Darcy James Argue is a Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based composer and leader of Secret Society, an amazing, genre-defying 18-piece band. He’s also a long-time Finale user (and beta tester). Darcy appeared previously on this blog in 2010, to discuss Secret Society’s debut release, “Infernal Machines.” Like its predecessor, their 2013 release, “Brooklyn Babylon,” also received Juno and Grammy Award nominations, and appeared in many “best of” polls.

Last fall Secret Society released “Real Enemies,” an incredible sonic exploration of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and our modern existence. The new release has already received a Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, and widespread praise like this:

“A work of furious ambition…deeply in tune with our present moment.” – The New York Times

Darcy and I connected recently to discuss the new release and music notation.

Real Enemies

What was the initial inspiration for the “Real Enemies” project?

After the success of my first multimedia work, “Brooklyn Babylon,” I was invited to develop another project for the BAM Next Wave Festival. I was casting around for a suitable topic. I thought it might be interesting to deal with non-fictional sources. At my girlfriend’s recommendation, I read Katherine Olmsted’s book “Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11” and loved it.

I gave a copy to my co-creator, writer-director Isaac Butler, and said, “This probably sounds crazy, but read this book and tell me if you think there’s a show in there.” He read it and came back and told me, “That does sound crazy… but, yes, I think there is a show in there.” From there, we recruited our third co-creator, filmmaker Peter Nigrini, and together we hammered out the basic structural framework. Once we got the green light from BAM, it was off to the races.

Where do you live on the conspiracy continuum? Do you think most of society is too paranoid or not paranoid enough? Does the possible veracity of a conspiracy theory influence your interest in it?

There’s a character in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” who has a poster on his wall that says: “Yes I’m paranoid — but am I paranoid enough?” I think that captures the dynamic pretty well: to the conspiracy theorist, skepticism is naivete, countervailing evidence is just more proof that they don’t want you to know what’s really going on, et cetera.

Conspiracy theorists don’t lack for information — they often have a staggering array of facts and pseudo-facts at their disposal to back up their claims, or at least cast doubt on the generally accepted version of events. What they lack is a sound architecture of critical thinking: the ability to evaluate sources and claims objectively.

Instead, they reflexively reject anything that doesn’t fit nicely into their conspiratorial web of belief. Ironically, this makes conspiracy theorists (who are so invested in seeing themselves as highly skeptical individuals) easy marks for politicians who would exploit them to further their own cynical ends — by eroding faith in good government and in democratic norms, say.

It’s worth remembering that we are all prone to motivated reasoning and obstinacy in the face of facts that contradict our existing beliefs. Conspiratorial ideas cut across all kinds of social and political divides — they aren’t just limited to the left or the right, or to one segment of society. At the same time, while we tend to use “conspiracy theorist” as a term of derision, there are real conspiracies out there, including ones we don’t know about yet.

So, I mean, are we being paranoid enough? How much paranoia is healthy, and at what point does it turn toxic? “Real Enemies” tries to investigate these kinds of questions, to scrutinize how we form beliefs about the world… while also leveraging the audience’s paranoia for our own ends. (Purely artistic ones, I assure you.)

The Music

You have said that the album “draws heavily on 12-tone techniques, but the wide-ranging score exhibits a gleeful disregard for how those techniques have traditionally been deployed.” Can you talk about that? How does your use of harmony differ from what traditionalists think of as big band music?

If you’re going to write a piece of music about conspiracy theories, there really is no choice but to make it a 12-tone piece! “Real Enemies” derives entirely from a single 12-tone row — vertically, horizontally, and structurally — but unlike a lot of canonical 12-tone music, it’s not trying to deliberately avoid or undermine any sense of harmonic stability. Instead, the row is used to organize a highly chromatic quasi-tonal language, a sort of “shadow harmony” that sounds like a dark, distorted reflection of traditional harmony.

Each chapter is in a different 12-tone “key” based around a particular row form, and the progression of “keys” follows the same sequence as prime form of the row. Because jazz is a highly chromatic language, one can extract chords from the 12-tone row that are oddly reminiscent of jazz chords, or to construct melodies that sound somewhat like idiomatic jazz melodies, and so on.

Are there composers you admire whose work influenced Real Enemies?

The score to “Real Enemies” is dedicated to film composers David Shire and Michael Small, who took the techniques of musical modernism and adapted them for the screen in incredibly inventive and effective ways. The scores they wrote for classic 1970’s films like “The Conversation,” “The Parallax View,” and “All The President’s Men” (among others) were instrumental in shaping our modern idea of what paranoia sounds like.

What was the inspiration for the Latin feels interspersed throughout the recording? How did you notate those for the rhythm section? Were any grooves or feels left to the players or did you through-compose them?

The middle section of “Dark Alliance” is based (with permission!) on a song by the Nicaraguan singer-songwriter Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy, “Un Son Para Mi Pueblo,” which celebrates the overthrow of the dictator Somoza in the Nicaraguan revolution of 1978-79. (Although everything is still filtered through the 12-tone row!) The groove is a Nicaraguan take on són, which we primarily associate with Cuba — there’s a kind of pan-Latin revolutionary solidarity being expressed here.

“Casus Belli” is inspired by a curious 1958 record made by the great New York-based Afro-Cuban bandleader Machito, called “Vacation at the Concord” — it was a promotional album designed to hype the Concord, a lakeside resort 90 miles north of New York City, where Machito’s orchestra was in residence.

I’m picturing a group of CIA operatives sitting around the pool drinking daiquiris while plotting false flag operations that could be used as a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. The groove is a sped-up cha-cha-chá (sometimes disrupted by an extra eighth note added to the end of the phrase) that alternates between two keys a tritone apart. It eventually moves forward into present day speculation about false flag operations by way of a Afro-Cuban-inflected metal riff.

Like most of my music, the rhythm section parts here tend to be fairly specific, though there’s also room for individuality within the style. I also gave the players some source recordings to use as a reference, and our drummer, Jon Wikan, overdubbed many layers of percussion on both “Dark Alliance” and “Casus Belli.”

Editor’s note: Check out this behind-the scenes view of the recording of “Real Enemies”: