MEM10: Ten Questions for Jacques Granger
The Memphis electronic and experimental musician/promoter divulges his thoughts on Midnight Star, Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra, WEVL and WYXR, writer's block, the DIY ethos, and more
photo credit: Josh Summitt
I’ve known Jacques Granger for decades. He was a regular at Shangri-la Records when I worked there in the 1990s. Today, we live on the same Midtown dead-end street. In between, I’ve enjoyed Jacques' musicianship in the long-running post-punk band The Family Ghost, his instrumental electronic project Revenge Body, and other entities. I’ve also appreciated his behind the scenes work for the experimental electronic music festival Memphis Concrète and as a local promoter for touring experimental/electronic artists. Jacques and his cohorts, who include Natalie Hoffmann, the brilliant frontwoman for Nots and Optic Sink, and Memphis Concrète visionary Robert Traxler, have a unique talent for harnessing lightning and turning fleeting moments into lasting art.
Yet, despite our long history, close proximity, and access to his extremely dry social media posts, I realize I hardly know Jacques at all. He remains as enigmatic to me as the world of electronic music itself. Thus, the MEM10: ten questions exploring music, process, and creativity. Jacques’ responses offer deep insights not only into his own career but also into the intriguingly niche experimental/electronic music scene in Memphis. They’re as revealing as a glimpse from a submarine porthole as it dips beneath the surface of a cold gray sea. Suddenly, the mundane becomes the extraordinary, rendered in startling technicolor. In Jacques’ purview, Memphis’ electronic/experimental music scene coexists with the prevailing independent music scene, sharing airwaves, creative spaces, and performance venues. You just have to open your eyes and ears to find it.
What was the first music you ever bought? The first music I ever bought was Kiss’s Destroyer on cassette. I got it at the Pop Tunes on Summer Avenue when I was a kid, eleven or twelve years after it came out and well after Kiss had entered their facepaint-free hair-metal era. The first music I ever owned was Midnight Star’s No Parking on the Dance Floor LP. I flipped out when I saw them play a couple of the singles on Soul Train around the time that album came out, so my folks gave it to me as either a Christmas or birthday gift. I still love both of those albums!
What is the last music you listened to? claire rousay’s sentiment album. The song “it could be anything” cuts right through me.
What are you currently working on? My bandmates and I are writing songs for the next Family Ghost album, and we’ll hopefully have some new work show-ready in the very near future. I’m also in the middle of recording a full-length Revenge Body album, which I intend to finish by the end of the year.
Revenge Body. photo credit: Juli Jackson
What is your creative process like? For The Family Ghost, I have notebooks and phone memos full of lyric ideas in various states of completion, and I’m forever jotting down phrases, lines, and words that come to me. I’ll either try to write guitar parts that fit one of my lyric ideas or I’ll just start playing guitar until I land on something I like, and then try to work out a vocal melody and lyrics that make sense with it. None of us ever really brings a fully formed song to the band; each of us will bring in chords, drum patterns, lyrics, or some other idea to use as a jumping-off point, and then we collectively hammer the songs into shape by writing our own parts. We also sometimes just get together, start playing, and see if we stumble on anything we like, Can style. I love the feeling of working out a song’s parts with my bandmates and hearing them coalesce just about as much as I love playing a show that goes particularly well. For my solo work, which is all instrumental, I usually try to write with the intention of creating a particular atmosphere or addressing a certain theme. In those cases, I tend to have an idea of what synths and other equipment will let me best execute what I’m reaching for. There are plenty of times during which I’ll just hook up a bunch of synths, start recording, and see if I play anything I like on the fly. I also love running an instrument or radio through a series of effects as a method of procedural music generation, recording the results as they happen, and then processing segments of those recordings and repurposing them into parts of more structured finished tracks. I tend to like my tracks to be “just so,” even when I use a generative, unstructured approach to make up some of their constituent parts.
How do you handle creative blocks? I typically only ever have creative blocks when it comes to writing Family Ghost lyrics. There’s no distance between my lyrics and my life—I don’t deal in abstractions—so I take my writing seriously. That combined with my tendency toward overthinking and my fear of embarrassing myself can sometimes make lyric-writing tough, even when my life feels reasonably even-keeled. In the aftermath of a significant trauma several years back, I struggled with a major case of writer’s block that I’ve only gotten out of fairly recently. It was a life-altering thing that I knew I needed to write about, but I just could not articulate my feelings in the way that I wanted. I don’t know whether enough time finally passed for me to have the perspective I needed or if keeping up my practice of writing down lines and phrases shook me out of it, but I’m happy to be on the other side of it.
What’s your favorite venue for live music in Memphis? Your favorite record store, radio station, or studio? Why? I love the Lamplighter. Laurel [Cannito] and Chuck [Vicious]’s enthusiasm for hosting experimental music and their commitment to maintaining a safe, inclusive environment mean the world to me. I’ve had nothing but great experiences with the Hi Tone. They’ve always done right by me, I’ve seen more incredible shows there over the years than I can count, and I love their current space. I’ve only ever played at Bar DKDC once, but it was an absolute joy, and I always love seeing shows and going dancing there. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Crosstown Arts’ myriad excellent performance spaces. They’ve hosted so many artists who might not have otherwise played in Memphis, and they’ve partnered with us on every in-person iteration of Memphis Concrète. Courtney [Fly], Tori [Nute], Jesse [Butcher], and Jenny [Davis] are an absolute dream to work with, and I can’t possibly say enough good things about them, specifically. I’m still mourning Barristers, Two Rivers Bookstore, the P&H, the CMPLX, Last Place on Earth, and Artemisia Studios.
Revenge Body performing at the Lamplighter. photo credit: Robert Traxler
I similarly can’t settle on a single favorite record store in Memphis. Shangri-la will always hold a major place in my heart. I’ve been buying music there since I was thirteen years old—I only remember this detail because my dad took me there for the first time on my thirteenth birthday—and I still stop in pretty often. On my most recent visit, I was excited to pick up David Shire’s score to The Conversation at a reasonable price after looking for a copy forever. The workers have always been helpful and unpretentious, which is a huge deal. I should also mention that it’s the first place we ever met, back when I was a baby goth buying as many Joy Division/New Order/Cure/Bauhaus/Sisters of Mercy twelve-inch singles as I could afford. There’s almost no way you’ll remember this, but you once gave me a whole bunch of Joy Division and New Order-related press clippings, buttons, and other ephemera when I stopped into the store. That was a really thoughtful thing to do, and I still have all of it!
I also have a lot of time for Goner, naturally, and don’t think I’ve ever walked out of there without at least one CD or record. I’ve lucked into finding several of my holy-grail albums there over the years. And that’s saying nothing about all the incredible artists they bring into town, or about how cool and friendly the entire Goner crew is. And I know it’s been closed for years now, but I still miss Last Chance Records a lot. It was my favorite local record store when it was around, and the owner, Larry Shields, was—and I assume still is!—preternaturally kind and knowledgeable.
I tend to listen to radio purposefully, and WEVL and WYXR both have shows that are appointment listening for me. Among those are What Fun Life Was, Modern Girl, Into the Deep, and Modern World on WEVL, and Puttin’ on Airs, Sonosphere, Strange Wave, Computer Noise, We Belong, Grotto of Miracles, Thrust, The Witching Hour, Mint Cream Tunes, and Wake and Break on WYXR. Memphis has an absolute embarrassment of great radio. Mike Honeycutt’s Audio Exotica and John Thomas’s Back at the Home on WEVL, and David “Worm” Nall’s Modern Music Show on FM100, of all stations, stand out as crucial formative listening for me in the ‘90s.
Our band engineers all of its own work and I record my own solo work, so I have no experience in a traditional recording studio. If I were going to record in an outside studio, I’d go to OUTERSPACE or 5 and Dime Recording because James [Dukes] and Harry [Koniditsiotis] are friends I trust who themselves make music I’m into. I’d also unequivocally trust Alyssa Moore to record my work for the same reason.
What musician have you always wanted to be? Ian Curtis or Hank Shocklee.
What’s the best part of living in Memphis? The best parts of living in Memphis are the friends I’ve made from living here all my life and the city’s creative community. There’s a lot of overlap between those two groups of people, of course. The subsection of the creative community in which I tend to work places a lot of emphasis on inclusivity, safety, and kindness, on top of making singular art, and that means the world to me as a queer, fat musician. From a pragmatic standpoint, Memphis is a decently central location from which to tour or travel the eastern U.S. in general.
What’s your best show memory as a performer or an audience member? My best show memory as a member of The Family Ghost is having played a set to a receptive audience of friends and peers at a small festival in Chicago during the summer of 2013. Several people told us they were genuinely moved by our set, and I’m still grateful that they met us halfway and got something out of our work. Plus, we shared that festival bill with a bunch of bands I love, including The Book-Burners, the rutabega, and The Karl Hendricks Trio. The Family Ghost also got to play a couple of shows with Bottomless Pit, one of my favorite bands, and that was another definite high point.
As Revenge Body, my best show memory is having performed an original electronic score to Halloween III: Season of the Witch in a trio with Natalie Hoffmann and Robert Traxler at the Crosstown Theater last year. I was absolutely floored by the number of people who came out to the screening and by just how overwhelmingly positive the reception was. I admire Natalie and Robert an awful lot, and writing and performing that music with them was a joy.
L-R Granger, Traxler, Hoffmann. photo credit: Elizabeth Williams
I also have to mention playing in Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra at Off The Wall Arts in 2022. That show had a sense of sheer power to it that I haven’t otherwise felt as a performer. As an audience member, seeing Bedhead at Barristers in 1998 was transcendent. It’s the closest I’ve had to a show-as-religious-experience thing.
Do you currently make a living in the music business? I don’t. I’ve worked as a technical writer and editor for over twenty years. I genuinely enjoy the work, and I’m lucky enough to have spent the past eight years at a company I love surrounded by creative people who I’m friends with outside of work. I make enough money to fund my music and keep my life stable, and I’m able to take time off to tour. That’s a rare thing and I don’t take it for granted.
I’ve never aspired to make any money from my music, let alone a living, and I’ve never had the option of not prioritizing stability and survival above everything else. I’m one of those “I-make-music-because-I-have-to” people, in spite of the deliberate pace at which I release my work. My bandmates and I do everything ourselves, and I handle everything for my solo work. The music I make is such an unknown quantity that there’s no money to be made in working with me, and that fact tends to keep managers, publicists, and the like at bay. I wouldn’t dream of paying an intermediary to handle any aspect of my musical life, in any case. I’d always rather deal with people directly.
Look for Jacques Granger behind the drum kit in a newly formed, as-yet unnamed band with Maggie Trisler and Neely and Avery Vaughn. Keep an ear out for a new Revenge Body track, which will be featured in an upcoming compilation of Memphis artists on Machine Duplication Recordings.
More music from Revenge Body.
More on The Family Ghost.