Of or Like Water is a classical guitar duo made up of Omaha native Colin Hotz and West Virginian Kyle Douglas.  While studying together at the Manhattan School of Music, they quickly realized a musical chemistry, enjoying seemingly endless impromptu sessions.  A few years after graduating the two got together for a recording session at a beach house in Australia, and the duo’s debut album …and then vast silences was born.  Well, there was a whole lot more to it than that, but the album’s out now and available for purchase (you can email the band at oforlikewater@gmail.com to request a copy).  It features 70 minutes of music, a fusion of classical and modern styles that makes for quite a unique listening experience.  Hotz and Douglas were in NYC for a show recently, and they were kind enough to sit down with the Inflatable Ferret’s James Passarelli.

Inflatable Ferret: You guys met at Manhattan School of Music?

Colin Hotz: Yeah, we were in the same graduating class.

Kyle Douglas: I think we just realized we had similar interests early on, but we didn’t start playing together at first.  We just hung out, doing social things like drinking and what not.  One thing led to another, and we started doing improvisations, and for some reason it worked out well.

CH: Once we played together a couple times, it was like, “Okay, that’s kind of weird that it’s happening that way.”  And intuitively, we felt like it was working.

KD: And I think we both sort of felt each other’s angst and frustration with the classical world, so we supported each other with that.  We would just sit down and play songs and have a beer.  That was long before we started to write – well, I guess not that long.

CH: Well, we didn’t get into writing songs until after a year of playing together.  It was mostly just improv.  We were in a classical guitar duo as part of our curriculum at school, so we had to play traditional music.

KD: And I think there was a lot of fine-tuning in that.

CH: Absolutely.  That made us tighter as performers.

Inflatable Ferret: Well, your music is kind of all over the place.  But it’s kind of “ambient” – mostly instrumental, and it’s all made from just two guitars, right?

CH: Right.  And it’s mostly live, on-the-floor recordings.  And we were just talking about how the raw tracks are pretty bland.  So, part of the mastering is bringing out certain frequencies and lowering others.  Classical guitar is a really hard instrument to record.  It’s very finicky, and it can come off sounding really dry.

KD: And nasal.

CH: Yeah, very nasal.  So, the challenge was really to recreate on the album what we hear in the room.  Because when you’re playing in a room that has really good acoustics it fills your whole ear.  It’s like sound comes from all directions, whereas on a recording you’re listening to something through speakers, and you kind of lose that intimacy that we experience recording it.

KD: And I think because we play in and unusual spaces we need to be creative in the recording process because we need to figure out how are we going to make it work.  If doors are open, if windows are open, if the space is big or small – we need to figure out how to maximize the sound.  It’s in unusual spaces because it’s all environmental response and it sort of happens organically.  We react to the environment and whatever’s going on around us and try to put that into sound.

CH: A pretty good example of that is a track on the album called “It Would Be Rude (To Let The Birds Sing Alone).”  And that whole track – we weren’t even planning for the recording.  As I remember it, we were kind of winding the day down.  It was dusk, and we opened up the screen door, and all of the sudden the birds just started going crazy.  And the whole time we were there, we had maybe only heard a couple birds, but it wasn’t like this.  And we just looked at each other, hit “record”, and let that moment be what it was and kind of create this subtle thing coming up out of it, and that track is the perfect example.  It starts very quiet and slow, and by the end of it it’s got this huge, round sound, and it just sounded like the birds were doing things in rhythm with us.  I listened to it a lot, and I can’t even believe that happened.  You can’t write it that way.  The experience was just so unique.

KD: And it’s We were in a beach house, and between us and the ocean was just this canopy, and they just went crazy.

Inflatable Ferret: They wanted on encore.

CH Yeah, they did.

Inflatable Ferret: Was one of you more involved with the mastering side of things after you recorded it?

CH: Yeah, I definitely took on that task.  I went back to Omaha – well, we were in Australia for three weeks, but we really only recorded for eight days – so, I got back to Omaha and basically spent five and six hour days editing, because we had about three hours of material.  When you’re doing improves and doing them based on environmental things you’re going to have a lot of bad stuff.  That’s just the fact of it.  You take chances and you’re going to make mistakes.  So, part of that process was just filtering and finding out what we wanted on there in the first place.  And then it was about making them sound right – bringing certain levels up and organizing them in the proper order.  It took a lot of time – from July, August, September, and I probably sent Kyle a copy of it by October?  So, it was about a five-month process, pretty intensive.  And it was really my first effort doing mastering, producing, and organizing for a full-length album.  I had been in rock bands before and recorded, but someone else was always doing that other stuff – I was just playing guitar.  So, it was nice for me to be more hands-on, but there was a lot of trial and error.

Inflatable Ferret: More so than anyone we’ve ever interviewed, it would probably be kind of hard to tag your influences.  You talked about frustration with the classical world, but are there any classical guitarists you would cite as influences?

KD: Yeah.  And, you know, it’s a frustration, but it’s a sickness.  Classical musicians are sick (smiles).  We were just talking about that – about how there’s so much pain involved in doing all this work and preparation for a recital, and, in reality, all you want is to be done with the concert.  We were talking about how fun it is to write songs, get up and perform them, and have a good time in the process.  When I was playing I did mostly modern 20^th century composers.  Lots of minimalism – Steve Reich, John Cage, people like that.

CH: As far as performers go, classical guitars that I’ve seen perform that are really inspirational…David Russell – he’s from Scotland, one of the top classical guitarists.  Composer-wise in the classical guitar world – [Cuban composer-guitarist] Leo Brouwer – he definitely has a very distinct sound.

