Lotus performs tonight, April 26 at Summit Music Hall and tomorrow, April 27, at Red Rocks. The five-piece has been playing the jam band/livetronica circuit since near the turn of the century. But its compositions and sets transcend clichés and have more in common with the early 70s experimental jazz and Krautrock that informs its sound and song structures. Its imaginative use of tone and texture and incorporation of the methods and aesthetics of electronic music production has pushed the band out of being stuck in a creative rut resulting in a fairly consistent run of fascinating records and live shows.
Formed in 1999 at Goshen College in Indiana, Lotus didn’t have much in the way of an outlet nearby to perform or like-minded peers. Certainly the jam band and improvisational music world existed and groups of no small artistic merit like Widespread Panic and Gov’t Mule had already established themselves. But groups that had the electronic element were not yet so, pardon the reference, widespread. Two years prior Umphrey’s McGee had formed at the University of Notre Dame. And there was a bit of a circuit Lotus cultivated, recalls bassist Jesse Miller, a circuit playing in college towns like Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, Michigan. In Goshen, “[there] was terrible hard rock and rap rock,” says Miller. “At the school it was more people doing folk music.”
“The local place we played was this really dumpy bar called Courthouse Pub,” says Miller. “It’s crazy to think about how people just smoked everywhere back then and that that would never change. Instead of ventilation it would be fans blowing cigarette smoke back down at you.”
Miller’s description of Courthouse Pub could apply to many dive bars and other small clubs across America regardless of the style of music you played in the late 90s through about the middle of the 2000s. But Lotus had some options for relocating to where it could easily tour the east coast and cultivate a regular audience and Philadelphia seemed like a place where they group could get some momentum going. Disco Biscuits had established itself and played bigger places. Brothers Past was active during that early 2000s period. The Ally, with whom Lotus drummer Mike Greenfield once played was also based in the Philadelphia area. Lotus went from a place with few like-minded artists to a place that seemed to have a genuine scene where it could develop and expand its fanbase. And, of course, Lotus has has since built itself into one of the most innovative and popular acts in all of the realm of livetronica.
Miller and his brother Luke, the guitarist and keyboardist in Lotus, had grown up in Lakewood, Colorado where they had a high school ska band called Put That Down, Chris that in the late 90s played events like People’s Fair, shows in the park, gigs at church community spaces. But it was nothing too serious, just friends playing and having fun, and Miller’s own interest in composition was something he pursued when he went to college. Miller garnered a healthy appreciation for jazz, particularly the late 60s and early 70s era including the spiritual jazz of Alice Cooper, the fusion era of Miles Davis (especially Bitches Brew from 1970) and Joe Henderson. Miller particularly enjoys “the textural stuff they were doing with percussion but also the groove, and trance-like nature of that.”
However, unlike, say, the Dap Kings, Lotus has never been the band to try to recreate a faithful rendering of a studio sound or era. There is a fluidity and well crafted layers of sound and dynamics that is almost its own kind of fusion—that of the aforementioned era of jazz but one that includes not just jazz, rock and funk but also more modern electronic sounds and hip-hop production. Its 2018 album Frames Per Second is a fine example of the way Lotus integrates its musical interests with its unique alchemy of ideas.
From early on in the band, Miller’s imagination was impacted by music that doesn’t seem to fit in with the image of a jam band and yet The Orb, the legendary UK production duo, exerted a strong and early influence.
“The stuff we were hearing from the Orb were so different from a rock band but we heard a lot of similarities in how they would extend things and the idea of minimalism and using sounds as part of the composition process,” says Miller.
On the new record one can hear a scintillating collage of sounds and textures that are reminiscent of the likes of Flying Lotus’ wide rangingly ethereal sounds and Daft Punk’s smooth yet renegade beats. “When I think of Daft Punk compositionally they’re very into this idea of looping, really short loops, sometimes one bar or two beats,” says Miller. “When I was writing ‘Cold Facts,” it was based around this simple bass line that’s one bar long but the way it’s set up rhythmically you can almost be fooled as to where the downbeat is. Those kinds of loops can go on for so long because what’s interesting about it is already built into the loop and it doesn’t ever need to change. That simple bass line and very simple beat frees up the space for the more complex harmonies that are happening with the keyboards and the guitar.”
As a bassist Miller is bit unorthodox in he becomes a bit of a lead player while also holding down the rhythm. Rooted in funk, Miller and his band mates approach the writing process more like Krautrock.
“[We keep] this propulsive thing going and [break] off from that and [come] back,” says Miller. “Sometimes I think of it as a sequence that’s running and I’m manipulating the synth. I’ll keep a pattern going and I’ll make subtle changes to the effects or how I’m articulating the line. Give it the idea of filtering in and out.”
In building in that ability to go off the map yet maintain a dynamic center, Lotus’ songs can sprawl where they will without losing coherence. The hallmark of a great jam band of any kind. And Miller doesn’t mind being put under that umbrella.
“I’m fine with being slotted in with that,” says Miller. “There are advantages and disadvantages to that. I think to have a unique voice you need to look for influences outside of that stuff. Honestly I can’t really stand listening to jam bands even though we are one. Once you’re inside of that you’re really exposed to the excesses and flaws that style can be and hopefully avoid them. The downside is that people have this idea that they know what you sound like without actually listening to you. That’s frustrating for any artist.”
Church Fire at Titwrench 2015, photo by Tom Murphy
Denver’s Church Fire recently became a trio with Kate Warner (formerly of Mirror Fears) joining Shannon Webber and David Samuelson in crafting a sound that melds noise, industrialized hip-hop influenced beat making, electronic dance music and emotionally charged pop. Church Fire also infuses its performances and words with political content that dives deep and examines deeply rooted issues of systemic, cultural and personal issues that can be tricky to examine much less untangle in a way that the band, with its visceral presentation doesn’t abstract so much as clarify in a way that isn’t intellectualized even as it doesn’t lack for sophisticated thought and nuanced emotion as manifested in art.
Recently the band released its video for the song “Mechanical” from its fantastic 2018 album Summer Camp Doom Diary. Visually it’s striking and on par with the more imaginative dark fantasy and horror cinema. It also represents well the feel of the band’s shows that operate as a cathartic, mystic, pagan ritual dance. It’s a song and video that embraces and works through, integrates and transcends personal and cultural darkness in a productive way that doesn’t preach yet doesn’t wax vague in its meaning. Church Fire is nothing if not direct. We recently sent some questions to the band regarding the video done with Cheyene Grow of the video collective 75 Ohms. Read on after seeing the video immediately preceding.
Queen City Sounds:How did you come to work with Cheyene Grow and why was working with him a good fit?
Shannon Webber: Cheyene and Ryan Peru (75 Ohms) are fantastic visual artists who have veejayed a lot of shows we’ve played over the years. We love their glitched out retro VHS style and the way they live-loop video recordings and add fascinating and fun effects. Having seen what they do live, it was really exciting to have the chance to visit Cheyene’s studio in Colorado Springs to do some filming, and we couldn’t wait to see what he’d do with the footage. Cheyene’s been active in Colorado underground scenes for years, dragging a huge analog setup to shows to create live visuals like no one else. The splicing of organic, live footage with retro neon effects and glitchy visual noise feels like a natural visual representation of our music. As an artist, we trusted him to take full creative license to create a new version of our music through his visual art. ‘Mechanical’ is about transformation in a lot of ways, and we were thrilled to see how Cheyene would transform the song.
There’s a kind of “lost VHS tape” quality to the video. Was that an aspect of the video you discussed with Cheyenne? What do you like about that kind of aesthetic?
This style is pretty quintessential for Cheyene and 75 Ohms and it has a lot to do with why we wanted to work with him. In our music, we like to get lost in darkness and light and to hold more than one extreme at a time, and Cheyene’s video techniques do the same. Using direct footage of something as simple as our heads gives it a natural, intimate and raw feel. Combined with his visually noisy techniques, bright colors, distortion and glitchiness, one gets an experimental, dark and exhilarating feeling watching the clips. It adds a striking intensity to some already pretty intense but simple headshots and keeps the momentum of the video and music going strong.
While not new and it now occurs to me resonant in ways with the name of the band and pagan black metal, there is a kind of tribal pagan mystic aspect to your performance garb including an antler crown. What is the significance of that for your band? With a lot of those early Norwegian black metal bands there was some reference to cleansing the land of non-native religious structures built over traditional Viking holy places and thus a call for a return to an older, more primordial native spirituality. American black metal bands like Wolves in the Throne Room, of course, are more obviously oriented toward nature and the preservation of that as part of holistic view of our existence.
