Q&A with Fog/Andrew Broder

Updating a resume should be mere data entry, but it throws me into a dull panic. The cursor blinks petulantly, and I stare blankly. I'm faced with a patchwork of jobs past?the closest I've come to consistency was doing biochemical research and animal rights activism at the same time. I've labored at libraries and AIDS charities; I've been a photographer and a teacher. I'm not above babysitting, telemarketing and day labor. As I try to synthesize things, my thoughts blur. I think I might be a freelance freelancer.

Listening to his music, I'd guess that Fog, aka Andrew Broder, doesn't share my anxieties. I'll say it now and get it out of the way: Don't come to Fog (Ninja Tune) expecting a musical Portuguese, a seamlessly happy medium between styles. Some artists combine genres by fusing and resolving them, from Miles Davis and Amon Tobin to Santana and Radio Mundial. Others release a Tourette's outburst of hyphens, as if broadening the definition will clarify things. For Broder, it's been the equivalent of composing a complex, abstract photograph, only to have someone ask, "Well, what's it a picture of?"

"People's response is trying to find a category...as opposed to just talking about what the sounds are, what they mean, how they make a person feel," he says. "You talk to somebody, and they say, 'Well, I don't know if this is post-rap or avant-rock or turntable folk.' By the time they're done listing what the music might be, the interview's over."

Broder's music retains a turntable rawness reminiscent of Kid Koala or DJ Spooky, but each song remains crisper, more true to its form of the moment?you're guaranteed to like or hate each track. It's less about a cohesive sound or summation than about a momentary sensation. "The way styles are used, it's very unintentional...," he says. "I don't know that people quite know what to do with it yet, because it's a difficult one to put into a package."

The album begins with "A Word of Advice." I'll admit that having lived in can't-we-all-just-get-along California I initially skipped this track. The preface to William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life is spoken over a warbling hum and plodding, mournful piano. On second listen, the didactic text ("Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness and evil") clashes neatly with the muddied sounds beneath it. It's the equivalent of slouching over your last-call drink, knowing how you should live, but not wanting to hear it.

Other tracks convey cheerfulness in spite of, or perhaps to spite, an overwhelming sense of oppression. In "Pneumonia," comfortingly familiar guitars and high-pitched scratching are betrayed by the lyrics: "Mold spores fill my lungs and silverfish hide in the Venetian blinds in the wintertime/In the bathroom, with the shower running and my clothes on I figured out that I hate you all." On other tracks, the oppressiveness comes to the forefront, as on "Hitting a Wall," where anthemic, buzzing voices chant over a driving beat, "Hitting a wall blood in the mouth...some days it's like it's flattened/picking of teeth with toenails, eyeballs locked into position." On "Truth and Laughing Gas," the wail of a guitar blends seamlessly with the air-raid siren of turntables, only to turn into the curdled electronic remains of what were human voices. "The Smell of Failure" is John Cage-ish, with Broder spinning a mix of windy tones as a mechanical-sounding voice stumbles the word "this" through either speaker.

Broder seems to negate Tom Stoppard's caveat, "it's the Americans who don't have an irony button on their machines." His lyrics stretch between an embrace of too-clean suburban happiness and a bitter rejection of it: "the casserole was good and the drives were so nice, welcome to the worst part of your life." He's more afraid of being generic than cryptic, describing his music as "less primal, more sitting, reaching into parts of yourself."

Fortunately, he's also wary of being contrived. "The best [lyrics] come easily. Usually, if I sit and agonize, I end up throwing something away. The ones that stick are the ones where I'm going about my business during the day, and a line comes into my head and I write it on my hand."

In presenting divergent sounds on the same album Broder hopes people can look beyond the instruments and the label, and pay attention to the music?maybe even open up to something new. "Someone who's into Ninja Tune stuff might listen to my record and branch out, maybe go out, buy a Will Oldham record or something?

"We started playing live," he goes on, "a lot of the time, with punk bands or indie bands. We'd bring the turntables onstage. I'd look out at the crowd, and you could just tell, you knew what they were thinking. I could see the fear-of-Limp Bizkit look in their eyes. But it was good, because we had to prove ourselves."

Though Minnesota-based Broder is critical of the Midwest music scene, it's more an attempt to be realistic on his part. "It's like anything. If you're from somewhere, it's easy to take it for granted. [But] if you're trying to avoid pretentiousness, you're not going to. You're not going to avoid cliqueyness or arrogance or backstabbing. It's the same shit, there's just less of it. The smallness of it makes it almost incestuous. It's harder to feel a grand sense of accomplishment because let's say you're in a band, you can only play a limited amount of times for the same people... The well of that excitement runs dry really quickly."

Still, Broder seems to have found his place. "At some point in your life you discover what you're really good at. Everything else, after that point, becomes secondary."

Having overcome brief postrelease doldrums, Fog's about to head out on its first tour. Though this won't be Broder's first trip to New York (he's considered moving, except "it's a lot easier to be penniless here"), it will be his first gig here when he plays the Knitting Factory this week. What should we expect?

"In the recording process, I do all of it, or most of it. And it's pretty solitary, and it's pretty much in my own head. But when I do it with the band...it's up to me to articulate what it is." Think guitars, drums, turntables cutting up recordings of Japanese flutes, Neutral Milk Hotel indie hipsters, Prefuse 73 IDM'ers, MF Doom hiphop kids, those middle-aged guys who refer to it as "the Knit" and, of course, some dilettantes figuring out exactly what they're up to.

Fog plays Tues., July 16, at the Knitting Factory with DJ Illogic and Eyedea, 74 Leonard St. (betw. B'way & Church St.), 219-3055.