SPEAKER 1: Woohoo!

SPEAKER 2: Welcome to Austin.

SPEAKER 1: Welcome to Austin.

SINGER 1: Welcome to Austin!

SINGER 2: Check, check, check, woo!

[BELONG PERFORMING AT THE SXSW MUSIC FESTIVAL]

JOHN SCHROCK: Alright. We are here on day one of South by Southwest 2006 in Austin, Texas, and I'm sitting next to Turk from the band Belong, and we're at the Havana on 6th Street here in Austin. Turk, you guys have a pretty cool sound and atypical I would say to say the least. Can you talk through a little bit about how you get that sound, and do you have your own set up at home or studio wise or --

TURK DIETRICH: Yeah. We have a home studio set up in my house in the bedroom. Basically the sound is a combination of guitars, synths, Mellotron effected with a lot of outboard gear then manipulated even further inside the computer.

JOHN SCHROCK: Are you Pro Tools guys or it's...?

TURK DIETRICH: Absolutely 100% Pro Tools guys as far as like the arrangement and editing of the songs. We do use other software like Reaktor, like Pro Tools is the crux of what we do for sure.

JOHN SCHROCK: So just lots of track manipulation, after effects [OVERLAPPING]?

TURK DIETRICH: Yeah. A lot of manipulation beforehand and then a lot more manipulation inside...

JOHN SCHROCK: Okay.

TURK DIETRICH: ...ProTools...

JOHN SCHROCK: Yeah.

TURK DIETRICH: ...and the other programs.

JOHN SCHROCK: Gotcha. I guess your gig is tonight so we have yet to see you guys live but it's a pretty, pretty interesting I'm sure to watch you guys get those sounds in a live room.

TURK DIETRICH: Yeah. Yeah. It's just the two of us for this tour. It's the most economical thing for us right now to do: one guitar, one laptop, and visuals. The visuals are a big part of the show. It wouldn't be as interesting without visuals. If we didn't have visuals, we can probably just turn our lights off and get it as dark as possible, so the visuals are definitely a major element of the live show.

JOHN SCHROCK: It's definitely head music I think for...

TURK DIETRICH: Yeah.

JOHN SCHROCK: I can see listening out with some headphones on.

TURK DIETRICH: Well the -- we're part of a new wave of producers I would say in that in the studio, headphones are always used, like in addition to studio monitors we use headphones through the recording, the editing, the programming, all the way through final mix headphones are used, like it's always considered. Headphones are always considered.

JOHN SCHROCK: Is that just to bring out the details? Is it --

TURK DIETRICH: It's just because it's actually the most controlled environment that you can get under headphones in my opinion, and you can just really get the detail and the whole spectrum of the audio under headphones I find I can hear it really, really well under really nice headphones.

JOHN SCHROCK: Okay.

TURK DIETRICH: But you can be fooled under headphones as well that's why you need like studio monitors as well and you know you should check your business on your boombox and your car or whatever but...

JOHN SCHROCK: That's the car and -- definitely.

TURK DIETRICH: ...headphones are crucial.

JOHN SCHROCK: So what types of headphones do you find work best for your music?

TURK DIETRICH: We've used two pairs of headphones. For years we've used Sony MDR V600's which we've come to find aren't the greatest headphones in the world, but if you can get a mix to sound good under those headphones, it might translate well to a bunch of other places. The headphones we've been using now are made by a company called Grado and I recommend them tenfold. Their headphones are amazing.

JOHN SCHROCK: Do you have the open back or the closed?

TURK DIETRICH: Yeah, the open back. We have the 300 series and it's worth every penny.

JOHN SCHROCK: It seems to end up with whatever you use to monitor, you've got of kind to learn how to compensate because you [OVERLAPPING]

TURK DIETRICH: Right. Well you got to learn like for instance with Grado it's like they're so crisp and they're so nice and they open the sound up so much that if you would just use Grados and you would bring to like a car, you're mix will probably sound like [EXPLETIVE] because it's like, it kind of like hypes up the music a little bit, but once you learn what it does then you can compensate. You know what changes you got to make. But yeah, Grados, great stuff.

JOHN SCHROCK: Is it full-on DIY with you guys or do you send it out for mastering or do you do your own stuff or...?

TURK DIETRICH: We did everything.

JOHN SCHROCK: Okay

TURK DIETRICH: We mastered it ourselves and what-not so yeah. Why pay $500 or however much to master it when we could do it ourselves?

JOHN SCHROCK: And you just work out of your home in New Orleans?

TURK DIETRICH: Yeah. Majority of the record was produced at my home in New Orleans and I'd say maybe like 5% of it was done at Josh Eustis's Studio. He's a member of the band Telefon Tel Aviv. We've been working together for years and years and years, and he helped us with stuff and some stuff on the record and we did some stuff at his studio as well.

JOHN SCHROCK: So with Belong, how did you guys get together originally? What was the kind of idea that sparked the outfit?