Our identity as a band definitely continues to grow and has developed a lot even after changing our name to church fire in 2012. When David made this crown, it felt like a portal was created for us to step into when we perform and write. The crown itself, actually preceded our aesthetic. Initially, it wasn’t an idea inspired by anything in particular and honestly had no greater vision behind it other than it was curious to us and felt powerful. It was a very organic transformation for us. I think the image and feeling of the crown and our masks have felt more powerful for us as time goes on, and allows us to let go of our everyday identities and step into the new worlds that we’ve created with each other through our music. It feels transcendent and liberating to us but is not connected to any existent culture, image or community for us – not intentionally, anyway.
That said, after we stepped into the crown, the flowers, the lights and the masks, we have been able to even more fully relish in a dark, earthy but surreal experience. There is a sense of the divine feminine and of the power of nature in those images, of a softness, a strength, and a darkness, and that’s where we come from when we write and perform. To keep these unshakable, powerful and ancient images in our minds when we create and perform makes our own experience with our art more fulfilling and transcendent, and we hope others tap into those feelings and are inspired as well.
Church Fire’s Shannon Webber at Hi-Dive for December 29, 2018 release of Summer Camp Doom Diary. Photo by Tom Murphy
“Mechanical,” tell us a bit about what inspired this song and its tones and sense of urgency.
I was sitting on a beach in Oregon watching the waves roll onto the shore, sifting through rocks and shells, thinking about how drastically these artifacts have changed over more time than we can fathom; how they used to be huge and jagged, perhaps, and are now smooth and small and have creatures living inside them. I started thinking about all the ways that we transform throughout our lives and beyond our lives, transitions that we have no awareness of having undergone whatsoever; how some of the most powerful things that make us who we are, make reality what it is as we know it, are really tiny, delicate waves washing over us, so small we can’t even feel or see them; and that this version of everything we see, feel and know to be true is only what it is in this instant and instantly is forever changed again under a new wave.
We fancy ourselves in so much control, able to eliminate our desires if they don’t suit us, able to cure illness before it ever afflicts us, but the waves will still take over. It’s beautiful to be tiny and insignificant. It’s unrecognizingly powerful to transform and to be changed by the earth and Her elements. In writing the song, the meaning started to transform as well. In watching Cheyene’s video, the meanings continued to change, touching on gender and identity and transformation of these aspects of ourselves as well.
In 2018 Church Fire played a kind of one-off, special set that was some kind of black metal/noise/industrial set. Was this video a kind of precursor to that or inspired by that? What about the sorts of feelings you’re able to conjure playing that side of your music do you feel are different from and/or complimentary to what most people have seen/heard from Church Fire? I feel like your live performances always had that dark yet cathartic quality and that your latest album brought that out more in your recordings.
We’ve been secretly playing some doomy sludge guitar/drums drek for fun for a few years now, and when we were asked to play the Noise vs Doom festival last year it seemed like the only appropriate way to show up! [The] March 14th [show] at Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, with The Drood, blackcell and DJ Mudwolf, [was] our first show with David playing drums and Kate Warner (Mirror Fears) on electronic music. We’re not a duo anymore! We feel honored to work with one of the most talented and hard working musicians in our scene and to transform our own music and push our limits in new ways.
Statement from the visual artist (Cheyene Grow)
One of the many things I find compelling about Church Fire is how they can simultaneously occupy seemingly diametric spaces. You could argue they are too noisy to be pop, too poppy to be noise. Too theatrical to be punk, too punk to be theatrical. Too goth to be cyber, too cyber to be goth. The list goes on.
I wanted to embody that contrast with visuals that would occupy conflicting spaces. So went for a look that felt aged and dirty, while also being clean and cyber-futuristic. Shannon has an intense and very engaging stage presence that I wanted to feature. So, instead of trying to put forth an actual narrative of transformation (which the lyrics capture well), we went with a performance piece and tried to incorporate transformation elements into the performances and the visual effects. The video glitches serve as way to mechanically degrade the image and make it feel like old film, while the core image maintains a certain high-end integrity.
Motherhood is a trio from Fredericton, New Brunswick in eastern Canada that has been developing its unique and eclectic sound since 2010 when its members met while at university. When critics and fans make unusual and diverse comparisons between a band and personal musical reference points, you know the band in question is onto something refreshingly different from prevailing trends. For this writer, hearing Motherhood there are resonances between the band’s music and the otherworldly, carnival-esque sounds of a Danny Elfman soundtrack, the frayed folk art punk of the Mekons and the strongly thematic and sonically diverse yet focused conceptualization of Rubblebucket. Some might hear in its songs the sort of amalgam of slackery looseness and precision that has made Pavement so interesting and unpredictable. Of course Motherhood, as you’ll see in the interview below with bassist/keyboard player Penny Stevens, doesn’t really sound like any other band touring in the underground precisely because its influences are so disparate even as the alchemy of its creative process and its evolution over several years has resulted in music that one might expect from artists who developed early on in a small city (Fredericton even now has a metropolitan area population of under 110,000) with no entrenched musical sub-scene to easily access.
On March 1, 2019, Motherhood celebrated the release of its new album Dear Bongo (out on Forward Music Group) and its songs informed by humor and brimming with tender emotional immediacy even as it explores the folly of seeking and demanding perfection in our lives whether through our relationships, our psychology or in our creative work. Motherhood is currently on tour throughout North America including the following shows coming up in Colorado and at the Treefort Music Fest in Boise, ID.
Queen City Sounds:Your band has been around longer than I had assumed. Has it been around for about eight years?
Penny Stevens: Yeah, Brydon [Crain] and Adam [Sipkema] have been playing together since high school and I joined them during our university days. 2019 will make nine years since we formed Motherhood.
How did you meet them?
They’re from a small town kind of in the middle of nowhere and they moved to Fredericton, which is where we all live now, to go to college. I needed a place to live and I ended up moving in with them and we started jamming in the basement.
Did you grow up playing music?
S: Yes, I’m the only one that took actual music lessons in band except I took a semester in classical guitar and Adam took two drum lessons, I think. I took classical piano lessons while growing up. So I write the piano stuff. When we started out we had a bass player and when he quit I took over bass duties and had to pick it up pretty quick. We’ve been playing music all our lives. I guess a lot of it has been at this point in Motherhood and we learned to play instruments while in this band. A lot of of artists have had other projects that they developed in and formed something later on but we kinda grew up with Motherhood. It’s been a constant for a long time. We didn’t experiment too much outside of Motherhood so we spent our experimentation years inside this band and we sound completely different now than when we started out. Now we can identify what we’re going for. There’s a more clear vision of where we’re headed next.
We all had little projects in middle school and high school but this is our first “real” band that played actual venues. It took us a long time, when we first started out, to figure out how to BE a band. Coming from a really small town with not a lot of other bands around it took us some time to learn how to book a show, make a record and stuff like that when there’s not really anyone else to follow.
Was there a local music scene and places to play for you starting out?
There’s one sweet venue where we booked one of our first shows, The Capital. We were horrible but they kept booking us and asking us to come back. We still play The Capital all the time. The record label that we’re on now, Forward Music Group, is based out of Halifax but it was formed in Fredericton and a lot of bands that were on the label we consider kind of the grandfathers of the music scene there. A lot of them are still playing in awesome bands. They’re older and have families now but we kind of came up going to see those bands play and watching them. Grand Theft Bus is like a prog jam band, they’re pretty cool and still playing. Bands like Force Fields, Share, The Slate Pacific—they’re not as active anymore but those folks are still around and will come and see us once in awhile. That was the only record label we were familiar with coming up so nine years later we’re working with them and it feels pretty good to be a part of the family after all these years.
Is The Capital an all-ages venue?
No, it’s a bar. Some friends of ours started booking there in the late 90s, taking a risk because there wasn’t really any live music happening in Fredericton and touring bands weren’t coming through much but they begged the owner to have a show there and it went really well. The guy that started booking the shows now owns the bar and he’s a huge supporter of the music scene and keeps the Fredericton music scene alive and he does a lot for other bands too.
Did you get a chance to see many bands not from there coming up?
It comes and goes. There’ll be a few years when a lot of touring bands are coming through and there’s a lot of activity. We’re in a little bit of a quiet space now. I lived in Fredericton when I was a teenager and I would sneak out of my mom’s house and go see all-ages metal shows when I was 14 or 15. Those were my first shows and I didn’t even know you could do that thing. That scene isn’t really alive in Fredericton anymore. When we released our record Dear Bongo on March 1 we put on a big all-ages show and we had probably close to seventy high school kids come out. It’s pretty rare to have an all-ages show in Fredericton right now but I hope they’ll be able to have the kinds of experiences I had when I was a teenager going to see all-ages shows and thinking, “Oh, I should be in a band!” That show was at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre, which is a community art center that has a big auditorium.
