Interviewed late september 1997 at a hotel in Den Haag

Once a year there’s a festival in The Hague called Crossing Borders. The main theme of the festival is about crossing borders as you might have gathered from the title,the crossing of borders between the literary world and the music world. So on this two day event you’ve got lots of writers from all over the world, reading their work, lots of musicians posing as writers, reading their work and lots of musicians who have somewhat to do with writing playing music. I have no idea why Rachel’s got invited, because their music does not contain any lyrics, nor does their music have anything to do with writing. Or has it? Considering all three records feel like books, look like books and their subjects can be considered literary or poetical: Handwriting, Egon Schiele and travelling by boat.

Rachel’s played a late set, in fact the latest. At two a clock at night they were the last ones on the festival playing a quiet but intense concert in which they played a soundtrack to their home-made 8 milimeter films. Films showing passing trains, slowly collapsing buildings, old models of wooden ships, enormous steal bridge constructions and landscapes shot from a window in a driving train. The group was smaller than I’d expected, only five people played this classical-like music, not static or serious, but very dynamic and clearly having a lot of fun, in a way they appeared to be a normal rockband. The band was accepted by all who stayed to watch them and all listened carefully and enjoyed the music. I hadn’t expected that.

A CLASSICAL ROCKBAND
The next morning, I met them at an unholy early time considering how late I got to bed the night before. I spoke to two of Rachel’s main musicians: Jason Noble and Christian Frederickson. Christian: ‘This was the first festival we ever played at. I liked it. So many people stayed although we played so late. We were afraid everyone might have left when we got on stage or everyone would be asleep.’ Live the band uses many classical instruments, like two violins, a piano a trumpet, but also rock instruments like drums, a bassguitar and electric guitar. That must make things difficult during soundcheck? Jason: ‘It does, but we still try to play as many venues as possible. Rockclubs as well as all-seaters and everything inbetween. To divert unexpected problems we take lots of sound equipment with us on tour, like the microphones. But there are shows that turn out to be big challenges, technically speaking.’

I’d never expected to see Rachel’s live. The band has made three albums already, every succeeding one even more magical than the one before, containing the kind of music you wouldn’t expect on a rockstage or concertstage. Christian: ‘Music to us is playing to other people. Making records is great, but you keep staring at each other in the studio. This way we get to see how people react to it and they in return can see who is making this music.’ In contrast with what the kind of music would suggest the band seems to function like a rockband. Jason: ‘Yeah, we’re pretty active onstage. Live presentation asks a certain agression. That’s probably because we have to hurry to set things up on stage before the show and then when you play you have to get quiet, fixate, meditate. It’s a challenge to quiet down, to me it’s the biggest challenge. Becoming quiet is way more difficult than to rush through your repertoire.’

Although the music on record seems to hold a fixed structure not unlike classical music, Rachel’s live is much more loose. In every song there’s room to improvise and they often do. Christian: ‘Sometimes we just have to, many of the songs start to get pretty boring for us after playing them so many times.’ Jason: ‘We arrange them differently to keep the music fresh. It prevents us from playing on autopilot.’ Christian: ‘We just try to stay scared.’ On the stage the violin players read the music from sheet, is that the way the band makes this music? By first writing it down? Jason: ‘We make music in three ways: parts get written down and arranged. That’s for when more people have to play and then we get in a conductor too. Other parts we write down in a bigband kind of way, with key and tempo signatures, so later we can fill up the music when we have the band together. And added to that we work on soundeffects, which some of us make at home or in the studio. There are very few times we actually get to jam.’ Christian: ‘Jamming usually happens during rehearsals. Those are fun. Many times we play pieces we would never be able to do live and when we get bored we start playing reggae versions of them.’ Jason: ‘Or country singalongs.’ Jason and Christian giggle.

On the second record “Music for Egon Schiele” the band has written down a quote by Arnold Schoenberg:

One has to realize what restraint it needs to express oneself with such brevity. Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a singel gesture, joy in a single breath: such concentration can only be find where self-pity is lacking i equal measure. These pieces can only be understood by those who believe that sound can say things which can only be expressed through sound.

Jason: ‘That quote is about the work of Anton Webern, but hold truth for that whole period in time. Especially considering Egon Schiele was a good friend of Anton. It’s about expressing things very clear and direct and to us Rachel’s and the people in this band try to be like that too. In music as well as in dayly life. We try to keep things as simple as possible. We are in luck with a recordlabel like Quarterstick, because this profession can be so complicated. There are many simple things you shouldn’t have to worry about as a musician. I mean, I like to play music and go on tour. But I shouldn’t have to worry about things like: “Where are the elefants? Why didn’t we bring the elefants with us!”, if elefants are needed Quarterstick will worry about it, not us.’

