DRU ALLEN

How did you first get into music? Had you played in any bands before This Ascension?

Dru: No, I didn't. I sang in school growing up a little bit, but I wasn't a music geek or band geek or anything like that. When This Ascension came up, they tried out a few singers; they never actually did any gigging without me, but I think I was their third or fourth try, and it was just a good fit. I don't think they were really planning on me, or a girl necessarily, and I didn't know anything about singing rock music or anything contemporary. I just did things like choir at school. Happy accident.

So how did that end up happening? Did you know the guys before trying out?

Dru: Their drummer and I were friends, and we were promoting shows in the area. The music promotion bug bit me, which is totally terrible and thankless and hard, but we were really interested in starting a label. Who would we sign? We wanted to put records out. It's kind of funny; I think that was almost contemporaneous with us being in This Ascension, because we thought they could be a vehicle for one another. That's kind of why we put a record out so quickly. The machine was already in motion for that kind of thing. We had already started learning about it before I was even in This Ascension.

This Ascension has often gotten lumped in with the ethereal scene, but to me there was always something harder-edged about what you were doing, between the big drums and your vocal style. What was your original vision for what you were doing?

Dru: If you're familiar with our first record, I don't think we ever set out to be lumped in with the gothic scene, but that's the group that gravitated toward us. It was a group of people who were very gracious and provided a lot of support for our music. It was like, "Wow, these people really like us!" I think we sort of grew into that a little bit, because we were seeing our potential through this audience that we hadn't really planned on, if that makes sense.

So it was almost like, "I wonder what they know that we don't know?"

Dru: That's very true! To me, Tears in Rain was kind of a pop record. I distinctly remember one of the first times we played the old Helter Skelter club, and people were like, "They're like this folk hippie band from Santa Barbara," and I felt like we had less in common with any bands there than with 10,000 Maniacs or something. So I think we grew into that. I found myself putting classical elements into the music; I'd been a fan of Renaissance music and early music for a really long time, and I was studying Latin in college, so I think I really used that as a way to explore what I could do musically. You mentioned the drums, and I was having dinner with somebody the other night who said, "To me one of the most characteristic things about This Ascension was you and Matt, who had a really unique, tribal style, and these things together were really uncommon for a band like yours." Matt came from a background of punk rock, tribal music, and New Wave, and I think he added a lot of aggressive elements; I don't mean aggressive like violent, but very visceral, with a lot of energy.

It's not the kind of stuff you can put on in the background and drift off to.

Dru: I don't think we were the kind of band that you could put on as background music. I think the band really evolved into what you're talking about, which was really much more of a tribal rock thing with classical-ish vocals, and it just seemed to really please a lot of different people. I remember one show in New York, and the sound people that worked in the club were like, "Ho hum, another goth band." During warm-up, we were playing Black Sabbath songs and fooling around, and they were like, "That's so cool!" We had a steady stream of members come in that had more and more influences like that. The bass player, Charlie, on Sever was a really big influence on the band's sound on Sever and beyond—to me, This Ascension is like Sever and before Sever , not that I think one is better than the other, but there was a shift that occurred—and Charlie had a lot of that punk and heavy metal background, and our last guitarist, Giancarlo, who never got to play on our records but toured with us for a couple years, was another person with a heavy metal background. It's just kind of funny the way that happened. I should also mention that when we added a second percussionist, Paul, who did African drums and stuff, it really blended itself well to the more aggressive musical style, so that was a nice complement to that sound.

You were talking about being a fan of early music and Renaissance music, which brings us to Mirabilis. How did you and Summer Bowman first get together to create that project?

Dru: We were aware of one another's bands. I got Underworld —I think someone gave it to me—which was one of The Machine in The Garden's earlier records, and it lived in my CD player for a long time. I don't know if you've had the experience where you listen to one CD all the time and it almost becomes the soundtrack to your life, and you feel like you know the person that's playing, but I had a neat experience with that CD. So I was aware of their music, and back in the heyday of MP3.com we wrote to each other. That was a really good way for artists to easily get in touch with one another; you could send each other little notes and stuff. I can't remember who wrote whom first, but we were like, "Oh, I really like your music!" "Oh, I really like YOUR music! I'm so glad you wrote me!" I think we were also on the same Faith and The Muse discussion list, and I'd see her post, so we became aware of each other. You know how you can become friends with somebody just on a discussion list, and you know about their lives and stuff? Anyway, I told Summer once that I had an idea for a music project, and I wanted to get a bunch of female vocalists that we were friends with or that were peers of ours and do some classical standards. She had a classical background, too, actually much more extensive than me, and we each knew a ton of songs and kind of spoke the same language. At the time, truthfully, I was not aware of Mediaeval Baebes, I swear! I was a Miranda Sex Garden fan, but I didn't know what had become of them or anything. What I didn't know I was doing was very much in the Mediaeval Baebes style. We ended up not really going that route. That would've been a complete copy of the Mediaeval Baebes, had we done so. Summer has a lot of experience with composition and instrumentation from The Machine in the Garden, because she and Roger share the music-writing. In This Ascension, my experience was strictly writing vocals and singing melodies. The most musical input I had in This Ascension was, "Why don't you go one longer?" or "Why don't you go dit-dit-dit-dit-dit ?" and it was just not the same kind of thing. Mirabilis, besides being unwittingly like this Mediaeval Baebes-style project...we really used it as a sounding ground to try to create experimental music. I think that her writing in Mirabilis is different from The Machine in The Garden, so that's neat for her, and it was a great experience for me to learn more about musical composition. People can do so much now on the computer using Pro Tools and even GarageBand, and it really is this great tool for people who are musically inclined, but I don't play an instrument. I haven't played an instrument since I was young; I played violin growing up, and I played a little bit of piano, and I just fell out of it. I didn't practice enough. But it's great because you can play things on the keyboard and put things together and it's just really neat. We've both been practicing on dulcimer and trying to get less hideous at that; it's a really a freaky instrument. Anyway, I had this idea, and Summer really made that come to fruition. She said, "Why don't you come out to Austin, and we can use The Machine in The Garden's studio and try to record some songs and get some other women involved?" She really took my fly-by-night idea and made that happen. We went out, and we'd never met, so they took me into their home and everything. It was a little funny, because she's quite a bit younger than me, and she was like, "Oh, I really loved you in high school," and I'm like, "Oh my god, please kill me immediately!"  

