Cactus Tractor

While examining the stylings of the new Kickstarter-funded Cactus Tractor album, this reviewer also perused the mighty blog of Cactus Tractor which confirmed the band to be both clever troubadours and confident naked apes, sans les “hangups” as a group-sex commando unit from a Harryhausen-era Hercules movie—this tidbit indicated by the ancient greek-costume clad Cactus Tractor pictorial in the companion booklet to Lydian Water Songs. In a moment of revelation related to said booklet, I recognized the violinist as almost certainly the same seen flying over her own handlebars after her violin case appeared to have violated her spokes in a not-as-funny-as-it-sounds single bicycle accident. “You show boat don't tell.” So, yeah. Smart, funny, Americana-weird with horns and a variety of modes from silly to sentimental. Come for the precision, stay for the bacchanal. (Geoffrey Plant) - Alibi

David Bashwiner is a professor of music theory at UNM, but you might recognize him as the singer and guitarist for local band Cactus Tractor. The Alibi spoke with him to discuss the double life of a musician and music theorist and how the two roles affect each other.

Alibi: Who is Cactus Tractor, and how did y’all start playing together?

David Bashwiner: We’re a music group of anywhere between 3 and 14 people; we live in Albuquerque. The three “core” people are me, Christy Cook and Stef Graner. We got together about three and a half years ago. Stef had been playing with Christy in a trio for a couple of years; I was hanging out with the two of them at the time. So we started playing every weekend at a coffee shop on Eighth Street and Mountain—Mr. Watson’s little place (now Boiler Monkey).

Can you tell us about the making of Lydian Water Songs?

It’s our second album. While not exactly a concept album, it’s more of a concept than, say, our previous [album, Cactus Tractor]. Once we had the title and started thinking about how to work with it, it became more and more of one. Once we made the [Kickstarter] goal, we had to prep the album quickly in order to get into the studio not much more than a week later. The studio we use is Empty House Studio, with Matthew Tobias as the engineer.
Once we got into the studio, stuff became even crazier, because we’d scheduled eight hours a day for five days in a row of two consecutive weeks. It ended up feeling like a 10-day-long road trip with Matthew and me both in the front seat and a rotating cast of crazy people in the back seat. So it was awesome. But I did have a bit of PTSD when it was over with!

Are the songs on Lydian Water Songs all written in the Lydian mode?

We considered calling the first album Lydian Water Songs, because we started noticing that virtually all the tracks had water references/themes in them, and a serious number of them were in Lydian mode. [the Lydian mode is a musical scale that contains an augmented fourth.] In making the second, we recognized that all the new songs were doing this too! “Under the Sky,” for instance, is just 100% in D Lydian. Stef’s “Woman Who’s Torn” is also Lydian. My song “I’ve Moved On” is one that was designed to be purposely “slippery” with respect to key, and I do a lot of this by way of things that “are” Lydian or “could be construed as” Lydian. At their best, the modes are like colors—they can blend into one another, contrast with one another, vary in hue and brightness.

What’s next for CT?

We’re actually planning to take the concept thing to the next level, to bring it in at the level of writing the songs, orchestrating them, coordinating them with one another—not to mention ordering them in a particular way, composing transitions between them, working out stage business related to the storyline, etc.

Next week, the theorist in Bashwiner speaks out. (Robin Babb) - Alibi

In last week’s issue, Alibi interviewed David Bashwiner about his musical career with local band Cactus Tractor. On Friday, Dec. 18, at 7:30pm, Bashwiner's folk ensemble plays the Outpost Performance Space (210 Yale SE). Cactus Tractor describes themselves as “a seven-person bohemian pop folk disco (beau-pop-faux-disc) band with four songwriters, toothsome harmonies and a multitude of fun, stringed and unstrung instruments.” For this week's interview though, we talked about his work in music theory.

Alibi: Can you talk a bit about your career at UNM?

