Herb Sundays 133: Warren Defever
The His Name Is Alive sonic explorer shares a mix that at the right volume can pair with your "heart sounds, breathing and the cat click-clacking across the floor."
Herb Sundays 133: Warren Defever
Playlist: Apple Music, Spotify
Art by Michael Cina
“When I was tasked with making a playlist for Herb Sundays, I first reflected on some of the previous playlists I had made. The last mix I did was called ‘Pharoah Sundays’ and it was a career overview of Pharoah Sanders’ most beautiful music from his first album through his last. An older mix I made about ten years ago on YouTube is called ‘Every Thin Lizzy Guitar Solo From 1971 To 1983’ and it compiles a hundred guitar solos from that beloved band. This new mix is for “when no one is looking” but also for “when no one is listening.” I think it works well not only in the background but at such a low volume level that its virtually undistinguishable from your heart sounds, breathing and the cat click clacking across the floor.”
“Starting out with Hildegard - a medieval saint who painted cosmic tapestries with scenes of God directly laser beaming the ideas into her eyes. She wrote recipe and medicinal guidebooks with exotic ingredients including dolphin, whale, and narwhal horns. She was a witch and its Halloween month so that seems like a good place to start. Some modernish electronic music from Brazil and NYC follow before Sad “Yellow Submarine” enters. How did they get a cartoon out of that demo??? A detour into the early 70s acoustic guitar jams, jazz fusion, and then some serious vibes from Glenn Branca’s “Seventh Movement (Polyhymnia)” leads into Lester Young’s “Pagin’ ‘The Devil’” which brings us to the actual devil - The Rolling Stones’ fuzz and feedback driven “Please Go Home.”
“Beautiful music from Ravel, Un Programme, and Ghostface Killah should melt back into the background hum of your Sunday chores. There’s a couple tracks from a century ago to help re-establish us in our time position - as not to create a disruption in the control system. The tape ends with an introduction, Zia Mohiuddin Dagar’s thirty-minute opening section of Raga Yaman. Lemme know if you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions. Thank you, xoxo war
P.S. You can only trust yourself and the first fourteen Pharoah Sanders albums”
- Warren Defever for Herb Sundays
Warren Defever has famously released over a hundred records, a number I haven’t fact-checked but is quite possible given that his alias/band/project, His Name Is Alive, is nearly 40 years old now, with more early recordings still surfacing. HNIA is both feast and famine in the streaming era; the benefit is, of course, the raw volume on display, but the curse is, well, knowing where to start. The most popular tracks on major services tell only a tiny part of the story. I am slowly going through the archives, building my own Defever playlist, gathering amulets and talismans from his vast book.
Signed to the always illuminated 4AD label in their late ‘80s/early ‘90s second imperial era, Defever and then vocalist Karin Oliver, became a beloved act for label fans for over 12 years. Defever is still active and hones sonic craft as a mastering engineer at Third Man in Detroit. He recently did some shows promoting a new 4AD HNIA box How Ghosts Affect Relationships:1990-1993, which collects expanded editions of the first three albums, starting an arc of Defever doing whatever he felt like. HNIA has famously never picked a lane, and his Herb 133 playlist reflects this curiosity, equally comfortable in pop, dub, jazz, noise, and electronics. Martin Aston’s brilliant book Facing the Other Way: The Story Of 4AD (2013) shares how the project became entangled with label founder Ivo Watts-Russell:
“But Ivo’s next signing was the label’s most co-operative venture of them all, offering [4AD designer] Vaughan Oliver complete freedom, and Ivo the chance to take a creative role beyond This Mortal Coil, within the context of a similarly cinemascopic sound. Warren Defever was born to Canadian parents in Livonia, a small suburb of Detroit, Michigan. His grandfather was a musician who had taught Defever and his brothers not only guitar but bass, slide guitar, banjo, accordion, saxophone and fiddle. The Defevers had subsequently worked up a repertoire of polkas, waltzes, country and western and Fifties pop, to which Warren added Fifties rock’n’roll and rockabilly… Over the years, Defever writes, he has specialised in what he describes as a kind of interior music… ‘I wasn’t going to parties or school dances, so things developed on a very personal level. I think I probably got into “weird sounds” from that. Eyes closed, headphones on – anything can happen.’… Ivo was equally pleased. ‘Livonia and the second His Name Is Alive album sit just below This Mortal Coil in terms of how close I feel to them, because of how I could affect the way they sounded, what tracks to include and in which order. Warren was abnormally generous to let me do all of that...”
Late to the party, truth be told, I got more into the project after the Warp-affiliated UK label Disciples put out a series of strange and beautiful archival releases not long ago, Return To Never, All The Mirrors In The House, and Hope Is A Candle which cover home recordings from 1979-1990, starting when Defever was only 10 years old.
As Defever recounts in the liner notes: “By age ten, I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brother’s LP collection played at the wrong speeds. As a teenager, I got deep into all kinds of music - punk, new age, blues - and played bass in the high school jazz band, as well as studying Bach chorale harmonization and counterpoint. My first album consists of rhythm tracks made of loops of the next door neighbor raking leaves and shoveling the driveway with echoey guitars and vocals with lyrics about ghosts.”
