Meet The Artists: Cordoba
Photos by Andrea van den Boogaard
C: Cam Cunningham
B: Brianna Tong
K: Khalyle Hagood
E: Eric Novak
ZB: Zach Bain-Selbo
ZU: Zach Upton-Davis
Amplified: There are so many movements in each Cordoba song. What’s your starting point for a song, and how do you build it from there?
C: In general, I am the contractor. I am the Stephen Yeun of this one. [laughs] But yeah, I arrange them all in Ableton Live using only the worst-sounding midi instruments.
ZB: Only the most Nintendo-sounding instruments. [laughs]
C: [laughs] They’re not the worst, but anyway. So I arrange them in Ableton, then we work with them, kind of mess with our arrangement a little bit. And often times we use sheet music, so we’re kind of old school. We have actual notes written out.
Amplified: You write sheet music for all your songs?!
ZU: Pretty much.
C: The songs are pretty tricky, I think, to learn. There are a lot of moving parts, and they are very interwoven - Like particularly Eric and I will play a lot of complimentary lines that are definitely arranged. Zach, too.
ZU: One time, me and Cam got in a bad fight because -
C: That’s not true. [laughs]
ZU: [laughs] I had stopped at count 15 or something and I had no idea where 1 was, and he wouldn’t give me sheet music [laughs] because it was going to take a long time for him, and I had to listen to it over and over again for, like, two hours, to determine where 1 was.
C: Because you were digging for 1?! Did I end up making it?
E: I think he just ended up making it a bass part.
K: I will say, normally in the process he makes a bass part and I end up veto-ing really hard things to make them easier.
Amplified: So it’s pretty collective after your first draft.
C: It’s collective after it. And some of these parts are harder to pull off live, so we change it, and maybe we’ll do that for the session [instead].
E: [To Cam] Also, sometimes you’ll write parts with notes that don’t exist. [laughs]
C: Like what!
E: Like on that flute part, where you wrote a low B! Flutes never have low B!
ZB: Or he’ll want us to play a 13th with one hand. [laughs]
C: I attached finger stretches to that pdf! [laughs] But then after we do these arrangements, then often times mainly Brianna will write her part and lyrics. I’m not really involved with lyrics.
Amplified: And what are all of the instruments that you have on In Hell? Is that an insane question?
C: No no! This is actually something that I’ve thought about. So on our last album, we brought in some friends to play additional horns. Eric can play just about any read, but we brought in people to play brass instruments.
E: Just about any read? I can play any read.
B: Ooooooooooh!
C: Oh yeah, there you have it… Bassoon?!
E: Yeah, but I don’t have a bassoon.
C: Contrabassoon?!
E: Yeah, it’s the same thing. [laughs]
C: So that’s how we did the last record. This record was much more stripped down. So it’s only the things we play live, basically. Except Zach, he plays things on the record that he couldn’t do live.
ZU: Put a little honky tonk piano in there.
E: I play some flute and bass clarinet, too.
ZB: I thought we’d start bringing my piano to our gigs. [laughs]
Amplified: And what does a stripped down album look like for Cordoba?
B: No string arrangements. [laughs]
ZU: It’s not really stripped down. It’s just less instruments.
B: It’s just no one else is playing instruments.
E: Yeah, there’s no guests playing on this one.
B: But David Fletcher was on this last one.
Amplified: Every time I listen to Cordoba, I feel like you’re not shy to acknowledge dystopia. Could you speak a bit on what it’s like to make music right now against the backdrop of our own American dystopia?
B: I feel like that’s the thing. I think that the last album, [Specter], I was like, “Let’s write about all of the terrible things that are going on.” This time I was like, “Bro, I can’t do this anymore.” [laughs] So then for this album, it was horror-fiction that drew me to it. And a lot of the songs are about that - The every day horrors. And there are still some that are like, “Here’s the stuff that’s going on in the world,” but honestly, we’re living it. And I also want to write it, and sing it, and perform it.
E: The last album was more about all of the problems in our world. And this one seems kind of more how it’s affecting individual people. There’s a lot of more personal lyrics. Like, one of the songs is about living with mild schizophrenia, stuff like that.
B: Yeah, while I wrote many of them, I was tired and like, “I don’t want to think that deeply about my own experience right now.” So I looked at a bunch of other shit that was very moving to me, and not necessarily about me. And I think a lot of them have obviously parts of me still in them. But I thought, “I’m gonna need a filter to distance myself from a lot of shit,” which was really helpful! I feel like it helped me be able to actually write the songs. It was a lot of me being tired like - Okay, we know. We look around, we go outside every day, and we know.
