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Excited that Stephin Merritt's playing in Madison? He isn't

Katjusa Cisar  —  10/09/2008 5:03 pm

Stephin Merritt doesn't like choices. He only wears clothing in the white-to-brown palette ("so I don't have to stare at my closet for an hour"), bases each of his records on a different theme or production style ("so I have fewer decisions to make") and prefers recording to the unpredictable experience of performing live music.

Choices invite chaos, and for a musician who has worked with genres as varied as rock, opera, country, musical theater and pop, it helps to narrow things down. For his main project, the Magnetic Fields, Merritt has themed albums around love songs (69 Love Songs) and traveling (The Charm of the High Strip). For the 2004 album i, Merritt wrote only song titles that started with the letter "i."

On the Magnetic Fields' latest, Distortion, all instruments except for drums and bass sound have been recorded at the point of feedback. The album takes inspiration from Jesus and Mary Chain's album Psychocandy -- which broke new ground in 1985 by distorting Beach Boys-type pop songs with feedback noise.

"I thought I could make a record quickly by adopting a particular production style from another record," Merritt said in a phone interview. "We were recording all the instruments as though they were electric guitars. It colors the sound. And when there actually is feedback, it introduces undernotes or a new note, usually harmonically related to the first one."

The Magnetic Fields strapped Smokey amplifiers onto instruments to record Distortion. The Smokey amps are so tiny that they come in cigarette boxes, which can't handle high volumes, so they distort.

"And that's what we were looking for. If you have a stack of Marshall amplifiers, they exist to actually play huge amounts of loud sound. They won't distort at all," he said.

The Magnetic Fields rarely tour, and their appearance in Madison this Saturday, Oct. 11 is a rare treat for fans. They play in the Capitol Theatre in the Overture Center, 201 State St., at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30 and available at 608-258-4141, at www.overturecenter.com or at the Overture's box office.

Merritt can't think of anything he enjoys about performing. He'll often discover new things about his music when playing it in front of an audience, "but not in a pleasurable way. Often I discover that that last chorus is kind of redundant. Unfortunately, some of my songs are not short enough. And almost all of everyone else's songs are not short enough. It's unbelievable how much unnecessary repetition people put in their records. Why give it all away the first time?"

Merritt's distaste for performing is also partly medical -- he suffers from a progressive hearing condition that causes his ears to be hypersensitive to normal sounds like applause.

"We try to ask the audience not to clap, but it just seems psychologically weird. I just stick my finger in my ear while they clap and take it out again when they finish," he said. "There's no reason to bring earplugs because we are very, very quiet."

But, sensitive ears or not, he'd rather play music in the studio and prefers listening to recorded music.

"I don't like live music in the first place. I put a lot of effort into producing the records so that they sound interesting and it all falls apart when I have to perform it live," he said.

But if Merritt is unenthusiastic about the Magnetic Fields performing live, he's about the only one in the room. "For anyone who's feeling a little down in dumps, I can't think of many better bands to look to for a pick up," a reviewer for the New York Press wrote in February.

He doesn't see the record industry's switch away from CDs to file sharing as a negative, and though he does say it's harming intellectual property law, it's not killing music. The current industry hysteria over pirated music is just another swing through a familiar cycle.

"In the mid-'80s, there was the cassette revolution and there was panic about people taping records," he said. "There were record sleeves printed with the slogan, 'Home Taping is Killing Music,' and it had a cassette in a crossbones logo, instead of a skull."

But the low sound quality of MP3 files does force musicians to be more creative, according to Merritt.

"People are getting used to very, very low sound quality. It's worse than a cassette. That can be cured. It makes people listen to music that doesn't depend on its sound quality, like in the days of early rock 'n' roll when teenagers listened only to things that sounded good on transistor radios or 45 rpms," he said. "Hip-hop, for example, sounds terrible if you don't have any bass speakers. You would think that hip-hop would be going out of fashion, and I don't know that it is."

In general, Merritt's bored with hip-hop and with all other genres these days, and he hasn't brought in musical openers on this tour. Opening bands are a tradition he said he's never understood -- "I mean, it's competition. Why have them up in front of you?"

Instead, just for the Magnetic Fields' Madison and Minneapolis shows, he's having two guests open the show with two 15-minute PowerPoint presentations.

His friend Liz Clayton runs the Web site "Not Fooling Anybody: A Chronicle of Bad Conversions and Storefronts Past," (www.notfoolinganybody.com) which documents the transformation of buildings that used to be Taco Bells, Pizza Huts and other chains.

Merritt got to know Paul Lukas, the other presenter, back in the '90s when Lukas was making a pop culture fanzine called "Beer Frame: A Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption." Now a writer for ESPN, Lukas will give a presentation on sports' uniforms and their cultural significance.

Katjusa Cisar  —  10/09/2008 5:03 pm