A lot of the songs on the Mirabilis album were interpretations of traditional classical pieces.   How did you choose the pieces, and how much did you end up altering them for the album? What kind of changes did you make?

Dru: She and I looked at historical texts that are part of public domain. We started with that because we didn't have to worry about, "Do we have to get permission for this? What are the rules about this?" There are lots of really neat historical texts that are available through public domain. We just started to look at sets of words, and we really just picked things where the words resonated, where the phrasing had a certain vocal color that we gravitated toward. It's funny, because the first song we sung together was a song that we didn't know already had parts and a melody; we just saw the words and thought they were cute, so we did this song that we call "Tears," but is really a song by John Dowland called "Weep You No More, Sad Fountains." We didn't know that, so it was funny later to discover that other version.

You just sort of took it and ran with it?

Dru: And then we heard the normal version, and it was completely different, of course. Actually Sting has a new record of all John Dowland Renaissance music, and he sings the song, so if you want to see how it is really, just listen to Sting. How did we do the others? We did a Faith and The Muse cover for this tribute record, and I don't know how familiar you are with their music, but we took "Iago's Demise" because that was in the period we were interested in. Then, near Christmas time, Projekt asked us to do a Christmas song, and I had always loved "Riu Riu Chiu." There's a really important person to me who is a great singer, and I saw him do that piece at a concert with a choir, and I loved it, loved it, loved it! Summer was aware of the tune, and she said, "What if we slow it down and give the music more space and let it flourish?" Because "Riu Riu Chiu" is a very fast song. We slowed i down, and at first we were like, "God, this is so slow!" but I've heard people say, "Wow, I really like how you slowed that down! It's really interesting!" What else? Some of the other songs were songs that she had sung before that I was totally unaware of. We tried to do things where there were multiple parts, so we could each sing. We were like, "Why don't you and I each sing an alto part, and then you and I will each sing a soprano part?" It kind of got nuts, like "Gosh, now there's 10 of us! This sounds great!" But actually a lot of the songs on the first record are just words that we made up melodies to. That was kind of nice, because after being in a band for a long time, sometimes you just don't feel like writing words, and it's really nice to have words given to you. It's kind of a puzzle to make something out of it. It was a nice change. It was really enjoyable to work with somebody in a partnership and not be one sixth of a band. The rest of the songs on that record are songs that Summer wrote the music to, and in some cases she wrote everything, and I sang in counterpoint. That was neat, to support her that way. There was one other song that I chose, a Hildegard von Bingen song. I do a song of hers on Sever as well, a song called "Columba Aspexit," and this song on Pleiades is called "O Virga ac Diadema." I became aware of von Bingen because I worked at record stores for years and years and years, and that's one way I supplanted my music addiction and really learned more and more about it, especially classical and world music. I became aware of this composer from the 1100s, she was an abbess and a mystical person, and she probably had some mental illness or something; she certainly had migraines and some sort of seizures or visions or something. She seemed like an interesting person.

She's actually been rediscovered lately.

Dru: Very much so in the past five or 10 years. I have several of her records, and there are people who are really dedicated to her compositions. She definitely inspired me. I don't know why I picked that certain tune, but I really liked this one version of it, and I thought, "Can I capture that?" That's one of the a capella songs on Pleiades , and it's done really simply. I sang it almost all in one take, and there's not a lot of space age effects on it or anything.

What kind of music are you listening to these days? Is it mostly traditional, or mostly modern?

Dru: I'm so embarrassed. I don't know any of the music right now. When people talk about bands, I feel like I'm 80 years old, like "What in tarnation is that?" It's terrible. I can tell you the things I enjoy right now just because people have either made me known of them or I discovered accidentally. You know Wolfmother? I guess they're popular now. I heard that in a bar in Santa Barbara and I just flipped; I thought that was so great. I bought that, and that was probably the last CD I bought and actually paid full price for. You know Imogene Heap? Summer introduced me to her, and I think that's really fabulous. I'd like to learn more about looping and sampling voices, because you can do so much with that, and she's an example of that. Talk about a one-man band, or a one-woman band, right? Do you know Sleepthief? Oh my god! It's the best! That CD hasn't left my CD player. It's really wonderful. A pop record I really like from last year is Nelly Furtado. I also love Monica Richard's solo record, InfraWarrior . I just love it. Also, I am going to see VAST and am really excited about that. I think he is a very underrated artist.  

To jump from music to film, you're a big Star Wars fan. What did you think of the new trilogy?

Dru: Well, that's a very personal question! No, I'm just kidding. I think that if those movies had not been made by George Lucas, people wouldn't have given them so much shit. He had such shoes to fill. Think about it! You've basically made the greatest movies ever, and then you're going to make more and the whole world is analyzing every microscopic thing you do. I enjoyed The Phantom Menace ; I thought it was just a fun movie. If you watch Return of the Jedi , there are some pretty silly parts in it, so what do you want? In Attack of the Clones , I enjoyed the evolution of Anakin. People were really annoyed with him, because he was sort of whiny and petulant, but I really thought that's how he would've been, so I thought it was good. Luke ends up whiny in Star Wars , so I thought it was good for continuity. I liked the tension that was set up in the second movie, and I had a lot of fun thinking of how the third movie would end up, and how they were going to play Anakin and Obi-Wan against one another. I loved the third movie, loved it, loved it, loved it! I think I liked it better than Star Wars , if you can believe that. Not better than Empire Strikes Back , but I loved it.

What other science fiction stuff are you into? Your website mentions comic books.

Dru: I love trading books with people. Some of the authors I've been into lately...do you know Alastair Reynolds? I didn't like his stuff right away, but the more I read, the more I liked. My favorite one by him is called Century Rain . Also, although I don't agree with him on some personal issues, I really like Orson Scott Card. Such fun stories!

He does seem like kind of a nut on a personal level.

Dru: It seems like it. The key to reading his books and enjoying them is to skip the forward. I don't want to hear about your nut-job ranting or whatever! I have an anthology of his short stories, and some of them are just awesome, but they're really fucked up. Another one is Vernor Vinge, and I really like the Harry Potter books. Those are really enjoyable. And the His Dark Materials trilogy was so   good. All three books were great, but when I finished the third book, I couldn't believe what a great experience I had had. They're making movies out of it, so you should read the books before the movies come out. They were released as young adult books, but then repackaged as science fiction.

They're awfully subversive for books marketed to kids.

Dru: And very intellectual, too! I don't know if I could have appreciated that as a young person, but I think we kind of underestimate young people.

Now that we've gotten the science fiction bit out of the way, you and Summer are working on a new Mirabilis album, right?

Dru: I was hoping I could give you some solid details about that, but I can only give you vague details: "Coming out some time in 2007..."

So it's coming out this year?

Dru: It should. It's basically done, but we're working with Middle Pillar, our label, to fine tune some things. They're sort of exacting; they care about everything they put out. They don't just put out things willy-nilly.

They don't put out a lot of stuff, but all the CDs I've gotten from them I've been very impressed by. They're always beautifully packaged.

Dru: That's true. Summer designed our last record, and she's going to design this record, too. There is a little bit of good news, though! I'm going to be doing my first solo performance at Convergence! It's not been announced yet. I wish they would announce it, but they've said it's OK to go ahead and tell people. It's very unusual for me; I was asked to sing at an organ performance at this old church, on a Sunday afternoon. I'm going to sing as people get seated for the organ performance, and it's going to be totally traditional. I don't even know if there's going to be any amplification except for the natural acoustics of this church from the 1880s.

Who's doing the performance? Is it Soriah?

Dru: Yes! He sounds very interesting. My boyfriend saw him at some illicit club at a warehouse, and he played, and my boyfriend didn't even remember his name or anything, but the next day he was just raving about it. He said, "I don't even want to tell you how cool it was, because you'll be mad," and he described his performance in detail.

He does Tuvan throat-singing.

Dru:  Yes, I'm really impressed with anyone who can do that. I told my boyfriend I was performing with some organ-playing throat singer. He said, "Oh my god, what's he called?" I said, "Well, his goth name is Soriah," and he said, "Oh my god, that's the guy! That's the guy!" I'm in e-mail contact with him, and we're trying to coordinate everything. I'm really happy   to have the opportunity.

Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?

Dru: I'm also kind of a resident guest in this ambient band, Falling You, so I wanted to throw that in there because that's who I get to play live with sometimes. I really miss being a band, and even though it's a totally different style of music—it's sort of like the Sleepthief style with guest vocalists—it's really neat, so that's been a nice opportunity, and I look forward to playing with Falling You again some time soon.

www.dejadru.com

Interview by Matthew Johnson