With a penchant for visual and audio experimentation, Frivolous is known to use a mic through a red telephone, sometimes making music with a chef’s knife. His last album, “Meterology,” dropped on Cadenza in 2011 to praise from both critics fans alike. But since then, the intelligent and affable Frivolous, or Daniel Gardner, has been rather silent, or so it would seem.
The reality is that in the afterglow of “Meterology,” Gardner embarked on a tour schedule that even some of the biggest artists in the world would shy away from, playing well over 100 gigs a year. However, the constant travel made it nearly impossible for Gardner to get back into the studio, and the strain of relentless gigs took its toll emotionally as well. Facing burn out, and yearning for studio time, the newly married Gardner realized something needed to change.
“The system wasn’t working. I wasn’t getting the inspiration or the time I needed to dedicate to finding new directions to go in.”
Now, Frivolous, who’s living back in his native Canada after leaving Berlin, is searching for inspiration as to what’s next, invigorated after slowing down and heading to the Canadian countryside. In his journey, he decided to look back through his own catalogue, and wound up finding gems he’d completely forgotten about, stretching back to 2003. He’s now released 9 of these tracks with a new LP, “Lost & Forgotten,” one of which Daniel is giving away to celebrate (which you can download below). So we caught up with Gardner from his hotel room in Berlin as he battled with the powers that be over his wife’s unfortunate passport situation.
How are you doing? Oh man, it’s been a stressful, stressful last couple of weeks, that’s for sure. We’ve got some visa issues, so we’re trying to do emergency last minute visas through embassies. That’s what we’re dealing with for the last 2 weeks.
Visa issues from touring? From my wife to get home from Christmas, actually. We are stuck in limbo. We’re stuck in ‘monkey hell’ here. We’re not really going from one place or the other; we’re just stuck here until we can get a new visa so we can go home, for fuck sake. The problem is that my wife is a Russian national, and we’re applying for permanent residency in Canada. We actually extended her tourist visa so that she could travel and come back to the country, but they didn’t tell us that with this document they gave us, although we were allowed to remain in Canada, we weren’t allowed to go out of Canada and come back in – as we would have been able to do with any normal tourist visa. So we did the whole trip, she went home for Christmas, I did the tour, and she had a normal European visa. And when we got back on the plane, they said, “No, you can’t get back into Canada with this, we not going to let you on the plane.” In addition, her European visa was expiring that night at midnight, so we were actually detained by the police in Amsterdam for like 4 hours.
So in the mean time we’ve been in contact with the press. We’ve been talking with politicians and they’ve been writing to embassies and trying to get us to the front of the line. So it’s been pretty brutal.
No good. Are you having a nice time in Berlin otherwise? Yeah. Now that I don’t have shows to do and we’re forced to do not much. We have a nice place here, and when we’re not stressing out about meeting a deadline with the visa, then we do have these lulls where we can go out to breakfast.
That’s good. How was the tour? It was okay. There were a couple weird shows, but there were some good ones too, so I can’t complain. That’s how it always goes.
From what I understand, you took time off after your last album? Well, the last album came out in 2011. And all of 2011 and 2012 were consumed by shows. It was crazy. I don’t know how many shows I played. I think it was 125 shows in 2011, and 115 shows in 2012. So by the time I was done in 2012, we were ready to make some serious change, because it couldn’t stay like that. Also, the quality of the shows were going down. When it started off, when I first released the album with Cadenza, I got opening slots with Luciano and Carl Craig, that kind of thing. But by the end it was like, all right, who haven’t we played for yet? It kind of got to the point that I didn’t have time to work on new music because I was touring too much, but I needed to have a new record out to keep good shows happening. So basically I decided to pull the plug on the way it was.
Now I realize that I do work better with a remote view of the scene. You get so excited to go out to a club, and it’s pretty rare that you come back and you’re more excited than what you were expecting. Somehow I find that the scene, it feels better in your mind. Your imagination of the electronic music scene can pretty rarely be surpassed by the reality of the club scene. And I’m always thinking, there are a lot of writers that approach their work like this, especially fiction writers, and that’s essentially what I’m doing. I’m writing fiction narratives in music. It’s definitely something that glamorizes the metropolitan lifestyle, since it is electronic music. Usually most of it’s consumed in urban areas. So, when you can live in this dream, imaginary world of the perfect urban environment, or post-apocalyptic urban environment – whatever it is you need to fuel your inspiration, I think it’s a good idea to get away from all that, because you get refueled. You miss it, and it becomes romantic again, and becomes this picture you want to paint with music.
So I think it was a good decision. Now that I’m back in Berlin, I do miss it, but I know that being back in Berlin permanently, I would become disenchanted with it again quite quickly. So I think it works to my advantage to be living way out in the middle of an island in the Pacific Ocean surrounded by turkey farmers and environmentalists. As much as I don’t get along with turkey farmers and environmentalists – not to say that we hate each other or anything – but I think that it helps fuel my inspiration again and has given me a rebirth towards the way I look at electronic music, and my relationship with it.
