stephen Merritt, Tropicalia, Balkan Brass, ect.), Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker. Also me and Bennett went through a significant phase of 60s psych pop and bands like the Zombies, Left Banke, Kaleidescope, etc., have been influential in terms of melody and harmony development. I guess as a song writer those are my main influences. Bennett’s music too.
BK – I grew up listening to ’90s IDM and am now into modern styles of electronic music like dubstep and broken beat, especially the music coming out of Warp Records and LuckyMe.
Here is my Myspace, which has a bunch of recent releases on it that I did for my buddies at Astro Nautico. It’s a music culture blog run by two of my friends from home. Sometimes we put original material on it. We just released an EP this week called Atlantics. I have two tracks on it under the moniker ‘Kuhn.’
Here’s an article Impose wrote about that release.
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Thanks, Mt. Desert Island! And thank you readers. Be sure to check out the links and keep up with these fellas.
To listen to the song “The Waltz” which is mentioned in this article, refer back to the post “Winter Mix.” To hear the other song mentioned in this article, “Before You Go” check out the guy’s myspace here.
See you next week.