Presumably this isn’t your first big tour.
This is the biggest we’ve done yet, it’s six weeks long. Last year we were gone a month. We came through Denver [at Seventh Circle Music Collective] and across to Idaho and Northern California and up the coast and back. We won’t have to drive as long this time but we’ll be out longer. Our music is diverse so we can fit into a lot of different places. We can play a legit venue and we can play a punk house and it’s not really that different for us. It translates to a lot of different audiences. In Boise we’re playing at Treefort on Thursday and Saturday. We played Treefort last year at Neurolux and another place. It’ll be nice playing with DIY bands we’ve been in contact with across the US like Charcoal Squids from Missoula, Montana and Lloyd and Saviour from Idaho.
Dear Bongo is not your first full-length.
We’ve had two full-lengths and put out our first in 2013.
Dear Bongo is a name I associate with something people might name their dog but I assume that isn’t the case here.
No, but a lot of people make that association. The dog’s name is Tesla.
You made a video with footage from a GoPro attached to Tesla?
Yeah, we made the video for “Bird Chirp.” We shot that in one of our favorite places in the world called the Nashwaak Flats. You gotta know it to know it, you’ve got to know where the little path is but it’s very close to where we all live. We can bike there from where we live in a few minutes. You basically leave downtown and follow a little path for a few minutes and come out onto this huge, open field. It’s close to downtown Fredericton but it’s quite secluded so we spend a lot of our summer there hanging out and having fires and stuff. We took Tesla down there, she loves it there, and she rants around for twenty-five minutes and collapses and has a naps. So we just strapped a GoPro to her and took her off leash and had a really good day at the Flats. She’s a greyhound and she’s so fast so it kept flopping onto the side so we had to stuff socks between the leash and her shoulder blade so it would stand up.
Kyle Cenjuk took photos and did some performances on the new record?
Yes, he co-produced the record and he runs Forward Music Group so we asked him to produced the record not having any knowledge of how we were going to put the record out. When he came to produce the record he kind of fell in love with it a little bit and asked to put it out on Forward Music Group. We were super stoked about that, obviously. He plays in a bunch of Canadian bands and he plays upright bass so we had him play upright bass on a couple of tracks. He helped with vocals and arrangements. Right now he’s touring with David Miles, who is a pretty well-known folk, pop artist. He also plays in Olympic Symphonium, which is a five piece chamber folk group and he plays in Force Fields, a really intense post-rock band. He has his fingers in many pies as far as East Coast music goes.
When people hear your music they probably accept it for what it is but it gets interesting comparisons like The Mekons, which seems fitting.
Usually when we get comparisons a lot of the time we don’t know the projects. I don’t know who The Mekons were until someone wrote that about us and I checked it out and thought, “Okay, I can kinda see that.” We get Primus a lot, which is fine. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense but I can see where they’re coming from.
There’s some playfulness in the music and it’s not obvious if there’s some genre it’s coming from.
Yeah. When we write something with an obvious influence we like to make it very obvious. Our influences are thinly veiled but very diverse. On Dear Bongo we have a song that we were like, “Let’s try to make this sound as much like a Beach Boys song as we can.” Because we all love the Beach Boys. There are songs like that throughout the record, homages to artists we really care about. Either way, we’re not trying to sound like any particular band but there are bands we like to pay our respects to for really setting the stage for us.
On the Forward Music Group there was a reference to a story associated with the new album about a painter who was pursuing perfection, which is something many people aim for but don’t really find.
S: Pretty much every album we produce is conceptual and completed in one album. So there’s a running theme that carries through every song lyrically and sonically. The lyrics for sure play a part in telling the story but also in the music we have themes that will repeat in different songs in different ways to add cohesion and completeness on the album. This record tells the tale of a painter who is going through a horrible breakup of some sort, falling out of love with someone. He uses painting to try and solve his problems, to paint the world that he wants to see but perfectionism doesn’t mean it can be too perfect. There’s a lot of metaphors and it’s not just one kind of painting. He paints lines on the highway, his house and pictures. By the end he’s playing every blade of glass, tree trunks, trying to paint the world as he thinks it should be but he’s never going to get it quite right.
Lot Lizard is a post-punk band from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. If you’ve not been to South Dakota maybe you only think of the Badlands or Mount Rushmore and that scene from North By Northwest and not a place from which interesting music hails but it’s long been a fact that relatively isolated areas is where you find a good deal of spark and originality as creative people there have to be more or less self-inspirational. Also, one of America’s great record stores is located in Sioux Falls: Total Drag. The latter has been the regional stop for touring bands on the underground/DIY circuit since opening its doors around half a decade ago.
Lot Lizard’s sound is haunted, ethereal yet brooding and urgent. Like a goth-y Pere Ubu or resonant with the eclectic roots of newer bands like later period Iceage and Protomartyr. Currently the group is on a tour with Frankie and the Witch Fingers with dates in Colorado listed below before the interview. The band is nearly finished with its debut full length with an anticipated release on vinyl through both Different Folk Records and Total Drag Records. Patrick Nelson, the group’s bassist, recently answered some questions for Queen City Sounds illuminating some of the band’s history and how he got into post-punk.
Queen City Sounds:Sioux Falls, South Dakota is not the first place people think of when it comes to post-punk. What brought your band together and what kinds of places did you play locally before branching beyond?
Patrick Nelson: It’s true, South Dakota is not a place know for its post-punk (or insert any genre) bands or for its boundary pushing culture in general. This band was brought together essentially by our drummer Brogan who basically reached out to all of us separately about the idea of starting a new band. All of us, at the very least, knew of each other and had seen each other around at shows and/or in other bands. We started playing the typical places available to bands: small clubs/bars, basement shows, and most importantly our local record store that doubles as an all ages DIY space.
How did you get into post-punk and noise rock (referencing Lord Bronc’s mention of Jesus Lizard on your Bandcamp page)?
That’s a good question.. I’m sure the answer would vary greatly per member. Post-punk was a weird one for me as it took me quite a while to “grow into.” An acquired taste if you will. To a 15-year-old me it was just kind of weird boring music that I didn’t get at the time. When you’re that age and full of youthful insanity blasting, I don’t know, classic early punk from NY, LA and the UK or early hardcore stuff like Minor Threat or Black Flag, bands like The Fall or Joy Division are just kind of weird and out there sounding. Not energetic or shocking enough. Of course you grow up a little bit and figure it out and realize you were totally wrong.
Noise rock on the other hand was something that grabbed me right away and was part of my musical experience at a young age. I think that has to do with that it was having a sort of heyday in my formative years. Like that whole Amphetamine Reptile scene or bands like Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth or Jesus Lizard. All super abrasive in their own way but were getting press, major label contracts etc.. I was lucky enough to see Jesus Lizard AND Sonic Youth at Lollapalooza in 1995. It’s always interesting to see what other bands people link your band to. I don’t really see the Jesus Lizard but we’ve gotten it more than once. Although I won’t deny the influence of that rhythm section on my playing and I can see a connection with Ben’s guitar work as well.
Did you play different kinds of music before starting this band? What bands? What kind of music?
Oh yeah. I’ve played in plenty. In addition to this project I’m currently involved in a moody post-hardcore project called Roman Ships. Prior to that I’ve played quite a bit of guitar and a little bass in projects that range from street-punk/power-pop to new-wave/space rock, to even a ska band back in the 90s. I can honestly say I’ve been a fan of at least one band every one of the other guys has been in. Lindy had this killer Goth/death-rock project called Angie Hosh. Ben fronted a cool noisy post-rock band called Talk Rock. Brogan’s been involved in a ton of bands (as drummers in this town, and presumably most towns, are known to do). Most recently a garage project called Weathers Rest and in the early 2000’s a chaotic screamo band called Sinking Steps…Rising Eyes.
What made what you do now more interesting for you initially? I know, it’s not as cut and dry and by the numbers like that. That live video you sent and your demos reminded me a little of another band whose post-punk and other musical roots come from a little different direction as well and that is Protomartyr. Did you start out sounding sort of like that? Did you evolve into that sort of sound?
