Don’t call Noot D’ Noot a funk band. They may inspire dancing hysteria like James Brown and dress like they are straight out of Parliament-Funkadelic, but the seven-year-old Atlanta veterans combine different styles into a genre-bending musical Frankenstein beyond classification.
Bassist Ben Coleman (Kid Pyramid, Judi Chicago, Early Modern Witch Trials) and saxophonist Ben “Dr. Kinje” Davis (Purkinje Shift) have weathered the unforgiving musical landscape of Atlanta. Both assert their own personalities in Noot D’ Noot, while simultaneously fitting seamlessly within the band’s individual grooves.
The Signal spoke with Coleman and Davis hours prior to Noot D’ Noot’s November 8 performance for the Creative Loafing-curated Red Bull Sound Select with Elf Power and Electric Sons. The pair spoke about how to write songs with eight songwriters, genre blending, the spirit of live performance and the influences that inspired their recent album, “Horn of Plenty.”
The Signal: I saw you perform for your album-release show at The Earl earlier this year, and you guys brought an incredible amount of energy into your performance. How important is the live show for you, and what do you to let the audience know how much you’re into your own music?
Davis: I don’t really try to do anything, and the spirit takes over your body and you start testifyin’, I guess. It makes me move around a lot and I can’t just stand there, even if I’ve had an incredibly heavy pizza [laughs].
Coleman: There is no try. We’re a party band, so that’s the whole point of what we do. It’s built to perform a function, so that’s what it does. It’s not something you have to force yourself to get excited about.
Davis: We’re having a party on stage. We hope everyone else is having a party with us.
TS: What kind of influences inform your music?
Davis: Since we’ve got eight members, their influences are all over the place. Several people in the band were in punk rocks bands in Atlanta a long time ago. We’ve been in punk bands, psychedelic bands. We have a hip hop DJ in the band, who also DJ’s african-pop music.
Coleman: Glam rock, whatever’s coming through at the time. We’ve got cowbells, plenty of go-go music. These guys are like a cyclorama of Atlanta bands. From left tor right you see someone who’s been in every different style of music.
Davis: it’s interesting because I have never heard of go-go music, but our drummer is really, really into it and introduced me to Trouble Funk, and I’ve never heard that particular style of music before. Everybody’s brought in their own things and we’ve all learned about what makes us want to party.
Coleman: We called the album “Horn of Plenty” because it’s meant to be whatever diverse funk music we pulled out of the last 100 years of pop music. There’s some crazy carnival music, there’s some proper Gary-Glitter-stomping glam rock, there’s some straight up funk stuff. You will hear stuff like Parliament in there. It’s not accurate to call us a funk band anymore, if it ever was. It is hard to pin it down.
TS: With eight different influences coming in at once, how do you manage to collaborate on songwriting?
Davis: There are two different ways: some of the band members will bring in unfinished tracks from home, and the band will learn that and add to it. Sometimes we’ll just be playing and practicing and jamming, and [we] harness those parts we come up with and arrange those.
Coleman: Free composing is a big thing — recording practices and pulling out the bits. I know before I joined the band, I know Mathis [Hunter] would reference the German band Can because they had their own stdio and just roll tap- play and just collage the bits that they liked together. So that happens with us as well.
Davis: That’s how a couple of our earlier records came together; [it] was us just playing and recording everything and arranging everything. How we do things seems to change all the time as well.
TS: Was that collage-like process how “Horn of Plenty” came together?
Coleman: Some stuff was already written before I joined; I’ve only been in the band for two years. Mathis and I got together and wrote about half of the album over one weekend. We just sat down and worked out different hooks and ideas and then those developed when we proposed them to the band. It was an exciting time, too, because I just joined and there was a lot of working out what we were doing in the new configuration as a group. So we had something to work on every time we got together.
TS: What was your musical background before Noot D’ Noot?
Coleman: I play in a group called Judi Chicago and we liked Noot D’ Noot; so we asked them to do a regular residency with us — originally at the Drunken Unicorn, but we went to Lenny’s and did a thing for a whole seven months and we’d play together and switch out who headlined. Inevitably because we were both party bands, the edges got blurred together. James [Joyce] starting playing drums for Judi Chicago as well so it was a no brainer when someone left Noot D’ Noot and there was a vacant position.
TS: What did the original incarnation of Noot D’ Noot look like?
Davis: Originally there were just two members. There was Mathis [Hunter] and Rich, and they came up with lots of different music in their homes and in their home studios, and eventually they wanted to record an album of their music, so they invited all their friends in to record their tracks. Then there was their mixtape release-show, and so they had everyone get in and learn the songs, and that was our first show. It was kind of them writing and having their friends play stuff on top of that. Afer that it morphed into everybody writing together.
TS: How have you seen Noot D’ Noot’s sound evolve over the course of seven years?
Davis: Well, if you were to listen to our first mixtape, it sounds like an African mixtape made by someone who’s on a lot of acid. There’s the stuff we play now, and you can hear a harder edge to that. “Street Fighter” for instance, to me is pretty hard rock; you can’t really call it a funk song, or if you were just to hear one song you couldn’t say, “this is a funk band.” They wouldn’t have been playing like that seven years ago.
Coleman: We have a willfulness to blend genres that don’t necessarily work well together. “Street Fighter” is a glam rock song like Rock and Roll Pt. 2 by Gary Glitter, and there’s a part that has an acid house 303 sequence playing across it. Noot D’ Noot has always been doing stuff like that. We’ve worked with Dungeon Family’s Sleepy Brown; Brann [Dailor] from Mastodon plays drums on one of the tracks. We can do that — we can have someone from Mastodon to play drums on this weird hip-hop track. They love it.
TS: Was this genre bending a conscious decision?
Davis: I would have to say it’s a deliberately unconscious decision. It just so happens that we’re all into so many different things that we have to put all those things together. We can’t just say, “well we’re just gonna play funk.”
TS: Do you feel like Red Bell’s Sound Select has increased your presence outside of Atlanta?
Davis: Definitely; we’ve gotten a lot of exposure through Red Bull. We’ve gotten a lot of new followers in Atlanta and some outside of Atlanta just through their website.
TS: Do you have any spoken or unspoken goals for Noot D’ Noot’s future?
Davis: I think we just decided tonight we would rather just do instead of dream.
Coleman: Just do what comes naturally.
