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Review: Radiator Greys, Denying the Other

[This review of Denying the Other appeared in the April 2016 issue of Eleven Magazine. Cover art by Max Allison.]

Back when—pre-2012, say—Josh Levi was a key participant in the St. Louis experimental music scene. As an Apop Records employee, music writer, show organizer, and member of kraut-surf band Bikini Acid and drone duo Worm Hands, he made a lot of things happen and brought a lot of people together, to the point that even now he’s a ghostly center of gravity who just happens to reside many hundred of miles away in Washington, D.C. In the capital, Levi’s been working hard on solo noise-drone project Radiator Greys, and his new full-length Denying the Other is garnering some much-deserved praise at home and abroad.

While many noise projects focus on the physical possibilities of certain instruments or on pushing as far away from convention as possible, Denying the Other is a rooted strongly in evoking human feelings. The record’s five tracks don’t shy away from tonality, and many are humid with a humming synth sound and thunderous percussion that wouldn’t sound out of place in an ‘80s horror soundtrack. But while John Carpenter or David Cronenburg might be interested in inducing the terror of getting chopped up by a backcountry psychopath or consumed by a sentient videotape, Levi’s operating on a more subtle, personal scale. The best tracks on the album are full of slow builds and subtle textural changes that display the illogic of a panic attack, rushing, ebbing, flowing, cascading, and then slowly trickling to unsettling conclusions. In “Wait,” my personal favorite, a pummeling waltz beat and sheets of gleaming sound wash through the speakers, interrupted violently by curlicues of noise. In “Cocksure on the Chopping Block” (which, to be fair to the horror angle, does sound like the name of a snuff film), Levi takes a similar beat, some pummeling sub-bass, and a fair dose of tormented screaming and leads us on what sounds like a journey through the flame-toasted hellscape left over after Armageddon. In “Under the Tongue,” a long sample of a kid reading about the end of the world and humanity’s ills (from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series) gives way to a slowly shifting web of heartsick synthesizer lines before the whole composition collapses in a fit of panicked electronic scribbling. The Narnia quote is the perfect way into Denying the Other: like Lewis’s story cycle, Levi’s catastrophic compositions express a sense of loss, of change, of the steady hurt of earthly existence. Things may not always turn out alright, but there’s relief in expression.

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Review: Mount Moriah, How to Dance

[This review of How to Dance appeared in the March 2016 issue of Eleven Magazine.]

Mount Moriah has always been a strange chimera: a conservative alt-country band made up of a group of musicians with wildly divergent interests. Frontwoman Heather McEntire (of the post-punk band Bellafea) plays sinuous guitar parts in tandem with insanely productive black metal, drone, and avant-garde maestro Jenks Miller, who here takes on the role of sensitive sideman, coloring almost entirely within the lines of soulful gospel-country. Jazz-noise bassist Casey Toll anchors the whole mix not only to Earth but to the hills and hollers of the group’s native North Carolina. If the group’s avant tendencies show through in their third album at all, it’s in the spirit of discovery and passion that they bring to the frequently calcified formula of roots rock. While lesser bands recreate their favorite Stones records, Seeger recordings, and ‘70s Nashville country hits, How to Dance reinvigorates the form with youthful enthusiasm and supple musicianship.

The record isn’t a wild departure from the group’s previous work, but it showcases a broadening in almost every respect from their previous LP Miracle Temple. An impressive range of guests—including Angel Olsen on vocals and producer Brian Paulson, who’s worked with Beck, Wilco, and Slint—fleshes out the band’s minimalistic sound. Mount Moriah (named after the mountain where Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son in the Bible) has always had a mystical dimension in keeping with its Southern gothic grounding. Here, McEntire’s lyrics straddle the intimate and the universal, moving from a reflection on a half-clothed lover to meditations on the inevitability of loss. If How to Dance has a weak spot, it’s a subtle overproduction that pervades the album. Guitar lines are perfectly if coldly executed, and McIntire’s voice has a theatrical quality that, though it illuminates the music’s emotional extremes, sometimes sabotages the sincerity of the group by placing the listener more in the Grand Ole Opry than in an old country church.

The showiness sabotages the band most when Mount Moriah rocks its hardest (which is to say, about as hard as Fleetwood Mac and the Dixie Chicks). This band of mournful country devotees is at its best when the trio embraces the catharsis-in-slow-motion of its strongest compositions. On glacier-pace album standout “Baby Blue,” McIntire’s lyrics shine at their most affecting, buoyed along on a gracefully arcing melody: “Oh baby blue, you know nothing lasts forever, even if you want it to.” The music is nothing groundbreaking, but the feeling of yearning that McIntire captures so perfectly is as old as the hills.

