For those of you who hadn’t yet noticed, we at Inyourspeakers Media love to wander off the beaten path to find new, exciting talent. This time around, we delved into Milwaukee’s experimental scene and dug up an artist/producer who goes by the name of German Shepherd.

Way back in early 2008, GS began releasing a slew of locally-lauded web and physical releases (the most recent of those releases is a split record featuring the likes of Brian Grainger, Millipede, and MOTH). The steady stream of lo-fidelity guitar-based drones lends itself to as much dissection as it does aural surrender. His underwater guitar manglings have been praised across the blogosphere and have garnered comparisons to Belong, Amplifier Machine, and William Basinski.

Read on to learn German Shepherd’s gradual evolution from hardcore to ambient/drone basement experimentation, the proliferation of the internet and it's powerful effects for constructive criticism, and our shared love for Black Flag.

Inyourspeakers: Tell me about your gradual evolution from playing in hardcore bands to your ambient drone project German Shepherd?

German Shepherd: There were three big events and several small events that led up to it. It was the whole classic, got a skateboard in 1984 went to a ramp with a bunch of scary old guys and they were playing Black Flag’s Damaged. Before that I had never even paid any attention to music and it scared the hell out of me, but I loved it. So, I was pretty much hardcore until about 1991 when I was in a thrift store and I heard, like everyone else, Loveless. But, I never knew who the band was because the clerk at the store was too scary for me to go up and ask her who it was. So, I heard this crazy stuff and I had idea who it was, I didn’t know anything about it and then I left the thrift store and kicked myself for the next seven years.

IYS: How old were you?

GS: I was 17, it was in Minneapolis, [the clerk] was, like, 25; it was just so terrifying and she was just scowling at everyone at the store, and so I walked out of there not knowing who it was. In 1995 I was looking through this used cd bin and I found it, and I just liked the cover, I had no idea who it was. It was just a cool pink cover, I was like “My Bloody Valentine”, that’s cool. So I got it, brought it home, and by the time I was at about track seven I was like “holy shit!”, I had refound this. About the same time I had met someone who was really into Flying Saucer Attack, he was in this band called the Dallas S; they had Theremins and the whole nine yards, effects pedals and a whole bunch of stuff I had never seen. That made a big impression, so for the next ten years I was playing in other kind of hardcore bands. Shortly after that I bumped into Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon album and that blew my mind. That kind of became the template for the kind of early morning/late night music.

IYS: Is that how you would like to describe your music? Something you would like to wake up to or fall asleep to?

GS: Yeah! So, my deal was I heard this Eno album and, I’m a terrible guitar player, so that didn’t help, but I had this fantasy that after the next few years that someday I would cover that entire album. I wanted to play the entire album, but I wanted to do it with guitar, where he used pianos and synthesizers. I thought, how cool would that be to do it on acoustic guitar or electric guitar? With my caveman skills I could never even conceptualize how to do it. Those are the first two or three points in the evolution and then the final one was in 2007, getting a hold of Brian Grainger’s Eight Thousander record. It was just a fluke that I picked that one up, I just started really digging it that people were really making the kind of music that I was thinking about making. From 2007 to now it has been this process of trying to get the sounds in my head to come out of my amp.

IYS: One thing that I really like about your music is that it sounds like it is coming directly from your speakers into my subconscious. It seems like I will be walking or being involved in some other mundane task and out of nowhere a snippet of one of your tracks will pop into my mind. I really like that idea that it is coming directly from your brain into mine. I feel like there is a lot of attention paid to the method in which you record your music. You stated recently that you replaced your “withering tape recorder” and replaced it with a Tascam 8 digital recorder. How does the actual physical recording apparatus factor into your recordings?

GS: That is a tough question. One thing, the target of what is in my mind is quiet, droney music but no so monochromatic that little chunks don’t pop out or that little things don’t repeat. The other sound that is in my head is song #4 on the Swirlies’ Strictly East Coast Sneaky Flute Music. It is the classic woozy, circular guitar feedback sound. That made a huge impact on me when I first heard it. As far as the recording stuff goes, my less than pristine sound comes from my punk background where what is happening is more important than what it sounds like. I think the other part is I am not a nob twiddler so most of the sound that is on the CDs comes from fiddling around until I get a sound I like and then turning the recorder on and then going from there. Most of the stuff is one take, straight into the Tascam, and no monkeying around with it. But I think the tape player had to go because it was putting a prohibitive amount of hiss into it. The hiss is what people were hearing and that wasn’t acceptable, it was time to move on.