I actually recently watch a documentary on Minilogue where they mentioned similar things – finding it easier to connect to the music when living in nature, and that the city bared down on them, influencing the way they made music in a negative way. Well it can. Some people thrive in that environment, and some people don’t. When I first got to Berlin it was bright and shiny and wonderful – well it was never bright and shiny – but it was this kind of wonderland. At first I tapped into that energy, but after a while I felt, a little bit, the pressure to conform. I felt like people were always evaluating my work in relationship to other people’s work. So in the end, for me it felt better to move out. It’s a personal thing.
I do relate to the Minilogue guys. We’ve had a few conversations about this, and we definitely see eye to eye when it comes to a lot of things, and that’s one of them.
So what’s the new approach that you’ll be taking with touring and producing? Well we’re going to keep it on a schedule of coming two, maybe three times a year to Europe. Two big tours, and maybe a couple of short ones throughout the year. I would like to try and fit South America into that somehow. That would make it easier for my wife and I to get to with her Russian passport. There are a lot of places in South America that have an open door policy towards people with Russian passports, which is not the case in Europe.
But right now the thing is for us to get back, and her to get her Canadian permanent residency so that she can live there. We’re just kind of settling down to a pattern again. When we come to Berlin, we go to the record shop now and we just load up on vinyl because there’s nothing to do back on the island. It’s a great place to observe from an outsider’s perspective, and keep the record collection up to date, and I think that’s pretty much all we need. Sit on the porch, look at the sky, listen to great music, and walk down for some crab fishing.
That sounds like a very balanced approach to the scene. As I get older, I need to think about having a healthy relationship with my work and with the industry. And I think having this outsiders perspective is going to be really great in sustaining a long-term plan for the future instead of just burning out. Because I was burning out, I was burning out hard.
When you first started digging around in your crate, were you originally going to start writing new material for a new album? I was, but I was kind of lost in terms of the direction I wanted to take. I’m really the kind of person to where I don’t want to speak up until I’ve got something to say when it comes to contributing to electronic music. I don’t really want to keep a constant flow of the same old tracks done in a semi different way, because that’s boring for me; it doesn’t keep me inspired. So I’ve been taking my time, buying vinyl and buying full lengths and really exploring what else is out there, exploring sections of the record store that I never would have gone to before. I’m definitely starting to form a pretty cool picture of what comes next, and in the mean time, I think going back and releasing a lot of stuff that I was either self conscious about or wasn’t happy with, production wise, and took the time to doctor it up again so that I was happy enough to release it, I think by releasing a lot of these old tracks now, it’s going to be really liberating. It’s my old inspiration again. It’s what really brought me to the scene. Tracks from as far back as 2003 that nobody’s ever heard before.
It’s going to be a really interesting record. It’s going to span a lot of time – 10 years basically – from 2003 to 2013. But there was such an overwhelming wealth of back catalogue that I didn’t know I had until I really tried to put it all together. It was something like 60 tracks.
This one record is something like 9 tracks, and it’s really focused more on the danceier stuff. But there was a ton of other stuff that fell into really weird crevices of experimental work, singer-songwriter work, all kinds of stuff.
You mentioned you were exploring different parts of the record stores. Yeah! The electronic music record stores like OYE here in Berlin, they’ve got a pretty good selection of bass music and electronica that DJs would never even look at as a possibility to play out in a club, especially in Berlin, as bass music hasn’t really caught on here in a big way – there’s only a couple clubs that do it, and a few parties that are pretty small. But it seems like it’s starting to take hold here through artists like Four Tet and, I don’t know, I’d have to look at a record collection here (laughs). I think it’s coming around, but the lines are getting so blurred now that people aren’t even sure what to classify bass music as. Is it basically just house music with more of an emphasis on rhythm in the bass line, or is it actually something else? So it’s cool, I’m definitely finding a lot of great records and forming a picture in my mind about what I’d like to be doing next.
What is your live setup like? I like to keep it a bit like a concert. So either I’m always doing live percussion, live keys, or live vocals, and I’m also sometimes using some circuit bending kind of stuff as well. Just as a little extra candy to get people…to engage people in the set. For a long time I was using this electromagnetic chef’s knife, which was a giant chef’s knife that I got for my birthday that went dull and sat in the kitchen cupboard for I don’t know how many years. I started messing around with contact mics, and stuck one onto this chef’s knife and started throwing that through a bunch of analogue effects and got some really crazy, crazy sounds out of it. So I was actually performing with a giant knife at one point. But I’ve given that a bit of a break now because it’s started to manifest people’s image of what it is that I do to the point where I would show up on stage and people would immediately be screaming, “Where’s the knife? Where’s the knife?” So I wanted to give it a break for a while, but I think I might bring it back again as long as I’ve got something else to go along with it.
But yeah, I’m always leaving at least a couple voicings of the track to do live, whether it’s keys and singing or keys and percussion parts or whatever. Aside from that, it’s basically an Ableton live set, so everything is run through the computer with a bit of external gear.
"Lost & Forgotten" is out now on Lessizmore. You can buy it here.