This has been an interesting ride so far for many reasons including the fact that song writing has been very organic. We didn’t go into this with the idea that we would create something that sounds like band A crossed with band B sprinkled with layers of C and D. Of course we talked a bit about bands we liked and such… but that can be an exhaustive conversation with this crew as we all like a huge variety of music and have a lot of respect for different styles. The Protomartyr connection is interesting to me in the fact that I think most of this first record was created without everyone in the band really knowing about that band and their records…. That being said I can see some similarities particularly the idea that much of the music is rhythmically driven via the bass and drums while the guitar often textures in these tasteful atmospheric licks. I think at this point I can speak for everyone and say we are indeed fans of that band now though. Recently saw them live, they killed.
Is there an active local music world that you connect to right now? What is life like for a band like yours in South Dakota in terms of playing shows and connecting with other artists to share bills? How did you get hooked up with those shows in Colorado?
The Sioux Falls music scene is doing pretty well currently. In terms of venues/spaces hosting live original music I think we’re thriving, the best we’ve been in over a decade! Whether people realize that and get out to support live music as much as they should is certainly up for debate. We’re a small city and so it’s tight knit and for the most part I think we try to support each other. The city is growing fast, and has been for [many] years now, so I’m very interested to see where we end up in 5 or 10 years.
As for connecting with other artists and how we got connected to the Colorado shows, we played a gig with Frankie and the Witch Fingers in Sioux Falls a little over a year ago. They dug our band and on top of that had the next day off so we became friends and were lucky enough to connect with them in Denver and Ft. Collins.
Like-minded or at least adjacently-minded bands we should know about or hear that maybe no one outside of South Dakota or regionally?
There’s plenty of talented musicians here that’s for sure. Two I’m particularly excited about are Bodega Sushi and Velcro Ultrasound (both are in the middle of full length albums). Rifflord and Green Alter are some other friends, both in the heavier realm of things, that are working hard and deserve a shout.
“Lot Lizard” is a term I grew up knowing (as a child of the 70s and 80s), is there a story behind why you chose that name or a significance to the name that has come to fit your band and its music?
Ha, yeah there’s a bit of a story. So I had written this bass line and had an idea in mind for how I wanted the song to sound sonically. I was describing it to the guys at practice and tried to put them into this landscape, this frame of mind. I believe it went, “Like some lot lizard out of gas and stranded in the middle of nowhere on some desert highway.” To which Brogan said, “What did you say? What’s a lot lizard?” And after a laugh and an explanation on my end he responded, “That’s it, that’s the band name.” There was definitely a little apprehension as we weren’t trying to be overtly offensive or whatever. We asked for outside opinions, including those of our girlfriends/wives. It stuck. And I think it fits. It’s also fun to forget about the social term and just use it as more literal in terms of reptiles. And the alliteration. I mean heck, it might just be the perfect band name.
How did you get connected with Total Drag and why is that a significant place for your band and maybe for the local underground music world?
Brogan [Costa], our drummer, actually helped open and is a part owner of Total Drag. On top of that I’ve know Dan and Liz [Nissen] for as long as I can remember. We’ve attended and played a lot of gigs together over the years. Total Drag is an integral part of what is happening in Sioux Falls. Lot Lizard played our first gig there and it continues to be the place we most often play locally.
In any city the importance of a space that hosts all ages shows cannot be stressed enough. At a most primal level, a music scene will have a hard time surviving without it. Music is evolved by the youth. A scene being engaged by youthful energy and ideas will hopefully foster growth and longevity.
Since 2015, Portland, Oregon’s Alien Boy has been establishing itself as one of the most intriguing guitar rock bands in the American underground. Its sound could be roughly described as a mixture of pop-punk, post-punk and shoegaze. The jangle-y riffs and melt-y, fiery tones propelled by urgent rhythms could certainly be considered to be an amalgamation of all of those styles of music. But Sonia Weber’s vocals, expressive, poignant, unafraid to go off of conventional and sanitized melodies anchors the songs in relatable human experiences which aren’t ever perfect. But that willingness to embrace flaws is its own perfection by speaking to emotional truth and it’s what makes Alien Boy more compelling than many bands that seem to write music where everything is ultimately okay. This band’s music isn’t about bravado, it’s about being real and honest with oneself and others.
In 2018 the group released its debut LP Sleeping Lessons on Tiny Engines [soon to be included on Queen City Sounds’ Best Albums of 2018 list]. Currently the group is on another iteration of touring in the wake of the release of the record including tonight February 20 at Larimer Lounge. We recently sent some questions to Alien Boy which vocalist/guitarist Sonia Weber was gracious enough to indulge.
Queen City Sounds:Since hearing about Alien Boy a few years ago I’ve thought of the band as punk even though your songs are musically not reducible to a single genre. Do you think punk as music, culture and ethos informs your own music? If so, how so? If not, why not?
Sonia Weber: Yes, absolutely. That’s the first type of music I felt really passionate about when I was younger and I think it always shows no matter what. No matter what I’m always kind of searching for that heaviness/energy and style even though I don’t listen to that kinda stuff as much anymore. Ethos too, I think punk taught me so much about how I want to interact with the world and it has a lot to do with why it’s important to me to express that this is a queer band. I think if you’re going to have any kind of platform it’s important to acknowledge it and use it for some kind of good.
When your band, or previous bands when you were younger, started out, where were you able to play? Was there a scene you were able to plug into?
Yeah! I started playing in bands when I was 16ish and played a lot of shows at Satyricon, Backspace, and Laughing Horse Books when I was a little older. We got really lucky, there were a lot of people my age starting bands at the same time and when I think back I think that time was really special.
Was there and is there an active realm of DIY or unconventional spaces where you were able to develop and where newer bands can come up?
Yeah, absolutely! I think there was and is and will always be somewhere even if you’re not plugged into it there’s always stuff you don’t know about and people doing inspiring stuff for DIY to make it happen. Laughing Horse Books was big for me when I was younger, then Anarres Infoshop, and now places like Black Water and houses in Portland are doing really great stuff for DIY.
The Ghost Ship fire had a direct connection to Denver and many other places and the aftermath of the tragedy deeply affected our underground art and music community including harassment from alt-right types. Did that event affect you and your band at home and in terms of trying to tour?
You couldn’t go somewhere without knowing someone who knew someone that was there or affected by it. It was a huge dark cloud over something that was usually a place that made us all feel so good and safe. [It] and was just so, so, so, so sad. As far as how it affected tour stuff it lead to a lot of DIY spots closing down or being harder to access but on the other side of that I think it made spaces that were able to keep going realize things they could do to make it safer for everyone and I appreciate that. Mostly it just devastated so many people including myself, I felt hard to get through and we’re all still working on it.
The 2018 KEXP article on your band mentions how being devastated was a feeling that inspired many of the songs on Sleeping Lessons. Why do you think that emotional state leads to vital songwriting?
I think music and art are at its best when you’re feeling a type of extreme emotion and can be honest about it. The stuff you’re too afraid to say yourself but then you hear it in a song and it feels important. I think that’s where a lot of connection comes from.
Your Facebook pages lists a band not many people these days cite as an influence (maybe in Portland it’s more likely) and that’s the Wipers. What is it about that band that you find inspirational and affecting?
I love the Wipers so much. We draw a lot from their guitar sound which is I think where the influence shows the most, especially on our first few EP’s. I think that band is so emotional in a way a lot of punk bands weren’t back then, I think we’re similar in that way too even if it doesn’t sound that way immediately. I really relate to the song “No One Wants An Alien” and obviously “Alien Boy” which is where the name is ripped from. It’s all about being isolated and lonely and different from other people and I think it’s done in a really beautiful way. That’s the kind of punk I hope shines through a little in our stuff.
“Only Posers Fall In Love” has a long lost Smiths with Robert Smith guesting like he did with Siouxsie and the Banshees sound. What is it about that sort of guitar style do you find appealing and interesting to play?
It’s my absolute favorite kind of guitar playing. I’m totally obsessed with how Johnny Marr plays guitar and got that way right before I started Alien Boy. I can’t even really describe what I love about it but it was the first time since being younger that I was super excited about guitar again. I’m obsessed with chorus pedals.
Why do you think shoegaze and pop punk compliment each other so well? Your music demonstrates they definitely do.
Most of the song structures are the same! I feel like I realized most songs are similar it just depends on how you play them and that if I felt like mostly pop punk was coming out but I wanted it to feel a different way it was totally possible. I want the same thing from both genres, they’re both so emotional I think that’s the main reason why it works so well together.
Your songs fulfill a similar function to writing a journal in terms of externalizing feelings and thoughts so they don’t just, or no longer, sit in your body. What does the process of doing so look like for you?
