By Ryan Schreiber

Interview conducted March, 1996
Originally appeared in Pitchfork April, 1996.

Not many bands come along that are as innovative as Soul Coughing. Mixing billions of musical influences, they're sort of a hip-hop/jazzy/cartoon-style thing with either totally crazy or incredibly colorful lyrics read and sung over them. I don't know how you interpret that, but fuck it. It's just journalism for Christ's sake.

Anyway, we talked to the guy that does all the weird samples in the band, M'ark Di Gli Antoni: Master of the modern-day moog. I was really, really, really sick when I did this interview.

Pitchfork: So how did you develop that trademark Soul Coughing sound?

M'ark: We sleep together a lot. A lot of sex.

Pitchfork: Wow!

M'ark: No, I'm kidding. You know, just growing up in this busy, wonderful New York. To me, there's no magic to it. It's four people who don't tell each other what to do very much. We clearly reflect different interests that are going on, and New York is sort of the great place that it all happened and I think a lot of it has to do with this really busy, competitive city and people are always playing together. It's a real great music place.

Pitchfork: You sound like New York. I think like, a lot of traffic on time-lapse camera. That's what it sounds like to me. How did you decide to name the record "Ruby Vroom"?

M'ark: Mitchell Froom [producer of records by Soul Coughing, Suzanne Vega, Elvis Costello, Cibo Matto, and the Del Fuegos, just to name a few] and Suzanne Vega had a little baby named Ruby Froom and when we were making titles for the record, we had a big billboard and we were writing names on it all the time. We saw Mitchell one day in the studio and he told us this name of this beautiful child and I thought, "Ruby Froom, what a gorgeous name." I think Yuval [Gabay], our drummer and his infinite wisdom probably mispronounced it one afternoon and it stuck.

Pitchfork: Do you know immediately when you hear something whether it would make a perfect sample?

M'ark: That's a good question. Yes, I think I do. It's very particular to me, but I look all the time. I'm always listening for stuff and I will make a lot of stuff that I don't use, but I think that when a sound presents itself, I think it's either going to make a good sample, meaning some potentially good basis for a keyboard kind of treatment or concrete sound. I think they present themselves big, loud, and clear.

Pitchfork: How did you decide where they fit in each song?

M'ark: Some songs started with me. Quite a bit of our process is, I will start something, because we always play and write together, and Yuval and Sebastian [Steinberg, upright bassist] or Doughty [vocalist, guitarist] kind of...it'll do something for them. Either Sebastian and Yuval with start grooving or Doughty will start doing words or a guitar part, then either I'll keep it, or a lot of times, I'll drop it and come in with something else. There are a lot of time when we're actually jamming together and it's just whatever sounds I have up. I like to have lots of sounds ready and just improvise with them.

Pitchfork: So, does Doughty just come up with things on the spot?

M'ark: He does a lot of that, and he does a lot at home. He's not really like a storyteller immediately on the spot because he goes home and works quite a bit on his lyrics. He's always got a list of poems or words or fragments of poems. He's always got that stuff at the ready. He can draw it out anytime. You know, even on the road, he has his little Powerbook. He's always writing.

Pitchfork: Where do you generally draw the samples from?

M'ark: It kind of comes in grooves. I take a lot from my own music that I write outside of the band, or from, you know, any kind of source. Just going through CDs and cassettes and LPs and trying to get stuff and turn it into something. You know, not just having it be a reference, but actually, out of this little sonic element that just happened, is it possible to create a keyboard patch, like something I can play? Also, I carry around a recorder a lot of the time and I record the world at large. Probably sixty or seventy percent is stuff that I make myself and the other roughly, thirty percent, you're going to hear where it's coming from. The second record, I made a point of trying to hide stuff.

Pitchfork: I know somewhere on the record you sampled a bit of a Tori Amos song.

M'ark: Yep. And this record it's Daryl Hall! [The Tori Amos samples are] in two songs, "City of Motors" and "Mr. Bitterness" and when I listen to it, it's so loud and clear, but I've never been called on it. You know, she does a cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and you know, it's so melodramatic...actually, it's a really great cover. She's amazing until like two-thirds of the way through and then she gets into one of those [mimics wispy vocals] and it just falls apart, but until that moment, it's like "Wow, this is a really sick, great version of the song. The way she sings "I feel stupid" is so overwhelming. I used it and tried not just to treat it as her saying that directly, but I tried to break up the phrase a little bit and treat it like a woman singing. But with the second record it's Daryl Hall. I don't wanna say where it is on this record yet, because I did a lot of inviting last time. I made a big point of saying, "Hey, I sampled Tori Amos," and didn't get caught.

