Photo by Lala Ryan
Some bands you love because you understand everything they do, and that’s satisfying and even comforting. Other bands you love because you are never sure what they’re doing, but the mystery is also a kind of comfort. It’s the feeling of not being sure what’s going on or where it’s going, but trusting that the band is going to take you some place good, some place you would never reach on your own.
Excepter is that band. The group formed in the early 2000s around John Fell Ryan, who had come out of the previous decade’s No Neck Blues Band. In the first few years, they were a quintet, then a sextet, then Lala Harrison joined; she and Ryan eventually married. A band member from the early years, Clare Amory, died of cancer in 2011. There were more personnel changes, then John and Lala moved from New York to Chicago and kept Excepter going as a duo. Now they’re back on the East Coast, living up the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie.
Their music is much more difficult to describe. Excepter is an electronic band, although very different from most others. In addition to percussion, vocals, Lala’s flute, and other instruments, they use synthesizers and samplers—digital tools that include built-in digital quantization for pitch and arpeggiation of chords in set rhythms or in sequences of notes. What’s out of the ordinary with Excepter is that all these instruments aren’t synced together; Excepter is essentially a free improv band. They’re also something of a circuit-bending quality in the way they can adapt an electronic instrument by running it through a series of pedals rather than as part of the whole mix, which is a very orchestral concept.
Finally, there’s a fundamental post-punk, Downtown-improv aesthetic in how they seem to take apart the very notions of what a band should be playing. Excepter tracks always seem on the verge of questioning and cannibalizing themselves into something else. The rough and strange beauty of their sound may seem to fit into turn-of-the-century New York City, but in important ways, they’re closer to Tangerine Dream than anything else—and also Cecil Taylor, and Lee “Scratch” Perry, and anyone else who makes music that’s surprising and slippery.
Ryan and Lala recently spoke with Bandcamp Daily from Poughkeepsie about Excepter, where it’s been and where it’s going.
Sunbomber
This EP-length album is a fine, concise way to get into Excepter. Recorded in 2005, while the band was a sextet, despite the number of instruments and voices, the textures remain clear. That’s important because, with Excepter, what’s happening in the music keeps defying expectations and previous listening experiences. Ryan considers this recording another favorite, “mainly because of the samples of Lala laughing and the cover image of her playing a flute knee deep in Catskill Creek on our third date.”
Stream 59-65
Live performance is a crucial component of Excepter’s sound, both on record and onstage—not that there’s much of a distinction. The band applies the same exploratory mindset to both their studio sessions and club dates, as shown by this September 19th, 2009, at The High Noon Saloon in Madison, Wisconsin. Ryan says that the Stream collections are “largely unedited,” adding that Stream 59-65 was a “pretty bananas gig…we played after SALEM and really pissed off the already pissed off audience; ended up getting in a bar fight and had to flee the venue, who refused to pay us.”
The Debussy EP
Ryan says the title of this EP has “no real relation to the composer, other than we watched Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film (1965) after recording it in a hotel room, in an ‘artists residency’ gig.” This was during the spell when Excepter was in Chicago—the room was in the Ace Hotel—and the band was a duo. Lala’s flute is more prominent here than in many of their other recordings.
Split w/ Microwaves
One of the few recent Excepter releases not on their own label, this is another Chicago performance featuring shorter tracks than usual. The B-side is given over to the Pittsburgh group Microwaves, a more straightforwardly post-punk cousin to Excepter.
“hare KRSNA”
Cassette
This track from a compilation album captures a lot of Excepter’s special qualities. There’s a crunchy beginning that dissolves into gentle, mysterious, sustained tones and murmuring voices, like stepping into a grand cathedral during daytime. The secret thing in Excepter, what makes them different from so many other bands, might be the feeling that produces: A sense of exaltation. That’s the point; as Lala explains, “there’s actually a melody to the Hare Krishna mantra” inside the music.
Presidence
Originally issued on two CDs on the Paw Tracks label, Precedence is Ryan’s favorite Excepter album, full of wild details and moods. It’s also their most musically ambitious, with relatively shorter vignettes and also the large-scale, album-side explorations of “OG” and the title track that come together as an integrated, epic form. Excepter is far on the punk side of electronic music, but the scale and unified feeling of Presidence is a hint of their prog side as well.
Displacer
Vinyl LP
Still a duo for the time being, Excepter keeps making big sounds. This album was recorded when the pair were still in Chicago, then painstakingly mixed. Lala’s sensibility—equal parts sensitivity to harmonies that comes from her classical ear-training, and her taste for the timbres of woodwind instruments and the phrasing that’s inherent from playing something that depends on breath—continues to expand the band’s sound, and they still surprise. This is maybe as close to a relatively normal pop album—heavier than usual with lyrics, most from Lala—as Excepter has yet made, every track song-based, or close to it. Expect surprises.
