Manuok AMP #37

Out of the Bedroom and into the Ballroom—Manuok’s Scott Mercado goes Big
By Adam Gnade / Photos By Robert Queenin

Scott Mercado from Manuok is an unassuming guy—quiet, aloof, not the sort of dude to talk his music up or even let on that he’s in a band. He’s the kid you’d see at parties, slouched into the couch, nursing a beer, and smiling—not an idiot’s smile, the smile of the empty-headed, or the grinning boozy hipster smile, but that of a man content with life, not concerned with the dizzy, spider-fanged, fame-hungry circus around him... watching and listening.
His mellow attitude—kind of the thinking man’s version of the stereotyped laidback Californian—might be the reason his solo music’s stayed unknown for so long. His dayjob band, Via Satellite, is doing well, and has been for a while, and he’s done work for The Album Leaf, who’s now Hummer commercial big. But Manuok, a project Scott’s been working on for years, has slipped through unnoticed by the greater indie rock obsessed masses.
But he has his debut record out, and he’s been forced to bring things into the light. Touring. Full band. CD release parties. Promotion. The whole deal. So, meet Manuok, meet Scott Mercado, and get used to him. You’ll be seeing a lot of him in the next few years. (That’s a good thing, by the way.)

Q: What does Manuok mean?
A: Read it on a bathroom wall.

Q: Yeah?
A: I've always been into puns and linguistics and things of that nature. It was in two or three parts... and I just read it as a string... and replied to the toilet, "Yes, feeling fine."

A Reader’s Digest Condensed History of Manuok
Scott Mercado was in the sixth grade and his neighbors were having relationship trouble. To placate his tempestuous wife, Little Scott’s neighbor got her a Sonor drumkit to replace her 1968 Slingerland set, which the sixth grader promptly bought. (He used the $200 he made mowing lawns, which is the sweetest thing I can think of right now.) And the rest—as they say in the land of journalism cliches—is history.
More history: Scott was born in Montrose, Scotland, in 1976. From there he moved to LA, and then to Virginia, then back to LA—where he took up guitar to go along with his drums. He still hadn’t learned about music composition and invented, by necessity, his own songwriting style. (It had chords like “chord x” and “chord z.”)
In his teen years he played in a handful of LA bands—including one where the singer’s gimmick was eating weird shit on stage—live fish, vomit. (You probably haven’t heard of them.) His bands were art rock, experimental, and acoustic coffeehouse stuff, everything but the hair metal noise that had owned the city throughout the ‘80s but was—at the time—fighting a dying battle against grunge.
“My first gig at the Whisky a Go Go was in ‘91, I believe,” says Scott. “It was a tough time for LA hair bands—with names like ‘Alley Kat Scratch’ and ‘Jo Mama’—but rock will never die in LA—and I think the same 180 pairs of leather pants have been passed down from generation to generation. Like an American (rock) quilt. All the while, I played drums in bands, I played guitar at home—in PJs. Though most of the albums I recorded in that time have a song or two I wrote, for the most part I just played in my room.”
A few years later Scott moved to San Diego and joined the popular rock band Grow, but was never happy. (“Drumming and bumming,” he says.) The answer to Scott’s blues came later when he met San Diego songwriter Drew Andrews and “became” the band Via Satellite, when its singer and guitarist left the group to get married.
Right before Scott joined Via Satellite, in the nine month limbo between drumming and bumming and his new group, Manuok was born.
“In 2000, after a long and horrible tour, I quit being a drummer. I holed up in my bedroom with a shitty computer and started recording all these ideas I've had forever.”
Since 2001, Scott and a variety of players and friends have recorded a handful of unreleased Manuok music, including the 20 copy CD-R Atrophy, in between him touring with Via Satellite, doing remix work for The Dropscience, playing live with lowcloudcover and Ilya, and recording with The Album Leaf and Pilotram.
He also did a soundtrack for a short film called, Almost Romeo.
“I was lucky on this one. The movie was about a man losing his wife and child. They took a few songs from the album and I composed two. Interestingly, one of the songs was for a goth club scene. (You'd be surprised at the types of songs I've recorded, everything from country to industrial.) The movie had its debut on Friday the 15th at Warner Bros. Studios. It's a short film, 15 minutes. It's been sent to most film festivals. I don't know too much else about its release or distribution. I was just happy to help them out.”
But don’t expect Almost Romeo to be Scott’s last work in celluloid.
“It is my intention to do soundtrack stuff for the rest of my life. It is a goal: I want to be a composer.”
You might even see his stuff on commercials one day.
“Commercials... eh, yes. I've dabbled in it. I had a really hard time getting my heart behind it. I've gone back and forth on this one. I've been offered a job here and there... I gave the jobs up. I just couldn't do it. Recently, I’ve been more keen on the idea. I'd like to think that I am capable of separating what I do for myself from other projects.”
But his priority right now is the new CD.