Pitchfork: That's cartoon music I hear on "Bus to Beelezebub", isn't it?

M'ark: It certainly is. I think it's one of the most used themes in Warner Brothers cartoons. It's always in some industrial scene coming through the city or the factory. It's really a brilliant piece.

Pitchfork: So you have sort of a hip-hop/jazz/cartoon-music-type thing, as I always describe it, and some vaguely similar bands seem to completely dismiss the lyrics as not-so-important, and you guys seem to focus a lot more on that.

M'ark: I think Doughty comes to the table first and foremost as a poet. He studied theater and drama and he was always a writer. I think that for him as the nerdy high-school kid, English was a big outlet for him. I think that applying the words came later, but I'm sure he was greatly inspired by hip hop and listening to Cypress Hill or A Tribe Called Quest's early stuff and it sort of allowed him to explore some of his rhythmics a little bit more than just in a poem form. I guess, for him, poetry is great, but it's a very, very limited market and I think he uses music as a vehicle to get some of his poetry a little bit more exposure. His words are not really standard pop words. It's not "Love Me Do", which are great words, it's just he happens to really be into the English language and the rhymes of the English language.

Pitchfork: Where did the sample from "Down to This" come from?

M'ark: It's from the Andrews Sisters and it's just "Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me, no no no," and it's kind of an old World War II song. To us, it was very comical. We had these new tools in our hands and we were having a great time, but actually, that song, women think it's about rape or they're confused that it might be about violence to women, because it's this male talking sort of quickly, this hard beat, and "You get the ankles and I'll get the wrists, it comes down to this" and then these womens' voices come on and go "Anyone else but me, no no no," and I talked to quite a few people who questioned what it's about but, boy, it couldn't have been made with more naive intentions. "You get the ankles and I'll get the wrists" is kind of throwing a version of oneself off a roof.

Pitchfork: How long have you guys been together?

M'ark: Now...hmm...three and a half years now? Yeah, in the middle of June it'll be four years.

Pitchfork: Where'd you get the band name?

M'ark: Some friend of Doughty's, I think, was barfing at a party one night and probably his analogy for getting sick was 'Soul Coughing' and then Doughty had written a poem about Neil Young that he won't show anybody because he's so embarrased about it, but somehow Soul Coughing was in there. When we were forming, everybody out there was Soul-something. There was Soul II Soul, Soul Asylum, and it was like one after the other and I think he saw us coming together as this hybrid of all these things and I'm sure the contrast of Soul Coughing was attractive, too, because it kind of placed us in what was happening at the time.

Pitchfork: Which of the four of you do you think would make the best president?

M'ark: [laughs] I would say the best president would be Yuval Gabay. Every day would be a party. Every day would be lunch. There would be amazing food and he's a great host.

Pitchfork: So, are those all your real names? I mean, M. Doughty, Yuval Gabay, M'ark Di Gli Antoni...

M'ark: Yeah, there's no stage names in this band. Doughty, that's his last name.

Pitchfork: What's his first name?

M'ark: It's Michael. He's thinking about using Michael more often.

Pitchfork: Do you ever have a problem with unruly breakdancers at your shows?

M'ark: Yes we do, and Doughty is the artful dodger about that kind of thing. We played in Boston recently and there was just this frantic group of kids in the middle and they were just moshing like crazy, and we'd just started "Bus to Beelzebub" and he just stopped. It was so great. We kept stop/starting the song like all the way through. He really like tells people that heavy dancing is not a problem but just slamming and moshing is out. Get out. But crowd surfing is always encouraged as long as people don't get their heads split.

Pitchfork: A few questions from Pitchfork columnist, Mr. Jason Josephes. Have you ever done a stool sample?