David Bashwiner: I’ve been there five and a half years. It’s a tenure track position—this is the year I’m being reviewed for tenure—I actually just heard the department’s vote today, which was a unanimous positive! It doesn’t mean all the hurdles are cleared, because the vote just has to go up in the university. But definitely super awesome. I love the people I work with, and it seems like they at least like me!
My job is teaching music theory. To people who don’t know anything about music theory, I often say that it’s pretty much the grammar of music. Like, when you diagram sentences in school—label the adjectives and nouns and prepositions and such—you suddenly realize that you’ve been speaking in grammatically correct sentences all your life without ever really thinking about it. And you don’t consciously employ the rules of grammar when you’re speaking, but when you hear a sentence that’s grammatically incorrect you know that there’s something funny about it, intuitively. Everybody who really likes music is kind of parsing musical sentences as they listen all of the time, without necessarily knowing the “rules” of music theory. Just like with linguistic grammar, there’s this hugely complex set of operations that we do automatically when we’re listening to music, that we don’t have conscious access to.

What sort of research have you been doing while at UNM?

For the most part, my research is about the emotions that people get from music. Looking as much as possible into biological processes that are involved in those emotions. So, I like to ask people on the street why they feel the way they feel about a song; most of the time, people will say it’s because it reminds them of a certain person or a certain moment in their life. The thing is I don’t think that’s true. Neuroscience studies have proven that a massive percentage of the time, we don’t know why we feel the things we feel. When the conscious brain doesn’t know what the answer to a question is, sometimes it will try to logically figure out the answer, but more often than not, it will just make up a believable, understandable answer. It’s not that we’re lying to ourselves—it’s just that our emotions are almost entirely based in the subconscious. In reality, we have very little access to our feelings.

Do you feel that your approach to songwriting is more technical or theory-driven than other musicians you’ve worked with on account of your academic/theory background?

Definitely compared to some other musicians. Interestingly, I have always tried to keep my songwriting and pop music production pretty separate from my academic life, because I notice that I get extremely constricted when I start generating music for academic contexts. My creativity dries up. As a result, making songs and pop recordings is like “finger painting” for me—I’m purposely trying to be “primitive” in these processes of creation, not at all aiming for a certain product but trying to let my subconscious get some exercise and get into the spotlight a bit. I really try to turn off the analytical brain and engage more emotionally, especially when I’m writing music for film.
A lot of people’s first understanding of how emotionally affecting music can be comes from film. Like, in a horror movie, you automatically get anxious when those violins start speeding up. Did you have those emotional highs and lows in mind when you’ve written music for film in the past?
Yeah. It’s kind of like cooking: Everybody eats food, but when you cook food you kind of become the ultimate eater, as it were. You taste the recipe along the way and get the perspective of the consumer, as well as that of the producer. I’ll work with a song until it’s really emotionally powerful to me. When I first started writing music for film, I had trouble finding sources on composing emotionally impacting scores—there’s no manual on “How to Write Good Music for Horror Movies,” for instance. So I had to kind of cobble together a method from theory and philosophy, from texts that weren’t really focused on the composer’s perspective.

In what ways have you seen the fields of music theory and cognition change during the time you’ve been studying them?

Theory conferences have gotten more fun, I’m happy to say, in part because there are many more women and people of different ethnic, cultural and musical backgrounds attending. No longer is a talk about Schubert or Mozart deemed to be higher in register than a talk about punk or electronica. I saw a surprisingly good one recently on timbre (quality of sound) in Neutral Milk Hotel’s album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I still like Schubert, though. Don’t get me wrong. (Robin Babb) - Alibi

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In a way, water courses through much of the music of the dryland band Cactus Tractor.

In the process of writing the compositions for its self-titled debut album, the band realized that just about every song had water references – such as rain or rivers.

With its current second album, the Albuquerque-based band was aware that there were also many water themes running through it, said David Bashwiner, one of three musicians fronting Cactus Tractor.

That new album is titled “Lydian Water Songs.”