BACK TO HISTORY

Rachel’s is a romantic band. The melancholic music, the beautiful packaging of the albums and the themes in the music - trains, painters, boats, handwriting, journals and travelling - are evidence of that. Everything has nostalgic feel and seems to look back on a period just after the turn of the century, the twenties and just before that. Christian: ‘In many ways people living now can be considered the luckiest people who ever lived. Because we have so many possibilities. But it doesn’t mean people seventy years ago weren’t also the happiest people ever at that moment in time. You can say it’s nostalgic, but people now seem to take everything for granted. We don’t find it strange to get in a steel tube and eight hours later get out of it again and be in another country at the other side of the globe, where they speak a totally different language. It’s good to realise that you have travelled such an enormous distance. To me the ways of transportation of yesteryear, the wooden ships, the steamtrains, were so much more beautiful in a humane way than the things we have now. The technology we have now is amazing, but a wooden ship is something else completely.’ Jason: ‘The human stuggle that’s in that. When we got over, we kept joking about how it would have taken us fifty days to cross the Antlantic by boat.’ Christian: ‘Or take driving from town to town by carriage. It’s good to think about the past. Not that we are ever able to go back, but we think about it when making music. And if we could go back you wouldn’t want to go out on to the ocean without G.P.S. now would you? Imagine that, you could die out there!’ Jason: ‘Going back in time might even more difficult because of the enormous knowledge we have living in the twentieth century. It would be very hard to act out being someone in the eighteenth or seventeenth century. You can see it in the way Rachel’s uses things that are very modern. We are a band which uses so much technology, like fax, telephone, computers, recording equipment, electric and electronic instruments. All things that are fairly modern. Still it isn’t our intention to use as many things as possible because we can. We can’t pretend were living in another age, but we can pay attention to a rich past. But recently we got interest in more recent influences.’ Christian: ‘We have now arrived in the thirties!’

A MUSICAL VOYAGE

So now we have explained their longing to the past, but how about your fascination for travelling? Jason: “Indeed, we are fascinated about travelling and the time spent during travel. The loneliness of travelling.’ Christian: ‘That reminds me of a film I saw: “Dead Man”. In this film there’s a young gentleman played by Johnny Depp who makes a voyage by train to the middle of North America. The first five minutes of the film are beautiful. We see him in a compartment day after day, people are getting in and out, all totally different from him, some are carrying dead animals, people who are trying to survive the wilderness. It very illustrative of how that must have been.’ Jason: ‘I think our fascination isn’t that strange, lots of writers and filmmakers are reacting to the coming millenium. Everybody feels a certain change. It is out of respect of the diversity you can be aware of, but immediately realising you will never able to know everything that is known. At the certain moment in history there were probably people who did know everything that was known within a certain area. We are a collective of musicians who try to illustrate that by being diverse. Are we a disciplined classical music ensemble? Are we a jazzband or a rockband? That’s so hard to say and you shouldn’t want to be everything at the same time. You have to dare to simplify it.’ Rachel’s comes from a background with many different bands. From Chicago and Louisville there are now many instrumental bands trying to experiment within the outer regions of rockmusic. Jason: ‘We have a interesting group of people who are thinking about the same things. Not only in music, but also in film and graphic design. We live in a fertile time and we hope people will become increasingly more tolerant for music. More tolerance is something I’m hoping for.’
Rachel’s work does not only sound magical, it looks magical too, their records look like artworks in a record collection. Printed on beautiful heavy paper using special ink and relief print. Even books usually don’t get printed this beautiful. Jason: ‘It’s what I’ve studied and I still do it to keep myself alive. To us it was a challenge to make beautiful packaging and keep it in print. This way we made a platform for other artists to contribute.’ Christian: ‘The next work will be more conventional though, not that we don’t want to do it anymore, but we though it wasn’t necessary this time.’ Jason: ‘We weren’t able to connect our music to a certain theme.’ That did happen with the first three records. The first album “Handwriting” was about handwriting, the second album “Music for Egon Schiele” was the soundtrack to a play and dance-piece about the life of Austrian painter Egon Schiele and the last album “The Sea and the Bells” is about a ships journal. Jason: ‘We do the greatest effort to not make products that are standard and that can be made by the million from an enormous pressing machine. We know there are many people who started to listen to our music just because they liked the packaging.’ Christian: ‘Yeah like: What the hell is this? Hey this would make an excellent coaster!’

Will Rachel’s ever come back? Jason: ‘Well, I think this will be our only tour through Europe for a while. The major part of this tour is payed by ourselves, because the recordlabel couldn’t afford it. Luckily we all have jobs next to doing this. So who knows, maybe we’ll get enough attention doing this so we can come over next time on somebody else’s money.’