Imaginary World Music: Inside the outsider folk-rock of P.G. Six
by Aaron Burgess
Pat Gubler's creative work hasn't taken him more than 100 miles outside of New York City, and yet his music—both under the solo name P.G. Six and within the loose-knit group The Tower Recordings—has become an audio travelogue through some of the most faraway places on Earth. Born in the Bronx, and raised both there and upstate, Gubler didn't begin taking music seriously until his teenage years—though he recalls getting the itch much earlier. "I [remember] playing the chord buttons on one of those 'chord organs'—you know, the kind Daniel Johnston plays," he recalls. "Just playing these chords from left to right and back again, and listening to the sounds." Later, when his brother Steve brought home and repaired an old piano, Gubler felt he'd found a niche. He soon began taking lessons. "I had a really great teacher, Elsie Storck," he says. "A very serious player—she had studied at Julliard. She was also very nice and laid-back in her approach, and very encouraging. I think she saw that while I didn't have, like, massive technique, I did have a bit of a feel for it. When I was finishing high school, she said, 'Well, are you thinking of going to college? Maybe you could study some music, among other things.' That sort of affirmed it for me, that music was something I could pursue further." From 1988 to 1994, Gubler studied composition at the State University of New York's Purchase College, a liberal-arts school best known for giving the film world Hal Hartley, Wesley Snipes and Parker Posey. For Gubler, who didn't share his fellow music majors' commercial drive, Purchase was a place of mixed emotions. "My interests were sort of all over the place—I guess I wasn't that great a student," he says. "But I met some very interesting people there." One of those people, professor Dary John Mizelle, helped crystallize Gubler's interest in musical experimentation. Mizelle, head of Purchase's Composition Area, is an internationally known composer and former pupil of Karlheinz Stockhausen with more than 300 works to his credit. "He was one of the standout teachers for me," says Gubler. "If you went in to a lesson and hadn't brought anything to show him, he'd be like, 'Well, do you want to look at something I'm working on? Maybe it'll spark some ideas for you.' And he would walk you through some of his works in progress. "He uses a lot of complex structures and inter-relationships in his music," Gubler continues, "and he tends to work in a slow and steady fashion, which winds up being extremely prolific, because he's grabbing [time] here and there to work on his music. I really admired his approach—it would spark ideas for your own work, and it could really open your mind to new ways of working." Gubler made another important connection at Purchase when he befriended Marc Wolf, a guitar student with similarly noncommercial ideas about making music. Wolf introduced Gubler to his friend Matt Valentine, who played with Wolf and drummer Todd Margolis in the Captain Beefheart/Pussy Galore–inspired Memphis Luxure. Gubler joined the group on keyboards and recorded two 7” singles with them before Margolis moved to the West Coast, effectively ending the band. Before Memphis Luxure's breakup, Wolf, Gubler and Valentine had been improvising and making experimental 4-track recordings with another New York musician, Helen Rush. (Superlux, the label co-run by Rush, Valentine and Gubler, had released both Memphis Luxure singles.) Calling themselves The Tower Recordings (after their Port Chester, New York, rehearsal space, Tower Gallery), the group released their first LP, Rehearsals for Roseland, on Superlux in 1995. Though Roseland seemed doomed to obscurity in its paltry first pressing of 500, Tower's oddball bedroom folk attracted some notable ears, including those of Matador Records' Gerard Cosloy, who listed Roseland on his year-end top 10. By this time Wolf had adopted the stage name Spanish Wolfman ("We had a lot of nicknames for each other in Tower," Gubler says), while Gubler, referencing both his own initials and a character in Bryon Gysin's The Last Museum, had begun performing as P.G. Six. The oddball pseudonyms—another member went by "S. Freyer, esq." —lent an air of humor to the austere-sounding Tower Recordings, but they also helped the group build an interesting micro-mythology around itself. Guest musicians began passing through Tower like commuters in a revolving door—at one point, the band had 11 members—and the TR network grew to include both side projects (MV Holoscanner Exhibition) and one-off group efforts (Planet TR). Plus, the LPs that followed Roseland—The Fraternity of Moonwalkers (Audible Hiss), Furniture Music for Evening Shuttles (Siltbreeze), Folk Scene (Shrat Field)—were making Tower's early work sound like Sebadoh demos, with influences ranging from Tropicalia to '60s folk-rock to microtonal composition. Thirty-plus years after the Godz and ESP-Disk had turned New York's folk and jazz standards on their ears, Tower and Superlux were nurturing a similar freak scene upstate. In the six years he'd been with The Tower Recordings, Gubler had released just one 7” single (1995's The Book of Rayguns) under the P.G. Six name. The ongoing creative challenges within Tower—revolving group lineups, malleable song structures, ever-changing instrumentation—had been affording him everything he'd needed. "For me, [Tower had always] been an outlet to try out playing some