When I was writing sleeping lessons it was really the only way the feelings were being expressed in a genuine way. They would come out in little bursts and I’d forget and re-listen and be like, “Damn that’s how I feel about that? Okay”. And then once the record was done it really felt like I had gotten it out of my body. I felt a lot lighter it was pretty unbelievable to feel it in that way.
A long time ago “pop” used to be kind of a dirty word in punk and underground music. Did you ever have to reconcile pop with the music you came to love as an adolescent and beyond? What are examples of, conventionally or unconventionally so, perfect pop songs?
When I was younger I definitely felt super ashamed liking pop music but as I got older there was a point where I was just like, “Fuck that this isn’t fun at all I’m gonna like whatever I want,” and seemingly everyone got the memo at the same time, haha. Music has been much more exciting since then. Coming back to the idea again that most music is structured the same way, I like the same things about all the different types of music I like and most of it comes down to chorus pedals and relatability.. What I can relate to changes all the time too! So it’s always changing.
Examples of perfect pop songs to me? There’s so many! “In A Big Country” by Big Country, “Celebrity Skin” by Hole, “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift, “Baba O’ Riley” by The Who, “I Wanna Be Adored” by The Stone Roses, “The Jerk” by Joyce Nanor. Conventional and not all those songs are perfect.
Hackedepicciotto is an avant-garde, multimedia project formed out of the collaboration between Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto. Hacke is the bassist and one of the sound designers in influential industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten and de Picciotto is an internationally renowned author and musician in her own right as well as a co-founder of the now defunct electronic music festival the Love Parade in Berlin. Their work in various projects across the past few decades has been rich, diverse and prolific. As Hackedepicciotto the duo has produced a body of work that explores the ways in which what some call late capitalism and its fallout with widespread gentrification in cities and the consequences for those who have carved a niche as creative people and those who are drawn to doing so.
De Picciotto wrote a remarkable graphic novel published in Europe in 2013 and in the USA in 2015 called We Are Gypsies Now in which she outlines how she and her husband, Hacke, came to realize they were basically being priced out of their longtime home of Berlin and how it was becoming a city that was increasingly losing some of its character, of decades if not centuries, as a place generally open to and welcoming creative types and lateral thinkers of all stripes. That realization inspired the couple to travel around where they could perform in search of a new place to call home. In the end, as you will read below, de Picciotto and Hacke came to some conclusions about the state of the world and their hometown. That subject and their discoveries since have been the subject of at least two albums, 2016’s Perseverantia and 2017’s Menetekel. A powerful expression of despair can be felt throughout both albums but in the end, Hackedepicciotto believe not the platitude that things will all work out but that hope for making a better future is not a naive concept. We interviewed Hackedepicciotto via email in 2018 following their 2017 tour of North America.
Queen City Sounds: How did you come to record Perseverantia in the Mojave desert? Is there anything about that setting or the circumstances of being there then that inspired documenting your travels up to that point?
Danielle: We have been traveling art nomads for over seven years now and at one point we ended up in Joshua Tree. I fell in love with the starkness of the desert. It is incredibly inspiring because it brings you back to life’s basics so we recorded not only “Perseverantia” there but I also recorded my solo album “Tacoma” during the same time period. I would have loved moving there immediately but Alexander does not have a drivers license which would have made it difficult for him to move around freely and it is very far from Europe where we do need to be quite often so we decided to put it on hold for the time being. I still do have the dream of owning a small cottage there to retreat whenever possible.
Alexander: The desert is vibrating with energy. You might say that it’s a barren and lifeless landscape, but it really is radiant with life. There’s hundreds of plants and creatures within every square inch. Also there’s no apparent boundary, few geographical features blocking your view. All of that does have a very inspiring effect and gave us the opportunity to look at our work from a different angle. We gave up traditional song structures and arrangements thankfully due to those surroundings.
QCS: What seemed like the most likely places to find a sanctuary for creative types as you had in Berlin in the 80s and to some extent in the 90s? What ultimately made those places not quite what you were looking for?
Danielle: Joshua Tree and the Hudson Valley both seemed like the perfect places because they are not overpriced yet, have a great artists community and are beautiful nature-wise. Hudson Valley was basically the decision we made after five years of contemplation. In the end effect we did not move there for two reasons: 1) we were originally invited to do an artists residency in a private art space there for a year and had planned to use that as a starting point from where we could look for work and connections. After we told the curator that we would accept his offer he informed us that as we had stopped drinking his invitation was not open anymore as that would bother him whilst drinking. (!) The art residency was obviously a very unprofessional one and we are happy it did not go through but it did shock us to be confronted in such a manner on something we were rather proud of having achieved so we started looking around once more when 2) the elections happened. That was the second shock which brought us back to Berlin to try and understand what is happening in the world at the moment.
Alexander: Well, ultimately we didn’t manage to discover a place, a city or a community that would live up to the West-Berlin standards and we realized that it would be silly to even try looking for that. Instead it is imperative to understand what “[survival of the fittest” really means, because it is not about strength, or appetite or ambition, it’s about being able to adapt, so we should all let go of the romanticized, sentimental and awfully nostalgic notion that anything could be the way it once was again and rather try to make things happen in any given place. Not being twenty anymore sort of reduces the options though, of what I am willing to invest myself into.
QCS: What circumstances do you think made Berlin such a great place as a sanctuary for artists? How might such a situation be attained now even given the dire state of the world?
Alexander: Not only were we perfectly secluded from the rest of the west, the special status of our elitist little village informed the selection of people, who would go there. You wouldn’t be drafted into the [mandatory] year of military service if you were a registered citizen of West-Berlin, so all the freaks who’d have a problem with the system represented by the army and whatnot, could safely realize their personal utopia there and because of the presence of the allied forces stationed by the winner nations of the Second World War, we had quite a good connection to what was happening abroad internationally, in London, New York and Paris to some extent, if you will.
Danielle: In the 80s Berlin was an island which was completely subsidized because of being an island within cold war communism. That meant that everything was very cheap and money was not an issue. You could work in a cafe two times a week and pay your rent and food from that so art and music were not done with commercial interest in mind. This brought about that Berlin became a madcap laboratory of unusual sounds, ideas and experiments which would nourish creativity all over the world. Personally I think that this is the key to being able to live a healthy, humane life and make oneself free of our insane world: find a place to live which is cheap and spend your time not trying to earn money but to do things that really mean something.
QCS: Have you found havens to stay while you travel? How has being on the move regularly now impacted the legal aspects of being able to travel and other mundane matters most people take for granted?
Danielle: We have many homes now and they are mainly influenced by our friends. We have discovered that the saying “home is where the heart is” is true and that the heart is mainly there where one has good friends. Because of traveling so much we have met incredible people all over the world and those havens are places that give us strength and hope. We try to travel to their cities regularly to create a net connecting all of them with like minded people and in this way spread the strength that we receive.
Alexander: I used to enjoy air travel a lot more than I do now with all those security and luggage regulations “The Man” is imposing on us. What equipment we are able to bring and what not is having considerable impact on our work. That is maybe a good thing, because we have to calculate and re-adjust the weight and efficiency of every detail in our cases over and over. We travel with a scale and make sure that all our checked luggage is maxed out.
Hackedepicciotto, We Are Gypsies Now tour 2015, photo by Tom Murphy
QCS: Why do you feel times have changed and it seems more like a dog eat dog world? That makes it sound like you gave up on the idea of finding a sanctuary like Berlin used to be. Have you?
Alexander: I am grateful to still be able to make a living with music. We are doing pretty well in comparison to almost every other profession. I do really cherish to get to put my energy into creating something meaningful, rather than having to do some kind of slave labor or, even worse, to get paid for being a heart-[less] and soulless corporate prick, in order to pay the fucking rent. And yes, thank God for our wonderful friends who have our backs.
Danielle: Negative news is everywhere and reading it all the time can be very depressing. But there are very many positive things happening all the time and it is important to concentrate on them and give them your support. It just takes more time to find out about them—I try to keep my Facebook page free of negative news and post as much positive news as possible to prove this. There are a lot of small communities getting together everywhere, in the US and Europe, connecting people that are environmentally aware and that actively work on changing things. These communities are incredibly inspiring and one can either join them or learn from what they do and try to integrate this into daily life. All of them are as inspiring as Berlin used to be but in different ways. Berlin’s most creative times were in the 80s and 90s which is now quite some time ago and it would not make sense to turn back time. The world has changed and we need to look into the future not into the past.
QCS: When you speak of displaced people, the thousands of homeless souls you speak of in your press release, what is the essence of what you think many of us have lost in the wake of what made Berlin unaffordable in the way it used to be but also many other cities in the world where creativity found a home?
