Vince Cuneo is a guitarist who forms one half of the Venice Beach-based instrumental Rock project Movie Club, along with Jessamyn Violet, and on November 9th he launched a new side-project of his work called Portraits of Pirates with its first album, Floating Gold. Part of the equation for Cuneo is the ongoing involvement that Movie Club have had in promoting live music events, even acting as hosts for themed nights of music and art. The songs on Floating Gold began as a meditative practice for Cuneo that delved further into ambient psychedelic sounds, but it was the live opportunity to test this music at outdoor yoga events that convinced him to gather and release his experimental tracks.
What we find on Floating Gold are tracks themed toward calm and reflection, but also towards inspiration and adventure, with the titles giving a clue of the mood that inspired Cuneo, like “Smuggler’s Cove”, “Walk The Plank”, and “Drop Anchor”. Since Cuneo is a guitarist, it’s natural that these pieces are guitar-driven, but this new territory allowed him to discover very different ways of sculpting sound with this guitar and building electronically on organic processes. I spoke with Vince Cuneo about his discovery of Portraits of Pirates and what he’s searching for with Floating Gold.
You are a very busy man. Not only do you have Movie Club, but you recently contributed to the album for the book Saint The Terrifying with Joshua Mohr, who I spoke with. And here comes a new project, Portraits of Pirates.
Vince Cuneo: The album was super fun! Movie Club is super busy. We’re playing a show in Austin and New Orleans next month, right after I drop this Portraits of Pirates album. We’re trying to put out there as much as possible. With this project, it feels very natural, and I’ve just been making this music more and more.
You already make instrumental Rock music, but this is something pretty different. Have you been interested in ambient music for a while?
It just started with me and a looper pedal. I got that pedal within the first year of me playing guitar, and I would just use it for practice. I started listening to a lot more Neo Classical. One of my big influences is Nils Frahm, and he performs this kind of music live with the piano. It’s this idea of live looping. This music’s a lot more droney. I started playing this while winding down from a day when I want to practice but don’t want to play heavy Rock. It’s soothing, it’s a lot slower music. It was just for personal meditation. I didn’t think it would be a project.
Then, I had a friend who was doing yoga events and asked if I wanted to play while she guided some people through slow yoga. Performing with her also changed it into something else. I was having more fun exploring with it, and people were receptive to it, so I thought I should put an album out there. I want to start playing more shows in LA with this project, so that seemed like a good idea. It seems like there’s kind of a scene right now for this music. There are all kinds of artists who are in various projects but also do this solo ambient stuff, and everyone does it differently.
I realized that since I had a minimal studio with gear, I could track all of it myself, and that’s the beauty of it, that I don’t have to put aside a budget to put this out there. That was an exploration to see if it even worked to record. That process was super fun. When I track with other bands, I track separately and do overdubs, but when I started working on it, it was all about feeling and emotion. So I tracked most of this album live, where I’d create a loop, and then just play over top of that. Then I’d add some delays and reverbs. That felt more natural than writing a melody. When I play this music live, most of it is improv, so I just recorded that. I kept tracking songs, and then asked myself, “Which of these work?” That’s how I put together the ten songs.
It’s very self-contained, which is different from anything else you’ve done. Is that ever disconcerting, wondering what to do next?
It’s funny because it could be called a solo project, which feels a lot more pressurizing, but I feel like the more I continue to play music, the less precious I am about things. It did take a while, since I finished tracking it in March. But then I had to have pictures taken and do a music video. Stuff like that was the piece of the puzzle where I got a little hung up. I didn’t want it to be “The Vince Cuneo solo project.” This is just a facet of what I do.
We did a little more ambient stuff on our Movie Club album Great White because it is psychedelic, and we do a little of that in our performance. We kind of go off into a floaty sequence and Jessamyn will play the drums for transitions between heavier Rock songs. But this is a little different, and I get to have restraint with this. I don’t play super shredding guitar lines. I play less and let things breathe. That’s a fun part of this project, practicing restraint on the guitar. [Laughs] Most guitarists don’t think that way! In fact, doing this has been bleeding into all of my other projects. My guitar playing is growing because I’m playing much more of the time now. The other thing is that there are a few songs on the album that are more guitar songs than ambient songs, because that’s just who I am.
Does this take some adjustment when playing live, or do you stay very stripped down?
For me, it’s supposed to be about the simplicity of it. So it’s just using my guitar, and some delay, and some effect pedals. Some people will hear me play and say, “Wow, I didn’t even realize that was guitar!” The second track on the record, “Davey Jones,” was one where the fact that I’d been listening to a lot of Tangerine Dream came out. That’s the cool thing, these influences just naturally come out. Someone thought that it had synthesizers, but that’s my guitar! It starts to become something else after so many loops. I can create a Punky noise. I can think of the guitar as more of a percussive instrument.
