Absent Friend 1: Seth Vanek of Velvetron
"You've been warned. It's definitely four guys trying to make eachother laugh."
My interview with Seth Vanek of Velvetron.
Velvetron are a synth and post-rock band who have been active between 2002 and 2025. They’ve always been four guys from Chicago: Tim Berthiaume, Anthony (Tony) Mizicko, Colin Palombi, and Seth Vanek. They made a few releases and held these to, generally, great standards. Their music can be found and purchased through Bandcamp, and a particularly good starting point is the Spring EP. Somehow, they were algorithmically gifted to me on Spotify, and I almost didn’t believe this band existed without my knowledge. I was confused by Velvetron’s recording fidelity, their ability to match some haughty inspiration points, their placement in the Chicago scene, and yet their lack of online fandom and reviews.
In their own time they actually put a lot online but, because private web domains go unhosted, and because of MySpace’s tragic passing, there is little online about Velvetron today. I reached out to Velvetron and their drummer-percussionist Seth Vanek agreed that an interview was a good idea.
Seth and I met through Zoom. He knows this is my first time doing an interview, that I don’t have a website up yet, but we’re both excited to talk about Velvetron and their bizarre relationship to Chicago’s post-rock and indie scene. Our conversation starts with me apologizing that my condenser microphone stand is holding it right in front of my face; Seth shows off his Fender Rhodes at his right side; and we jump into a conversation which tells the whole beautiful story of Velvetron.
A. Friend: You know, just today I found so many more things about you guys. A couple minutes ago I finished listening to the Faust [1926] Original Score.
S. Vanek: You’re probably the fifth person, counting the four people in the band, to watch that. It’s pretty bewildering to have someone reach out about Velvetron, it’s not a band that people tend to know about, it’s cool that you found us.
A. Friend: I just spent today going back through everything a search engine will fish up for you guys, and it’s seemingly all stuff that you put up a year ago.
S. Vanek: Right. Tim is sort of our official archivist and he’s held on to everything. As we were working on this record that we put out last summer, he decided I’m gonna put this stuff up, now, in case - for whatever reason - this album gets people interested. The YouTube channel especially, there’s a lot of really silly videos that we did when we were younger.
A. Friend: That was what I just found, I just watched “Now Where Are They?”.
S. Vanek: Oh my god.
A. Friend: I loved it. If I had found that I wouldn’t have had to google so much. You guys gave your own history and just said it all backwards.
S. Vanek: I don’t know what we were thinking when we did that. That’s a theme with the band, we would do anything to not have to write and record music, so we were always like making videos. At one point we made this fake kickstarter project-
A. Friend: You took in money for a fake kickstarter?
S. Vanek: It was right around 2014 or 2015, it seemed like kickstarter was being really abused. Our idea was ‘what if we make a kickstarter, but the video is so incomprehensibly vague about what we were actually raising money for.’ If you don’t make the goal people don’t have to pay anything to it, so it seemed harmless. The goal was so ridiculously high, we came up with some cockamamy amount.
A. Friend: I have to fish that up. [I was, after our interview, absolutely able to fish that up.]
S. Vanek: You’ve been warned, it’s definitely four guys trying to make eachother laugh. The video worked like an opening act, live. We were instrumental music for the most part, so it did well to have something in a live setting that shows our personality more.
Image: Vanek appears on Velvetron’s “multi-platform collaboration engine” kickstarter.
A. Friend: The first thing that I know is nowhere online is you guys’ age, how does Velvetron come together? Were you guys a high school band?
S. Vanek: We’re all from a suburb called Oak Park, like the first suburb west of Chicago that’s still on the CTA. We didn’t know eachother well in high school so we met through college. Right after college, me and my friends found this warehouse for rent, and we thought we had struck gold. It had these offices in the front we could use as bedrooms, this studio in the back, and we did shows in the main warehouse space. That was the home base for the band.
A. Friend: Wait, is this The Ice Factory?1
S. Vanek: Yeah! Maybe that’s mentioned somewhere?
A. Friend: I saw that the Gapers Block Transmission has a blog post mourning the Ice Factory, 2002-2007.
S. Vanek: Woah! Yeah, that’s a long dead blog that did local arts and culture. You’ve been digging!
A. Friend: They called you an “Ice Factory resident.” I read it thinking ‘oh, you did a residency there.’ [laughs] No, you really lived there.