Danielle: Society has become corrupted. We all seem to believe that what the companies want us to think and we need to become free of this because it is not only killing our health but also our souls.
Alexander: Change, transcendence and reform [are] imperative for the survival of mankind. Luckily it can’t be avoided and will happen anyway no matter how hard reactionaries will cling to their valuables. You have to start with yourself and try not to be too frustrated with the ridiculous amount of time it seems to take for everyone else to get into it.
Hackedepicciotto, Menetekel tour 2017, photo by Tom Murphy
QCS: The word “Menetekel” means “the writing on the wall” and I take that to mean that what was happening to the creative community and the social and physical infrastructure that made a creative life a viable option and possible to thrive is now happening to everyone. That is to say, in our capitalistic world where rampant greed is the only protected value, creative work is not valued and seen as a luxury and thus more or less the first thing to go, to be sacrificed. My melodramatic language aside, what made the collective despair of the world seem like particularly fruitful material for your new record?
Danielle: When we record it happens instinctively and we were quite surprised how dark some of our tunes had become. It is always interesting to record first and then speak about what happened because that way you can see what your subconscious is saying. Here in Berlin we work in an area that is very poor and in which a lot of refugees are put. Their collective despair can be felt palpably, being displaced is terrible. Living in a country after having lost your family, your job, your home only to arrive somewhere where you are considered a subhuman, cannot speak the language and have almost no prospects besides being alive is unimaginable for anybody that has not experienced it. I think we felt a lot of this despair besides the feeling of homelessness we felt whilst traveling ourselves. When you travel a lot you can experience transcontinental shifts on a one to one daily basis and our world is changing at a breakneck speed. Most people do not think it will affect them because they refuse to see the writing on the wall and go on numbing their minds with fatty foods, alcohol and non stop media. If people do not wake up it will soon be too late.
Alexander: Menetekel is about waking up to the reality of our condition.The reference to the word as it is used expressing impending doom in German, is a biblical story found in the book of Daniel, chapter five.
QCS: Obviously the dark intensity of the album matches the subject matter. How does performing this music along with your visuals affect you revisiting the music and channeling that kind of vibe?
Danielle: It makes me want to find as many ways as possible to help change things to a brighter future.
Alexander: Ideally we create with the vibrations of our music and Danielle’s imagery (if we have it) a bond between the audience and us, the performers. By sharing the moment together in the given venue, we get to connect and experience reality as a unit, a community. Separation is an illusion and with our art we try to overcome that false view of the world.
QCS: The final song is “Crossroad.” What kind of crossroad do you feel humanity and human culture may be at this time? What do you see as possible paths that seem likely before us?
Danielle: I think that people have to realize that they cannot wait for others to save us. We are the others. Every single person is responsible to make change possible. As we can see with elections: every body that does not vote makes evil possible.
Alexander: Know thyself. Stop buying into consumerism. Quit drinking and go vegan. Meditate. That’s a start.
Melvins [L-R: Steven Shane McDonald, Dale Crover, Buzz Osborne, Jeff Pinkus], photo by O1Depending on how you’re counting it, Melvins released its thirtieth album, Pinkus Abortion Technician in April 2018. The title of the record an obvious, and humorous, reference to the 1987 Butthole Surfers classic Locust Abortion Technician. It should be noted that Butthole Surfers’ longtime bassist Jeff Pinkus has been a member of Melvins since 2013. The record is bookended by two Surfers songs, “Stop Moving to Florida” and “Graveyard.” While a testament to the impact the Butthole Surfers had on Melvins, both bands proved influential on 80s underground rock and the musicians who would break that parallel vision of interesting and exciting music, likely considered largely uncommercial at the time, to the world in the early 90s when alternative rock bands took the foundation built by bands like Butthole Surfers and Melvins to a massive audience.
Though Butthole Surfers had two left field hits in the 90s with “Who Was In My Room Last Night” and “Pepper,” neither Butthole Surfers or the Melvins were aiming to appeal to any trends, their respective music too weird and idiosyncratic for most people with mainstream tastes and otherwise casual music fans. Because of that both bands have a body of work that has aged well and in the case of Melvins, work that continues to evolve organically, regularly yielding interesting records. This weekend, Melvins are playing a pair of shows in Colorado, the first on Friday, August 10 at The Gothic Theatre in Englewood and Saturday, August 11 at The Aggie Theatre in Fort Collins, both with WE Are The Asteroid. We spoke with Melvins guitarist Buzz Osborne ahead of the show and talked about Butthole Surfers and his pragmatic attitude toward the appeal of his own music.
Tom Murphy: When did you first hear about Butthole Surfers?
Buzz Osborne: ’82 or ’83. I think I saw them first in ’83. Seattle.
How did you hear about them?
Same way I heard about every other band. I listened to underground music, I heard the EP and I really wanted to see them. I heard about them long before I saw them, like the year before.
What is it about that music that appealed to you?
It was left of center, it didn’t sound like anything else. They had a nice way of expressing their melodies that I found to be quite exciting and refreshing. I thought they were extremely good players. It was weird to the point that I could get into it and not feel like I was listening to a fucking REO Speedwagon record. It was everything I enjoyed about underground music. But having said that, honestly, if REO Speedwagon put out a record I liked, I would buy it. I’m not going to hold my breath but I’m not being perverse, you know. I never have been. I feel things are good or bad and that’s the end of it.
When you saw them the first time was it more the stripped down thing or the multimedia thing they did later on?
It was stripped down. I’m not sure what you mean. To me it was super punk rock but it wasn’t 7 Seconds, you know? It wasn’t no jive bullshit like that. It was really good in every sense of the word. Not normal but I was okay with that. I embraced that.
Do you feel like they were influential to you then?
Of course! They always were. That’s why at this point now, when I think about what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with, I can’t even really believe it. The idea that I’m in a band now with two guys that I’ve been fans of for literally decades is really quite amazing to me. It’s second to none and I feel like the happiest boy on earth.
The album is bookended by two Butthole Surfers songs? Was there an inspiration for the choice of eras of the band?
I don’t know. It could have been any era. We have been touring around playing both of those songs live a long time prior to recording them. And when we got in the studio with Jeff it just seemed like the right thing to do. An obvious choice. There’s no more to it. There isn’t an era of the Butthole Surfers that I don’t like.
Did you tour with them way back when?
We did shows with them but never toured with them. Three or four shows.
Is there a specific era of the Butthole Surfers you favor?
Like I said, I like every era of the Butthole Surfers. But if I had to get particular, I guess I would pick Hairway to Steven, [Psychic…Powerless…] Another Man’s Sac and Brown Reason To Live.
How do you think they impacted the world of music?
I never thought about how they influenced music in general. Maybe their weirdness. They influenced me. They did have an album that sold a lot of copies but I can’t say how well-versed a lot of the people that bought that album were in what [Butthole Surfers] did before that. Or if they had explored the earlier records if they would have been as excited about it. Maybe they would have loved Another Man’s Sac as well, it remains to be seen. Yeah, these guys are going to love the Brown Reason to Live EP, they’re going to be super into it. But who knows? I have no idea why people like what they like. I only know what I like and I’ve always figured that I operate with the assumption that I have good taste and I will make music I think is good without thinking in terms of how it will be perceived by anyone else. Just figure that if I like it, other people will like it but it probably won’t be millions of people and I’m okay with that. It’ll be enough. I’m not concentrating on selling records or not selling records. I’m concentrating on making music that’s good.
T-Rextasy will perform two shows in Colorado this week with Blacker Face. Monday, August 6 at Your Mom’s House in Denver [show canceled and relocated to TBA, ask a punk] and Tuesday, August 7 at Surfside 7 in Fort Collins. The New York City-based band has garnered a bit of a following in the past few years for its spirited and unconventional pop punk. Formed in 2013 while its members were still in high school, T-Rextasy demonstrated an astute and thoughtful take on social issues and identity from a young age imbued with a genuinely clever and irreverent sensibility.
Drummer Ebun Nazon-Power had been playing in bands prior to T-Rextasy when she heard about Lyris Faron from a friend. “We first met at my show at my high school,” dsays Nazon-Power. “After she saw me play she said, ‘I want to start a band with you.’ She wanted an all girl band, you know, to play some rock and roll music. I was down with that. Within a couple of weeks we started practicing together.”
The group’s first performance was at a house show and one of its earliest gigs at a more conventional venue was opening for the great New York City indie pop band Frankie Cosmos at the DIY space Shea Stadium. “That was a big deal for us because it was our first opportunity to play before this big group,” says Nazon-Power.
