Who are they?
Though it looks on paper like the makings of a multinational conglomerate, MadLove is actually the first band-related offering from former Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn since his spazz jazz Trio Convulsant released their 2004 freak-out album, Sister Phantom Owl Fish. Labelled by Dunn as a straight-up rock band, MadLove nonetheless boasts an eclectic mix of musicians. Fellow NYC avant-jazz travellers Ches Smith (also of Xiu Xiu and Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog) and Erik Deutch (DeVotchKa, Charlie Hunter) hold the fort on drums and keyboards respectively, while Icelandic guitarist Hilmar Jensson and South Korean singer Sunny Kim add their own sense of harmonic adventure. The latter’s involvement in MadLove was somewhat providential, as Dunn says they’d recorded all the music without knowing who was going to sing it.

“I went on this journey to search for the ultimate singer,” he explains from his Brooklyn apartment. “I went online and asked friends and went to 50 different MySpace pages, and then a friend of mine gave me this CD of a band called Myth of Mitch that Sunny led when she lived here in New York a few years ago. I loved it.” After the pair spent only two afternoons together at Dunn’s place, the journey was over.


A rock band, eh? So is normal the new weird?
“When I started out playing electric bass I was listening to pretty straight-ahead rock stuff and I’ve always enjoyed doing it,” says Dunn, an unabashed lover of Cheap Trick, Blondie and X. “The last few rock bands I’ve been in have been on the weirder side, and I just wanted to do something that was based more in the early stuff that I listened to. That, and just wanting to get onstage and play rock music.”

And while MadLove’s Ipecac debut White With Foam is a conspicuously progressive rock-out — sounding like a mix of late-period Faith No More, German popera singer Ute Lemper, new wave and metal, along with a formidable helping of vibraphone — don’t expect to hear frenetic arrangements or jazz-metal mash-ups. “I didn’t want to write anything that was like Bungle. I wanted each song to be a little more congruous to itself, which isn’t a critique of anything I’ve done in the past. Maybe if I played in straight-ahead rock bands before, I’d be doing something weird now. But I have outlets for doing more avant-garde and obscure music. So I need an outlet for this.”


Is there still a market for ADD-fuelled genre-crossing musicality?
The world is a much more open-minded place than it was when John Zorn started cutting his Nashville melodies with thrash-metal or when Mr. Bungle determined that the most direct route from Sinatra to surf-pop was through white-boy hip-hop and grindcore — a development for which these outfits were likely responsble.

“I mean, the cut-and-paste idea, I was never really a huge fan of it,” Dunn admits. “It’s humourous and fun to listen to, but this idea of genre shifting, I don’t feel that it was an apex of creativity. I feel like there is a lot more to be explored beyond that. It’s more homogenous somehow. That mixing of tastes has been refined somehow. And that’s the western way, to a degree, of taking all these influences and just dealing with them in your own personal way.”


Ears wide open
In an essay for John Zorn’s Arcana II collection, Dunn asserts that, “I don’t think I could even hold a conversation with someone who hasn’t spent quality time with Slayer and [Anton] Webern and [Charles] Mingus.” Dunn’s own resumé is a testament to this aesthetic, as he’s played with everyone from Zorn to Sean Lennon, Melvins to harpist Shelley Burgon, and even our favourite local carnival director Friendly Rich (Dunn appeared on the latter’s reworking of Modest Mussorgsky’s classical suite Pictures at an Exhibition).

“A lot of the people I play with regularly are basically like that — they listen to all kinds of different stuff,” says Dunn. “The truth is that I’m not going to alienate someone because they don’t know who Webern is or don’t like Slayer. But that general open-mindedness, I just really believe in.”