Q&A with Radio Astronomy

John Flannelly lit up a cigarette and balanced it between his fingers, adjusting his red DigiTech Whammy pedal to distort the ambient noise filling the room. Colin Jenkins, his partner in the duo’s project Radio Astronomy, filled the basement space of local music venue The Ream with reverberating, mesmerizing sound.

Radio Astronomy played its debut show at The Ream last night, followed by Indianapolis band Skything and Massachusetts acts White Crime and Secret Lover.

Before the Radio Astronomy set, the IDS talked with Flannelly and Jenkins, the minds behind Radio Astronomy, to find out the inspiration behind their music.

IDS: So, how would you describe your sound?

Jenkins: I would say noise ambient, space music. Kind of space-themed music. Sometimes we go for either a more ambient, more up-tempo beat, but sometimes it’s more noisy and chaotic.

IDS: How did you find out about the show tonight?

Flannelly: We’ve both played shows here a bunch of times and have seen a bunch of shows here, but this one in particular Colin and I have been working on for a while, since this is our live debut tonight. We’ve both been active with playing solo shows in town and I think we both appreciated each other and saw ourselves as kindred spirits and decided to experiment with a little collaboration. So Cray, who lives here, set up the show and brought the show up to me because I think he was looking for a local act. He didn’t have anybody from Bloomington playing. And tonight is Kurt Cobain’s birthday, so my original plan was to do a tribute to grunge I guess, like a weird solo thing, but then I was like, no, fuck that, let’s just try this out.

IDS: Can you explain some of the equipment that you guys are using tonight?
Flannelly: For me I just use a keyboard that I found, plus a bunch of effects pedals and I basically have some distortion, an echo delay, a Whammy pitch and some volume controls.

Jenkins: It’s basically some effects, a couple multi-effects boxes that do echoes, another delay, this does loops and distortion and everything else pretty much comes through that. There’s a drum machine, a microphone and a couple of keyboards.

IDS: Are there any vocals in Radio Astronomy’s work?

Jenkins: I sometimes use vocals and run through the stuff so it’s distorted and sort of blown out from sounding like real voices. I try to make a lot of the sounds kind of sound like they’re coming from the same thing even though they’re coming from a lot of different sources. I try to kind of like mash things together.

IDS: How did you get into music and working with digital sounds and mixing everything together?

Flannelly: For me, like I never thought I could play an instrument, so I started just making stuff up on the computer just generating sounds out of that and trying to make music from scratch. And then I got into it and tried to play that stuff live. So I tried using pedals and I realized how easily pedals can be essentially instruments by themselves, very expressive forces. Gradually from there I kind of gained more confidence actually playing a traditional instrument.

Jenkins then asked Flannelly if he’d had any formal training with instruments.
Flannelly: So what happened to me was in fourth grade I had some lessons playing piano and right as it went to the two-handed stuff, I broke my thumb. So I really never got beyond that. I dropped out. You know, I tried to fake it during that period but when the cast came off I was just like, “OK, I’m done.”

Jenkins: In D.C. I kind of learned about the experimental music scene there, which is really good, a lot of good bands there and bunch of good venues. There’s this organization Sonic Circuits that organizes shows and festivals so I just kept going to that and eventually I realized a lot of this music was kind of made by kids that are less skilled musicians. So I kind of figured I wanted to start doing it. I had two things, a mic and a keyboard. And I was using pedals and the effects as instruments in themselves, trying to stretch out sounds and layer them.

IDS: What are some of your influences musically and what are you listening to right now that you think is really interesting?

Jenkins: Sunn0())), they do these super deep, kind of very black-metal influenced drone pieces, very focused on tone and texture, and add experimentation in with that. They were one of the first bands that I started listening to. Some of the D.C. artists were really cool. It was really cool to be able to see it and hear it and go back and listen to it to see if I could remember what was going on.

Flannelly: Over the years I’ve been immensely interested and influenced by the sorts of artists Colin was talking about in the more experimental scene. But lately, I’ve just been listening to pop, Beyonce and Taylor Swift, shit like that. But something I’m really striving for — and  I’m not ready to do it yet — but something I’d really like to do is find that happy medium between true pop music and true noise. That’s where I want to head at some point. That’s not what we are, but that’s a personal goal. It’s all about finding that spot where it’s weird and enjoyable.

Flannelly will be playing a solo show alongside Rob Funkhauser and Beverly Bouncehouse at the Root Cellar on  Feb. 28 and Jenkins will have a solo show under the moniker Canid at The Ream on  March 15 with local acts Blues Control and Circuit des Yeux.