Charlie Looker’s CV reads like a who’s who of contemporary Brooklyn cool. As a fledgling multi-instrumentalist, he linked with Battles’ Tyondai Braxton for one of Glenn Branca’s seminal 100 Guitars pieces, helped pick the knots out of avant culty Zs’ endless jazz navigation and improved Moog jams with John Zorn. He even made his mark as part of Dirty Projectors for an album or two, god damn it. In Extra Life, his first band-proper, Looker has pinned, and punctuated, a gargantuan musical brand. The progressive, deeply poly-rhythmic, almost vaudevillian pieces ally Gregorian chant with Scandinavian chug metal and sheet music with a skeletal calm distinctly its own. Dazed Digital spoke to Charlie about sound ventures of past, present and future.

Dazed Digital: How did you go about establishing yourself as a singular performer?
Charlie Looker: I’ve just been making music the way I want to, with the people I want to play with. And that mostly means peers; people on my own level. Getting to play with older, influential musicians like Zorn or Branca is exciting, but most of their influence I had probably already soaked up from records before even meeting them. Most of the real inspiration I get comes from friends and people who are in the same life place as me.

DD: How did your participation in one of Branca's 100 Guitars pieces come about? What was the preparation like?
Charlie Looker: The music was really easy to play and immediately sounded awesome. I was brought on that project through some forwarded chain email invitation. The group had a ton of people I already knew, Dan Friel, Jessica Pavone, Ty Braxton, Ex-Models dudes. Weasel Walter was engineering the recording. The back and forth between Weasel and Branca was like a comedy duo routine, like some hyper-negative Abbott and Costello...

DD: Any chance of a proper collaboration with Tyondai?
Charlie Looker: Funny you should ask, Ty and I actually did a collaboration way back when I first met him in ’01. We had this short-lived trio called Antenna Terra, with drummer Mike Pride. I only sang a little, and some of it was hardcore-style screams. The sound was pretty trebly and no-wavey. Who knows what a collaboration with Ty would be like now? Given all that we’ve each gotten into since then, we would definitely have to officially discuss parameters and ideas beforehand.
 
DD: 'Made Flesh', Extra Life’s latest LP, is a sideways step from Secular Works. How do you think is differs?
Charlie Looker: I guess the songs on 'Made Flesh' are less expansive, shorter, somewhat less complex than the Secular Works stuff. Made Flesh still isn’t a pop record, but maybe it’s ever so slightly more in that direction. No acappella songs, nothing drone-based, no songs where my voice takes three minutes to enter, like on the first record.

DD: How have audiences reacted to the material? Any shows that stand out?
Charlie Looker: Well, people who like intense, weird music love Made Flesh to death. People who like chilled-out escapist beach jams don’t. When I said the new record was a tad poppier, I was splitting hairs really. In other words we’ve made a bunch of new fans, but not really any new kinds of fans, you know? As for stand-out shows, we played in Berlin with Parenthetical Girls and Former Ghosts, who are all friends of ours. Parenthetical Girls are so different from us, but the whole crowd loved us and it just proved that there are spiritual undercurrents that can tie together different audiences.

DD: Any new projects on the go?
Charlie Looker: Several! I’ve been working on this brand new all-acoustic band called Seaven Teares, which includes an awesome lady singer and some ancient Renaissance organs and recorders. I’m also doing this project called Sculptress, a recording-only collaboration with Chuck Stern (ex-Time of Orchids). And I’m playing with Period, an improvising group which includes Mike Pride, Chuck Bettis and Darius Jones (of Little Women).