“Most songs are in major and minor modes. Lydian can be thought of as something similar,” Bashwiner said. “Some of those songs on the album are in part Lydian and with some it’s the whole thing. …We decided to make up an imaginary world of ancient Lydian people composing these songs.”

Bashwiner, Stef Graner and Christy Cook are in fact the band’s three main songwriters.

“Lydian Water Songs” could be considered a concept album, more so than its debut recording, he added.

Cactus Tractor will be in concert tonight at the Outpost Performance Space.

All 14 of the band’s musicians heard on the album will play in the concert.

However, Cactus Tractor isn’t always a big band. It can have – and will have in the concert – as few as three or five players depending on the song.

Bashwiner, who organized the band about 3½ years ago, acknowledged that it’s tough to describe its music.

“So we made up a genre – Bohemian-pop-folk-disco,” he said. “I like that you can’t really figure out what it is but it opens up a lot of possibilities.”

Bashwiner, an assistant professor of music at UNM, recommends that listeners come to the concert with an open mind. And open ears. - Albuquerque Journal

By Jonathan Baca.

With an eclectic sound that swings easily from folky blues-rock to bluegrass and country, and a live show consisting of seven members and 14 different instruments, Cactus Tractor is a serious band that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

The first time I saw Cactus Tractor perform, they were nowhere on my radar. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and summoned visions of cow skulls and tumbleweeds, sipping tequila and sunburn. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but what I saw truly blew me away. It was outdoors on a beautiful warm evening, in the soft summer twilight, and sharing a somewhat cramped stage were seven (yup, that’s 7) highly talented, well rehearsed and charming musicians. Throughout the night, they all kept moving around, swapping instruments, pulling out new ones, some I had never seen before, which I learned later they had invented themselves. Their set that night (and every time I’ve seen them since) was tight and energetic, spanning several genres from Americana and blues rock to country and bluegrass. Their music is a soundtrack to a cross-country road trip, conjuring dusty diners, sweet cherry pie and stargazing in the back of a pickup truck. I was hooked, and after buying their new self-titled debut album, I chatted up several members and made plans to interview them later.

Here, I thought, is a band halfway to great things. They clearly take their music very seriously, but unlike many musicians on their way to great things, they were incredibly approachable, and have a genuine desire to connect with people. And connect they have. Reaching out through the inter-web to their modest but extremely dedicated fan base, they raised around $4,500 through a Kickstarter campaign to finance their first full length album. It was money well spent. The self-titled album is a highly polished piece of work, recorded in Albuquerque at Empty House Records with producer and studio drummer Matthew Tobias, who, in the process of making the record, seemed to be absorbed into the band and now rounds out their rock solid rhythm section. The record sounds as good as anything coming out of major labels, proving that Cactus Tractor’s brand of bottom up, do-it-yourself business is looking more and more like the future of the music industry, a bright light at the end of the dark tunnel of bankrupt record labels and shit-flavored sludge oozing out of Clear Channel radio stations. After seeing one performance and listening to the record a couple times, I wanted to learn more about the band, so I caught up with front men and founding members David Bashwiner, Christy Cook, and Stef Graner before a gig at Burt’s Tiki downtown.

I was very surprised to learn that I was the first writer to interview or write about the band, which only increased my feeling that I had discovered a hidden gem in the desert dust. I was also surprised to learn that the three of them were all immigrants to the Duke City, and like so many others, had quickly fallen in love with the place, finding a cozy little home among the bars and bands of Burque. “Bands in this town are like amoebas. What’s it called when you’re trading chromosomes? Recombination. That’s how the scene is around here,” Bashwiner said, talking about the friendly and often incestuous Albuquerque scene, where everyone knows everyone and has probably played music with them at some point. “I think Albuquerque has got the most welcoming music scene in the world. It’s really just fun I think, being a band in Albuquerque, and everybody is so inclusive and loving here,” Cook said. That close-knit community has carried Cactus Tractor a long way, manifesting most clearly in their amazingly successful Kickstarter campaign.