E: Yeah, plus the reality of Instagram, you can see what bad things happen at any point of any day.
B: And I think a lot more people are realizing what’s going on, too. So I don’t know if people need to be reminded. Like, during the pandemic, and during all those protests, I felt like “Okay we are ALL aware that this shit is just fucked. Shit is very fucked, the state is very fucked.” So I don’t know if people need to hear that it is… again. I don’t need to hear that it is again.
E: Yeah, and it’s just pointless.
B: Well I don’t know if it’s pointless - But, for me. [laughs]
E: [laughing] For you.
C: I think we’re pumped for Brandon Johnson a little bit.
B: We are. A little bit.
C: A little bit.
B: A little bit.
Amplified: I wanted to ask - What are you hoping to see for the climate of being an artist in Chicago, now that Brandon Johnson has been elected?
E: I think the most important part is public transit. [laughs] Because as an artist who does not have a car, I have to take public transit to get everywhere. And it’s terrible. Waiting 30 minutes for the bus is the norm, at least.
C: But then when it comes, you have three of them to choose from. [laughs]
Amplified: Or, you wait 30 minutes for it to come, and then it doesn’t show up. So you have to find a new one.
E: And then when the next bus does come, it’s just chalk full of fucking people, because only one bus has come in the past hour. And I’m never on time to anything - No matter how much time you leave the house, it doesn’t matter. You’re still going to be late.
Amplified: Not to mention insurance for instruments, too, right?
E: True. I did have someone on the bus run past me and knock my saxophone out of my hand, and it just broke.
K: Wow.
Amplified: And what did you do after that?
E: I had to take it to Evanston to get it repaired, because there’s no fucking saxophone repair shop in Chicago. [laughs]
K: I feel you on the bus though, Eric. Because I spend a lot of money buying very small bass shit, like in my head it’s small, so I’m like, “Great! I can take this on the bus!” And then it gets there and it’s like, “Ooooohhh….”
ZB: Might as well just walk.
B: Rent, too. Because practice spaces are high. And most people’s apartments you cannot practice in.
Amplified: What do you consider to be your options in Chicago for practice spaces?
B: There are some big warehouse-type buildings that you can rent, or you can rent a room, or you can rent a room by the hour…
Amplified: Does that seem realistic to y’all?
B: Not if you have a whole band.
C: Because you don’t want to be thinking about time. You want to have a rehearsal, write, and be in that zone… And that’s part of being in the band, is having a place where we operate, a place where we figure this out. And really it’s about the space. And if you’re going to one of these practice spaces, it can get kind of stressful.
B: It’s not the same.
C: I mean, coach houses are the secret. If you can get a coach house.
Amplified: Are other employers are sensitive to your practice schedules and performance schedules?
B: Well, I work for the city, and Brandon Johnson, I hope, will continue to support the labor union that I currently work for at this moment in time. [laughs]
E: I worked at this movie theatre last summer, and they were hiring a bunch of artists. And when I got the job, they told me I could make my own hours, that it’s cool. And they knew I was an artist coming into it. And then, when I was on a tour trip, I got a call saying I was fired because I was taking too much time off.
ZB: From a seasonal gig.
E: Right, from a fucking gig in the suburbs.
Amplified: And are there any protections for musicians in a situation like that?
E: No.
ZU: No, you just get screwed.
C: I think that’s why a lot of us find work study, self-employed things. Like I teach music lessons, that’s my main thing, and I also work as a composer for films. So then I don’t really have a boss.
ZB: I mean, all my stuff’s freelance, so I just tell them when I work.
C: But Zach, do you ever get tired of hearing music? [laughs] Because you have so much work that you do that’s just music.
ZB: [Laughing] Yeah. Especially the country music.
ZU: But it’s also worth noting that Zach recorded a lot of the album. All of the album, right?!
C: Yeah, shoutout to Zach for recording and mixing it. Doing hours and hours of work on that, sitting there with an 80-track Pro Tools session. The only person we brought that’s not in the band is Steve Marek, who did an incredible job mastering the record. Steve’s great. And Sandra Dib was there a couple times, too.
K: I used to work full time jobs, and now looking back on how I did it… Working 40 hours a week, and then the fact that I was in 4 or 5 acts? And then I got fired in COVID because I was just having a sad, depressed time and could not function at my job. So they fired me. Kind of bogus. But now I work for the city, which is great! But also, I don’t work very often, which is unfortunate.
