I don’t write professionally much anymore — no seriously, I used to earn a (meager) living at it — but from time to time I’ll pick up some freelance work if the subject interests me. I recently did a brief e-mail interview with bass player Al Cisneros of Sleep / Om / Shrinebuilder. He’s one of my favorite heavy bass players, an icon of the low end, largely unsung by mainstream music and the bass community, whose playing is heavily rhythmic, full of awesome subtlety, and uniquely percussive.
The piece hasn’t run yet (it’ll be in a future issue of Bass Player magazine, I don’t know which one), but in anticipation of the upcoming US Sleep reunion tour, and because I’ve recently started playing slow and heavy music with plenty of low frequency modulation, and listening to a lot of Om as inspiration, here’s a little teaser quote from the interview, and an awesome video of Om live at Amoeba Music in San Francisco from a few years ago:
“For me the bass is essentially part of the drums, it’s a melodic percussion instrument. You have to be able in some degree to play drums if you are going to play bass, otherwise its role is reduced to a downtuned guitar. Breathing and spacing in flowing time are totally essential in the bass approach. You’re not just playing a riff, you’re bridging the meter of the drums to the riff. For this you have to find the intervals in space between beats and melodies, and then know how to push them or hold them back depending on what the song is saying.”
Case in point…
As far as seasonal association, I always thought of 