Instead of going the usual route, coughing up a whole lot of their own cash and hoping to someday break even, they decided to reach out and let their loyal and generous fans take ownership of their fandom and plop down a donation. “It definitely feels like the people who are donating are a part of your art. It’s more like energy than money. It’s this weird thing, because everybody who donated to our campaign received an album. So it was kind of like they were pre-ordering, but it was more like they were just excited to be a part of our project,” Cook said. But it’s not like the band just sat back and waited for the cash to come rolling in. In their classic DIY frontier fashion, Bashwiner and the gang came up with some creative ways to pay back their generous co-conspirators, washing people’s cars, raffling off homemade dolls made in their own images (only smaller and cuddlier), and even delivering singing telegrams. “It’s funny, it didn’t feel like free money, it definitely felt like we worked our asses off for it,” Bashwiner said. In the process of coming up with inventive incentives and connecting with their fans in ever more personal ways, he said that the campaign itself became a creative process, a collaboration between the band and the community that in the end transcended the music they were trying to make. “As we made the album, we felt like there were people out there, some who are very close to us, who we’re making it for. It was so much more than just buying a record,” Bashwiner said.

Often they perform as Cactus Tractor with just the three of them, acoustic style for house shows, coffee shops and other small, intimate venues. However, their fully-formed rock n’ roll Voltron consists of seven members total. Brandon Baca is another dedicated guitar player, Samuel Sullivan serves up some sultry harmonica, Paul Hunton sings a song or two in addition to bass and guitar duties, and Matthew Tobias’ drumming is the rock solid foundation that the entire 100 room mansion is built on. “Seven members?” you may say, “I’ve seen that before, nothing special.” But on top of guitar, bass and vocals, Bashwiner, Cook and Graner play a mind blowing ten instruments between them. Banjo, mandolin, piano, fiddle, saw, ukulele, washboard, and charango are all in heavy rotation. Rounding out this circus of sound are two homemade instruments, the hula-horn and chupper-horn. The first is basically what it sounds like, just a piece of tubing hooped like a hula, that Christy blows into like a bugle, producing a limited but surprisingly clear and powerful range of notes. The second is played by Graner, and is essentially the same thing with a kazoo as a mouthpiece. By now you might be starting to comprehend the sheer spectacle and fun that is a live Cactus Tractor performance. Seeing these well-trained hooligans running around stage between songs, swapping and strapping and pulling new instruments out of nowhere like magicians truly has to be seen in person. The grand total of 14 instruments, in addition to the sharp and shiny three part harmonies, result in an amazingly rich and textured sound.

When asked about the dizzying number of instruments they play, Cook had a pretty straightforward answer. “I think we basically didn’t want anyone playing the same instrument, so we all had to learn a bunch of instruments. And then there are a couple instruments that are a little less traditional that rotate through, like the Hula-Horn and the saw, the washboard and different things like that, and those are kind of just for fun,” she said. Oh, and as an afterthought she mentioned that she had just bought a trumpet, which will appear on stage soon I’m sure. Although all the trading and tuning can definitely be a challenge live, Graner finds that all the different sounds at their disposal open up new avenues to songwriting. “You write different songs depending on what instrument you’re starting with,” she said. “Chords played on a piano, as opposed to a banjo or mandolin, can lead you in a totally different direction.”

Cactus Tractor is a band that takes songwriting very seriously. Writing duties are split between Bashwiner, Cook, Graner and Hunton, and all four sing lead vocals and harmonies. The three founding members recently attended a songwriting workshop in Texas, returning with an even deeper appreciation of the art of the song. “The first time I recognized how amazing of an art the song is….it isn’t as respected as painting or sculpture, symphonic composition or making a movie or something like that. I think it’s because we all like songs, and they’re simple verbally and musically. So I think we tend to underestimate how difficult it is to write a really powerful song, and how hugely powerful an effect it can have on the emotions,” Bashwiner said. “They are just little three to five minute combinations of harmony, words, narrative, this storytelling element, and a little bit of melody in the voice. And it is something that lasts your whole life and is this really really deep art that has gone back maybe forever.” With so many cooks in the kitchen, they admit that things can get a little crazy, but as they move forward they are beginning to get a better handle on themselves as individual songwriters and as a group. Learning and playing each others’ songs, and now writing new ones together, is a very intimate experience, Bashwiner said.