Ghost choruses and Styrofoam beats
Scott’s new record, released by San Diego’s Loud and Clear label, is self-titled and packaged humbly—not the sort of thing that advertises its wild and haunted insides. Dark, bedroom-pop waltzes flit and sway up against a thundercrack of drum ‘n’ bass. Scott’s voice comes on as a whispering mumble, then harmonizes into a pure, high falsetto alongside a ghost chorus of voices.
The record sounds organic—always—no matter how much electro soup simmers into the cracks—beats like wine bottles hitting against Styrofoam ice chests, swells of flighty bee-stung strings, flourishes of laptop noise skirting under the piano and bass, swirling like goth-informed gypsy music.
It’s mainly him, along with some friends, but it always sounds like a full band. And, recently, he made it one, bringing on drummer Jeff Grasmic, guitarist Matt Mournian (Goodbye Blue Monday), bassist Russel White (Camera Obscura, Short Wave Radio) and cellist Jarrod Chilton.
“Brad from Loud and Clear heard the album and wanted to put it out but only if I formed a band. I was uneasy about doing so—since the thing has been locked up for so long. But I decided to go ahead with it... take the chance. So here I am. Since I've started playing out and promoting my music, things have been wonderful. I am very grateful to my friends who have pushed me along. Jeff, Matt, and Jarrod have been my backbone. I wouldn't have gotten off the ground without them. Especially Jeff, who's one of the best musicians I know.”
Songs like “Maria Oden” begin with clean, stately piano, which is then joined by drums and a rise of electronic strings. “Happy Clause” is all foreboding Black Heart Procession-ism, brushed light with Scott’s boyangel voice. My favorite track on the album, “Ahead with Nobody,” is a well-composed waltz that bends and nods like Bright Eyes’ “Sunrise, Sunset.” It is then peppered by a jackhammer of jungle beats—which come out of nowhere—and then rinsed clean by European ballroom piano, a good piece of music writing coming in at just over a minute and change.
“Generally, I write music as it comes to me,” says Scott. “Most often when I get a certain feeling ... some kind of sadness being the strongest and most often. After a long day. After a sad movie. After something happens to me or someone I know. After an election of a certain evil person. After war breaks out... you get the idea. There's nothing I do to get into the mood. I do not force my music. In fact, that's why most of my songs are short. I usually only write what I need to convey the feeling. Nothing more. I'd rather sing the same lyrics over and over than force them.”

Chant it, sing it
I email Scott late one night. I’m in Virginia, near where he bought that first drum kit, and he’s on the road with Via Satellite. “How do you write music? How does it work?”

“I write a couple of ways:

1: An idea or song comes to me at a time when I have absolutely no way of playing music. Shower, driving, talking on the phone, at work... you name it. That's where either a tape recorder, answering machine, or religious chanting of the song until I get home in my head happens.

2 A: While messing around, stumble on an idea or song (usually at night)—usually in a matter of minutes—piano or guitar.
2 B: While recording an idea or part, the rest of the song just happens—falls into place.

3: I have an innumerable catalog of old parts and songs. Most of which I've forgotten—some of which I've recorded. So when I am writing a new piece, sometimes an old piece of music finally finds its home. I often destroy an entire song for its parts.

4: Drum beat. This is an old school way that sometimes still creeps in. When I was a drummer it happened more often. An interesting beat, almost always odd metered or an off beat. Part of ‘Happy Cause’ was written that way.”

Behind the hulking orchestration of his “odd metered beats,” electronics and flourishes of somber piano, the lyrics blur into each other, dreamlike, garbled behind effects. It gives the feeling of words heard through walls, or under the effects of a heady booze buzz, your reality blipping out into fractals and loops of conversation and noise and incoherent slurs. Which isn’t to say it sounds messy or half-done. It works. Well. And only adds to the distorted, almost druggy dis-reality.
“Lyrics, shit. That's another thing,” he says near the end of our on-and-off two week long interview. “I usually write very epigrammically. A phrase, a thought, something that moved me when I wrote the song. I can't stand writing lyrics. If it doesn't come to me on its own, I will sing gibberish or repeat the same lines over and over again. I do that live in Via Satellite and Manuok. The melody and feeling is more important to me.”