BELFAST - Dan Beckman and Amy Moon looked at some 70 homes before settling on a fixer-upper on Mill Lane in 2006. Perched above a bend in the road, the old farmhouse had space to garden and keep chickens, room indoors to make art, have a band and run a record label. It also had a rustic barn for hosting live music shows by a steady stream of musicians they'd met during a decade of touring the country — independents like themselves, willing to venture north of Portland for a potluck dinner, an appreciative audience and gas money, collected by passing the hat.

Moon and Beckman record and perform with an evolving circle of collaborators under the name Village of Spaces (the current group includes multi-instrumentalist Bob New). Past albums had an open and spontaneous feel, owing largely to the fact that the performances were captured live, often in their home. But for their most recent album, Welcome In, the session approach wasn't an option. Less than a year earlier, they'd had their second child, and finding time together in the studio without distractions proved next to impossible. Overdubbing the album in shifts offered some benefits, but on balance it was a compromise, and it didn't always work.

For one song that refused to come together in layers, they reverted back to the old way of doing things with some modifications. In advance of recording, Beckman set up microphones in the living room. Some time later that day, they reconvened. Moon held their infant daughter in a sling until she dozed off long enough to run the song. The take captured enough vibe to outweigh the occasional crack from the wood stove audible in the background.

These kinds of details are easy to romanticize. In talking about the recording Welcome In, Moon didn't go there but said the found and incidental sounds that permeate the album — a dog scratching its collar, answering machine recordings — do give it a more intimate sound than past recordings.

When I met up with them recently, the music studio adjacent to the kitchen had been partly converted to a production line for silkscreening LP jackets for the new album. One side showed a drawing by Moon depicting the band members as trees. If an album cover could be said to convey a sense of the music inside, this one had it: homemade, firmly rooted and a little weird. Rows of partially finished covers were strung up to dry at one end of the room like Tibetan prayer flags. Moon and Beckman's four-year-old son played with a cordless drill while their one-year-old daughter sat in Moon’s lap, occasionally bursting out with exclamations of “wow, wow, wow!” Both children are credited as contributors on Welcome In.

PBP: How did you get started making records?

DB: The first release that I did was in 1998. It was a 12-inch vinyl record [with Andy Neubauer/ Beckman and Moon met two years later]. We just didn't consider any other option besides recording it and releasing it ourselves on our own imprint.

PBP: That was a time when a lot of people were doing CDs or cassettes. Why vinyl?

DB: When I look back on it, we didn't think of it as a radical idea. A lot of our favorite albums that we had were self released records. We also loved David Bowie and Captain Beefheart and a lot of that kind of music that was mostly on records.

PBP: Were other bands pressing records then?

DB: If you look at a timeline, it ebbs and flows. The mid '90s was massive for vinyl. When I say massive, we're talking about bands that are going to sell a couple thousand records. There's such a glut of vinyl pressing now. My friend Caleb Mulkerin [of the Portland-based band Big Blood] says 300 is the new 1,000. As in, if you were a band that used to be be able to sell 1,000 records ...

PBP: Why did it change, because people had more choices?

DB: I feel like five years ago people were more likely to buy records just because they were vinyl. Now, just about anything that you can think of has been re-pressed on vinyl. Plus most new bands are going to put out a record. The idea of making records is less daunting now because you can go to a website and it's set up to do every aspect of it for you, start to finish. It's also a lot easier for a do-it-yourself band to get their music out there because there are all these corporate platforms available on the Internet. To me, it's confusing. It's like, ok, now I'm a do-it-yourself band. I'm not interested in corporations. But at the same time, in order to sell records — even 300 of them — you kind of need to use Facebook and YouTube and Bandcamp. And they're all very user friendly. They're not editing content. Much. 
 

The New Collective

PBP: You used a crowdfunding site for the new album. Why?

AM: In the past, when Dan and I were working, we've had to front money for the records and slowly get paid back. Now that we had a new baby and I wasn't working and we were trying to do some traveling, we didn't have enough money to put out the record. But we had all the music because we had recorded at home and we were ready to put it out. The record pressing plant we use [Gotta Groove], they press the vinyl and they also have this crowdfunding thing.

PBP: How much were you trying to raise?

DB: We set the goal for $2,500.

