Left to right: Jay Ryan, Kip McCabe, Jason Harvey
Essayist and self-proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics” Robert Christgau once wrote, “Great bands keep creating from what they know, and figuring it out as they do.” Chicago’s Dianogah have spent the last twelve years crafting unique compositions primarily from their two basses and drums, incorporating minimal guitar or keyboards when the situation called for it. On their first album in six years (still untitled at press time), bassists Jay Ryan and Jason Harvey and drummer Kip McCabe branch into new territory, using their bass-centric background in exciting new ways. “We’ve been a band for a really long time,” says McCabe, “and I think now we’re trying to shrug off how captive we are to our instrumentation. We’ve explored a lot of what we can do rhythmically and melodically. I think our next step was breaking away from what seemed easier to do with our instruments and trying to do something different.”
Dianogah formed in 1995, and quickly became a staple of the vivacious Chicago independent music scene. “You had all these vibrant labels working here,” says Ryan. “You had bands that were operating on a really small level, like ours, all the way to the more popular indie rock bands like Shellac, Tortoise, and The Sea And Cake. There was very much a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude. That was the thing people said about Chicago.”
Now, in 2008, Dianogah are operating in largely the same self-sufficient manner, but in a changing scene. Harvey comments, “The whole point of this was to have fun, and the fact that anyone would come to see us play, the fact that anyone would still put out our record is great because it’s just our fun thing to do. Now, every Tom, Dick, and Harry band has a booking agent, a PR guy, a label, a manager. When we started out, we felt lucky that we would have a label to release our record.”
Ryan, who also runs his own screen-printing studio The Bird Machine, adds, “I think it’s fair to say we’ve always had super low expectations of the band. We can probably go to any city in America and a dozen people will come out, and maybe four of them will have heard of us, and that’s cool. We don’t expect three hundred people to come out, and we don’t get frustrated when three hundred people don’t show up.” The rampant careerism of current Chicago bands is somewhat at odds with the community from which Dianogah arose. Still Dianogah persevere, and in 2008 Dianogah are shaping up to be stronger than ever.
The band’s first three albums were in-depth explorations of bass guitars, seductive rhythms, and intertwining melodies. By the time Millions of Brazilians was released in 2002, the wandering melodies threatened to drift away entirely. “I think we realized after the last couple records that the quieter songs don’t end up making it into our live set very often, because they seem to be the things that bore people when we’re playing them,” says Harvey.
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