S. Vanek: It was like a live-work music space, and it lasted five years, 2002 to 2007. It was the best thing ever if you had a band, we could like … live, practice, rehearse, record in the same space, that was how we got the band off the ground.
Image: Velvetron channel Devo during a 2003 live set at The Ice Factory (which is their house).
A. Friend: I was wondering why there were so many clips of you guys in studios.
S. Vanek: Well, the studio was the cheapest Pro Tools rig that you could get. We had no idea what we were doing, but it was great.
A. Friend: You say that, and there’s all these stories about, like, Tortoise and Stereolab in 1997, John McEntire turning both of them into Pro Tools bands2, or Joan of Arc doing the same for their 2000 album,3 the one that got people to stop reviewing Joan of Arc albums—
Everyone says they’re bad with Pro Tools, and then you go listen to the record and you’re like … ‘I’m not sure what is supposed to be bad about this.’
S. Vanek: We were in this sweet spot where you could do stuff yourself, that was the style at the time. We had a friend who had studied [audio] engineering a bit in college, and he helped us a bit, but it was mostly us just sticking mics on things and going for it. Nobody would ever master anything professionally. We were putting these things out on CD-Rs, we’d handmake the artwork and everything, we were not shooting for mass market appeal.
A. Friend: Were you all just taking lessons in your instruments, or was anyone coming from music school?
S. Vanek: Just me. I was coming from a jazz perspective, I went to a couple years of music college and burnt out on it, realized I didn’t want to be a professional musician. Then I transferred to DePaul and my roommate had this internship at a recording studio, I’d come over there after hours and he’d let me look over his shoulder. The other guys were coming from more of a punk and indie rock thing.
Colin, who played the bass, he’s self-taught. Tim, he’s self-taught, might’ve had some lessons as a teenager on guitar. Then Tony is a classic person who’s had piano lessons, and he could play anything, but he got his hands on this Roland Juno 60 analog synth when those could be had for a few hundred dollars. That was the thing we wanted to build the band around, analog synth. Then I found this Rhodes on the Reader for like $400, so it was Rhodes and synth, Tony would stack those.
A. Friend: Okay, so you are being a pianist some of the time. On “Want/Will,” is that the Rhodes that we’re hearing?
S. Vanek: Yep.
A. Friend: It has huge harmonic tones on every note. I really like that song.
S. Vanek: It was a pretty beat up Rhodes, and I finally got it refurbished last year. We were running it through a tremolo pedal trying to get the best sound out of it that we could. My drums always sounded like shit because I didn’t know how to tune them too well, but … the keyboards I always thought sounded good. That was Tony’s domain, except for that Faust score where I was playing a really old, badly tuned piano, and moving over to drums a little bit.
A. Friend: Right, I notice you step between the two.
S. Vanek: That Faust score just came from .. I had this TV on top of the piano, and I had that silent movie, and I would play along to it for fun. It just grew into a Velvetron thing.
A. Friend: Velvetron did often feel like it’s a keyboard band even though there’s all these other things to like.
S. Vanek: It’s kind of the thing that made us unique. You mentioned Stereolab, that’s the band we all … I was like a jazz snob in high school, so I hadn’t heard much punk. Not Nirvana or any of that stuff that everyone my age listened to. These guys all did but somehow we met and became friends, decided to try this band out, but I was into jam band stuff, frankly. I was listening to that stuff and just thinking longform.
A. Friend: Well, I really like the drumming in the Faust soundtrack taking on more of - obviously it’s gonna take on a cinematic character - but it’s like you finally got to breathe more.
S. Vanek: It’s a lot of cymbal rolls with mallets if I remember correctly. We didn’t really score it. We had written down just like .. “C minor, for this scene,” then we designed themes for some of the characters.
A. Friend: In general, on all the Velvetron material, I notice you’re heavy on the cymbals. The drumming is always pretty cool or west coast.
