When Noble County, Ohio native Zac Little was in high school, he heard Led Zeppelin make its musical point with a mandolin, and that led him to the conclusion that if banging on four instruments was interesting, three times that many would be exponentially incredible. When Little entered Ohio State, he began collecting the musical menagerie that currently defines his shifting and engaging band, Saintseneca.
“I was bored just playing guitar,” Little says. “You get a mandolin, a dulcimer, a bass or a synth, and all of a sudden, there’s this whole other terrain you can access that you never would have touched on guitar. It was just not being content with the limits of playing one instrument and wanting to have a broad spectrum of access to all that sonic territory.”
Little’s explorations eventually inspired him to form Saintseneca, the antithesis of his traditional teenaged Rock bands. Saintseneca’s initial incarnation recorded two EPs in 2009 and 2010 and relentlessly toured the Midwest and East Coast. In 2011, the band released its full-length debut, the prophetically titled Last; the group dissolved after the album’s release show.
A year later, Little revived Saintseneca with a new lineup, signed with ANTI- Records in 2013 and spent nearly a year working on home recordings. Little, producer Mike Mogis and a rotating cast of musicians then crafted Saintseneca’s sophomore album, 2014’s Dark Arc. Veering between acoustic and electric arrangements within a dynamic range bookended by reverent quiet and barely restrained tumult, Dark Arc was a triumph of Alternative Folk Rock experimentation and melodicism.
Dark Arc gave rise to an actual band — bassist/vocalist Maryn Jones, guitarist/vocalist Steve Ciolek, keyboardist/vocalist Jon Meador and drummer Matthew O’Conke — which toured the album, translating Little’s studio creations into living, breathing songs. This road-forged unit ultimately became the studio band that realized Little’s sonic vision on Saintseneca’s third full-length, Such Things, released last October. Such Things, also produced by Mogis, has a slightly bigger presence than its predecessor, but not by design.
“I was deliberately trying to make it smaller in some ways,” Little says.” I wanted it to have this vibe of still being an expansive record. It’s always interesting for me to cover a lot of sonic territory and have interesting textures and instruments that don’t adhere to the norms of a Rock or a Folk band.”
While Dark Arc’s dynamics are in full force on Such Things, the percentages lean slightly toward the more raucous end of the scale. Little didn’t actively change his songwriting process, but he did have a different goal in mind.
“I was definitely trying to push myself and do things that I hadn’t necessarily tried before,” he says. “I hadn’t really written that many songs with a groove, songs that rock through the whole thing. And I wanted to make songs like that, employing some of the surprises and twists that I like. That was a new challenge. How do I make songs that groove and chug throughout but still make them interesting and have the rewards that are fun for me to do?”
Although there are any number of sonic reference points in Saintseneca’s sound, they don’t necessarily stand as actual influences.
“For this record, Velvet Underground were big; The Beatles are always big,” Little says. “Fairport Convention was another one, but I like a lot of ’60s Psychedelic Pop.”
Part of Little’s homage to classic Psych Pop is reflected in his arrangements’ swirling surrealism, punctuated by his dizzying array of instruments and the inventive applications he’s devised for them.
“I wasn’t super interested in creating that in a literal way,” Little says. “That sound exists and it’s great, but how do you take that inspiration and write contemporary music that embraces all the exciting things you can do in 2015 that you couldn’t do in 1965? I’m sure they were looking back, too. Paul McCartney talks about listening to music in the ’40s, show tunes and vaudeville-style stuff, and you can hear that in their music. At any moment, music is that confluence of all those years squished together.”
Little’s obsession with exotic instruments and writing with them is Saintseneca’s signature. It’s also a supreme challenge.
“It’s a constant quest,” Little says. “All of these things are tools for finding something that you imagined or something maybe you didn’t even know you imagined. You’re discovering it as you’re manipulating that object.”
Little’s quest has pointed him down odd paths. He discovered a Turkish instrument called a baghlama, a microtonal quasi-guitar with frets delineated by pieces of string tied to its long narrow neck. Little found the baghlama at a ” sketchy” pawn shop and when he broke a string on the instrument, the store owners guilted him into buying it. The baghlama wound up being what he needed to complete the Dark Arc song “Blood Bath.”
“I had messed with that song on guitar and couldn’t quite get it,” Little says. “Then using this other instrument, it’s like, ‘Ah, here it is.’ I don’t need to know how to play something, it’s just picking it up and feeling inspired by the sounds that emerge.”
And if he doesn’t find it, he’ll build it. One such strange tool came from a garbage-picking excursion.
“I found this banjo in the trash. I took all the frets off and bolted this metal bowl on the back where the resonator used to be and then doubled the strings like a mandolin or a bouzouki,” Little says. “It’s a weird, fretless, drone-y creation; you can get some pretty cool sounds when you play it with a bow. I’ll have to come up with a name for it. I was determined not to list banjo in the credits because it’s a trope people like to accentuate when describing a band.”
With Saintseneca comprised of a stable core of players, the band is revisiting Little’s oldest material, allowing it to coexist with his most recent work. For a variety of reasons, even the new material is evolving in fascinating ways.
“It’s always fun to reinterpret old songs and make it a totally different thing live,” Little says. “My bandmates all have other bands and are quite busy, so our live presentation actually changes somewhat regularly when different people fill in. I’m thankful to have those folks when they’re able to be there, but it can be an exciting challenge to figure out what else to do. It keeps it fresh and alive.”
SAINTSENECA plays Saturday at Southgate House Revival. Tickets/more info: southgatehouse.com.
This article appears in Jan 13-20, 2016.