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Khaled Hussein & The Texas Room

[This is a feature I wrote for Eleven Magazine in spring 2016. Listen to The Texas Room.]

In a small bungalow in Tower Grove South, Louis Wall and I sit on a couch. Across a wide coffee table, Khaled Hussein and his teenage daughter confer. A huge TV showing a soccer game on mute dominates the wall closest to us; a giant fish tank with an electronic keyboard in front of it covers the opposite wall. The conversation is going a bit slower than your average music mag interview: Hussein speaks only snippets of English. His daughter is translating heroically, but she clearly has a few better things to do on a Saturday morning than answer a nosy stranger’s questions.

“Do you like living in the United States?” I ask.

His daughter translates the question quietly into Arabic, leaning to her father’s ear. Between my utter lack of Arabic and his minimal grasp of English, Hussein and I have had a hard time communicating, but the answer to this question comes easily. He looks directly at me. “Yes,” he says, smiling.

Like the stories of so many immigrants and refugees, the tale of Hussein’s path to his present home is full of false starts and reversals. Growing up in Iraq, he dreamed of becoming a singer, inspired by international icons like George Michael as well as local singers. He got his start hustling in local restaurants and clubs, and soon had a career on his hands. By the time he was a young adult, he’d become a minor pop sensation in Baghdad. A music video still in circulation in the Arabic-language reaches of YouTube shows him in a dark suit, courting a woman in a red dress. Men decked out in full Arab thawb robes and agal headdresses dance joyously around the couple to a pounding beat. Hussein was very much the secular cool guy of 1990s Ba’athist Iraq until a changing political and religious climate hostile to secular singers (and then the American invasion of 2003) pushed Hussein and his family out of the country.

Hussein fled to the then-peaceful Syria, where he raised his young family and sought out work as a singer until the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011. The Hussein family relocated to St. Louis, where they’ve lived since, out of reach of armed conflict but isolated, far away from friends and family back home.

Since Khaled left Iraq, he’s continued singing. He shows us a video on his cell phone after giving his daughter a wordless sign. (She reappears a moment later, holding a silver tray full of cookies and two glasses of Sunny D.) Onscreen, present-day Hussein stands decked out in white shirt and dinner jacket in the center of a crowd of dancers. He’s clad out in snazzy dress clothes, self-assured, gesturing to the crowd: every bit the professional.

Hussein’s American musical career might have taken place solely at Arab events if he hadn’t come into contact with Louis Wall through the St. Louis-based Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma. Wall was seeking participants for his recording project, The Texas Room, which pairs immigrant and refugee musicians with St. Louis locals to create unique conversations between disparate styles of music.

Wall, the slight, eloquent drummer of semi-defunct St. Louis rock group Jumbling Towers and present engineer at Cherokee Street’s Native Sound Recording, had been at work on the project for a couple of years. Years of conversations with friends in his indie-rock community caused him to realize that he had always been narrowly focused on American music. “I’d been playing in rock bands and jazz bands for the majority of my upbringing,” Wall says, “and the more I learned about other people’s cultures, I realized I had a pretty specific culture of my own, which excited me. But I wanted to know about other people’s stories because I was so in my own world. I wanted to know what kind of musician I could become if I worked with people way outside my social group.”

When he started the project, Wall reached out to the International Institute of St. Louis, which helps recent immigrants gain a foothold in the city. Wall got on the Institute’s message boards, and before long he had a short list of musicians he thought would make interesting collaborators. The project really took off when one of Wall’s friends got him in touch with a singer from Lagos, Nigeria. The singer needed a track recorded immediately for radio in Lagos, one of the biggest cities in the world.

Wall was the perfect guy for the job, because he happens to be an engineer at Native Sound Studio on Cherokee, the merger of his old apartment studio on Texas Avenue with David Beeman’s former studio across the street, behind The Bomb Door. The idea to make a full album out of his collaborations with refugee and immigrant musicians was gradual, though. Wall says, “I realized I could probably do a collaboration album at some point. I realized I wanted to do that before I had the materials or even people to do that. It was super sketchy even just to start.” So he started recording a song every month. Over the course of the last year Wall and his compatriots released one track each month on SoundCloud, culminating in the album Non-Fiction, out last month.

