credit: Indira Dominici

“We’re all visual people and we often talk about music in a visual way too. Sometimes we’ll refer to music as a color or a type of fog or use visual metaphors for what’s happening in the music,” bassist Scott Devendorf explains, as the former professional graphic design artist contemplates the impact of this pursuit on his work in The National and LNZNDRF.

The latter band came together spontaneously in 2011 after The National found themselves without an opener for a New Zealand gig. That’s when Devendorf and his brother Bryan, The National’s drummer, took the stage as a trio with Ben Lanz (Beirut) a touring member of the group, on synths. As Devendorf told Relix last year, “It was more of a concept before it was an actual project. We have a shared love of ‘70s krautrock— Kraftwerk, Neu! and Amon Düül. It informs these motoric-type situations that we get ourselves into.”

The band released its eponymous full-length in 2016, a hypnotic album that draws on a series of collective improvisations that were shaped by the group and producer Justin Newton. After two EPs, LNZNDRF has returned with a new record, the aptly titled II, an absorbing, expansive follow-up. Lanz himself produced the album, sculpting the sounds of what is now a quartet, following the addition of keyboardist Aaron Arntz.

Today, we are premiering the video for “Ringwoodite,” directed by Kevin Gilmore, which Devendorf discusses below, in a conversation that focuses on LNZNDRF’s visual aesthetic and its relationship to the group’s music. Devendorf also addresses the April 20 return of DJead Night, via the Relix Channel on Twitch, which pairs a Grateful Dead score with oil projections by D. James Goodwin and live illustration by Michael Arthur (the project now has an official Instagram page).

Do you believe that your training as a visual artist has manifested itself in your music?

Absolutely. I’ve played music ever since I was a kid and I’ve also been interested in visual arts. I think they go hand in hand.  I’ve always played music with my brother and I’ve been attuned to the relationship between posters and t-shirts. I’ve always felt that there’s a very tight relationship between the world of visual arts and music. They feed off each other. I’m talking about visual arts in general, although when we grew up as kids in the 80s, MTV and music videos were a big deal.

I ended up going to school for graphic design in college. That’s where I met Matt [Berninger] who’s in my band, The National, with me. I didn’t go to music school, I went to school for visual arts, so I’ve always been interested in the imagery associated with bands. I think that’s really fun and interesting to observe.

We started out going to school intending to be professional graphic designers and we did so for several years. And along the same parallel path we were making music. Throughout all of this we also were fans going to see bands and doing that together as friends. So there was always that aspect.

Then at some point I saw the music we were making offered us more freedom than the world of professional graphic design, where I always had clients and deadlines and expectations. Whereas music felt more free and open. So at some point I switched over from the day job to the night job.

With The National and with LNZNDRF we’re always thinking about the visual aspects and relationships of the music we make to the merch that we sell and that kind of thing. We view our records as these art projects that we make together. Everyone contributes and puts in their strengths. So in the end it’s basically a collaborative painting or something like that. We’re always kind of thinking in that way because that’s how we were trained.

However, I also think that the way we communicate about music to each other and the relationship to visual arts is probably stronger now because as the music aspect of our lives became bigger and more all-encompassing, we had more control over what things we could make visually that accompanied it.

We were always kind of an indie band and so we worked on the album covers from day one. I consider it a really fun and satisfying aspect that we can continue that sort of thing. When we’re making merch or we’re making posters, we get to find artists that we like and work with them.

Stage design is a part of it as well. We’ve worked with Michael Brown, our lighting designer, for a while—he also works with Bon Iver and others, too. He’s a true artist of light and staging and that kind of thing. So as soon as we became able to make any kind of visual impact with the band on stage, we were like, “Oh, let’s draw on all our visual arts backgrounds and contribute to that.” We did that as much as we could. Not that it’s ultra-theatrical or anything, but it’s something we’ve thought about, coming at it the way we do with those paths crossing over.

Is there a particular visual aesthetic to LNZNDRF?