S. Vanek: That’s the jazz influence, yep.
A. Friend: Had you guys heard The Sea and Cake and Sam Prekop stuff at the time?
S. Vanek: We were totally obsessed with The Sea and Cake.
Them, Stereolab, and Tortoise. Then Colin’s really into hip-hop, Tony listens to classical, Tim had got into The Cardigans and those more Burt-Bacharach-type 7th chords would sneak in from that. But Tortoise was the main thing. That was one of those bands where it’s like .. this is its own universe, then you had the side projects like Brokeback, Jeff Parker doing his thing, and we could go see them.
A. Friend: What was a Brokeback show like then?
S. Vanek: I think I saw them at The Empty Bottle4 one time … I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like pretty instrumental music, and people go to the bar to flirt, it’s like … you kinda wish there was reverent silence but it was never like that. You’re struggling to get out of it what you want.
A. Friend: Tortoise, though, they were billed pretty highly, no?
S. Vanek: Yeah, when I first saw them it was at a larger venue around the time of the Standards album [2001], which is still my favorite.
A. Friend: It’s great.5
S. Vanek: They had enough reputation that, at their shows, it did seem like people were locked in.
A. Friend: Did you notice they’d have Designer [Casey Rice] remixing their live shows as they happen?
S. Vanek: I’m learning about that right now, tell me more about that.
A. Friend: I think in Fearless [the 2016 history of Post-Rock by Jeanette Leech] there’s this thing about Casey Rice being ‘the hidden member of Tortoise’6 and, like, effecting and remixing and overdubbing layers as the band performed.
S. Vanek: Cool. That’s awesome.
We got like … it was weird being the age that we are. When we got to town in 2000, there had been a big boom in the 90’s - cool stuff like Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, Urge Overkill,7 and the aftereffects of that were still being felt but … it felt like we got there a little too late to see the cool stuff. I didn’t see my first Tortoise show until 2000 or 2001.
Image: screenshot of the 2004-archived Velvetron.net website.
A. Friend: Did you have the feeling in 2000 to like 2003 that you had to be on the internet, or that it was important to have a good web presence rather than getting the traditional indie deal?
S. Vanek: Good question, but, that sort of assumes we had more foresight or wherewithal than we did. YouTube was not around yet when we made these short, funny videos. They were coming from Colin going to the art institute and studying video, and so he always had a camera around, so he’d be documenting things that we did. Then he had this film festival at the Ice Factory8 where he’d show student work, local artists and stuff and we made our first fake trailer thing, “Behind The Story”9 … but the internet was just a means to an end.
MySpace became a big thing in these years and every band had a MySpace. When we were booking for the Ice Factory that was great, you could see and hear every band, see what bands they were friends with, how many people listen to them. It was a booker’s dream, MySpace, it was a shame that it went away. If you had a band, you had a MySpace, it was the rule.
A. Friend: Your band website, the WayBack Machine has you guys archived in 2004, and it was already in a pretty cute state. Like I have your website open to the Consume tab right now-
S. Vanek: With all the fake product links and stuff?
A. Friend: Yeah.
S. Vanek: We were always doing stuff like that. Noone would ever pay attention, I don’t know if anyone ever looked at that stuff. One time we took an ad out in the [Chicago] Reader that just said “band needs girls to like band.”10 No romantic requirement, we just want some girls to go to our show. It was just something we spent money on to make ourselves laugh.
A. Friend: Did that one work?
S. Vanek: No. [I laugh]
There was this other band in the UK named Velvetron11 and we’d write them these long letters and stuff, try to be friends with them, but also to be intimidating and make it seem like we were the more important band. Like I said, anything to avoid actually working on music.
Image: releases available for download from the Velvetron website in 2006.
A. Friend: You say that you didn’t work on music but everything, from the first EPs on, sounds really strong. Were you guys playing around with recording before those EPs? Are there bootlegs somewhere that come before this?
S. Vanek: Yeah, we started out playing in my mom’s basement out in Oak Park before we got the warehouse. There are some four-track tapes from that. Some of the stuff from those EPs was sketched out by individual people. The idea with those EPs was, like, instead of putting out a debut album we thought let’s take the stuff that’s more dark and post-rock, put that on one EP, take the stuff that’s lighter and jazzier, put that on another. We had a show on Winter Solstice 2002 for the Winter one, then .. no, actually, I bet it was our plan to do a 5-song EP for each season and then we just quit. [laughs] Like Sufjan’s states.