A Bandcamp commenter nails it: “Warren Defever was making stuff on par with Grouper and The Caretaker at an age where my favorite band was Dethklok. True genius.” The trio of LPs and the other related cassette releases form a document of shocking purity, adjacent to Outsider Art in its uncanny awareness. As Philip Sherburne, who included HNIA’s “As We Could Ever” on his Herb 80 playlist, wrote for Pitchfork about Mirrors:
“Recently, Defever came across a box of cassettes—many without covers or cases, the labels scrawled in ballpoint or Sharpie—that lay at the root of all of it: his own adolescent (and preteen) home recordings, from the years predating HNIA. Some went as far back as 1979, when the Livonia, Michigan, native was just 10 years old. He paid fellow Michigander Shelley Salant [Sam’s HERB NOTE: another Michigan legend], of Saturday Looks Good to Me and Tyvek, to make digital transfers of their contents, and he asked her to flag anything that sounded “new agey, ambient, or had echoey guitars.”
All the Mirrors in the House is the fruit of that harvest: a slim, beguiling album of reverberant ambient made with piano, guitar, and rudimentary electronics—reverb pedal, boombox, 4-track recorder—all as smudged a kindergartener’s chalk drawing….It boggles the mind to imagine a suburban teenager in the early ’80s making music like this, even if he did have the legendary Canadian radio show Brave New Waves to help guide his nascent taste for outer-limits sounds. Ambient music was hardly a household concept back then; Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which helped popularize the idea [HERB NOTE: Defever wouldn’t hear Eno til many years later], had been out for only a year before Defever began experimenting with tape.”
You’d expect Defever to be sort of self-serious or aloof, maybe akin to the insular grandeur of the Chris Bigg / Vaughn Oliver art direction and Brothers Quay vids that have canvased his music, but he’s sort of anything but in conversation. In his Aquarium Drunkard podcast interivew, he jokingly presses Ivo on why he didn’t force him to focus on making the band bigger, that he himself is not good at anything, hence the genre drift, etc.
A lot of Herb Sundays is about reckoning with the past which Defever has done with grace in the past decade, finding new ways to approach his former selves including the “idiot kid” who made all those old cassettes, but in a method to move forward. The other thing Herb is about is how things become greater (or lesser) than they appear to be (the art history asshole in me would rush to use the word transubstantiation), through time, canon erosion, and something otherworldly.
Livonia is like many other beautifully-named (but ugly-sounding in our own Midwestern mouths) towns in Michigan. Cities with names more expansive than the topography and sights of the actual place. The fact that Defever’s internal, and uncomfortably strange vision, forced its way into the hearts of global goths in faraway England, and beamed back to us as something operatic, something holy, is reason to believe our own banality is also worthy of more romantic study.
Phone A Friend: Clark Warner
HNIA was always sort of a “big sister/big brother” band, meaning that I was a little too young and unworldly to be ready for it, so I messaged my friend, Clark Warner who is a very handy DJ and as fine a human as you’ll meet, is now also now director of operations at the beloved Detroit Jazz Festival Foundation (locals would say “Jazz Fest”) for some intel on what HNIA has meant to the scene.
Lesser known than other musical exports, Detroit has had a deep love affair with ambient, shoegaze, and dream pop, including it’s own semi-owned varietal Space Rock (which Third Man nicely organized into two compilations, Southeast Of Saturn Vol 1 and Vol 2), a reverby/pedal-rich electronic enhanced rock that lended itself to chilly forever nights and zoned-out basement recordings sessions / local label distribution.
Clark came up in the early '90s with Detroit residencies at The Shelter and Motor. In fact, Clark and his wife, Liz Warner (Herb 28) happened to DJ the first Ghostly event there in October of 2000. Working as part of Plus 8/M-nus and stacking ambient-esque gigs including Sonar, Mutek, DEMF/Movement, Tribal Gathering, among others. His HNIA adjacent involvement as a DJ at EXAT, a ‘90s experimental and ambient techno night at Zoot’s Coffeehouse in Detroit, a night and scene which Michaelangelo Matos covered beautifully for the Detroit Metro Times in 2022: “Zoot’s hosted performances by everybody from His Name Is Alive to Windy & Carl, Sleater-Kinney to the Mountain Goats. And beginning around 1994 — nobody remembers the precise date — until the place closed early in the fall of 1997, EXAT — whose final night was that Sept. 29 — decisively thickened the Zoot’s musical pot.”
Warner weighed in on Defever for me:
“Darkest Dreams” from Livonia is an oldie fave and last track on the album, wait for it jam. Warren is one of my all time fave guitarists. I was able to see their first show at the Majestic Theater (1990), where I’d frequent to see Blake Baxter DJ in my early club days. Not sure if it was their very first show but it was a release show/party for Livonia. It was mind blowing knowing a band from the area was signed to 4AD since their catalog was import only and you had to dig for it. It was around then I started to feel local scene pride of artists earning recognition. Like a local skater that got sponsored, or a producer that landed a remix.
Warren still has all the chops. We just saw HNIA play El Club in October and it was a real treat. They played “How Ghosts Affect Relationships” from Livonia and ended with a real deal singalong of “This world Is Not My Home”, it was bonding and grounding.”
Bonus Beat:
I indulged myself for my birthday this past week and booked a DJ set on LA’s Dublab community radio. The station was formed the same year as Ghostly in 1999 so there’s a lot of shared memories and experiences. They also have a lovely new book out (Hat & Beard Press) documenting their work. The rough and ready vinyl mix is here.
amazing! i need the pharaoh sundays mix link!
The greatest. Love HNIA!