Name: Mark Guiliana
Nationality: American
Occupation: Drummer, composer, educator, producer
Current release: Mark Guiliana's new studio album BEAT MUSIC 2.0, featuring Nicholas Semrad (keyboards), Stu Brooks (electric bass, electronics), Tim Lefebvre (electric bass), Gretchen Parlato (vocals), and Marley Guiliana (vocals) is out via Edition.

If this Mark Guiliana interview piqued your interest, and you would like to know more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Facebook, bandcamp, and Instagram.

For a deeper dive, read our earlier Mark Guiliana interview.



BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! seems to have captured a special moment, both for yourself as well as a really diverse group of listeners. Or, as a discogs comment puts it: “This is a 'must listen' album if you like music.” How do you look back on it?

I have very fond memories of the first BEAT MUSIC album and its rollout and all the shows we were playing around that time. I really learned so much and am so thankful for all the musicians on both the record and on the road.

It was really fulfilling, not only to make the record, but to realize that stuff live and see where it could go each night.

What prompted you to return to the world of that album?

These two records are, what, seven years apart. Which sounds very long. And I guess by definition, it is. But to be honest, it doesn't feel like a return in the sense that I don't feel like I ever left. For me, it's always been the beat music world, and that language is always occupying a pretty large part of my brain.

Whether it gets communicated in the more literal way that it might appear in BEAT MUSIC 2.0 is another question, but it's it's definitely all of those influences - and that way of thinking is present in everything I'm doing.

The title BEAT MUSIC 2.0 suggests the new release is not so much a follow-up but an update. Can you talk about that a bit?

I I like how you put it. More of an update than a than a follow up.

I just think of it as a snapshot of who I am today, both compositionally and in terms of the playing and all the production elements.

I think of each record I make as just trying to be the most honest representation of who I am in that moment. So I hope I hope this record is doing that as well.

I would assume that for you as a drummer, the beat is always particularly important. In which way, then, would you say does you approach to writing “BEAT MUSIC” differ from how you would “usually” write?

When I was younger, the compositional process for BEAT MUSIC or, say, the jazz quartet was normally quite different. But as I've gotten older, the compositions usually stem from the same place.

As I'm discovering the components of a new piece, oftentimes through harmony first, there are always little points in the process that tend to be a fork in the road to either a more production-heavy sound or a BEAT MUSIC world, or a more acoustic environment.

So I'm just trying not to maybe force a new idea into a certain environment until it has kind of proven to me that it wishes to go there.

I've long been intrigued by bands or ensembles where the drummer is the leader and/or main composer. In as far as it is possible to generalise, what do you think changes in terms of the music or performance in these situations?

You know, drummers as leaders or the main composer, is something I'm always aware of. And I'm always curious to hear the music from that perspective.

That said, to be honest, my goal is for no one to know. I don't want the compositions or the way we played to give anything away. The last thing I want is any artificial emphasis on the drums or exaggerated emphasis on the drumming, both in the writing and the performance.

So, if anything, I'm a little allergic to some of the generalizations, and I try to just make it about the the music in general.

From the credits, it seems as though at least some of the contributions were recorded in separate locations. What was the process like and how do you get that desired human touch for remote collaborations?

Yes, this record was made in a few different rooms. But I think the most important thing for me is that the musicians on the record are longtime friends and longtime collaborators.

I'd like to believe that although we're not necessarily playing in the same room in every instance, since at this point we've been playing music together for decades, that connection and that bond will appear and that it will persevere through any recording environment.

So, I'm trusting and leaning on the the musical relationships to to create the optimal feeling in the music.

In our previous interview, we talked about the importance of the space for any performance. What is the 606 like and why did you feel it was the right place to record the album?

The only thing I recorded at 606 were the drums, but it's a really inspiring studio.

The live room is giant and has a lot of character. There's a lot of percussion on this album, too, that I played. That all happened in the big room at 606. For me, I can hear the room, the sound of the room when I hear those percussion parts, and I'd like to believe it adds a lot of character.

Obviously, it's the Foo Fighters studio, Dave Grohl's studio. So I'd be lying if I said, that energy and just knowing the music that has gone on in there, didn't influence my choices and trying to get some of that spirit into my own music.

There's a great social media post with you in front of a magnificent Ampeg V9. Was that just a great photo opportunity or did those get used in the production somehow?  

The bass parts had already been recorded for the album, but we reamped them, which, if you don't know, is a technique where you can send the recorded information out through another source, and then you record, with a microphone, what's coming out of the amp.

So we did that for all the bass parts, and it definitely brought a different life to it.