It feels like the songs are more about the sounds that a guitar can make, rather than a guitar line or melody.
Right! That’s the fun thing. I’ll do some harmonic stuff. I’ll slide my wedding ring on the strings, and it sounds like birds chirping.
What about the whole pirates angle? Is this another oceanic connection, since I know you like those?
The name came up when we were at Disneyland, when we were waiting in line for “Pirates of the Caribbean”. We were looking at all these portraits of fictitious pirates as we were walking in. I really liked the ring of that, and I’m a freak for alliteration, so I wrote it down. Also, I’ve always been obsessed with pirates. I was a pirate multiple times for Halloween. Peter Pan was also huge in my household, so the idea of being a pirate, exploring, and finding treasure was always very romantic to me. With this project, there’s something that feels the same, like it’s an ever-growing thing. I’m already thinking about what I can do differently on the next record. I’m not forcing things. I’ll be filling in my free time with it when Movie Club isn’t too busy. We’re hoping to be on tour when Jessamyn’s next book comes out, around June 2025.
This album is also coming out on my birthday, which is exciting! I think it’s just more important than ever that artists keep cranking out art. One of my musician friends said, “Well, your music isn’t doing any good sitting on a hard drive!”
One of the things I was going to say about the different projects that you all have worked on is that it’s inspiring that you’re putting it out there so widely. It’s a lot of work, as we’ve been talking about. A lot of people want to finish projects, but they just sit. You are keeping pace with releasing the work that you’re creating.
Right. A lot of artists finally have everything in line and are getting ready to release stuff, then they get near the finish line, and they start to overthink everything. You’re hyper-focused on the artwork, or the font on your album. That’s part of modern times, but if you have a great album, just be excited. We all do wonder if people are going to like it, because we’re artists, but if you’ve created something, that’s exciting, whether it connects with a bunch of people, or one person. You’ve got to put your art out there.
It’s funny, because I did a few of these live shows, and I was wondering how they would go. And you have to ask yourself, “Where am I at today? Do I feel good? Do I feel bad?” Because that really comes out in this project. The other thing is that since it’s just me, if there’s a wrong note played, it’s super magnified on me! But an audience might not even notice that, so you can’t be too precious about it. People need music. If they can go to a show or put on music at home, they can shut off the other stuff. Maybe they can listen to some ambient guitar music!
Music affects people strongly. We know that, but we don’t really think about how that affects our mood. Maybe we should be more intentional about that. Maybe we should put ourselves in situations that we know are good for us.
I also just tell people, “Go see a band. Go see a style of music that you wouldn’t normally see!” I love it when I go to a show and experience a band where I haven’t listened to their album before. It revealed something inside me that I didn’t know that I was looking for. That’s always super exciting for me.
I should also ask you about your video for “Blackbeard” since that’s really intriguing. I understand that you worked with Bobby Rivero again.
Yes, Bobby Rivero is our go-to guy who’s done photos for Movie Club and he did the press pics for this as well, but he’s a surf photographer and videographer. He took some promo video when we did the photo shoot and I thought it looked really cool. I’m from the generation that has music videos, that’s important to me. I wanted to get a music video together as the last piece of the puzzle. Obviously, I wanted to do something at the beach, with pirate-oriented things. With any music video, you have a concept, and I wanted to do a search for buried treasure, where the treasure ended up being my guitar! Then you get into these questions, like “How am I going to pull a guitar out of a treasure chest?” But it’s a psychedelic thing, and it just keeps morphing.
The other thing is that I wanted something with me coming out of the ocean. So the idea is that I find this treasure chest, and then the treasure chest kind of shoots me through this portal into the ocean, and then I kind of come out in this new world where I’m in the same scene, but it’s different. It’s like a different planet. With all the videos that we’ve done with Movie Club, Jessamyn helped me storyboard it. And we shot the video in an hour! That included costume change, and jumping into the ocean. I got to edit it as well. The funniest part, when shooting it, was getting the action shot of me jumping out of the ocean. That took a long time. I was in the water at Venice Beach at 8AM so there weren’t any people around, and I was trying to get under the water with the treasure chest so it would look like I was coming out of the water with the treasure chest. We needed ten minutes of footage of me pretty much looking like I was drowning! I could see Bobby just laughing at me. I was in full jeans covered with sand and water. It was really funny, but we got most of the shots the first or second time.