The songs are a blend of traditional material with Wall’s own riffs and beats. Some pieces were fleshed out collaboratively over the Internet; a few were created completely from scratch. Wall had a sort of house band that appeared on many of the tracks, but due to budgetary constraints Wall acted as the nerve center of the project, coordinating collaborators, coaching performances, and editing work made by a group of people that eventually ballooned to fifty collaborators from over fifteen nations.

Wall would begin each month by deciding which of the musical ideas he was working with were either most exciting at that time or ripest to be taken to another stage. Typically, the next collaborator would be someone as far away from the original contributor as possible. “The last song we did [“Gau Sorai Uchali”] was a Nepali devotional song,” Wall relates. “I remember my friend Lisa was playing Irish flute at the time. I said, ‘Do you want to do this song? I think flute would be great on it,’ and it worked out perfectly. I think it sounds like one cohesive unit. But these people probably would have never met and these styles aren’t normally played together.”

Bringing in disparate collaborators on his own time allowed Wall time to create an artistic product to his personal standards, but it did impede the improvisational chemistry that could have come about if he had been able to get all the collaborators on a particular song in a room together. The project was funded by the New York-based organization Fractured Atlas in conjunction with the local Regional Arts Commission, but time constraints and the significant budgetary issues associated with booking time in a professional studio prevented Wall from setting up weekend-long sessions in which all of the collaborators could collectively come up with an arrangement. “These musicians are great and they can really feed off each other,” he says “My only regret is that I wasn’t able to get everyone in a room together. I was able to produce and arrange through the computer, but these are playing musicians who are way better musicians than I am, and could have worked a lot faster.”

Despite budgetary and time constraints, the sessions in which players actually did meet up and play together flowed smoothly. Many of the participants are professional musicians, and many have a conversational command of English, but Wall found that any remaining linguistic barriers melted away in the studio. “My buddy Khaled,” Wall says, “I had to communicate through his daughter. So I’d have to put up a microphone in front of him and hope for the best. Not only was it hard to communicate with him, it was hard to communicate abstract ideas like, ‘put a little more expression into this note, or put a little more feeling into this note, or watch the attack of this note, watch your timing,’ cues that would help a singer get through a session. I just couldn’t communicate any of those. His daughter isn’t a musician. She couldn’t translate these esoteric things into Arabic at all. That was a struggle, but he could tell when I was psyched when things were going well, and he’s a professional, so for the most part if we were both feeling good, then we were satisfied with it.”

The tracks on Non-Fiction are proof of the cohesion Wall found with his collaborators. “Unde Dragoste,” a clarinet-heavy tune sung by Romanian vocalist and guitarist Ben Tulin with backing vocals from Spanish-language group Adria and Her Treasures, showcases the project’s jazzy, elegant, emotive side. “Red River Valley,” dedicated to the memory of Eric Garner and performed by Natalie Huggins with The Voice of the Holy Spirit African Choir, presents an unsettling blend of soulful piano pop with chanting and vocal collage. “Tora Tora Tora” delves into hip-hop territory, with verses by 18andCounting and Smoll Mashup and a chorus by Khaled Hussein. My personal favorite, “Gau Sorai Uchali (Psalm 150)” demonstrates the project at its best, wrapping the touching, gonzo ebullience of an old Nepalese devotional song with an adrenalized drumbeat. The combinations of instruments and idioms are striking, but Wall’s careful cultivation of analog warmth and ability to swaddle the compositions in the production values of ‘60s and ‘70s pop bind the threads together into a cohesive whole. The lyrics—penned by Wall and the collaborators—work to tie the album together as well, meditating in a slew of languages on the power of collective action to overcome injustice.

While Wall is clearly focused on empowering immigrants and publicizing the work of musicians from foreign countries, his central place in The Texas Room project does raise questions of cultural appropriation. The histories of pop and “world music” are riddled with examples of white musicians employing the music of people of color to their own advantage. Ry Cooder has caught flack throughout his career for inserting himself into the music of other cultures for a profit. Paul Simon was lambasted for incorporating the compositions of uncredited South African musicians into his mondo-hit Graceland. And it’s easy to see the early histories of rock, jazz, and the blues as instances of the powerful borrowing from the disenfranchised. Whatever your understanding of the fine line between reverent imitation and colonialist plundering, it’s clear that Wall is wrestling with the issue and taking care to work for the whole circle of collaborators, not just for himself. “I think it depends on your intention,” he says, choosing his words with care. “There are definitely a lot of people taking non-Western music and making it accessible to Western ears. If that is the intention, then I have no interest. My interest and intention lies on me interfacing with other people and other cultures, and not trying to dumb it down or water it down. Hopefully, if I’m doing my job right, I’m going to speak my truth and my culture on these songs and not try to pretend like I’m taking on someone else’s role insincerely, and let the other people speak their truth.”