A. Friend: I guess you had a little time between then and the Faust score.
S. Vanek: I’m trying to remember if there’s anything else we did between then … I kinda wish we had stuck with the 5-song EPs, that seemed to be our sweet spot. Then we did our album called Things to Don’t, and that’s when we went on our one-and-only tour.
A. Friend: When I hear Things to Don’t, you guys sound even more songwriter, verse-chorus - do I hear the influence of Dntel?
S. Vanek: Definitely. It’s a little embarrassing even to think about but that Postal Service stuff was so inescapable at that time, it was just everywhere. I didn’t even actively listen to it or like it. It was just so present that I think it just seeped in.
[Dntel] wasn’t a conscious thing that we were going for. The conscious thing was that we had a friend who had an act called Office. They were way more popular than us [laughs]. He wrote like straight-ahead pop songs with electronic touches. Our song, that became the most popular song we did, was called “Snooze Bar.” We were trying to just rip off our friend Scott’s sound, really consciously, like ‘let’s just do a song like that and see if it works.’
Office went on to be signed for a little while by a little imprint that James Iha from the Smashing Pumpkins ran, then went on a whole music industry ride for a little while. But you’re very astute to hear that influence that’s definitely there.
A. Friend: That album also has the first Velvetron song with, clearly, no drums at all, and instead it has a really strong drum machine sound.
S. Vanek: That was an organ that we had in The Ice Factory, I just sampled each sound into Pro Tools and, like, edited it, programmed it, chopped it in Pro Tools, because I liked how it sounded. It was that analog kind of like .. I still have this one, now, this old Roland pre-808 drum machine, I don’t know if you can hear it. It had one of those sounds where, you know, the cymbals just sound like bursts of white noise, a little bit. That and the Lowrey organ, or something like that. Then I borrowed a vibraphone, that was the other thing, because Tortoise always had vibes.
A. Friend: I had a note to ask about that next, I was wondering are those synthesized vibes?
S. Vanek: No.
A. Friend: And it is just coming right from Tortoise.
S. Vanek: Totally.
A. Friend: I don’t have the track name but there’s one where the vibraphone ostinato sounds dangerously close to, I think, one of the “interval” tracks on TNT [the 1998 Tortoise LP].
S. Vanek: I know, I think [laughs] I know exactly what you’re referring to. We noticed it right away. We were like, are we gonna let this ride or not? And we were like ‘ah, who cares.’ That was already at a point where we were like ‘we’re lucky if anyone wants to listen to this, let’s not be picky about, like, whether it sounds too much like our heroes.’ I can’t remember which song either but I know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s like the guitar and the vibes are doubling a melody together.
A. Friend: On 4 [2011], you guys kept going with the vibraphones. You mentioned that in the gaps between the 2005 and 2011 LP, you guys are trying different stuff out, but the whole time it’s still the same friend group?
S. Vanek: Yeah, after the tour in 2005 I think we sort of needed a break. It didn’t go well. Those things can put a damper on the friendship and collaboration. I was doing a lot, I spent time in other bands, I was in a band with a friend called Roommate12 that eventually (- I only bring it up because we -) ended up recording in a studio called Soma in Chicago that John McEntire from Tortoise built13, where some of the great Stereolab and Tortoise stuff was recorded. That was like a huge full circle thing for me.
Image: The 2 post designs advertising Velvetron’s 2024 concerts.
A. Friend: There’s one more moment up that alley, too, and I’m skipping way ahead, but, you guys just performed with Dan Bitney.
S. Vanek: Yeah! That was definitely full circle too, and that was a little bit conscious too, it was like ‘how cool would it be if we could have Dan and Selina [Spectralina] play?’ And Matt Lux was in this band KVL [[the other recent performance]] and he’s in Isotope 217, another one of those side projects we loved. That also felt like another nod to the people we idolize.
A. Friend: Yeah, that’s awesome. I think Do Make Say Think are another band who have the same thing of having been formed as a “We Love Tortoise” group.
[[Seth asks about the story of Do Make Say Think, and I correctly mention that members of the group bonded over their shared loved of Tortoise, in the process butchering the names of Kevin Drew and Matt Spearin into one “Doug Spearin.”]]