different and exotic instruments. I've often enjoyed listening to and playing music that's pretty loose and raw, and one of my goals with Tower was to have that alongside some more refined moments." The material Gubler was contributing to Tower and its offshoots reflected these twin interests: His loose playing style complemented the group's abstract-modernist nature, while his warm, droning melodies referenced early U.K. folk-rock. Says Gubler, "I've always had an affinity for Anglo-Irish-Scot music. I love the tunes, the modal melodies, and I also really love the treatments those '60s and '70s artists gave those folk tunes. Because that really was a kind of 'fusion music' that they were doing, taking a traditional melody and giving it an arrangement that was contemporary for their time—and using the ideas of traditional music in their own songwriting. I know that what I do is many times removed from that, but I do take ideas from that stuff.” Around 1999 Gubler began recording solo material that more overtly reflected his interests in traditional European folk and American roots music. He was layering multiple tracks, accompanying his own guitars, keyboards and vocals with unusual instruments such as harp, ukelin, kemance (a Turkish violin), Japanese shakuhachi and Chinese d'tzu. He was also being more direct about his English folk-rock influence, even covering songwriter Anne Briggs' 1971 song "Go Your Way." "I had heard Bert Jansch's version of that song ["Go Your Way My Love"] long before I heard Anne Briggs'," Gubler says. "I thought it was one of his original songs; it's a really beautiful version that he does on the album Nicola. Later on, I heard [Briggs'] version and decided to learn it." Within two years, Gubler, now 32, had recorded enough material for a solo LP. Longtime Tower Recordings fans Brian Gempp and Matt Harmon got word of this, and approached Gubler about releasing the album on their Chinatown-based indie, Amish Records. "Much like what drew us to Tower Recordings, Pat’s music is a wonderful mix of old and new influences," says Harmon. We heard the full breath of 20th-century music in the nine songs [he'd recorded].... We felt that Pat had seamlessly linked all these concepts and created something unique that lacked any sort of tongue-in-cheek, ironic twist or shtick. He never let one influence consume any other, and the end result is an honest, pure and emotionally engaging songwriting effort." Released in 2001, Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites is a powerfully understated synthesis of, if not the whole of 20th-century acoustic music, the loveliest parts of it. Influenced by Briggs and fellow U.K. folkies Pentangle, Bert Jansch and the Incredible String Band, the album also touches upon American outsider music: namely, the avant-folk of the late John Fahey, the primitive country blues of the Appalachian mountains, and the minimalist drone of New York's 1960s art world. Though he invited auxiliary Tower Recordings member Tim Barnes to mix, sequence, master and add percussion to his basic 4-track material, Gubler retained his original vision of Parlor Tricks as a close-up portrait of his own internal universe. "It's great working with an engineer who understands your aesthetic," Gubler says of Barnes. "I wanted to use the original 4-track material because there's a certain intimacy to those performances, and not every engineer would be sympathetic to working like that. And I can certainly see their point -- it is working backwards a bit; you spend all this time trying to fix existing problems of signal/noise. But he's done a lot of things like this... [and] the record really took shape in a way it wouldn't have with someone else." Parlor Tricks also allowed Gubler to reveal some emotions he hadn't in the sometimes-opaque Tower Recordings. "I guess it is a pretty sad record—it just turned out that way," he says. "The mood of the record has a lot to do with losing my dad to skin cancer in '96 and one of my older brothers to a brain tumor in '99. There's a piece on there—it's actually two pieces strung together—called 'The fallen leaves that jewel the ground' that's dedicated to them. I had been playing a few different versions of those, and decided on using that arrangement with wire harp and electronics for the record." Both for its emotional resonance and for its sheer inventiveness, Parlor Tricks garnered almost universal critical acclaim. Gubler and Barnes found themselves being praised as everything from "a modern-day Incredible String Band" (Magnet) to "a window into the intimate and subdued world of six-string storytelling" (All Music Guide). Even The Wire, a notoriously tough nut for U.S. left-field rockists to crack, wrote that Parlor Tricks "justifies P.G. Six's place in the escalating folk-rock revival." With The Tower Recordings lying dormant (actually a fairly common state for the group), Gubler found himself becoming the center of attention. "I think that I'm much like a lot of musicians these days—with a weird musical background and different kinds of music that I've liked and wound up doing," Gubler says. "I feel sort of in-between—like, I wouldn't call myself a 'composer,' at least not with a capital 'C,' and I'm not a real 'songwriter,' meaning I don't necessarily have the natural gift of songwriting—which, I think, is the 'gift of the gab,' the ability to spin a yarn, even if it's an abstract yarn. Maybe I haven't totally found my voice yet. But I'm working with what I have right now."