Wall admits that he is at the center of The Texas Room. “I’m the biggest benefactor of this project,” he acknowledges, “I have no shame in that. I think artistically I took whatever direction I wanted to take. At the end of the day I’m still arranging everything. This is my way of opening my mind and my door a little bit to my neighbors. I just think it’s important that we listen to each other. When you listen and put a face to a name, that can really help with empathy and compassion. I just realized that empathy is not compassion. I just realized that empathy is the ability to see yourself in someone else’s shoes, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to do anything about it. You also have to have compassion.”  

By the measure of allowing Wall to meet his neighbors and practice compassion in the St. Louis music community, The Texas Room project seems to have been a resounding success. In Khaled Hussein’s living room, the Iraqi singer interrupts our halting conversation to give a demonstration. He sits down at his keyboard (flanked by tropical fish), taking care first to point out his new mixing board to Wall, indicating the device with his characteristically bashful charm. “Nice,” Wall returns, and the two share a momentary grin. If music is the universal language, musical gear must work at an even deeper for musicians. These two men don’t need words.

Hussein turns on his programmed drumbeat, the downbeat-heavy rhythm used in so much Middle Eastern pop, and begins singing, his voice strained with emotion from the first note. He wends his way up and down a scale abundant with twists and turns foreign to my American ears before tapping out the melody on the keyboard, daughter bored on the sofa, Wall and me rapt. As Hussein plays the last note, he looks up, radiant.

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Review: Mister Ben, the black mix

[This is an unpublished review of a CD-R by Mister Ben, a dark prince of St. Louis noise.]

Mister Ben?

A person from St. Louis.

A person who coordinates the concert series NOiSETTE and writes and illustrates the long-running satirical zine Freezerburn.

A person in the noise troupe Beauty Pageant, which is centered on his braying, microtonal guitar torturing.

the black mix?

A collection of solo guitar noise pieces recorded between 2012 and 2016.

What does it sound like?

Gnomic utterances from your innermost regions (physical and spiritual).

Sometimes, Boards of Canada. Other times, Loren Connors. Also, Alan Licht.

Occasionally, SUNN O))). Most often, though, nothing you’ve heard eked from an amp before.

Brooding. The two droning “Entropy” tracks waft through the speakers like radio waves from a distant star—natural, indifferent. “Video Progression” is sublime.

Anguished. “Vocal Interlude” captures a minute of agonized yowling. Throughout, the strings keen, screech, and whine.

Eerily traditional. Pop doppelgängers abound here, rock tropes reflected in a cracked mirror. “Progression I” is like the evil twin of a My Bloody Valentine riff. Is there a moment of jazz in “Wrong 5”?

At times, repetitive. Listen to find out if you need all fourteen minutes of “Nightmare Trio Live.”

What is it for?

Abrasion, revelation, desperation, fustigation (inducing depression, frustration, or progression), channeling aggression. Depending on the consumer, exultation.

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Q&A: ICE (fka Black James)

[This interview with ICE never made it to print. It happened in spring 2016 in Fox Park, St. Louis.]

Jennifer McDaniel is a master of bricolage, slamming together images, sounds, and concepts from every nook and cranny of our culture to jarring effect. In her visual art, dense assemblages of digitally rendered corporate logos, pop culture icons like Kid Rock and Slipknot, and characters copped from Second Life or The Sims coalesce in secular icons stuffed with the detritus of industrial society. And her music—made until now under the name Black James—is also a experiment in assemblage. Her first tape, 2010’s Waterhead, showcased a cracked form of banjo-based sound art, while her next efforts, im A mirAcle and MOUNTAIN BOY, steered the project toward hip-hop, deep house, and brainy computer music. It’s a natural gesture, then, that the project’s name itself is getting an overhaul—an expansion pack to Black James’s Nintendo cartridge, an aquarium to its pimped ride, a Red Bull to its vodka—as McDaniel transitions the project’s name to ICE. In advance of the release of her new zine-CD combo ICY2K, a record inspired by Amber, The Prodigy, and Deftones, I caught up with McDaniel at her apartment to talk about the shift.

