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Chino Moreno of Deftones Changed Everything You Know About Team Sleep

Listen to a new re-worked song from Team Sleep, and read an interview with Chino Moreno.

When someone thinks of Chino Moreno, many different projects and bands spring to mind. The most obvious would be Deftones, a band who's career has made music spanning dirty albums you can skate and drink 40's to like Adrenaline, to emotionally heavy and versatile works found in Koi No Yokan. The electronic solo project Crosses may come up too, featuring dark, glitchy electronic compositions using the digital sounds to highlight emptiness or intense emotion. Then there's Palms, the supergroup formed with former members of Isis (the band, duh) that delivered one a post-metal record of heaviness that could stand toe to toe with any other in the genre.

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The first one of these projects to come to the forefront was Team Sleep, a massive sounding supergroup featuring members from groups like Marilyn Manson, Stollen Babies, Crosses +++, Palms, Hella, Pinback, Helium, and more. Their self-titled record used an insane amount of experimentation to really subvert the way one thinks of post-rock. Songs on the record took elements of what made post-rock a poignant genre for people, and threw them into a concise atmosphere. Each track was different from the last, enveloping the listener in new soundscapes and environments. It's a hard record to classify as one genre, but at its core, post-rock is meant to push what we define rock music by, and how it can change and form. The Team Sleep record combined samples and atmospherics for an album that stands the test of time.

Team Sleep is back, having re-worked the songs on the self-titled into The Woodstock Sessions. It's a live record played in front of a studio audience that has the band playing expanded versions of songs from the self-titled. It has the band look back at a record they wrote ten years ago, and lets them augment the songs into new pieces that stand on their own. It embodies all the emotion of being in a small room with others watching on.

Listen to their new live, re-worked version of "Your Skull Is Red" below, and read our interview with Chino Moreno below.

NOISEY: Are you still living in Sacramento?

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Chino Moreno: No, I live in Bend, Oregon. I actually moved out of Sacramento a long time ago. I lived in Los Angeles for probably the last eight or nine years up until about a year and a half ago when I moved to Oregon. And I’ve been out there just chillin.

Nice. Do you miss Sacramento at all?

I do a little bit. I miss, you know, my family and friends and stuff like that but I mean, it's crazy. Sacramento has grown so much. The last time I went back there it's almost like a whole other city from when I was growing up there, hanging out downtown. Downtown has grown so much and it's so much more like a– I don’t wanna use the word gentrified but really it's kind of like a foodie town now. It's grown and there’re so many pubs and other things, when I was growing up in the town there was like dive bars and there was always a little grime still and now it's like totally coming up. Seems like a nice place to be but sadly I’m again, I’ve been out of there for about 12 years and just kind of living the quiet life up in Oregon now.

I get the feeling you like quieter places in general.

I do. Even when I was in LA I was in the Valley. I was up in Burbank which is sort of just a blue collar sort of neighborhood where the only difference is most people work in the studios and stuff but it's pretty quiet and safe. So when I moved to Oregon it's definitely really slow I mean it's not much music that comes through there um other than like Reggae, Dance and Folk artists every now and then but it's pretty quiet but I think it's a good juxtapose to what I do for a living you know. I travel a lot and I’m always around music and it's kind of like when I get to go home I’m actually home and I shut down for a minute and I feel like that’s kind of a healthy especially in this day and age.

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It's a good balance. You recorded the new Woodstock sessions in a quiet area too right?

Yeah. Honestly a lot of that stuff with Team Sleep has not really been on hiatus but everybody’s kind of just doing other things. But it has been worked on over the years with demos being made and things being sent around which has kept it alive. Todd has spearheaded a lot of what has now become the new record and kind of just kept it alive which has been great and because I don’t live in Sacramento anymore I don’t get to spend as much time around those guys as id like to. So we made this new music in a very unconventional way, every year we’ll finish a couple songs. And I think we finally got to a point where we have a whole album's worth of really, really great material, and we’ll work on breaks. Todd's a school teacher so it's pretty much spring break or summer time or Christmas break. We’ll get together for a few days and work on some stuff together live, and then the rest of it's all sort of post production stuff and putting stuff together over the web.

One thing I was thinking about when listening to the Woodstock Sessions was how expanded every song feels from the originals on the self-titled. It felt like the reverse process of the transition of "Pink Maggit" to "Back to School," where it made a larger piece concice.

Definitely. It's crazy, we really only rehearsed one day for that too and I honestly expected it to be not so good. To be honest, I was like kind of reluctant to do it because, obviously I wanted to make it good if we were going do it do it. Although I was pretty excited to do it just for the prospect to play with everybody again, and to do that I didn’t want it to suck. So I was reluctant to do it, I know the guys got there a day or two before me, I got there the day before their last performance and we learned some of the old songs. There were a couple of new things on there and we kind of just went through in one day. The day of the actual event, people started coming in and we were still sort of learning, I was still learning some chord progressions and things. But for some reason when we started playing it just sort of, everything fell back into place. It was like putting on an old pair of sneakers, a lot of the pressure from me being scared that it was gonna suck kind of went away after the first couple notes and right away we just started having fun. For me it was weird because I’ve never done a live record with Deftones, but we’ve never really recorded a live record or performed in front of a studio audience like that either, aside from doing late night TV. So people were literally two feet in front of me sitting in chairs. It could’ve been really weird and then the people that were there were people who really wanted to be there. They'd been fans of us for a long time so I think they were polite or they were a little more polite than your average buddy who’d say "hey come check this out." The people who were there wanted to like it so that fueled us a little bit too to make it great. And it did! It really turned out good for how it came together.

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Do you get nervous when you take new projects like live Crosses or Palms on the road?

Yeah definitely. I get nervous with Deftones still. I think it's a natural thing just to have nerves. Any time I’m off tour for any longer than a couple months or going back I’m always nervous again thinking “can I still do this?” or “am I still good at this?” you know, and like I said prior once you start playing it, it's a natural feeling of performing these songs that I’ve heard and recorded a million times it comes right back. But I still have nerves but I think a challenge is good, it kind of keeps you on your toes and it kind of keeps it fun. In general, I mean I’ve been playing with Deftones since I was 15 years old and I turn 42 on Saturday. It's been a long time you know, so again you gotta keep it fun somehow.

I guess thinking about that what sort of development do you think you’ve seen in yourself as a writer?

Well I’d hope to think that I’ve gotten better. But I don’t know maybe, I mean obviously I have a lot of different outside influences other than just heavy music although I love some heavy music. I love lots of different music and earlier I think it wasn’t this easy to sort of let those influences out as naturally. And I think over the years I think that’s just become more of a natural thing and I never go in doing any project whatever it might be with intentions of what it should be or what it should sound like. So tha natural progression or that natural… I don’t know, just organic way of letting yourself be yourself with 5 other guys that are being themselves as well and have it match up-mix up and match up and actually work you know? That is a… that is something I think that comes with time and the fact that we’ve all been friends for so many years I guess that’s something I’m probably most proud of in my career in general.

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Totally. This is gonna be goofy, but I'm 22 now, and my parents bought me the soundtrack for The Matrix when I was six. It was mostly because I'd just rewind the start of the tape to listen to "My Own Summer" over and over, so my parents bought it for me. Since then, it's been cool growing up alongside your music, because it grows up too.

[laughs] Absolutely. I think that’s the greatest part about music in general or being a lover of music is that you gravitate towards certain things for whatever reason, and I've never really shut myself off to that. I was never told that you cant like this or you shouldn’t like that or whatever and so my taste is all over the place and sometimes it's really silly and I don’t mind that I sort of embrace that. I love the fact that like, last week one of my favorite songs was by Nick Jonas, you know what I mean? Like i'm proud of that. Like wow, I love the fact that I can connect to this, where i'm a 42 year old man connecting with Nick Jonas [laughs] its just kind of– I appreciate that kind of stuff you know? It's what it is.

Do you think you're gonna take Team Sleep on the road? Last time I saw the band live, you were playing with Strata and Skrillex, before he was Skrillex and in that in between phase.

I think if we do stuff we’re gonna try to do more of a "boutique" sort of manner. The show should be something special, events where we’ll go and play one show here and one show there. I think that the idea of this project is it started out crazy, it started out to be not a band and a project. Really the initial thing was me, DJ Crook, and Todd. Everything was very lo-fi on a 4trak set recorder, and the idea was never to have a band and go out and tour and do this. It sort of grew into the idea and it was fine and it was fun up to a point where it became too much like a band where we were told to get in a bus and travel through every small city in the U.S. and around the world and to try to build it up from the ground up. Maybe I was a little jaded at that time and I just didn’t want to do that again. At that point I had just spent the last ten or twelve years with Deftones doing that and as much as I like doing the project, I didn’t wanna do that again and it sort of sucked the fun out of it.

The reason why we've been up there in Woodstock is because the guys had been recording what will be the actual second LP. The second record. But I don’t know yet if we’re gonna release that as an LP or an EP but I think there's talk of each one, but still we have an albums worth of material that I'm super proud of and I think everyones super proud of. I think it's worthy of a great second record. in my opinion it's sort of like a legacy project for me. The first record came out ten years ago but it still holds up. It's still relevant, I think with this second record it has these timeless sort of songs in it that hopefully after we’re long gone that I think they still have something in them. They’ll have that lasting power to them. So hopefully that is gonna come out sometime probably next year. And when that happens that’s probably when we’ll probably do some shows I’m thinking but up until then it's this live record and just of feeling it out. Especially since there's been some changes made as well with Gil Sharone coming in and playing drums and some other things so we just kind of wanted to pick up where we left off and see where we’re at. I think this live record was a good little kick start for us mentally, that we still enjoy doing it and still do it.

You can order the Woodstock Sessions right here for physical copies, and here for digital.

John Hill teared up a little when he first heard the new version of "Your Skull Is Red." Laugh at him on Twitter at @JohnXHill