IYS: You said that Alpine Melodies would have “less hiss, more cicada” what preceded this change and how was this achieved?

GS: I sent a copy off to Forest Gospel and they were like “good stuff, but too much hiss” and I had been thinking about that. There is only so much you can play off as trendy, lo-fi-ness, and I found out later that I had the input going into the computer going into the wrong input. After that I bought the digital, I guess I didn’t want the shittiness of the sound to obscure the actual shittiness of the music. [laughs]

IYS: That is great that you can take constructive criticism.

GS: Part of me, and this is the non-musician of me, I was scared shitless to send stuff out. Because, I like it, but that doesn’t mean anything; I’m just a dude who sits in a basement. But when I started getting generally positive feedback it made me start looking at it a little more seriously. If you send it to someone you don’t know you have to be able to handle whatever they say about it and pay attention to it. My wife isn’t the most accurate sounding board. She always thinks something is blowing up, or I left something on too long, or something is wrong with the furnace.

IYS: That is what my wife thinks when I play this kind of music. How did you get hooked up with the Traveling compilation, how did that come about?

GS: I wanted to do something but I felt like I couldn’t come right out of the basement and do a whole thing by myself so I thought if I could put something together, who would I pick? I love Millipede’s stuff, it is so over the top and awesome and Brian Grainger is pretty much responsible for me doing this stuff. I thought I would ask those guys to see if they were up to do something like this and they were. The MOTH guy is an old friend from a hardcore band and he is just getting weirder and weirder. Everyone was really positive and we have become really good friends through this whole process.

IYS: There is a basic conceptual idea behind the album, in the title and the way the tracks were compiled, can you describe the basic tenant behind the project?

GS: I think the high school teacher in me felt like I would get a better response from everyone if I put some parameters on it, so everyone knew what to work with. I am a pretty punctual guy and even though I am kind of a basement hobbyist musician, I still feel like I have a work ethic and a drive to do stuff. We kicked around an idea of a theme, we all came to the idea of traveling because we were from different places. We picked the theme of traveling and then interpreted it however we wanted. I envisioned the book as having your typical band thank you list, but I felt like if we didn’t have any parameters I wouldn’t know what to expect, so we arbitrarily picked 50 words. If you couldn’t get it done in 50 words it didn’t deserve to be done. We went for it and when everyone sent their tracks back I was just blown away.

IYS: The compilation was great. It was my first introduction to everyone on there except for Millipede. You said earlier that Brian Grainger was a type of mentor for you. How did that initial collaboration come about?

GS: I was so blown away by his CD and all his websites and output, I think that my first line of thought was that he would do certain things on songs that I wanted to know so bad how he was doing it. I bothered him a few times as a fan, asking “I don’t know if this is a trade secret or not, but what are you doing on track five at nine minutes and 12 seconds”? He put up with it and a few e mails later I found out he was a pretty fun guy and had a great sense of humor and we decided to do this compilation.

IYS: You seem to be teetering on this edge of a so called “basement hobbyist” and an up and coming musician within the ambient/drone soundscape. What plans or goals do you have for German Shepherd?

GS: Goal number one: do stuff that makes me happy. I will keep doing that as much as I can. That, whether or not it leaves the basement, it won’t even matter; I will keep on doing it. Goals….? Stay happy. I have been noticing that I will put something out, even if the numbers are tiny, that it takes a little while for all of it to disappear. So, keep on putting out stuff…I really like the process of hearing somebody’s stuff that you really like, getting in touch with them and saying let’s do something!

IYS: I really like that you offer your music free digitally and have a lot of fondness for the good old fashioned physical copies. Have you sold all the [Traveling] compilations?

GS: There are about six left. Not so bad. The Alpine Melodies, about one or two orders a week come in, which is a nice pace. I definitely want to keep it underground, keep it low key. I definitely enjoy my day job.

IYS: It totally blows my mind that somebody I have never met, from all over the world, would take the time to read about what I think of some band, or, in your case listen to something that you put out.

GS: It’s terrifying. I’ll have some packages to out ship toSweden or Japan. I can’t believe that someone sent me five dollars for something that I did, first of all. I’m thinking about knocking the price down to just postage and giving it away for free. I’m not sure my wife understands what’s happening, she can’t believe someone in Japan is into what I am doing, or some guy in Sweden. It’s weird though, that combination of work and serendipity that you used to go through pre-internet. I had to bumble around for five years before I figured out who My Bloody Valentine was. Now, I can type anything I want in. That part is gone, but that is just romantic thinking because I would much rather type in: “drone guitar” and then see what comes up and get exposed to it that way. There is almost too much stuff out there for me to digest.