S. Vanek: Broken Social Scene were another one of those acts that was huge for me, for sure. When we were working at Soma I found a pink notebook on a bookshelf, with a unicorn on the front, I started flipping through it and it was someone’s notes from a Broken Social Scene session, it had lyrics in it, from whichever album had “Sweetest Kill” on it.
We didn’t do much [between ‘05 and ‘11], the thing that got us back together was that I had a friend working on the first Obama campaign-
A. Friend: Oh that’s real? The Snooze Bar Obama Ad is real?
S. Vanek: It’s real! You wouldn’t know it, because of all our lies and fakery, but yeah he was like ‘do you have any instrumental music laying around?,’ I sent some instrumental mixes of stuff, and it ended up in an ad. In 2008 it really was, like, ‘woah, this is the first time a presidential campaign tried to use YouTube and The Internet to look cool.’ And some people did find out about us, because our friend was nice enough to credit us in the description.
We were like ‘should we go back to making music? Maybe people would listen to it.’
At that point I lived in a coach-house with a studio in the basement. We had a mixing room in the basement, and all the wires going through to this coach-house, we’d record and rehearse that way.
A. Friend: What’s the material on [the 4 LP] defined by, in your memory?
S. Vanek: It’s piecemeal. It’s reluctant work. That was when we had to start working independently, a lot of those songs had one person who’s the main author, then others came in.
A. Friend: Would you believe me if I said that’s what I thought was happening, like ‘each of the 4 of us has their songs?’
S. Vanek: Really? That’s exactly what happened.
And that was the time when you had what I think of as the first wave really out there Pitchfork indie rock stuff, you had Deerhoof, Animal Collective - but it was starting to move into poppy stuff like Phoenix and Vampire Weekend in 2011. You can hear that stuff coming through just like that earlier Postal Service influence. Like ‘should we do stuff that’s upbeat, happy, poppy, and major key?’
A. Friend: You guys put your first disco cut on there.
S. Vanek: Yeah! It’s pretty disco and dancy. We were doing more post-rocky stuff, then, but it never made it onto anything. Hours of jamming used to define our idea, but we never could do that. At this point we all had full-time jobs, we’d get together on a weeknight and everyone would be tired. We mostly made that album by sitting in front of the computer making little tweaks and looping things… But I really like the song on there called “Iowa.”
A. Friend: That song is awesome. And I like the closer [“April Song”], which is like your snotty indie rock song.
S. Vanek: That’s the Colin song. He brought that whole thing in based on a dream he had. He has a journal and, like, there’s a song on the first EP that has this computer voice - which is so Radiohead, OK Computer, just trying so hard - but all the text for that came word for word out of Colin’s journal.
A. Friend: And on the new album, the opener [“Something”]-
S. Vanek: Yeah. We said let’s just go back to that and reference our own shit, to be pretentious.
Image: Velvetron pose in front of a beautifully obsidian-finished, snow-cradled cabin, which must be in Vermont.
A. Friend: There’s a ten-year gap between It’s Christmas and Something/Anything, which you released last year. Is there one side of the quarantine that you guys were really putting your work in on?
S. Vanek: It’s quarantine related. Every musician or artist I knew, going through quarantine, felt completely detached from ... being able to do the thing they like to do, even though on paper you have all the time in the world for it. And people looked over their body of work, went through their archive, and had ‘will I ever get to do this again?’ in the back of their mind. Before that we had been working on stuff, renting a space in a warehouse, and it actually started in 2016 or ‘17 that we made a bunch of recordings. Then Tim moved to Vermont in 2018 or ‘19. So we were trickling along.
A. Friend: That shed in Vermont is his?
S. Vanek: Right, he and his wife moved to remote Vermont, and he does motion graphics for videos and ads, and so he had this really robust computer in his shed in his backyard, which is big enough that we all could fit in and play in it.
It’s hard to describe [the making of Something/Anything], it’s like what I just described about the making of 4 but, just, slower and more painful [laughs].
We’d sit together on a zoom and people would pitch new songs like ‘is this anything, is this anything,’ someone else would take that and run with it … we recorded a lot of stuff that we just threw out.