C: And not to get too explicitly political, but… [Everyone bursts out laughing] But this election was so important. Because like with Brianna and Khalyle, with all of us - I got a grant from DCASE to do my own solo project, Jeezel Peetes, and that was paid for by the city. And the public sector is kind of a hope for the arts? And Paul Vallas wanted to destroy that because he’s a piece of shit. [laughs]
B: Paul Vallas doesn’t even like house music. [laughs]
K: Lightning round debate prompts should just be classic Chicago house music. Just see what they do.
B: You know Brandon Johnson knows how to footwork.
K: He better.
Amplified: What’s inspiring you right now - Musically or otherwise?
E: ….Are we inspired right now? [laughs]
C: Do you guys know Onion City? It’s a film festival, they have experimental films and I don’t know, I saw some of those and I thought they were really cool. Some were very odd, but I’ve been doing more film music stuff too, and it got me thinking about how we can use sound in different ways. So I kind of liked that.
Some of them hired composers - But there was this one about relocation and feeling like you don’t have a sense of home, set in LA. And everyone had these weird masks - a bird or a fish - and a lot of the soundtrack was just swirling ocean sounds. (Because the one guy was a fish, and he came from the ocean, so they kind of used that.) But it conveyed a lot.
B: That was finding Nemo, I think.
E: It was Finding Nemo 2, actually. [laughs]
K: I guess I’m inspired by Röyksaap, but I’m always inspired by Röyksaap.
C: I didn’t know you liked Röyksaap!
K: I love them! They had Poor Leno in SSX3, so that’s where I got into them way back then. And it had a great soundtrack. And they just had a bass player! For a lot of their songs, they hired some dude to play bass on a bunch of them, so I was like, “Damn. Bass can just be more chill.”
Amplified: Can we ask you all what the last played song on your phone is? Or whatever you use to listen to music?
E: I don’t listen to music, that’s the problem. Most of the time I just listen to stuff that I’m working on, I don’t really count that as listening.
ZB: I’ve been listening to Welcome to Detroit, by J Dilla.
B: I was listening to Boy’s a liar Pt. 2. I am in my Ice Spice era.
ZU: I guess I’ve been playing a lot of Kingdom Hearts lately. So I’ve been listening to Utada Hikaru.
B: Yesss.
K: Who’s the composer for that again?
ZU: Yoko Shimomura.
ZU: I got COVID really bad recently, so I fell asleep a lot to Charlie XCX’s pandemic album. Which is incredible. I feel like a lot of the art that people made during the pandemic - I’m really sorry everybody – was really bad [laughs].
K: That’s okay!
ZU: But I feel like that album is a total outlier. She was just like, “i have totally unwraveled. Here you go.” [laughs]
K: The way I work, I pick one song to get obsessed with and listen to it a lot. So my new obsession is the song Intergallactic by the Beastie Boys.
C: I’ve been listening to a lot of classical music. I’ve been listening to Revel, Spanish Rhapsody.
Amplified: Are there any artists in Chicago that are particularly inspiring you right now?
E: I always like the stuff Rami Atassi does. He’s got some cool stuff.
B: I feel like the last full length album of the homies I listened to was Malci. The last full one was Papaya.
E: So good.
K: Is Sunjacket local? I saw them and they’re pretty electronic, pretty interesting. But I see Heet Death perform a lot, and I just like their energy onstage. That’s inspiring.
B: Lilac was really great, the last time we saw them. I really enjoy Lilac.
C: Our boy Marcos is playing with Rios Trio.
K: Raro is coming up and pretty cool, they seem to be doing some interesting stuff.
B: Naydja Burton bout to hit the scene again!
ZB: She’s got that new band too, the one she just started.
C: Can we shout out that jam session? That Naydja jam session at Elastic is very good.
Amplified: Speaking of locations - Where in the city should people listen to In Hell?
C: I think they should in Ping Tom Park and look at the most scary bridges. Those industrial, rustic bridges.
B: On 63rd Street between Western and Damen, the overpass is kind of depressing. Also on 18th and Western, the overpass.
E: Oh yeah, I have a list of abandoned areas on my phone. You can go to Hamlin and Grand, you can go to Humboldt and Cortland, you can go to Damen and Elston, Diversey and Hoyne, or Damen and Erie.
K: Just go to the 606.
ZU: Driving literally anywhere for any amount of time in the city is hell, so.
E: Or waiting for the bus.
Cordoba performs with The Phantom Broadcast at Constellation on April 21, 2023 (tickets). Their new LP, In Hell, is streaming on all platforms. Find updates on upcoming events with Cordoba on Instagram @cordobachi and online at www.cordobaband.com.