The cover for the latest record II, is this watery image made by our friend Indira Dominici who’s an amazing visual artist. She also made the film for the song “Auguas Frescas”—it’s a Super 8 film from Brazil and maybe Iceland. She travels a lot and captured all this stuff. My brother said something which I thought was funny. He commented that we’d sort of made the record after we had the cover. It was like, “Oh, we have the cover, let’s make a record that sounds like it.” I think there’s truth to that.

There’s certainly a visual element to LNZNDRF. The music is sort of psychedelic and a bit sprawling. There are songs but they all come out of this improvisational spirit. All of it was recorded in these 10, 20 or 30 minute sections and then we edited them down to make songs or we retained them as longer pieces.

But I think there is always a visual element. The first record was kind of desert-y and this one is more watery.

For this one we were in Texas in September of 2019. We’d just finished a National tour and we spent five days going to the Public Hi-Fi studio in Austin. When we would take breaks, we’d go to the Barton Springs swimming hole. I think there was something about being in this hot climate and then getting into this really cool water where it all started to make sense as to what we were making and what we were seeing and that went back and forth.

I’m fascinated by the power of place and how one can often hear it in the music.

The way we record with LNZNDRF is all improvisation. No one comes in with a finished song and presents it to the group. We set up and we have a palette of instruments that we generally play, but everyone kind of moves around a bit while we record what we’re making on the spot. Then we sift through it later to find the good parts.

For II, we added some lyrics and some of the production after the fact. Ben did that while we were touring in Europe and then the pandemic happened. The last time we spent together was in early February, when we did some mixing of the edited stuff from Austin. Then we all finished it over the next few months. We were trading files back and forth. But the main meat of the project was generated over five days in Texas.

We knew we were going to be in good shape playing-wise although we’d be tired. Day-to-day touring is pretty exhausting, but it was nice to set up in a single place and just be in this adobe room at Public Hi-Fi. I think that visual and physical environment is reflected in the album.

In creating new music with LNZNDRF, do you articulate any collective vision in advance or perhaps even bring in some stems?

This stuff is basically generated basically on the spot. Someone usually starts something, maybe it’s a drum thing or some kind of loop or whatever. Then we all just add to it. It’s an additive process. We’ll pick out something we hear and kind of run with it. I mean, there’s always an undercurrent of this kosmische motoric music that we love, the German stuff from the seventies. So there’s that kind of underlying theme that can kind of bubble up in the music.

The big difference I think on this record was Aaron Arntz who mainly plays keyboards in LNZNDRF. He’s a good friend but he also toured with us when we finished the first record back in 2016. He plays with other bands like Grizzly Bear and Dweezil Zappa. He’s a trained classical pianist as well, so he’s a bad-ass. He joined us in the studio this time and I think a major color shift on this record was having him on board. There’s a lot more piano. The record is much more keyboard-driven than the first.

There were all kinds of factors at play. I should say that Melissa Laveaux, who lives in Paris and is a good friend of Ben, was a big contributor to the natural world theme that became the names of the songs. She had been reading this book about ringwoodite and she wrote lyrics to that song. Ben does some singing as well, it’s kind of a duet, but it’s mainly her on that track.

After that, everything started to make a little more sense from a titling perspective with this whole water and earthen kind of thing that we were going with in Texas. It all started to sort of shift towards these larger things like “The Xeric Steppe” and “Chicxulub” and all these kind of big, natural phenomena. There is a more personal song on the record, a love song, but the other songs like “Cascade” have these kinds of giant earth-related themes.

Today, we’re premiering the video for “Ringwoodite.” What are your thoughts on it given your role in making the music and then viewing this representation of it?

Our friend Kevin Gilmore made the video. I really appreciate what he did. Ben has known Kevin for a long time and Kevin is an artist who does a lot of paintings. He’s also a fan of LNZNDRF and I think he approached Ben with the idea of making this video, which is like a time-lapse of dust and shadow. There’s a cyclical aspect to the song. It’s sort of a pulsing wave. I feel like Kevin’s video is a reflection of that—you’re seeing time move and then stop and then rewind and come again, almost like a breaking wave. That’s my take, at least.