Eleven: What made you decide to change your name?

ICE: I think it was me or [DJ] Drug Money just said the word “ice” and bells went off. I don’t know why, but I was like “Ooh, I would love to go by ICE instead of Black James. And then I kept talking about it all weekend, like “Should I do this, is this stupid?” and he was like, “No, do it.” I was like, “Ok.” So I just decided to do it. But Black James has been around for a long time and don’t think I’m killing Black James, it’s just another extension of Black James. It’s like my alternate identity is making one of its own, which is sort of weird.

Eleven: Were you getting tired of Black James?

ICE: Not really, I just want more. Just branching out. I feel like I am still Black James. ICE is a little more club, I think. Cause Black James started as my banjo project. And then I always joked about going from banjo to booty music, and then [five years later, in November 2015] I opened for Big Freedia at The Pageant and that’s like bounce booty music. I was like, “Now’s time.” I’ve always wanted to play more club settings, that’s always been my goal, so it’s just helping me propel to that mindset. I feel like I still haven’t made the perfect club music. I feel like I’m still in singer-songwriter mode. And that transfers into my club music, like songs with verses and choruses—although I may not be singing, I might still set it up that way.

Eleven: Whereas club music is more about how you build energy and the energy goes away?

ICE: Yeah. I’m crunching it down for an audience that’s looking at me. But I don’t really like modern club music that much - that’s why my new album is pretty much dedicated to 2000s club music. It’s not like it is now with dubstep or really harsh and disjointed music. Then it was disco, house, really easygoing fluid music. Balearic music, which is like Ibiza stuff that’s easy to dance to. You didn’t have to be a breakdancer, you’re just chillin’, barely moving around. It’s fine. You’re not trying to impress anybody.

Eleven: How did you get into that?

ICE: I definitely went to the club all the time in 2000, the late nineties. I was a teenager, I mean I went before I was old enough. But really when I moved to Florida in like ’03, it died. The club died, also, around 2002. It was a sad time in history.

Eleven: What happened?

ICE: What happened? I don’t know. There was a huge scene here in the late ‘90s. It pretty much died as soon as I got here. Which is really depressing. I actually lived downtown on Washington Avenue and would walk around and be like “Where are the clubs?” Businessmen would open clubs and they would be open for like three months and suck and play Top 40 shit.

Eleven: I’ve heard a lot of stories about warehouse spaces down there in the late 1990s.

ICE: Yeah, Alexis Tucci [veteran STL club promoter], she was telling me about a lot of the events. She was telling me about this crazy rave. It was in Grafton I think, there was a water park. It was called Psycho Splash. It was a rave at a water park with slides.

Eleven: Woah.

ICE: I know! This place is still there, so I was like “We could do this again, part two, like twenty years later!” It would be crazy to swim at night, going down slides with music playing, with lights, and wild adults.

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The Underdogs: St. Louis’s Record Labels

[A feature I wrote in spring 2014 about St. Louis record labels. Amazingly dated already, but such is the lot of articles about DIY scenes.]

[Eads bridge, STL.]

So, here’s the situation: in the last 20 years, digital production and the Internet have demolished the traditional record industry. There are all kinds of statistics to show the dire state of the giant record companies of old, but the fundamental fact is that record sales go down every year. According to a January 8th Rolling Stone recap of the music industry’s performance, even digital downloads sank 6% from 2012 to 2013. Major labels are mummies, the big indie labels—Merge, Drag City, Jagjaguwar, and all the others—have staked out some space on a sinking ship, and Record Store Day itself is a tourniquet, an annual reminder that physical products are alright. Of course, all that is totally fine, because musicians are still out there making music. The same technologies that annihilated the record industry blew open the doors of music production, so now you can now record, distribute, and promote music for a fraction the former price. In the age of Bandcamp, it’s totally feasible musicians to do it all.

Who, then, are the intrepid souls who start small labels, who throw their time and money down what Robert Severson, Pancake Master of Pancake Productions, calls “one big money pit?” Why do they stick out their necks for the creative projects of others?

We asked the daredevils who run St. Louis’ labels, and they say a top reason is the joy inherent in working hard on something good. Running a record label is an artistic process of its own, with all the highs and low that come with the territory. For Joe Schwab of Euclid Records, it’s about the work itself. As he puts it, “my favorite thing about doing a label is simple: dealing with creative people. Not just the musicians, but the cover artists and graphic designers as well.” Pat Grosch of Mounds Music echoes the sentiment. He got into the game because being “around extremely creative individuals as they let you into their projects, and thus their hearts, is reward enough.”

