An Interview with Randy McStine
Randy McStine has been playing music since he was five years old, and he’s been a name to know in the Binghamton music scene almost since the beginning. As he’s grown as a person and musician, so too has his list of accomplishments. We met up recently at a local café to talk shop:
TRIPLE CITIES CAROUSEL: Let's talk about your latest album, Blank. You go from mellow to heavy from track to track - some Beatles-ish, some like Nirvana. Production is very tight. It's vaguely psychedelic in places. And you've got members of Miles Davis' band and XTC on it.
RANDY MCSTINE: I do, yeah. It's an honor. Adam Holzman is the keyboard player. We worked together with an artist named Jane Getter. Adam's incredible. He played in one of the last incarnations of Miles' band, and currently plays with an artist named Steven Wilson from the band called Porcupine Tree. He's kind of at the forefront of the newer progressive-rock kind of scene. And then Dave Gregory from XTC did some string arrangements for me. I'm honored, really. I'm a huge fan!
TCC: The first time I saw you play live was at The Haunt in Ithaca when you were about, I guess, 13. You were playing blues then. What prompted your shift to the more progressive and ambient end of things?
RM: I always grew up with progressive rock in the household amongst a lot of other things, including blues and hard rock and whatnot. I think [it was] when I hit my later teens, when I started to focus on writing my own material, and specifically, lyrics. It's been an interesting journey for me, going through the more ambient side of things, things like Brian Eno and that sort of thing. So, with this record, I was interested in creating sort of a singer-songwriter style album that would incorporate those kinds of ambient and progressive elements in the background. So you have a real focus on the narrative part of it, which is the acoustic guitar and the vocals, and then in the background a lot of atmospheric guitar stuff that kind of unfolds as the songs go. And on repeated listens, you can hopefully pick out more details each time.
TCC: Tell me more about your old prog-rock band Lo-Fi Resistance. It included members of Spock's Beard, King's X, and even Kate Bush's band. The sound is a lot more straight-ahead; reminds me a bit of Rush.
RM: Lo-Fi Resistance was basically a solo project that I decided to attach a band name to. And throughout three studio albums, the first two specifically - the third one I did completely solo - but the first two with various collaborations of the people that you mentioned. That project was kind of a rebirth for me creatively, coming out of the era that you were talking about - which was playing with blues bands, and also writing more instrumental rock kind of stuff, like Jeff Beck/Joe Satriani-style. Once I got away from that, I started to focus more on my interests in a lot of pop-rock sensibilities as well, from people like Todd Rundgren to artists like Crowded House and Big Star and this kind of ‘70s power-pop kind of thing. So Lo-Fi Resistance was me pulling together all of these elements to try to make something cohesive out of my interests across the board. So there's a lot of new experimentation from me at the time that I started that project in 2009.
TCC: About another project of yours, Future Nostalgia - your latest album under that name, House Concert, is all ambient. Parts remind me a bit of Brian Eno's Music For Airports.
RM: Yeah, Future Nostalgia was this brief experiment. It was basically a collection of recordings that I had done dating back [from] 2008 to about 2015 that I just kind of had sitting there, and there was really no context for it. With Bandcamp as a site to be able to just put this stuff out there, I decided to compile all of it into, I think, seven or eight releases. I just spit 'em all out on the same day! I just put 'em out there. They exist. Not many people have found them, but they're there!
TCC: Well, I found them, and I'm glad I did!
RM: Yeah!
TCC: What plans do you have for the future?
RM: Right now the release of Blank is pretty fresh. It's an independent release, so I have a lot of work to do to promote it and get people to check it out. I have another more ambient-style release coming up very soon called Anachronism. That stems from a single live session that I did in Johnson City called Business District.
TCC: Oh, yeah, Business District. Hunter Davidsohn, yeah.
RM: Yeah, so in June of 2016 I booked a session there. We set up a few microphones in the room. I had him hit “record,” and out of this 90-minute improvised session I took that home and just kind of listened through it and made some strategic cuts and kind of put it all together into this one-hour piece. But it's all completely improvised and very, I would say, ambient, and even sort of industrial sounds, and mostly all guitar with a little bit of percussion. But that's coming soon, and between that release and Blank, it kind of completes the picture of that style, of what I'm kind of doing right now. I really just want to get out and start combining those into a show that is both singer-songwriter oriented and very tech and improvisational, guitar loops and that sort of thing. And I actually have my eyes on doing house-concert style shows. Just small events - get 20 to 30 people together and have a night of storytelling and experimentation and all sorts of stuff.
TCC: Sounds fascinating. You mean literal house concerts?
RM: I do. I'm looking to do more of those because I've done some of them in the past and I like having the ability to craft a show from top to bottom and have control over the environment - that I can provide a proper context for the music, rather than rolling the dice with a random club and showing up and 80 percent of the people there could either care less or you're kind of a nuisance in the background. I want to find a way to give proper context to the material so that it really can maximize the potential.
TCC: What about your upcoming Ransom Steele Tavern show?
RM: My Ransom Steele Tavern show is on June 23rd - it's a Friday. And that's with John Kanazawich and some local musicians here. We've had a duo since 2005, and since the close of last year we've been doing these sort of quarterly shows at Ransom Steele Tavern. We pick a theme and do a performance - a one-night-only set list. So, at the end of 2016 we did a tribute to some of the artists who passed away in 2016. The last show we did, we did Jethro Tull's Aqualung in its entirety. So this show is going to be based around the iconic Woodstock and Isle of Wight festivals of '69, 1970. We're going to be doing stuff from The Who and Hendrix. Basically, there was a lot of artists to choose from. So we're putting together kind of a master set list and we're going to have a lot of guests come up and do little singer-songwriter cameos. Somebody will do Kris Kristofferson or John Sebastian or Donovan. That sort of thing. We're getting a bunch of local talent together to contribute to the show and it's going to be really fun. We've never done a show like this before. It's kind of a variety show, with us as the foundation.
TCC: Sounds like you've got a lot on your plate!
RM: For sure, yeah! But it keeps me looking forward, and I'm always looking to explore new territory for myself. It's fun. That's why I play music!
Randy McStine and Friends play Ransom Steele, located at 552 Main Street in Apalachin, on Friday, June 23rd at 8pm; tickets are $10. Further information can be found at ransomsteeletavern.com. More information about Randy and his music can be found on Facebook at randymcstinemusic, and at randymcstine.com; his new album, as well as Lo-Fi Resistance and Future Nostaligia recordings, can be found at bandcamp.com.