AM: But we didn't anticipate being able to raise that much. We thought maybe some rich friends would decide to just give us a thousand dollars.

PBP: I was expecting you to say [the goal was] more like $25,000.

DB: No, but the lowball cost of whole project is $7,500. We set the goal at $2,500. We put some of our own money in and we've raised $1,500. It's allowed us to keep moving. Most of the people who supported it are fans and friends, and we haven't really figured out how to sell it beyond that. Which is probably why we didn't raise more. There are 61 supporters on there and some of them are distributors. It's hard, people, like family members who have said, oh, I want to support this, rarely have, and I think it's partially because you've gotta remember to check it out and go there and do it.

PBP: Were there fixed amounts that people were encouraged to give?

DB: It was actual cost. We put in some incentives for people who wanted to give more because they liked the project, and a couple people did that. But mostly it was pre-selling.

AM: Our business model is to break even [laughs].

DB: If we can break even, we can keep doing it. We rarely do this instead of going to work. It's not going to buy the kids diapers or even really put gas in the car unless we're going to a show or from a show.

AM: But we decided to pay ourselves this time to print the covers instead of paying someone else.

DB: That's how we're getting money for it, but we haven't seen any yet. Before crowdfunding, we put collectives together. We'd get like five labels to pre-buy a bunch of copies at cost and it worked really well. I think the reason we didn't do it on this one is that now we have these ways to get a hold of every fan and supporter individually.

[The collectives were a lot of work, not always well organized and didn't always live up to their economic potential, Beckman said, but occasionally the inefficiencies paid karmic dividends. He gave an example of an Oakland, Ca. distributor who ended up with extra copies of their album and gave them all away to friends.]

DB: That's huge, I mean, now we go to Oakland and play to like 80 people and get paid decent money.

AM: 80 bucks.

DB: It all works out. You get to hang out in Oakland.
 

The Return of Tapes

[The new album is available is just about every format from the last 30 years, including vinyl, CD, digital download and cassette.]

PBP: Cassette?

DB. Yeah, people buy them. There was a time when tapes were the best in rural areas. You'd go to the cities and nobody would buy tapes, but we'd play in rural areas and people would be like, 'Yes!' and buy tons of tapes. We've noticed a lot more traffic to our site from new tape people, younger people buying them.

PBP: Why?

DB: I think because they're cute and inexpensive. You can treat 'em like crap.

PBP: Is it funny to buy a tape?

DB: I think it's hip to buy a tape. I've heard people call it retro-fetishism. But I think generally the people who buy our tapes are like, 'I'm going to listen to this a lot in my truck.'

AM: Or in the kitchen.

DB: You can buy a tape deck at Goodwill for 6 bucks. You might have to buy a couple before you get one that works well.
 

Getting Rich

PBP: Have you entertained the idea of making a lot of money off of your music?

AM: We've thought about it, but I think it's impossible. You have to tour constantly, so it would be impossible to have a family. If Dan wanted to tour constantly, and stop being a weirdo, maybe we could make a little bit of money.

DB: We've just decided to put as a priority being parents and homemakers. We'll see. I had a dad who went away when I was 12 to live somewhere else to take a really good job, and I don't blame him for what he did but that's not what I want to do. And I think that's what it would take to really be successful at music. I'd have to hit the road for the next year.

PBP: I've heard that's true of bigger acts — that more of their money comes from touring than in the past.

AM: They say that because so much music is being sold on the Internet so cheaply, or being passed around for free, that now musicians are having to make a living by charging more for shows, which we're finding, too. We used to play shows where we'd pass the hat. Now we usually ask for a minimum guarantee.

DB: I have like a 20-year plan for quote-unquote 'getting rich' playing music, which is going to be more like retiring from my carpentry. I'm hoping in 20 years the kids can take care of themselves and all these different subsets of people will still be alive and we can play to 300 people instead of 50, and everybody will have gray hair, and there'll be some youngsters too, hopefully, and we'll have our motorcycle with a sidecar, and I'll ride in the sidecar, and Amy will drive the motorcycle, and we'll have a cart in the back with our records in it.
 

Listen to Village of Spaces’ Welcome In 
See other releases from Turned Word Records, or check the band’s blog for tour dates and news

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com