Basking in Obscurity with Jason Zumpano

Long into a boozy conversation about his work, Jason Zumpano makes a stinging observation about mine.

"If you're not consciously influenced by the Beach Boys, it's a weird thing to see in print," he says, about a split second after I finish comparing his last record to the Beach Boys; specifically, their fractured and desolate 1967 album Smiley Smile. "I saw recently that someone compared my music to Beirut, but I don't think it sounds like it. It must be weird to write about music. It seems like you always have to compare it to something."

It's true, and it's a tough habit to shake. Then you come up against a thing like French Door, Zumpano's most recent record under the name The Cyrillic Typewriter. A baroque pop album minus the pop? A witty attempt at bite-sized minimalism? A pocket mindfuck? What is it exactly, besides incomparable?

"You can't classify it," Zumpano shrugs, after throwing the names Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, and Philip Glass around (see? We all do it.) "Nobody knows what to do with it and who's gonna buy this fucking thing anyway, right? It doesn't sound like this, doesn't sound like that—but isn't that the ultimate goal? Ninety-eight percent of people who make music wanna be welcomed and carried off. That's why I'm basking in obscurity, which is not a terrible thing. It's better than being in the middle. Maybe down the road somebody's gonna really dig what you're doing, opposed to the middles that no one will ever give a fuck about again."

Back in the bleak mid-‘90s, Zumpano lent his name to and played drums for one of the few outfits in this city at the time that conscientiously avoided the middle. Zumpano (the band) made sunshiney pop music for the indie scene's intellectual wing, splitting -- to the horror of too few of us -- after a fine second album for Sub Pop (Goin' Through Changes). Singer-guitarist Carl Newman moved on to his bid for world domination with The New Pornographers and Zumpano (the guy) next showed up hunched over a keyboard in the early days of Destroyer.

"I only taught myself to play piano at the end of the Zumpano period because I met [Destroyer's] Dan Bejar," he says with a chuckle. "I was forced to play it live." A blur of solo projects followed -- Sparrow, Attics and Cellars, and finally The Cyrillic Typewriter -- attesting more to Zumpano's restlessness than anything else. "I can't help myself," he says, "And every time I get sick of a project I want to rename it. It's a bit of a problem I have."

Sure, but the benefits are all ours. French Door is, of course, the culmination of Zumpano's journey so far, and as such it's a riveting piece of work. The basic strategy is established on opener "Dizzy & Blessed," where a cacophony of horns battles it out with martial snare, Zumpano's literate and puzzling lyrics, and more parts in a single song than most bands manage across an entire album.

There's also a very fetching innocence to the enterprise, partly because Zumpano double-tracks his Al Jardine voice (sorry!) with falsetto, but mostly -- by his own admission – because the self taught musician is generally groping around for ways to execute his high concept ideas, which come thick, fast, and relentlessly. As such, atop basic units of repetition and rat-a-tat drum punctuation a la Pet Sounds (sorry!), something like "An Arrow Pointing In" comes off like the Fifth Dimension as tackled by a sharpened up Langley Schools Project. For the completists out there -- and after a forlorn cover of Devo's "Gates of Steel" -- Bejar and Destroyer bandmate Scott Morgan also show up to lend vocals and ominous "electronics" to "Visions of Daniel" and "Paris Churchyard".

In all cases, there's a curious and lively musical intelligence at work on French Door, which is probably why it's so damn frustrating that Jason Zumpano has retired from performance and is content to build these small but elaborate cathedrals to his own disappearance. "Maybe I'm a little bit of an outsider," he smiles. "There's no reason for me to impress anybody. In this day and age you can put out your own record, and that's what I do. It's kinda like being a shut-in. I think you can be that person, whether one person or 20 will hear it. It's the day and age. It's not a bad thing. It's just a thing."

Just a thing? You really should hear Jason Zumpano's thing.