Pennies: Album Release
Last Sunday, CU Records hosted TheFleok’s album release concert in the East Campus courtyard where they previewed songs from the upcoming record. The album boasts a wide array of emotional artifacts, passions crystalized in TheFleok’s sonic amber as various facets of love; be it love manifest as anger in “Fuck Your Show”, the loneliness of unrequited love in “I’m Not Invited”, or the love for a mentor and father figure in title track “Pennies” in the face of loss, TheFleok commands you to feel. After the show, I sat down with frontman Leo Jergovic (CC ‘25), guitarists Satchel Moore (CC ‘25) and Gui Matos (CC ‘25), bassist Murat Gulcelik (CC ‘25), and drummer Carlos Murillo (CC ‘28) to speak about opening Bacchanal earlier this semester, their recording process, and Pennies which releases this Friday, April 25th. Read our conversation below:
ELI: How did you get started with music?
LEO: I grew up playing classical piano, I did musical theater, and so I was kind of on those two
tracks and then started playing jazz and funk in high school. I think those things came together
and I started writing my own songs and wanting to produce them. I had a lot of influences from
my parents that were like rock music, alternative music, this kind of stuff. I started writing my
own music when I was a sophomore in high school, so I've been writing for a while but the first
time really putting out music of my own was in college.
CARLOS: I started playing drums when I was nine. I played mostly rock and funk and stuff like
that, and some metal, and then I got into jazz in high school. I'm in the jazz program here, and
yeah, I met Leo playing with somebody else.
SATCHEL: My dad is a music teacher outside Worcester, MA, so I get a private guitar and
drums teacher and I've kind of been around music my whole life. He puts together the small
community festival in my hometown where he has his students perform – he teaches group
lessons and has those groups perform. So I started playing in those shows when I was like seven
or something, I started performing very young. I loved it, and my dad got me started so to his
credit, and here we are.
GUI: My family was always into music. My brother has played the drums since he was super
little, and after I moved to the US I got jealous that he played the drums and I didn't do anything,
so my dad got me a guitar and showed me some chords. Then I just learned on YouTube for the
most part, and it stuck.
MURAT: There are not a lot of musical people in my family, I would say. I started playing
classical violin and piano when I was, like, however old I was, I don't really remember. And then
I switched to bass when I was in seventh grade, and I played jazz. I went to do more classicaltraining on bass during high school, and then, you know…classical music is great, but I prefer
playing this type of music. I play electric and upright now, for the most part.
How did the band get together?
SATCHEL: I think the first meeting was between Leo and me right at the beginning of freshman
year, when they give you the alumni signed copy of The Odyssey. We happened to be next to
each other in line for that and got to talking about recording and jamming, made plans to jam for
the first time, put together our first video playing “Best Part” by Daniel Caesar and the rest is
history. Yeah, you can go on about the rest of it.
LEO: I think the next person I met was Gui.
GUI: In our linear algebra class, right? I think so, sophomore year.
LEO: Yeah, and then we got a combo together in the jazz program, so I started playing with Gui,
and I was like “Man, this guy's cool, he's got some pedal boards” [laughing] and obviously he's
crazy so then he started playing with us, had some studio sessions with Satch and I. [To Murat]
And then, I don't know how we met…
MURAT: I think it was sophomore year? Maybe end…sometime sophomore year. I have no clue.
I appeared one day.
LEO: Yeah, I have no idea how we met.
CARLOS: I was playing with Rayan on a Sunday Session and apparently I played well, and they
were like, “Oh, this guy’ s cool”. I mean, I don't know what happened behind the scenes, I was
just texted.
LEO: I had a lot of meetings with Satchel about you. He had to do a screening, an initiation…
GUI: The four of us voted. Three to one, off the record.
How was it opening for Bacchanal?
CARLOS: It was pretty cool. I heard about Bacchanal, I think I might have put it in one of my
supplemental essays to get here, but I knew about it and I was always really excited about it.
There's a lot of really great artists that have played it so I was super excited at the prospect of
potentially playing it eventually, maybe in my senior or junior year. But it was cool to help these
uncs, you know, make it. No, it was really awesome playing with these guys, especially becauseit was their last Bacchanal and it was good to be there and play whatever they needed me to play
to get them there. It's been really enjoyable. And it was fun to play on that big-ass stage.
GUI: It was cool, I always thought it'd be cool to play Bacchanal, but we kind of meandered
around the idea for a while, and then I think a week before Battle of the Bands Leo informed us
that we had been signed up.
CARLOS: Battle of the Bands was almost as fun as actual Bacchanal.
MURAT: I think it was.
CARLOS: It was just the crowd; Wang Pavilion is really intimate, so the crowd was great.
MURAT: Yeah it was compact. It was cold for Bacchanal, my fingers were cramping up.
LEO: But we had 10 minutes and so it was literally like, “Okay, how much energy can we get out
in ten minutes?” It was kind of our typical energy, but drawn to the next level for all of us.
Cranking the amps.
You guys have great energy live. Obviously recording your music and performing it are two
very different mediums. What do you enjoy most about each? Are there areas of
unexpected overlap between the two? Are there any differences which surprise you?
LEO: I think that weirdly the difference between live and recording is what makes me enjoy both
of the processes. I would say that with live music you have to respond to the room. The thing
that I like is we had feedback today, some amps are louder, some are quieter, sometimes we get
PAs that are all distorted, right? So, you have to do your set a little bit differently each time.
Sometimes you have a crazy crowd. We really liked Battle the Bands for that reason, people
went there to jump and respond to bands. I think that was even more energy than Bacchanal in
some ways just because it felt so intimate, right? So my energy and I'm sure for the rest of these
guys is also based on that. I'd say the nice thing with recording is that you can be consistent and
those things don't change. So you can really perfect it and get something that feels right.