A song is a reflection of the writer, a little piece of themselves broken off and molded together with melody and rhythm, and sharing and writing together has brought the members closer together. “Recording the record, songs we had mostly written before we formed, was kind of like getting to know each other. And now learning our new songs, this is a little bit like ‘who are we in relation to one another,’ and kind of taking these relationships to the next level, learning who we are,” Bashwiner said.

The world has only barely started getting to know Cactus Tractor, and I think it’s safe to say that there is a great deal more to be heard from these creative talents. As a fan, I can’t wait to see what else the band has in store for its ever-enlarging group of admirers, what else they choose to share with the world. Their music speaks to a hopeful, genuine and un-cynical side of me, honoring the rich history of American music and songwriting and celebrating the simple things in life; like an outdoor concert on a warm summer night, where the whole crowd is dancing in pairs to the sweet, smooth sound of a fiddle. - Conversations With a Saber Tooth Tiger: Stories With Teeth

By Peri Pakroo.
I’m still a bit of a zombie after last night’s Cactus Tractor CD release party, which filled the vast Sister Bar and kept the crowd dancing well past last call. The bar had turned up the lights, it was 2am, and no one wanted it to end. This is the power of spectacle that Cactus Tractor conjures. They’re fun, sexy, flamboyant, and even a bit spooky at times. (Seriously Paul Hunton’s makeup was legitimately freaking me out.) I’ve been a fan of two members of Cactus Tractor—Christy Cook and Steph Graner—ever since they were recommended to me and I booked them for my book release party in 2010. Back then Christy and Steph and a third member, Bethany Delahunt, were performing as the Albuquerque Boys Choir: no boys, just three incredibly talented young women with killer songs and harmonies to make you swoon. Since then they’ve joined forces with David Bashwiner and a seemingly endlessly rotating group of other performers, and their charm grows each time I see them. Before last night’s show I was excited about Cactus Tractor playing Pyragraph’s ReLaunch party, and now I’m beside myself. David—Cactus Tractor’s guitarist, singer and songwriter (just one of ‘em)—gave me the lowdown on the band.

1. What’s your act?

Cactus Tractor is a multi-person Bohemian Pop Folk Disco (beau-pop-faux-disc) band based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We have four songwriters, sexy harmonies and a crazy multitude of fun stringed and unstrung instruments. These include, but are not limited to, the hula horn (invented by Christy), the musical saw (which is dangerous), the violin (which is also dangerous if you’re standing just to the left), the accordion (which is heavy), the charango (which attracts a lot of attention despite its small stature—much like its player, Stef!), buckets-and-buckets-full of harmonicas (which often fall on the ground and cause great consternation), frogs (which croak when struck with a stick—try it out!), and tea towels (which, laid artfully over a snare drum, make for a proper English quiet-funky kit sound). We love playing farmers’ markets, house shows, cafes, beer gardens, petting zoos, nursing homes, and just about anyplace where we will find teenagers uncomfortable to be with their parents.

2. Tell me about your backgrounds as artists/performers.

Our band assembled for the first time in May 2012 to play an art show held by the VSA Day Arts program, which provides education and training in the arts for adults with developmental disabilities. We played songs that VSA artists had written (assisted by Stef, our charango-mandolin-banjo-accordion player). Christy and Stef had already been playing together as two of the three members of the Albuquerque Boys Choir . Tim Psomas from the VSA also joined us on bass, Stef’s hubbie Samuel joined us on harmonica, Brandon on guitar, and so on. Along the way, we’ve had just about all our close friends play with us, including Monika Skiba, Jason Warshof and Bethany Delahunt. Currently we’re seven people: Stef Graner, Samuel Sullivan, Christy Cook, Paul Hunton, Brandon Baca, Matthew Tobias, and me. Oh, and my dog, Orson. That’s eight. Not-people. Or people-and-not-people.