IYS: Totally, but I think there is still a small amount of serendipity in this whole thing. The kind of music you created doesn’t have this mass appeal, so you have to be looking for it. It happens by word of mouth a lot, I think we discount that in the internet age. Blogging, is almost an extension of word of mouth, it’s like “hey, everyone I heard this great album and you should too.”

GS: Yeah, a searchable word of mouth.

IYS: There is still an element of discovery. You have to sift through so much on the internet, so when you hear something that is meaningful to you and you can decipher what it is about the music that turned you on in the first place. It doesn’t replace the experiences I had going to a record store and discovering the Blood Brothers for the first time because a clerk told me about them. But it is similar because I wouldn’t have heard of it unless someone pointed it out to me or recommended it.

GS: The name German Shepherd is a hold over from high school where when imagined I would be in a band I was always like, “I am going to name my band German Shepherd!” I always thought that an angry line art of a German Shepherd would be the best hardcore band name ever. Thankfully, everyone in my band vetoed that idea. It’s just not that cool of a name and now I don’t need my students harassing me and I would like to keep my private and my professional life separate. It is the least searchable band name ever. So, like you said, you have to look for it, or you have to be a really big fan of the dog. You have go through 12,000 websites to get to mine.

IYS: It reminds me of those bands from the nineties like “Hole” or “Belly” that are pretty much impossible to google. I have a question about Alpine Melodies it says that it was inspired on a large part by a photograph you purchased at a thrift store. What can you tell me about this photograph and how this influenced Alpine Melodies?

GS: It’s that classic mid-sixties, National Geographic where the colors are super blown out and aggressive. It is of an alpine valley, probably somewhere in Switzerland and there is this really intense, blue lake in the background and there is a meadow in front of it and a hint of a village in the background. It is one of those pictures that the minute you see it, I would give anything to be in that location when that photograph was taken. It was a dollar, so I bought it and took it home and put it on the wall in my basement. I just kept looking at it and I thought to myself what would I be hearing if I could bring this picture to me in 2009? That was my little restriction, to have [the album] built around this picture.

IYS: It definitely has an idealistic, pastoral feel that I like. I have a question about “Green Pine” where there is repeated guitar line, that as it is going through its cycles it almost wearing down. The fidelity is deteriorating, becoming more warped and just weirder and weirder.

GS: Two things, my staple piece of equipment is a V-Fex lo-fi loop junky. It is a looping pedal that introduces all this hiss, and pops and garbage into it and kind of mangles your sound a little bit. So, what I will do is get a loop, play a little guitar figure, and when I get it the way I like it I will play on the loop pedal and then I will bring it into the electric harmonics Memory Man. There is this button on it where you can control the direction of the loop. I will do a loop into the Electro Harmonics and then I will get down on the floor and gradually start turning that button until I gradually get the warping sound. My favorite sound is when it sounds like things are losing speed or picking up speed, and then I just turned it until it shut off

IYS: It reminded me of William Basinkski Disintegration Loops.

GS: I love the idea of how, on that record, stuff was giving away and fading. It was a genius idea and I like the idea of using stuff until it caves in.

IYS: Right, they are very long drones and by the end of the track it is a totally different sound, a totally different song because of the decaying analog tape. I think it is a beautiful statement for post-9/11. It is like a lost sense of idealism, a lost sense of security….Good stuff. Well, this has been beneficial for me. I feel like in your albums you never quite show your hand and so much music today is all about these self aware moves. A pretty straight forward instrument like a guitar can be buried under so much feedback and so much manipulation that have no idea what you are even listening to.

GS: I love that but I don’t want to show my hand when I’m playing something, like your listening and saying, “oh, that’s a guitar or that’s that” when you listen to my stuff. But I love showing my hand after the fact, so if people are interested I can talk all day about this stuff.

IYS: Well, thanks a lot for chatting with me. It has been a pleasure. So when can we expect German Shepherd T- Shirts?

GS: Well, now that it is out there in the open…hopefully soon! (laughs). I don’t know, if I could go back I might want to change the name of my moniker to something a little bit more scattered and potentially friendly, like an Australian Cattle Dog.

Check out German Shepherd’s work at Sunrise Acoustics.