Critics have referred to the band’s lyrics as radically political in the best sense—mincing no words yet creatively engaging.
“So educational but not didactic?” asks bassist Annie Fidoten. “As songwriters we’re rooted in thinking about things that are happening in our immediate periphery, to ourselves and our friends. ‘Chick’n’ is a song I wrote when I was 17 and now I’m 22. I was literally sitting around with people at the cafeteria and talking about how pet names annoy me as much as cat calling does. There’s something creepy about it. I thought it would be clever to put that into a song. A lot of people probably feel the same way and it becomes social commentary that resonates for other people. We’re always trying to write songs that we think might resonate with other people who have experienced those things themselves. If something happens in adolescence and we’re still thinking about it? I think that’s pretty universal.”
“Chick’n” appeared on the group’s 2016 debut full-lengthJurassic Punk, a record filled with exuberant songs that offer a perspective looking to encourage the transformation of the present into a better future by critiquing regressive mindsets and behaviors with humor and psychological insight.
Since all the members of T-Rextasy are currently enrolled in college in different parts of the United States, it has undertaken sporadic touring and took some time off in 2017 to go on a bigger tour. And in summer 2017, the band took time out for a kind of songwriting retreat to compose its sophomore album, as yet unnanounced, due later this year on Danger Collective.
“We stayed together in New York for four days or something like that and wrote songs and relaxed,” says Fidoten. “Some were songs we had pieces of or almost songs. Some were completely written while we were there. All those songs we wrote together. It was very collaborative, all of our songwriting is. I can’t imagine us writing songs remotely and sending each other parts. We operate as a unit. Half of the songs we had before and the other half are from that writing experience.”
The new record contains much of the striking and affecting lyrics one would expect as well as songwriting that could never be truly pigeonholed with the confessional, personal quality of the best pop punk and eclectic use of sound including bits of ska.
“I’m a big ska fan so I think the formula for what a ska song is we can sprinke into places to spice them up a little,” says Lyris Faron. “When we do covers, we can do an instant ska cover, bass on the 1, 5, 8, guitars on the off beat, super easy to spice it up lke that and make it recognizable and give it a kitschy feeling.”
Whatever its exact alchemy, for certain, T-Rextasy’s version of punk is not only good but good for you.
When Yvette Young of math rock band Covet started posting videos of her guitar sketches on Facebook and then on YouTube and other online outlets several years back she didn’t necessarily see herself doing music professionally. “I started posting those songs as an incentive to finish songs and share them with friends,” says Young. “There were a lot of cool communities on Facebook of people that liked the same music I did. I posted the videos just to keep track of my progress. I did it for the same reasons I post riffs on Instagram—to incentivize finishing them.”
Young earned herself a well-deserved reputation as a guitar shredder on par with the math rock inspirations in bands like Don Caballero, Pelican, TTNG, Tera Melos and Enemies. But her musical technique has never been done for its own sake and never really learned to merely show off technical skill. Young is also a visual artist and views musical technique in the same was she does artistic technique.
“I see technique as a tool kit,” says Young. “The more technique you have and applications you have for guitar—for instance two handed tapping, picking chords, tugging—it’s like a painter’s toolbox , [to use] the visual artist analogy. To me music is sonic painting and I want to transport someone with my music. I want as many colors and as many tools as I can. That’s my incentive for figuring out my technique—to get to the closest to what I want to achieve. For a lot of people they hear stuff in their head but their hands aren’t there. You have the potential to do this thing but you don’t have the tools so you have to learn the tools.”
“I write with my ears and then I find it on the guitar,” continues Young. “Usually I don’t know how to play it yet or how to do what I heard. I know where the notes are but I don’t know how to connect it all yet. So I’ll keep practicing until I get it down. That’s how I get my technique. I try doing stuff I think is impossible and once I do it, it feels good. Then I can apply that technique to any other song I want to write in the future. I always write songs I can’t play yet. I don’t go to comfortable shapes, I always try to push myself to do weird stuff that is uncomfortable at first. That’s a good way if you want to break out of your routine. Change your tunings so you can’t do those shapes anymore. Totally disable yourself so you have to use your ears and you’ll be able to write stuff that sounds totally natural because you end up having to write with your head and not just with technique itself. You can’t just do an arpeggiated sweep, the shape is gone. So you have to find something that’s much more creative.”
Young’s music is like her drawings and paintings—diverse, rich in style and evocative power. She does the artwork for all of her albums and there is an element of what Young refers to as “escapist” or fantastical, intended to transport the viewer to another place or another time in their lives. Whether it’s the albums or the artwork Young has shared on various online outlets, her development as a visual artist is seemingly in parallel with her development as a musician. The group’s new EP, 2018’s Effloresce, is Covet’s most fully-realized work to date with an appeal beyond what might be immediately to the taste of connoisseur’s of math rock. As Young discussed earlier, her method of learning and employing technique is a bit unorthodox but which has resulted in music that steps creatively out of what one might expect of the genre or of what Covet has done before.
The EP is named as a kind of tribute to British post-rock band Oceansize and its own debut full-length, Effloresce. “It kind of means to bloom and flour and in chemistry it means to dry up to a point to powderize and disappear,” says Young. “I like the idea of blooming. I feel this is a departure from our last album production-wise and songwriting-wise. We all have different influences and we want to take all our passions, influences and backgrounds and mesh them into one sound. This album is like a person with a bunch of flowers as a face because we’re growing.”
At moments the songs on Effloresce employ the familiar, elegantly melodic guitar tapping compositions and other techniques Young has mastered but Covet never seems to get stuck in a particular technique across the EP’s six tracks and the inventive creation of atmosphere and dynamics take the music beyond math rock and beyond rock itself into more experimental musical territory. The tracks “Glimmer” and “Gleam” in particular all but cross over into the realm of ambient music at points.
“I’m fascinated with how much you can push a sound and how many different genres you can [combine],” says Young. “Also, on a practical level, it makes touring a lot easier. I think metal is a cool genre but is unfortunately a niche genre. There’s only so many huge metal bands and you end up going out with the same kinds of bands all the time. If you are more like a chameleon you open yourself up to more touring opportunities. I don’t write to open up more touring opportunities, I write because I really enjoy multiple styles of music and I want to do all of it in one.”
Yvette Young may have initially seen a career for herself in the sciences, at least according to what she hints at in her refreshingly candid interview with Sidewalk Talk in May 2018, but for now she has carved out for herself a life as a professional musician.
“Essentially I became my parents’ nightmare but it’s working out,” says Young in typically humorous fashion. “I might as well join a gang.”
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2012, photo by Tom Murphy
Titwrench travels to Stockholm Sweden for Titwrench Stockholm, which happens this weekend running Thursday June 14 through Saturday June 16 (find details here). The festival, which celebrates experimental music and art created by female identified people and LGBT folk, has been going on since 2009, usually in Denver, Colorado. The edition in Stockholm starts off with will include European and US artists including the likes of Denver’s Rachael Pollard, R A R E B Y R D $, Church Fire and Mirror Fears as well as Albuquerque artists Cthulha, Weedrat, Chicharra, Bigawatt and performance troupe extraordinaire Milch De La Máquina. The US artists in particular could use your help to defray the costs of performing at the festival and you can contribute to the cause here or to the individual artist funds linked above.
Before Titwrench last happened in Denver in August 2017, we had the chance to speak with Marisa Demarco of Milch De La Máquina, Chicharra and Bigawatt. Demarco has long been a significant artist and journalist in Albuquerque and we spoke with her about becoming involved in DIY and underground music and art and her evolution from pop/rock musician to noise and visionary avant-garde performance artist.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2017, photo by Tom Murphy
Queen City Sounds: You grew up in Albuquerque, is that right? Or did you grow up elsewhere?
Marisa Demarco: Yeah, no, born in Farmington, NM but lived my whole life in Albuquerque, NM.
How did you become aware of underground and DIY culture growing up?
I was performing in just like a regular pop-rock band or whatever called Ya Ya Boom since I was in high school. I was in that band a long time when I was really feeling like I wanted to stretch my ability level and my creativity a little bit. So, I saw this ad on Craigslist where they were looking for players for Cobra Game, which is a game invented by John Zorn. I’ve heard it described as somebody who’s flipping a radio really fast through the stations. I don’t think that’s totally exactly it but that’s maybe the quickest shorthand. So I joined Cobra as a vocalist, which also I didn’t realize at the time was maybe kind of odd. I don’t think there were any other vocalists in the group at that time.