You mentioned growing up during the heyday of MTV.  We’re in another era altogether but how did that early exposure impact your perception of the medium in general? 

There are many different ways to go with videos. When we started our band in the late nineties and early 2000s, making videos was never one of my favorite things to do. Part of my issue with videos is that you’ll think a song is about one thing and then you see a video and it tells you that it’s about something else. Or it puts too much of a concrete story in your mind. That’s the issue I’ve had with videos, I’ll get disappointed—“Oh no, now I can only see that when the song used to mean this to me.”

That’s why I tend to like videos that are more open-ended like the “Ringwoodite” video, which has nothing to do with what the song is about, if that’s even possible. Instead, it creates a sort of mood which to a certain extent matches what the song is doing. It’s almost like a loop or a cycle. 

We’ve made a few videos for LNZNDRF but all of them are open-ended. They have an abstraction that I appreciate. You can compare and contrast them on the website, if you have some extra time on your hands. [Laughs].

We have a video that our friend Casey Reas made for this song “Samarra,” from the first record. I don’t know exactly what he did, but there are some bands playing who aren’t us, with a bunch of visuals he made. It’s all black and white and very grainy and messy.

Ben made a really funny video for “You Still Rip.” It has all these 80s hair metal bands cut with us playing but it looks like a VHS tape that went to hell and back or something. That one’s pretty funny. But again, it doesn’t tell you a full story or make you think, “This song’s about a guy riding a motorcycle who goes to a mansion and then has to get the girl.”

You’re using video in an altogether different way with DJead Night. How did that come about?

DJead Night—the J is silent—is Conrad Doucette and myself. Conrad’s a drummer and good friend. Michael Arthur is the artist who does the hand drawing. We started it in February of 2015 at Threes Brewing in Brooklyn, a brewery that our friends run. They let us set up one night a month and Conrad and I would play live Dead music from whatever source we had: tapes or home recordings or Dave’s Picks or Dick’s Picks, whatever, we’re not super precious about it. We’d do that for about three, four hours. It started out with us doing the DJ set and then there’d usually be a live cover band for a while. But that got a little complicated from the perspective of running the bar and having the live band there.

Then we added Michael and Dan Goodwin. Dan, who is known as D. James Goodwin, did the oils for the Bob Weir Blue Mountain tours that I had played on with my brother, Josh Kaufman and a bunch of people. Dan did the oil projection stuff that was on stage for those tours and we began using that as a background at Threes. Then Michael came in and we started to mix the oils with live drawing. Michael does a ton of event-drawing, basically live drawing things—mostly it’s music but some of it is theater. He’s really great, really fast and very talented. It just started to be a fun thing to do. We did that at Threes for a couple of years, with the projections while he was drawing and we were DJing the Dead music.

Then COVID happened and Threes got shut down. But FANS started doing streaming events and offered us an opportunity.  We did a couple of those in 2020 and we’ve also moved over to Twitch. The last one was great, we did it after the Oteil Burbridge show and I think a lot of people stayed on and listened for another two or three hours.

That one was the most successful yet, particularly because the DJs were off camera for the most part because it’s like watching someone work on their laptop. I know some of the other shows are more active but ours is more contemplative with the drawing. It’s supposed to be about the art and the music and we’re just there as the selectors. We want the focus to be on the art.

Is your playlist improvised or is it locked in advance, and has livestreaming modified your approach in any way?

Conrad and I have our favorite eras and we’ll let each other know what we might play but it’s mostly improv because we’ll react. We’ve done it different ways, like he does half, I do half. We’ve switched every two songs, although that gets kind of complicated over streaming because you have to really be on your toes as to what’s happening. Last time we did sets, so I would do five or six songs and then we’d switch.

The Twitch aspect was really fun where we could see people commenting and making requests. We played a couple of the requests and that definitely added something to it.

We finally got organized and made an Instagram so we can collect what we do and post the setlists. It’s been enjoyable for us and people seem to like it, so I’m glad that we’re getting a chance to do more.