3. What was the worst gig you ever played? Give me all the juicy bits.

I don’t want to insult the nice person who offered us the gig, because it was a charity event, and we were really happy to be a part of it. I’ll just say that that person probably didn’t check it out with the actual organizers of the event. As a result, there was a full-time DJ already scheduled, on an enormous stage, and we were asked to sit off to the side, about a quarter of a mile away, and play acoustically in a far-off field, almost out of sight, certainly beyond earshot. I think people assumed we were there to mooch off the free pizza. But it was good pizza.

4. Who are your favorite performers at the moment?

I saw Meredith Wilder and Sage Harrington perform last week as a duo for the first time, and they blew me away. I also always love hearing Le Chat Lunatique perform. We came across two amazing songwriters in Santa Fe last week, David Berkeley and Larkin Gayl. And at the same event (the Southwest Regional Folk Alliance), we got to meet Dalis Allen, the producer of my favorite festival in the world, the Kerrville Folk Festival. She’s not a performer exactly, but she’s a sort of meta-performer, getting together in one place some of the most amazing performers I’ve ever heard. That festival is a must-check-out for anyone who’s not afraid of a little road trip to Texas. That is, of tall people and steak.

5. Thanks for playing the Pyragraph fundraiser. What’s the most helpful tip you could share with aspiring performers?

This tip comes more from my academic work (I’m a professor as well). I was studying the evolution of musicality in the human species, and I began recognizing how social music is. We tend to think of notes as being first and foremost in music, but I started to recognize that the strengthening of social relationships is the real aim of music. Or at least, that seems to be the reason it exists in our species. For aspiring performers, I recommend you play music with people you like, rather than only with people who put the right notes in the right place at the right time. And reciprocally, whoever it is in your life that you want to grow closer to, play music with them. Everyone is musical. Draw it out of them, and you’ll draw them out. Perhaps this will sound like silly advice. I’m okay with that. Play music with me and maybe you’ll see where I’m coming from. Or at least come to our Pyragraph show! - Pyragraph

[by John Leach]

Albuquerque’s Cactus Tractor has been called a lot of things: Bohemian pop - Avante Gypsy Trance, Hippie Bubblegum - but that’s because their sound is so unique that nobody can quite nail it down. That is also what makes this band and this record a ‘must hear’ for the waning days of
2014.

The sound Cactus Tractor creates is all about blending their seven parts into one. Even the cover art shows the seven disparate parts creating one whole. They’re not so much a group of musicians gathering as an amoeba of musicians expanding.

Vocals get traded off from guys to gals, then from solo voicing to close harmonizing and back to solo voice mixed with wind sounds from accordions & blues harps that mimic singing. This happens almost seamlessly. How many people are singing and when would take a whole other article. It makes for a big listening experience.

Musically the strings come and go just like the aforementioned vocals. Mandolin, guitar, fiddle, ukelele, acoustic bass - if it has strings it makes into the record somewhere. Drummer Matthew Tobias deserves a mention for giving all this eclectic excitement a place to stand. His mellow mallet & brush style never interferes with the lead instruments & voices. His work supports and accents all the layers above.

For all of the Happy Hippieness going on here, some of the lyrics are surprisingly dark. A song like “Meat Hooks”, while a love song, sends a darker image than might be expected from these modern mountain troubadours. Another track spends a long time singing about sharpening a knife…..

Being that this group is from New Mexico the high desert sound makes its presence known. You just can’t make desert music without a lot of reverb and it’s in there when it’s needed.

This is an exciting group with a fresh & unique sound. You don’t need to be a hippie to enjoy Cactus Tractor but you do need to be able to open up your head and let a new sound in.

If you only listen to one song from this record, make it “Flood”.

While we’re at it - What exactly is a hula horn anyway????? - Brevard Live