People start running labels for pragmatic reasons, too. Local scenes are generally composed of loosely organized groups of friends with various degrees of interest in promoting themselves. Forming a label can coordinate the knowledge and energy of young and veteran members of a city’s scene, as well as provide an infrastructure for artistic cross-pollination. Damon Davis of the FarFetched Collective sees his label as an artists’ union. He started the organization, he says, to interact “with artists and [foster] connections between us in the music community.” Robert Severson of Pancake Productions was frustrated with the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of a lot of St. Louis music, so he started his label, Pancake Productions, partly just “to be an entity that never died.” And a coordinated scene is easier to explain to outsiders, so a label can be a doorway to out-of-state promotion. As Extension Chord’s Tim Rakel puts it, “an umbrella label seemed a good strategy for promoting music from Saint Louis.”

And then there’s the most fundamental concern of all: getting the music out! Major labels and even the big independent labels have simply never had an interest in putting out a lot of adventurous and underground music. Gabe Karabell of Don’t Touch My Records says it best: “Small labels have been killing it since the '50s and '60s, so I'm not surprised that the real jams remain underground to this day.”

Small labels work hard for the bands on the ground, and we owe so much excellent music to lonely owners. To get a sense of what’s really going on in the vinyl mines, we conducted a census of a dozen local labels in honor of this year’s Record Store Day. See a label you’re interested in? Check it out! Don’t think any of these labels look cool? Go forth! Start your own!

Twelve Saint Louis Labels

Big Muddy Records 

In a business where many labels close up shop soon after they open, Big Muddy Records is a crusty old uncle on the scene. Chris Baricevic lost a bet and started up the operation in 2005 with the self-titled Vultures EP, and gradually began putting out records by some of the city’s best-known Americana acts, including Bob Reuter’s Alley Ghost, The Hooten Hallers, Rum Drum Ramblers, and Pokey LaFarge. According to Baricevic, big things are in the works for Big Muddy: “a constant cycle of life and death, ulcers and dishwashing jobs, and we might have a hot dog party for our brother Brice.” He’d also like to say that Record Store Day should be about giving record store employees gifts.

Extension Chord Records 

Tim Rakel and Melinda Cooper of The Union Electric started Extension Chord Records last year as a way of releasing work by their side projects Town Cars and The Chainsaw Gentlemen. The label racked up five releases in its first year, and it’s moving fast: Town Cars’ debut CD is coming out this year, and the honchos are considering expanding the label’s roster. According to Rakel, the organizational headaches and sometimes glacial movement of the production process can be demoralizing, but ultimately, “it makes most sense to go ahead and do everything on your our terms.’”

Euclid Records 

Euclid Records (the store) has been around for thirty years, but the label has only been putting music out since 2009. The label got started pressing in-store sessions onto vinyl singles and selling them for the benefit of The New Orleans Musicians’ Relief Fund, but Euclid has quickly expanded the roster, issuing full-lengths by Troubadour Dali and Sleepy Kitty. Joe Schwab, the owner of both the label and the shop, sees underground labels and independent stores as closely entwined. “The only game in town these days are independent record stores,” he said, “and we're the ones that have been pushing indie bands and indie labels.”

Tower Groove Records 

Tower Groove Records is less a label than a loose collective of South City bands. Tower Groove’s been silent for a few months, but in the last several years Adam Hesed, Jason Hutto, and the rest of the collective have made some very unique releases happen. They got things rolling with a double LP compilation of 22 bands, and last year Tower Groove released a mail-order singles series. Each month of 2013, subscribers received a brand-new single that paired two local bands.

Mounds Music 

Mounds Music is the brand-new project of a few of the Bug Chaser dudes, an effort to put high-quality analog recording into the hands of local acts. Pat, Jake, and Zeng secured a start-up grant from the Regional Arts Commission, and they’ll be producing between 6 and 10 cassette releases in the next year. According to Pat Grosch, Mounds will be a creative platform, “an attempt to provide some new opportunities to musicians, and help let them focus on their craft—music—as we manage the production side.” The list of future collaborators is long, but Mounds is currently cooking up cassettes by Maximum Effort, The Bad Dates, Kisser, and Zak M. Details will be revealed soon.