Can you talk about these incredible layers of rhythmical crackling on “J.OHN,”?

The rhythmic crackling on “J.OHN,” - that was provided by Stu Brooks, who is a dear friend and and a collaborator.

I'm actually talking to you now from Dallas, Texas, where both Stu and I are on tour with an artist named Dominic Fike, we've been on the road for over a month now. And what a joy to get to play with Stu every night! He plays bass on the song "B EAT" on the album as well, but on several other tracks, he put electronic elements on to varying degrees, and brought his more production-minded craft to the table.



I am very grateful for him. I believe what you're hearing on that track is a part of Stu's magic.

Any idea how he created these sounds?

I really don't know exactly, technically - although I was in the same room! It was a bit over my head.



I was talking to Richard Spaven, your label mate on Edition, recently, and he told me that he loved “small bass drums and pitched up snares” and “dark expressive cymbals.”  I found that fascinating, as I also love precisely that sound. What is your own ideal when it comes to your drum sound?

To be honest, I do not have an ideal. I think I'm not holding too tight onto one sound.

I am just more interested in trying to craft the best sound for each specific musical moment, each song, each record. I really want the music to tell me what sound it's wishing for, and then I try to create that sound - as opposed to me insisting a particular sound onto the music.

Many recording engineers have remarked that the drums can be particularly hard to capture. How did you approach the micing for BEAT MUSIC 2.0?

You know, the the drums were recorded by Oliver Roman, who's the engineer at Studio 606, and I trusted him with all those choices. He's got a great ear, and of course the incredible gear at the studio.

Nothing fancy or out of the ordinary. Just trying to capture a very clean and clear picture, and you know, with as much character - and again the spirit of the room - as possible.

I find the album quite fascinating in that the sound world it creates is very futuristic, but the performances are very organic. When it comes to electronic tools, how and to what ends do you personally prefer to use them?

It's interesting. There are plenty of electronic textures on the record, but none of them are automated. So it it feels everything is performance. Everything is coming from a human delivery system.

And so from the source, it is all the same. It is all organic. Some choices from the source go in an acoustic direction, which might be the drums or percussion elements, and some might go a more electronic route through a synthesizer or some effects pedals.

But for me, it's important that they're starting from the same place, and that's providing the continuity.

How, would you say, has technology, such as drum machines and sequencers, impacted the way rhythm is created and perceived? In which way has it been a concrete influence on your own approach?

Drum machines and sequencers have definitely impacted my own playing. I'm heavily influenced by Aphex Twin and Square Pusher and many, many DJs and lots of music really that incorporated these more sequenced elements.

What drew me to the people I mentioned were not their tools. What drew me to them was their spirit and their personality. The tools are just helping to express these and get into the world.



So I think I try not to get distracted by the technology. I'm trying to really focus on the the human spirit that is being conveyed. I feel like that's where the connection can happen.

Because the album feels very electronic in many respects, I would really be interested on how you experienced the rise of electronic music throughout the 90s and into the 00s, with genres like techno, house, drum n bass and hip hop moving into the mainstream.  

I was introduced to drum and bass music in the late '90s. Specifically, my door in was Square Pusher, and that really kicked the door open to many of his contemporaries, and a lot of the rhythmic elements on those records, where specifically the drumming on a lot of those records is nearly impossible, or sometimes clearly impossible, to execute on the drums in real time. You know, by one drummer alone.

So in the pursuit of some of those rhythms and those beats and things, I definitely failed and landed in a unique place and tried to explore what was possible and what music was hiding in these other places where I found myself so heavily influenced. Always trying to keep an ear to the ground as to what's happening.

In The KLF's The Manual, there's a thought experiment about two singles getting released at the same time, both consisting of nothing but a four to the floor bassdrum. The claim is that one of them will undeniably be better than the other one. Would you have a suggestion about what that difference could consist of?

This is very interesting, although, you know, I'd have to spend more time thinking about this.

The thing that comes to mind initially is that I think it's less about what the actual difference would be and more about the human need or the human temptation to always compare things. Inevitably, in comparison, preferences will appear.

Sometimes I think people rush to judgment. We're always rushing to compare things, be it our experiences or food in a particular city, or you know, art. In doing so, we can sometimes exaggerate a difference in our own minds to support something we're feeling. Instead of developing an inability to just let things be as they are and receive them as they are, without having to put our own labels and overlay our own concepts or ideas over what's happening.

So I think as we start to lay our own ideas over something, that's when they can become more and more different. At the core, it's a helpful exercise to try to look for similarities instead – the common threads in things.