A. Friend: And yet is there somehow a space theme to the album?
S. Vanek: Yeah, it started as a space idea. After the fourth album we quit for a while like - nobody cares about music anymore, people like podcasts. So we did five or six episodes of a really bad podcast, and it just distracted us.14 We came back to the music and we were like ‘all of this sounds like soundtrack music, what if it was a score for something else?’ We started writing this … not a novel, but a narrative which we were thinking of like a book on tape, which would be narrated, and then we had a plot mapped out that was this space mission, and all these songs would be underneath it…
And then of course we realized that was ridiculous [laughs]. And then it became this process of just like ‘how can we finish something?’ That title was a nod to, like, let’s just put something out. If we keep trying to have a really high standard it’s just gonna be more heartache. Let’s go to Vermont, whatever we have at the end of the week, we’ll make an album out of that.
A. Friend: Any idea what comes next?
S. Vanek: Tony has let us know that he can’t devote that much time to it, our keyboard player, probably the most talented songwriter. There’s a song on S/A called String Theories, it’s the most ambitious song, it’s like a Pink Floyd space opera thing, and that’s a total Tony Joint. He’s stepping away for a while. The rest of us are talking through, like, what is this now?
I didn’t really have an answer for Seth, I could feel he was bummed to be telling me this, and it was obvious from everything Seth said about Tony that he felt like Tony was at the musical core of Velvetron.
Seth and I went on to have a second conversation, additionally, that focused less on Velvetron, or even Seth’s musicality, and more about Seth’s experience within Chicago’s music scene. Read on here.
If you want to hear more about the Ice Factory, you want to read the continuation of our conversation, which focuses more on the venue and Chicago at the time.
See “Fearless” by Jeanette Leech for a discussion of both Stereolab’s Dots and Loops [1997] and Tortoise’s TNT [1998] as being these respective artist’s forays into digital music production; my epub version of Fearless has the relevant discussion on pages 245-252 out of 431.
Tim Kinsella discussed making Joan of Arc’s LP The Gap [2000] in Pro Tools with David Anthony for this 2018 article for Vice.
Our conversation might look unedited, but in the conversation I think I had already mentioned The Empty Bottle at least twice by this point.
Standards goes a little unloved among Tortoise releases as it dials back all the studio witchcraft. I was surprised to see the Pitchfork rating for it was a 9.2.
I was completely wrong in sourcing the remark. Leech says nothing about Rice’s role for Tortoise. Many other people have made this suggestion, though, for example the wonderful industrial-and-post-rock website Brainwashed emphatically includes Casey Rice as a member of Tortoise.
The scene Vanek describes here is basically coincident with how Bruce Adams (of Kranky fame) treated Chicago’s 1990s alt-indie rock scene in his recent book “You’re With Stupid,” which Vanek and I chatted about. On this topic, I suggest this 1999 Chicago Reader article about Idful Recordings’ life and death.
Another slightly buried lede here. There are a few stray mentions of “The Ice Capades,” the Chicago Film and Video Series. Here it is in written about informatively in Chicago Reel, and uninformatively in Chicago Reader. Perhaps more interestingly, it seems the Ice Capades went on the road, and was written about in local papers in Savannah, GA, Memphis, TN, and Bloomington, IN. There’s also a Flickr post where someone posted informatively about The Ice Capades but then used a photo of the UK Velvetron (but that’s a different footnote).
This is basically the only piece of Velvetron video content that I haven’t been able to find online.
Unfortunately, I cannot find any record of the “band needs girls to like band” ad online. This part of the interview made me laugh a lot.
There certainly was another Velvetron, and, wow, their early-2000s website is also accessible through the WayBack Machine.
Roommate are a wonderful act who have received more direct coverage in the Reader than Velvetron. Miles Raymer wrote about them in 2008 with Vanek featured as drummer. “For Barreto and Vanek it started when they booked Roommate to play their old live-work space, the Ice Factory, in 2005; later they reissued the Celebs EP […] on their Fresh Produce label.” You might love Roommate’s music, which has been released by such great labels as L.A.’s Plug Research! The amazing [sic] Magazine wrote a lovely piece about a Roommate release in 2015, which includes comparisons pointing over at REM in the same breath as dEUS and The Besnard Lakes. They’re good!!
Sadly, Soma relocated to Nevada City, CA in 2017; then relocated again in 2019 to Gladstone, Oregon.
Another weird detail - a version of the Velvetron website with a ‘vlogcast’ page is still up online, but the podcast itself is inaccessible there.