KD: I think with people like him, because we played so much of his music, it ends up becoming engrained in your hands.  He uses very specific, idiomatic patterns that just fit very well.  And I think that comes out in improvisations and sort of everything we do.  All these different composers come together, especially Brouwer, because it’s so specific to our instrument.

CH: [Brouwer] grew up as a kid playing guitar, and he is just very good at finding things that are easy for the left hand.  The right is a little more complicated with his music – I feel like that’s where the technical challenge is.  His left hand patterns just make sense.  First of all, it sounds really awesome once you get into that style.  And then you just realize that the sound is really just dictated by the physicality of playing it.  So, I think as far as being a classical guitarist and being influenced by other stuff, I’d say Brouwer just influenced me just in the way I start to identify shapes with sounds.

Inflatable Ferret: Any rock influence?

CH: Oh, absolutely.  Thanks to my mother, I grew up listening to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix – all the things you’d consider to be standard music listening.  “Alright, you’re a kid?  You like music?  You need to listen to these three people.”  Of course, there’s a bigger list than that.  But as far as what you hear on the CD, I’d say we’re more influenced by where we’re from – that kind of grassy blues.  You’ll hear these pentatonic blues patterns in there or a folky kind of sound.  More of like an Americanized sound.

KD: Yeah, and he’s from Omaha – I’m from Appalachia.  So, you can’t help but be inundated with all this folk, bluegrass, and country music.  Even people like, well Bob Dylan, of course, but also Woody Guthrie.

CH: Also, Odetta.  You know, we play music based on environmental influences, and it’s kind of like stream of consciousness, like we’re channeling, not in any sort of crazy, philosophical way.  But not turning your brain off, but kind of letting your brain lead the way.  I’m still a huge Phish fan, and they definitely influence me the most as far as how I approach improvisation.  Their whole thing is “less is more”.  The less notes you play individually the better it sounds when you play all together, because you’ve got this really big texture, even though you’re minimizing what you’re doing.  And I was very drawn to that idea of the creative process, so they’re the biggest modern influence on my performance.

KD: And it’s the idea of long form improvisation.  When we first started doing improv the songs would be like 40 minutes long.  (laughs) And that’s not reality.  No one’s going to listen to that unless they’re on some kind of serious drug.  But once we cut that down to 20 minutes, 15 minutes, five minutes, and even some songs are less than a minute.  So, it’s interesting taking that idea of a long form improvisational piece and shrinking it down to make it palatable for listeners.

CH: Because we would definitely dig doing 40-minute improves.  We would listen to them and really enjoy it, mostly because we were the ones doing it – it’s kind of a self-centered satisfaction, I guess.  And it’s not like we make a compromise because we want people to like it.  We just understand that it’s more effective if we departmentalize, and I think Kyle said “more meat.”

Inflatable Ferret: You guys are self-releasing your album.  How do you go about putting yourself out there?

CH: It’s not easy.  I mean, it’s constant frustration.  You have to be very accepting of rejection, which I don’t think anybody in the planet likes.  But unfortunately, that’s what you get a lot of, whether you’re doing music or visual art.

KD: Any sort of freelance where you have to push yourself.

CH: Well, of course, how a record label works is it has money and they spend all the money on the artist.  Basically what we are is a very internalized version of that – it was all our own money going into buying recording equipment, to go down to Australia, to have all these materials, to do the packaging, pay for the replication, and we basically invest in ourselves.  It’s just us trying to have our place on the Internet, and if people want to come and they listen and like it that’s great.  If they choose not to like it, that’s perfectly fine too.  At least we, as independent musicians, can say, “This is who we are.  And you don’t need to go through Columbia, or whatever record companies are even left.  You know, it’s such a dying industry.  They don’t know what to do or how to make money, so why even try to go that route?  Why try to get your foot in the door at a place that doesn’t have a clue how to react to the current musical climate?  And it levels the playing field for everybody else.  In theory, we could have just as much exposure as a guy who’s got 15 albums.

KD: You know that I think would be interesting, and what I hope happens, is once the word starts to spread a little bit and people become aware of our site – if people started to say,“I have something to contribute to this.  I think you guys would like this” and send us something, and they could be under the umbrella.

CH: Absolutely.  We would love it if friends of ours have an album that they would want to put on the site under the umbrella of Of or Like Water.  And it’s not so much that we’re recording it or producing it like a record company would, but –

KD: More like a collective.

Inflatable Ferret: So, do you guys have any gigs planned?

CH: Well, we just had this one at the Living Room.  And Kyle’s actually going to Australia for a while, so right now it’s open-ended.  We’re both going to look around for stuff, but I think it was just important getting the album out.  The gigs were just kind of icing on the cake at the last minute.  We would really play anywhere – classical music festivals, folk festivals, rock and roll festivals, which I think kind of ties in to our name a little bit.  Of or Like Water kind of has these implications – water is a very interesting element.  It’s liquid at room temperature.  Freeze it and it becomes hard.  Boil it and it’s a gas.  So, we’re trying to be able to do multiple different styles, venues, and festivals.

KD: And be comfortable doing it.  We’re as comfortable playing in a big recital hall as we are in a lounge.

To get a free copy of “…and then vast silences” register on The Inflatable Ferret on the righthand side of the homepage and email info@inflatableferret.com to request one.  We’ll send it for free!
To download Of or Like Water’s IF Exclusive, click here.

Thank you to Eric Nolette and Pat Wedlock for helping tape the interview.

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