TURK DIETRICH: I had known Mike just because we live close to each other. We had friends of friends and I guess we sort of became friends over the years, and then circa 2002, we were just hanging out one night talking and we had like similar ideas, similar aesthetic. We just said maybe we should just get together a couple of times a week and see if we could do anything. We got together. We got along well in the studio and it's kind of a hobby again and it took us about a year or a year and a half to actually kind of hone our sound and get it to a point where we are like ready to like really confident in what we were doing.

JOHN SCHROCK: When in those initial conversations about your -- formulating your aesthetic, what-- were there kind of influences you guys had kind of tossed around as an idea you wanted to pursue or?

TURK DIETRICH: We really didn't name drop any influences -- any specific bands or cite anything like saying that we wanted to do something like that. We just -- we knew we wanted to do something that was maybe heavy on layers and not immediate like something that would be you may not like it on the first listen but maybe by the fifth or sixth listen to see if something's revealed that you like. That was basically like what we start out. That was like our initial game plan. That was like what we're talking about, trying to do.

JOHN SCHROCK: With the really washy stuff, kind of ambient like waves of sound and stuff, and I love that kind of stuff too, and one of the things I like about is the kind of melodies emerge from that kind of maelstrom, to use a word, a pretentious word, but you know there's swirls of sound going on and the kind of things that come out of you that may not come out for somebody else, and did you find that with your stuff too or is that part of...?

TURK DIETRICH: I'll find even working on the stuff sometimes that like just because they'll be a decent amount of stuff going on and with the harmonics bouncing around that I'll even hear melodies that aren't there intentionally, sometimes that will happen so it is interesting when you're trying to layer a ot of stuff together to make what we would like to call the ocean.

JOHN SCHROCK: The ocean.

TURK DIETRICH: Yeah, the ocean. So...

JOHN SCHROCK: Excellent.

TURK DIETRICH: ...it's fun. It's fun to work on stuff like this.

JOHN SCHROCK: So, do you want to talk about your album? Is it out yet or is it?

TURK DIETRICH: Yes. The album came out February 7, 2006.

JOHN SCHROCK: Okay.

TURK DIETRICH: It was recorded mostly for the most part in 2004, finished first week of 2005.

JOHN SCHROCK: Okay.

TURK DIETRICH: And I guess we had sat on it for a while and we had maybe like sent out a demo to and then like summer of 2005, I said, "Let's just send out a few more copies of the album to a few record labels that we think may be interested in what we're doing.

JOHN SCHROCK: Yeah.

TURK DIETRICH: And yeah, that second time we sent stuff out, about a week and a half later, Todd from Carpark got in touch with us and asked us is we wanted to put it out. We're like, "Absolutely!"

JOHN SCHROCK: Yeah. Why not?

TURK DIETRICH: "Why not? Let's do it," so yeah. It worked out really well. Actually, the album, we got signed a week before Katrina, and the album was done, the artwork was done, like everything was done, that all happened a week before the storm.

JOHN SCHROCK: Did that affect the timing at all of the album release or?

TURK DIETRICH: No. The album -- like the album was going to come out at that time period...

JOHN SCHROCK: Okay.

TURK DIETRICH: ...regardless but--

JOHN SCHROCK: It sounds like you might have dodged a little bit of a bullet there.

TURK DIETRICH: Yeah, yeah. If we had waited another week, we might have because the thing with Katrina was was that all communication like cellphone communications went gone. That was you couldn't get in touch with anybody, nobody could call in through your cellphone so you had to wait -- If we had waited like a week to send the demos out, Todd might have never -- Todd might have not got in touch with us. It was good timing and then bad timing, so.

JOHN SCHROCK: Yeah. Well, we're glad you got it out.

TURK DIETRICH: Thank you.

JOHN SCHROCK: So any plans for future recordings or are you just pretty much into this album right now?

TURK DIETRICH: We have five or six weeks off and then we tour Europe for five weeks starting in May through June, touring with Ariel Pink again, and after that when we come back we plan to -- We've been working on material for the next album that when we come back we'll jump head into the next record and hopefully we can have that done sooner than later.

JOHN SCHROCK: So do you enjoy sitting in the studio and tweaking knobs or do you enjoy like getting out on the road or is that a little bit of both?

TURK DIETRICH: I would rather be in the studio honestly, but I do like touring. I do like -- there is like a -- there is a sense of satisfaction playing it out and seeing, even if it's just one kid like really into the music that it's just kind of like some kind of like oh okay like somebody else gets it. You know like that's cool but if I had to choose one, yeah it would definitely be the studio.

JOHN SCHROCK: Yeah, yeah.

TURK DIETRICH: But touring has been really cool.

JOHN SCHROCK: Well thanks, Turk. I appreciate...

TURK DIETRICH: Thank you.

JOHN SCHROCK: ...you taking a few minutes to talk to us and we look forward again to seeing you tonight.

TURK DIETRICH: Thank you very much.

[BELONG PERFORMING AT THE SXSW MUSIC FESTIVAL]