In the past 12 months Califone has played only one show in Chicago–a January benefit at the Hideout for soundman Gary Schepers. In fact in the past year they’ve played just three shows total, notwithstanding the Thrill Jockey reissue of their debut album, Roomsound, in February; the other two were in March at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The next 12 months will be different, though: the band has completed what will be its first studio disc in nearly three years, Roots & Crowns, due on Thrill Jockey in early October, and will begin touring heavily come autumn. On top of that they’re preparing at least one new disc in their “Deceleration” series of silent-film sound tracks, as well as Everybody’s Mother Volume 2, a follow-up to a limited-edition odds-and-sods collection that front man Tim Rutili sold while on tour with Calexico and Iron & Wine late last year.
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Califone’s present fallow period began in late 2004, after seven months of on-and-off touring in support of Heron King Blues–their best-received and best-selling record so far. While his own band was on the back burner, Rutili produced the Freakwater album Thinking of You; all four members of Califone guested, and percussionist Joe Adamik even went on the road as Freakwater’s drummer. Multi-instrumentalist Jim Becker toured with the Dirty Three, and drummer Ben Massarella worked on a forthcoming disc from Phil Spirito’s group Orso. In June 2005 Rutili moved to LA, where he’s picked up some sound-track work for film and TV and has a shorter trip to visit his son, who lives with his mother in Tempe, Arizona.
There are a handful of guests on the album–including bassist Will Hendricks, also of the Lofty Pillars and a frequent Simon Joyner sideman, and the horn section from the Bitter Tears–but Deck, Califone’s honorary fifth member, is by far the biggest influence on its sound. “The songs are really heavily manipulated by Brian during mixing,” says Rutili. “It’s a combination between subtracting and enhancing and manipulating these sounds to bring the song to a different place–that’s a big thing on this record. There are not a lot of things that were left in their natural state.” Despite all the chopping up and reconfiguring the tracks underwent, though, the disc’s gauzy, murky sound is surprisingly naturalistic overall–there are only a handful of spots where the digital trickery is exposed.
Likewise in the works is a Califone tour documentary, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, by first-time filmmakers Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Solan Jensen. They’re currently editing down 250 hours of footage shot during U.S. and European tours in 2004, and expect the film to receive theatrical and DVD releases sometime in 2007. Also in 2007, Thrill Jockey will reissue an expanded version of the self-titled 1992 debut disc from Red Red Meat, Rutili’s old band with Deck and Massarella.