M'ark: Yes, I have as a matter of fact. You know, Christian Marquay [sp?], he's a turntable player out of New York City and he's pretty well known. He does a lot of turntable collage work and stuff but he does a lot of art installations now and there was a project in France that is this huge, huge cement room. Square, big thing. And he got a lot of wooden bar stools and then in the center drilled a hole and inserted all these brass instruments and then we made a CD of farts. It's like 50 minutes of all these different farts. Discreet, loud, whatever. Lots of time between them and we designed the CD so it plays at random. So, in fact, I have made a stool sample because Christian pretended to fart but I actually recorded quite a few of my own farts.

Pitchfork: That's insane! That's weird! He [Josephes] also wants you to name-check his old therapist, Dr. Myron Malecha, on your next record.

M'ark: Dr. Myron? Malecha?

Pitchfork: I don't know. If you could fit it in there, I don't know if it'd make his year or what. Don't feel obligated, because I wouldn't do it.

M'ark: The name is beautiful.

Pitchfork: What did you think of The Max Headroom Show ?

M'ark: I've only seen like two episodes of it and that was so long ago, but I remember, at the time, not being that familiar with computers because I come from like a real instrument background so I never had synthesizers. I never had a computer. It wasn't until like the last five or six years that I really got into it. So when I saw that show I was like, "Okay, how did they do that? Did somebody draw that into a computer or is that real time? Like are they filming the guy acting and that's the result they get?" That was my big question. "Is this happening in real time?" But no one I knew could answer it and then I learned later that in fact, it's probably not at all real time. But I didn't know a lot about the show. It seemed real cute, just that one gimmick, but I guess if I'd watched a lot more of the show, I'd be a little more informed about my commentary.

Pitchfork: Have you ever gotten sued over a sample, a la Negativland?

M'ark: No, although, I just had...Negitivland...the guy, Mark Hosler, was in town because a documentary was being shown here in town. Some guy made a documentary about the whole suing.

[Editor's Note: U2 and their label, Island Records, sued Negativland a little while back because Negativland sampled from a U2 song without permission. Now U2 is like a billion dollars richer, and, well, Negativland isn't.]

M'ark (continued): Mark, it turned out, was a big fan of ours. He called me, so we hung out. I even jammed with him on Friday at some party. He was a really great guy. But we have not been sued. On the first record, all the real obvious samples were cleared and then, on this record, there's only one sample that needed to be cleared. I don't deal with the media in exactly the way that they [Negativland] do, so I don't run that risk as much. Though, my little trick of "famous-singer-on-every-record" or...It's kind of like the responsibility. You have to be bold about it. It's no fair to clear every single sample. Part of the fun of releasing a record to mainstream America is having that risk of, "Wow, there's this artifact I stole from somebody else and look! It's right there in your face!" Now, if we base a composition on something of somebody else's, under any circumstances, I really believe in paying for it. But if it's in the middle of a song, just this piece of information that I received over the airwaves or whatever, it's like, come on. I should be able to use it. And I completely sympathize with those guys. I mean, I didn't know a lot about it until the documentary and Mark gave me this big book which documents entirely the whole transaction -- it contains legal documents. And it's really fucked because, U2, it's like come on! Where did they get that name? From something else. And then their whole Zoo TV concert thing. People are paying to see them show other peoples' work so it really seemed unfair. There's this big recorded piece where a couple of Negativland guys interview [U2's guitarist] The Edge and they're talking to him and he's feeling bad and he says, "Well, it's all Island Records' fault. It's not the band's fault." But you know that if Bono or The Edge walked into the president of Island and said, "Look fucker. Drop it now." Just whatever, destroy the records or tell them to put a new cover on, whatever, it wouldn't have been a problem, but U2 kept acting like it was all Island and there was nothing they could do. I mean, if that was us saying it about Warner, I would believe it. But if you're U2, you're basically like financing the whole label. I'm sure you could walk to the president and say, "Guess what." Record companies suck. Or they don't suck because it's nice to have your stuff distributed, but they're just about making money. There's no illusion of anything but achieveing a bottom line.

Pitchfork: So what's next for Soul Coughing?

M'ark: Well now it's a lot of touring. So this record is done, the second one's artwork has been finished and, in fact, I'm going to pick up an LP today. I'm really excited that we got an LP version of it. And we just kind of hang for the next month and start doing the press thing, and then by the end of April, just start touring. The record comes out I think, the first week of May, and then it's like tour mode.