Eat Tapes 

Eat Tapes is Matt Stuttler’s cottage industry, an all-cassette label that started when Stuttler moved from putting out tapes for his own projects to putting out tapes for his friends’ projects. The label has released material for Burrowss, Bruiser Queen, and others, but Stuttler has made a specialty out of sticking two bands together on one split tape. Split tapes are definitely in line with the label’s mission. As he puts it, “labels like Eat Tapes operate on a local/regional level that concentrates on supporting bands/artists that aren't going to necessarily have mass appeal. But who cares about that?”

Don’t Touch My Records 

The mission of D.T.M.R. is simple. Gabe Karabell, founder and tapemaker, says, “I just want to document some of the bands that I like before they break up.” Karabell is casual about the whole thing, but since 2012, the label has been in the right place at the right time to release music by The Brainstems, Rat Heart, Wild Hex, and Shaved Women. The only downside, Karabell says, is waiting in line at the Post Office to mail tapes when I'm late for work.” What’s up next? The debut of Self Help, “a new band with folks from Doom Town, Los Contras, The Vultures, Jack Grelle's band and the Bill McClellan Motherfuckers.”

Spotted Race 

For the last year and a half, Spotted Race has been churning out tapes from the city’s punk and hardcore underbelly. As operator Martin Meyer puts it, Spotted Race exists to release “bands that deserve to be put out but probably wouldn't be otherwise.” Meyer has assembled around 25 releases, by hand, for free, all to get the word out about bands that would normally never be heard outside the city. His work is paying off, though: Spotted Race has sold enough tapes, at home and around the world, to afford to release a Ruz flexi disc, a Black Panties flexi, a Trauma Harness LP, a Nos Bos flexi, a Dem Scientist 7-inch, and a Lumpy and the Dumpers 7-inch.

FarFetched Collective 

The goals of FarFetched go beyond simply distributing music. According to founder Damon Davis (LooseScrewz), the hip-hop centered collective aims to “create and nurture all forms of progressive music everywhere,” and even more fundamentally, to “create art that is genuine and thoughtful and make a living from that for my artists and myself.” FarFetched is home to artists including Scripts ‘n Screwz, 18andCounting, CaveofswordS, and Black James. Davis calls the label fundamentally focused on community and collaboration, an “artists’ union” rather than a hierarchical business. Look out for releases this summer, including a vinyl release of label comp Prologue III.

BDR/Rerun Records 

The BDR/Rerun collaboration is all about issuing lost gems of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Jason Ross, of Rerun, and Matt Harnish, of BDR, have done much to dig up, dust off, and reissue St. Louis punk, post-punk, and rock ‘n’ roll gems from The Welders, Max Load, and The Retros. After a period of silence, the label is returning April 1st with a bunch of releases from vintage Milwaukee bands.

Encapsulated Records 

 Encapsulated is the new, improved incarnation of I Hate Punk Rock Records. In 2012, owner Mike Jones opened Encapsulated Studios, a punk rock fortress in Maplewood where bands can practice and record, and where the operations of the label are centered. The label is still home to punk and hardcore acts from St. Louis and around the country, including Bent Left, Black for a Second, Fister, The Haddonfields, and Jetty Boys.

Pancake Productions 

Robert Severson, Pancake Master, created Pancake Productions as a production company for his student films. Sometime in the early 2000s, though, he started a one-man band, Googolplexia, and got caught up in music as well. Severson began by issuing albums by broken-up bands, a move that was not financially lucrative but certainly reflects the label’s ethos. Severson says, “Pancake Productions has never been about turning a profit. In some ways it's not even about breaking even. Really it's just about using every last dime (of both real money and credit extended to me) that I have to get good music out and available.” There’s a lot ahead for Pancake Productions, including a Vanilla Beans EP, a potential Stonechat CD, and “some top-secret things in the works for summertime.”

[tempocannon]