From there, I just kind of met a lot of people who became big experimental players down here and the Cobra group eventually became Death Convention Singers, which is still something that I’m involved in. It no longer performs necessarily John Zorn’s compositions or John Zorn’s game, Cobra, but it does perform compositions, like contemporary experimental compositions. We also are an art collective and do installations and that’s over many years. So, I think I joined [that] Cobra group when I was 25 and I’m 36 now, so it’s over like 11 years I kind of evolved with those other performers and through them kind of found all the faces that in Albuquerque pop up for experimental noise music and performance.
For a long time, what was happening out here was like a space would open up and be around for just a little while, like maybe a year, until, I don’t know, cops start showing up or something, and then we would go to another spot. So for a while it was just a migratory DIY scene culture out here. We also did performances that were not in established venues at all, like we did this one performance on top of the abandoned courthouse in downtown Albuquerque. You know, we were just trying things in different kinds of spaces. That’s kind of how I got connected to all that stuff.
That’s really interesting, I had no idea. I remember Ya Ya Boom played up here I believe. At Glob or someplace like that?
We played at Glob. I think the first place we played was at 3 Kings and I think there’s still a sticker in the bathroom, of our band. [Titwrench founder] Sarah Slater recently took a photo in the last 5 years or something and showed me that it was still in there.
Did you know Raven Chacon from early on?
Yeah, Raven was in the Cobra group. I think he’s one of the two founders of the Cobra group or maybe the founder and he turned it into Death Convention Singers. And there’s another offshoot of that that happens periodically, called Dirty Birdies, which is this kind of long form improvisation with many players. So there’s Dirty Birdies, Death Convention and Cobra group and those are all kind of part of the same tree branch I guess.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2015, photo by Tom Murphy
One of the best things that happens at Titwrench every year is Milch, of course. Is that something that you kind of got going to play that, or is it something you do there, as well, in Albuquerque?
Yeah, we started it – I mean, I gathered performers together when I even just heard that Titwrench was maybe a possibility. I didn’t even know if it was for sure happening or what but Raven Chacon, who you mentioned, actually sent me Sarah Slater’s contact info and was like, “Hey, I think she’s thinking about doing a festival.” And so I sent her an email and I was like, “Hey, I would super want to come up there to that” and so I kind of got a few friends together to make a group to play Titwrench. So we formed to play the festival. And then every year since then we’ve played every single one of them. We also always do the set here at home in Albuquerque and sometimes we’ve done even more elaborate versions of the set we do up in Denver. For instance, one year Milch did a set that I think had 6 people in Denver and then we came back here and I managed to rope like 30 people into performing it. Just cuz it’s easier to travel with 6 people than it is 30.
Is it “Milsh de la Makeena,” am I pronouncing that right?
Milch de la Máquina (with emphasis on the first a in Máquina)
Pardon me for not knowing, but what’s the meaning of that name?
It means Milk of the Machine and the name is in German and Spanish. The reason is because that very first group of people that I gathered together to head up to Titwrench included a woman from Germany and also, you know, lots of people in New Mexico are bilingual and I think a couple of our members at that time spoke Spanish and English so that’s why the name is in German and Spanish, making it really challenging for just about anyone to pronounce it or understand but, you know, what are you gonna do?
Every year is a new performance and concept?
A different performance every year. There’s some people who’ve done most of the sets. I think I’m the only person who’s done all of them and I actually randomly just listed all the sets today, which I’ve never looked back and considered what each one was but I did it today because I was hunting around for some photos for something else like, “Oh I can see what all the different sets have been through all the 9 years,” you know?
You had a characterization or an idea or a concept behind all the performances you’ve had?
I was just even trying to remember all the things we’ve done and built and who was in it, what we were working into, what was going on that year. I think a lot of times Milch is sometimes intentionally and unintentionally informed by whatever’s happening in the city. There was one year, the one that’s the dress piece, the great big dress.
I remember that, at the Mercury.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2011, photo by Tom Murphy
Yeah, all these areas around Albuquerque were on fire. There were big wildfires and we were in the middle of this super intense drought and then at night the smoke would settle all over the whole city as if the city was on fire and the moon was this crazy red color, you know? And we just ended up writing a lot about drought. Initially, not on purpose, like not in a really intentional way but in more of a subconscious way and then as the smoke continued for weeks we were writing about it pretty directly. So that dress piece I always think of as having a lot to do with water and drought and fire. Everybody remembers the dress but there were also waterproof microphones that we had in these big jugs of water that we were using to generate a lot of the sound.
Oh yeah, okay. I didn’t make that connection when I saw that back then. I remember the frames, like the illuminated picture frames or whatever they were from another year.
Yeah, the light frame pieces, yeah.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2012, photo by Tom Murphy
The Living Bird thing from Titwrench 201. I don’t know if you want to call it that but the performers were wearing hoods or something, and I had the impression you were simulating taking off in flight.
There was a big parade puppet, the Albatross, that’s the first one I think.
Milch is not necessarily a musical thing, it’s more like an experience in sound integrated full with a visual component.
Yeah, and it’s not like we’re like, “Hey let’s do a sound piece that includes a giant puppet” or something, it just all kind of came together that way. And I remember we were at Titwrench, the first Titwrench, and I was just like, “Aw man, did we bring something totally weird that no one’s going to understand or like?” You know what I mean? As it was getting closer to our time to perform I was like, “Did we just, like, venture way out there? Like, go too far?” You know? So I was nervous as heck that first year that we were just in some other – just not on the right trip, you know? And then we did it and it was great and everybody was really great about it. We kind of flew that really big Albatross puppet out of the building, and I remember people followed us! And I was just like, “Okay well let’s keep going until they stop following us” and we were walking down the street and it was cool, it was one of those really cool experiences, and formative for me for sure.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2010, photo by Tom Murphy
I was really surprised by how interesting it is every year. I don’t really see anybody doing anything like that. I don’t know about you, but maybe that happens in Albuquerque a lot but around here, no, not at all. Nothing like that.
No? I don’t really see stuff like that out here too much, either. Although, a lot of really creative people perform all kinds of different ways, you know?
Had you done anything like that before, even remotely, performance-wise?
Like the first Milch set that happened at Titwrench?
Yeah, that kind of performance art.
Yes, the set I was telling you about the show that happened on this rooftop of this old courthouse in downtown Albuquerque. So it was supposed to be, I think, everyone performing a really quiet piece. Albuquerque’s experimental noise community worked toward really small quiet pieces and I built this rig where I was wearing all hand-built little microphones and I put my sister in all these, kind of, speakers, and theoretically the idea was, and I don’t know how successful it was ultimately, but the idea was that when we were closer together we would be feeding back and then when we were further apart we wouldn’t be. So we developed this whole choreography and system around our proximity to one another and wore these robes and face paint and did it on top of the roof and I think I was just kind of inspired by the idea of being on a roof. That was before the first Milch set and I think Raven, who you mentioned earlier, kind of considered that to be the first actual Milch set, was the one that popped out on the rooftop before I had even ever heard of Titwrench or anything.
Milch De La Máquina at Titwrench 2017, photo by Tom Murphy
You and your sister Monica are in Chicharra together and somewhere the band is described as insect metal or something or other?
Glam insect metal.
That’s great. It’s pretty difficult to describe something like that.
Yeah, it sure is. I super hate describing things, which is funny because I’m also, like you, a writer and a reporter, you know? I find music to be so challenging to describe. I feel like we have a million adjectives that are about visual concepts and relationships and we have like, I don’t know, about 30 about sound. I’m just hazarding a guess again but sound is so hard to put into language so glam insect metal is imprecise.
Chicharra at Sister Bar in Albuquerque, NM, February 2016, photo by Tom Murphy
It evokes a creative image that kind of fits the music.
Yeah, so mostly I just describe [it by saying] that the instruments are all basses so they’re all using low frequency and then we organize more intricate vocal harmonies up top. And then we have either two drummers or one drummer. For Titwrench this year we’re just going to have one, unfortunately. We thought we were going to manage to get them both up there but somebody has a work conflict. But our single drummer, Chris Newman, is amazing and does the job quite nicely. We’re going to play tracks from our album [Let’s Paint This Town in Craters] that’s coming out in October [2017] so it’ll be a lot of newer material that is different from what we played last year.
You have a solo project called Bigawatt. Is that something that you haven’t done in a while or is that something you do pretty regularly?
I did a Bigawatt set on Friday night. It’s the name of my solo project, which has always been really heavily influenced by R&B and hip-hop and also noise. But I interpret that quite a bit differently than a lot of the things that I’m hearing right now that are defined also as being like noise hip-hop. So, sorry to say I don’t know if those are great descriptors for Bigawatt now, either.
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