Recording is like an exact, picturesque, replicable painting, and I think playing live is kind of
like a Monet, or impressionist painting where it makes sense when you look at it from far away.
GUI: Yeah, we take our time when we record stuff and think about each part very intentionally,
but when it's live you just kind of go with the flow and see what happens, and someone will play
something cool and you play off of that. Or you know, we'll change songs in the middle of the
set, just based on how it's feeling. But yeah, both of them are really fun.
Is there anything you do when recording to try and capture that organic feel on tape?
GUI: I think recording together. We've done a couple of songs where we're all in the room
recording one take and trying to get the best one.
CARLOS: Even if we're not all playing, if we're all there the energy is kind of consistent with
what it is live.
SATCHEL: Live performance is definitely made or broken based on the audience that you have.
I think when you have a really great crowd that beats anything else.
I'm super excited for the album on Friday. I was wondering if you wanted to share a bit
about the process of taking a track from an initial concept to a full recording ready for
release.
LEO: I write pretty much all the lyrics and the basic sonic ideas, but it usually starts at some
small scale where it’s just me and a guitar or at a piano, and it's just a riff I like, or something like
that. Then I'll reach out to one or many of these guys, depending on where I could give it more
energy. I send it to them, and then we expand from that. With “I'm Not Invited” I texted Gui (it
was Thanksgiving), I was like, “I have this piano part, what would a slide,” which is the main
guitar part of that song, “sound like over this?”. And then I also talked to [Carlos] about drum
parts, and sent some similar songs that had the vibe we wanted. So it just expands from there
slowly and organically.
Is there a track on the album that was most difficult to pin down in recording?
[They laugh]
LEO: I'm not gonna talk
GUI: There's a reason we did “Do It Again” as a reggae song today.
SATCHEL: It's very fast. And that's one of the ones we were doing live as a band in one take, so
it took quite a bit of focus to stay on this fast tempo.
LEO: I think I am immensely frustrated by that song, even whenever I hear the version we put
out, but especially anything we play, I'm like “No, this isn't working for me, or this is working”
so it's hard.
MURAT: The other one works well.LEO: The reggae version is my favorite we've done. [They laugh]
Is there a track that stands out as a thematic center for the work?
LEO: I think probably “Pennies” is the thematic center. What's cool about that song is I wrote it
initially as a poem and then added music to it, but it's evolved a lot over time. I wrote it about my
music teacher who was an incredibly important figure for me, and he’s since passed away. I was
talking to my mom and I realized that (unbeknownst to me when I wrote it) putting pennies on
someone's eyes is like retiring them. The song is about discovery, or escape from a lot of these
feelings that are presented in the album. The album is supposed to be escapist in nature, like a
place where people can experience, talk about, and listen to universal feelings, and then realize
“Okay, there's a greater light at the end of the tunnel,” you know?
Is there anything that's different about approaching an arrangement for a song like
“Pennies” where the lyrical content is spoken versus set to melody? Or do you approach it
the same way?
CARLOS: I think it just depends, honestly. For a song like “Pennies” individually, even when
there's no vocals there's still a drum part that's pretty clear. So it's just about what Leo wants.
MURAT: I instinctively play more sparse when it’s spoken, probably.
SATCHEL: We keep it kind of simple, but with a lot of energy. You need a lot of energy to make
it work.
GUI: We always try to get it to feel right with the lyrics, but [for “Pennies”] the lyrics hadn't
been recorded yet. We knew how they were going to be spoken, though, like the cadence of the
voice.
LEO: I was very much yelling at [Gui] about the vision of the song, to hone in on that while
playing it. That was a really fun session.
Is there a song you are most excited for people to hear?
GUI: I think my favorite I’ve done for this album right now is “I'll Be There to Walk You
Home”.
MURAT: That’s a fun one.LEO: I'm hyped for “G String”. I think that's a very cool mix. Very psychedelic.
CARLOS: Is that the one we did in the Carman basement?
LEO: Yeah.
What were some sonic references that you guys turned to when you were recording the
album?
LEO: We talked about some more echoey stuff.
SATCHEL: There's a lot of reverb going on.
LEO: We talked about Mazzy Star, some shoegaze, Slow Dive, Beach House, this sort of thing.
For me personally with writing a lot of the songs, I would say it was early alternative/rock music,
The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed.
The vocals, especially on “Pennies”, are very Lou Reed-y. I liked it a lot.
CARLOS: [Leo] sent me “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground for “Fuck Your Show”.
LEO: Yeah, that's the whole basis for how we play that song.
GUI: We all also have our own style which comes from what we listen to, and so that seeps in as
well.
Where do you see yourself taking music in the future, after graduating or during the rest of
your time here at Columbia?
CARLOS: I'm gonna go four for four at Bacchanal. [we laugh] No, I mean, Columbia has a
really great musical scene which I did not expect to find here. There’ll always be opportunities.
Of course, these guys will be around on the East coast, and so hopefully we'll get to play more.
We’re excited to see what's next for us.
SATCHEL: We've gotten the most momentum we've ever had right when we're about to
graduate, which is an interesting situation. So, we definitely all want to see if we can keep that
going, you know? Even though it can be turbulent when everyone's starting new things in their
lives.
GUI: Yeah, we want to keep playing for sure.
MURAT: Retweet
LEO: Retweet
Pennies by TheFleok comes out on all streaming services this Friday. You can stay up to date on
the band and their upcoming performances @thefleok on Instagram or at www.thefleok.com.