Trey Gunn is involved in a plethora of projects. In these very lightly edited interview outtakes he talks about his work with KTU (pronounced K2), a trio that also comprises Finnish accordionist and vocalist Kimmo Pohjonen and King Crimson drummer Pat Mastelotto. Gunn appears in the Riffs section of the October 2009 issue of GP.
Are you using any different tunings or gear with KTU or is it more of a mental shift from your other work?
The thing about KTU is that essentially Kimmo and I have the same capacity across the whole sonic spectrum, and that’s what’s so cool. I’ve worked with other Warr guitar players, and in bands where the bass player was happy not to be the bass player for the moment, or a guitar player was happy to share soloing duties—but the crazy thing about Kimmo’s accordion is that it’s completely full range. He’s got MIDI, low saxophone samples, bass samples, he can solo, and he can play chords. And, he plays an accordion, which is kind of ridiculous in an American or even European way, where the instrument is associated mostly with polka. Then we have Pat as this pivot point, and Kimmo and I can pivot anywhere around him that we want, so in that way it doesn’t even really compare to anything else I’ve done. I’ve never been a huge fan of the accordion, actually. Culturally it just goes with polka music or something. And Kimmo can do some of that. He was trained at the Sibelius Institute in Finland in traditional Finnish music. His accordion is also much crazier than normal. There are no piano keys on it. It’s fully chromatic with black and white buttons on both sides. So the big difference sonically is this crazy freedom to go anywhere.
So then how do you make the creative choices?
The group has gone through quite a bit of transformation in the past year. It’s kind of like many of my other projects in that we don’t work together all that much—we work sporadically like a SWAT team or something. But we have been doing it over the last five or six years, and we have a manager in Finland and do shows every year, so we’re working. We started out as an almost completely improvisational outfit. As I’m growing older I’m actually feeling more dubious about improvisation. Not so much as a player, but as a listener. Even though it is really the pinnacle of live performance—generally it’s not. For me it is generally the sad sack part of live performance, unless it is really great, which it rarely is, even when you are a great player. You can increase the odds of it being great, but still some nights it is just going to fall flat. Pat and I have this improvisational duo, TU, and Kimmo has a duo with an electronic percussionist Samuli Kosminen, and the four of us got together and did some shows in Japan and Russia, and it was pretty cool. But then Samuli became unavailable, and we became a trio. The first record we released was just from live shows in Japan. We brought in some material during rehearsals, but we didn’t have that much time to work together until we started writing the new record, which was very cool because it turned out that we all three have very different ways of organizing music, and Kimmo and I began to work very hard on the structure of the music, and melodic motifs, and how we were going to play together, and the whole thing went to another level. Writing with others can be challenging—sometimes it is great and sometimes it is hard. As I’m maturing, I’m becoming more and more interested in the form of music, and that’s more important to me now than just hearing somebody play really well, or just the emotional vibe that’s created. The record is probably split half and half between compositions and improvisation, or maybe two-thirds written with bits of improvisation in it.
Was there a compositional concept, or did you just feel your way through it as you were writing?
We didn’t have any more of a concept than what we’ve learned from playing together a lot, and what sounds good. Generally Kimmo would write something and bring it to me and we’d tear it apart, or maybe all three of us would tear it apart, or I would bring in something. Often we’d have a pretty specific melodic structure, but not know how we would orchestrate it. And, of course, that’s the big deal with our instruments—am I going to play it in the bass range, or up high and screw the bass, is he going to play the bass, or we don’t need bass? And a lot of that stuff, these days, you don’t really know until you record it. You can do anything live, and you don’t necessarily feel like it is missing bass, especially in a room, because you don’t really know what the structure is other than what the vibe is in the room. So a lot of the orchestration we had to figure out. That seems to be the challenge these days, with the huge spectrum of sound and audio possibilities. Sometimes I envy Alex Machacheck when he’s making a jazz record because you know what the sounds are, right? You don’t have to dick around with processing drum sounds or whatever. And it’s the same thing with orchestral work—you aren’t creating a new sound—but for our music the orchestration is kind of hunt-and-peck.
Were you doing much overdubbing, or was the intent to be able to have material that could pretty much be presented live?
It was a little bit of both. The only challenge with going live was with Pat, because Kimmo and I can do a lot of things simultaneously, and when you go live you need less going on anyway. So, even though on a recording it may sound much better if I double a little line up an octave, it doesn’t make any difference live. I’m really so off on this concept that you have to have all of these elements live. I just feel like live has it’s own special thing. And even how good things sound is to a large degree irrelevant. I know that sounds irrational in a certain way, but as long as the sound is not irritating you, there’s so much more leeway live. So Kimmo and I didn’t feel we were limiting ourselves doing overdubs, but with Pat it was more of an issue, because it gets a whole lot more complicated when you are running sequenced electronics live, and we were really trying to avoid needing that. We had a couple of shows where the power was screwed up in the Czech Republic or Russia, and the Mac just wouldn’t work. Or we were playing a festival with dozens of bands and the monitor mix just wasn’t there, and we couldn’t hear the electronics. So we didn’t want to go onstage with anything that we couldn’t immediately ditch the electronics with. Which is kind of sad, because electronics are really cool and add breadth to the sound.
You tune your instrument in fifths?
Yes, I am using all fifths. I’m a fifths guy, and I’m really happy in my fifths.
What other gear do you use live?
I’m currently using Native Instruments Guitar Rig on the guitar side, and I’m getting ready to make some tweaks. I’m probably going to switch to Ableton Live with Guitar Rig running inside it, but I have to get a fancier laptop to do that. I do run a Raven Labs PMB-II bass preamp on the bass side, though I also send the bass side to Guitar Rig, because there are so many cool fuzzes there that I like. So, I split the bass signal, and the clean sound goes into the preamp, while the split-off part goes into Guitar Rig for distorted sounds.
Are you using any pedals?
I use Carl Martin compressors. I have one for each side of the instrument, so that one doesn’t suck all the compression away from the other. The only other way I’ve found to do that is to use two compressors. I set one at a really high ratio—like 20:1, so it acts more like a limiter—and at a high threshold, with a fast attack and a fast decay, which reduces the intensity of the tap and releases really quickly. Then I set the second compressor to like 3:1, with a lower threshold and a slower release. It’s really essential on the bass side, but makes the guitar side sound better, too. One of the things that I really love is the envelope-follower sound, and previously I carried an Electro-Harmonix Micro Synth, but they have it inside of Guitar Rig now, and the software version not only sounds great, it’s programmable.
Photo: Tuomo Manninen