Preview: Low @ Off Broadway, StL, 2/13/16

January and February are usually the off-season for touring bands, but Minnesota slowcore titans Low are not to be deterred by a little cold weather. The band has released a steady stream of profoundly beautiful music over the course of the last twenty years, and though it’s hard to identify anything resembling a trough in the quality of their recorded output, the band might well be better than ever. Low formed in Duluth, Minnesota in the early ‘90s, a project of husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker and their friend, bassist John Nichols. From the beginning, the band took up a credo of softness and sensitivity. The group stripped away the maximal trappings of better-known exponents of Minnesota DIY—Hüsker Dü and The Replacements—and rebuffed the grunge aesthetic of the early ‘90s with a renewed emphasis on subtlety and grace. The trio recorded a slew of hushed EPs and full-lengths featuring Parker’s minimalist brushed drum kit (played standing up and without a bass drum), Sparhawk’s open-tuned guitar, and elegant electric bass parts concocted by a series of bassists. At the center of the band’s sound were Sparhawk and Parker’s haunting vocal harmonies, which insist the listener be open to the band’s unembarrassed pursuit of beauty. In the early 2000s, the group began to play around with more boisterous arrangements before making a major break with 2007’s Drums & Guns, which featured hypnotic loops and crisp sampled percussion in contrast with fourteen years of the group’s live-in-the-room sound. Since that record, the band has continued to play around with its classic themes, albeit in a more conservative spirit.

Ones and Sixes, the group’s latest, was recorded at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Touring as vigorously as ever, the band will make a stop February 13th at Off Broadway. The show’s called “An Evening with Low;” since there aren’t any openers scheduled, we can expect a few hours of incantation by a band at the height of its craft.

[tempocannon]

Capsule Q&A: Rat Heart

[Interviewing young artists is really fun. They typically haven't been interviewed before, so they're excited. A sense of silliness pervades the conversation because they're being grilled about smething that is, in effect, their hobby. And to me, the Q&A form lets some air into an article, particularly if the prose is pretty dense, like I like it. Conducting this short interview with Brice in late 2013 turned me on to these reportorial pleasures and inspired my column, "Introducing," which ran in 2014.]

Musicians look like they’re working hard at performances—they sweat, they carry amps, they jump around—but most of the challenges are over by the time the show starts. I talked to Brice Baricevic of local band Rat Heart to see how the group cooked up their white-hot jam “Second Encounters.”

SC: How did you come up with the main riff?

BB: Almost every song we write comes out of practice. We were just playing around and one of us started playing that riff, and we all jumped on it. It’s a pretty simple structure, like most of the songs. We're just a rock and roll band.”

SC: How about the lyrics?

BB: The words were written in less time than the music was. I had an idea...from just playing the song without words, and then we were recording the next day, so I needed words, so I sat down and drilled ‘em out. It was only one draft - all the songs are.

SC: Is the writing process pretty standard?

BB: It’s a pretty standard process for us. We just write the music, and one, or all us, will write the words. It’s a group effort up and down the ice.

[tempocannon]

Introducing: Little Richard Brothers Band

[This is the last edition of my 2014 Eleven Magazine column “Introducing.” If it’s not obvious from the text, this was a parody, an interview with my real-life bandmates Andrew and Sean about the roots rock band of their alter egos Bo and Mort. I didn’t tell my editor that this was fake until he smelled a rat, something I still feel guilty about and helped underscore the value of journalistic honesty to an unscrupulous boi.]

If falling to Earth in the belly of a crashing airplane is the red rubber stamp of rock ‘n’ roll greatness (look no further than the storied demises of The Big Bopper, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Otis Redding for proof), The Little Richard Brothers Band is guaranteed to at least have engine trouble on the runway. Bo and Mort Richard—no relation—made their debut on the summer’s Meat Bundle compilation with a set of three obscenely catchy songs about heartbreak, lust, and the desire to be degraded. Then they released their sophomore effort, Hard Lovin’ Losers, which contains exactly the same songs. Despite the Richards’s lack of initiative, the duo is adorably raw and poised to become one of the most adequate rock acts this side of the Ozarks.

The boys are new in town and slow to furnish their curricula vitae, so nobody seems to know who they are or where they came from. The Richards themselves hardly seem sure. This much is clear: 25-year-old Mort came west from Ohio, fleeing his former life as black sheep of the Richards Aluminum dynasty. Bo Richards—37 years old—came north from his hometown of Transylvania, Louisiana, though his route to the Gateway City was by no means straightforward. He had a brush or two with the law and one infamous brush (or more) with a pig, and there are certain states he’s not permitted to enter. These are the bluesman of our day, and they were kind enough to meet up one icy Sunday to shoot the breeze.

[Cover art for LLRB’s Hard Lovin’ Losers.]

Eleven: How did you guys get together?

Mort: Well, we met in kind of a funny way, actually, in a record store. We were both there reaching for the same copy of the Smothers Brothers. And we touched hands and it was like, what are you doin’ here?

Bo: I had a knife in my back pocket.

Mort: But yeah, then we got to talking, ‘cause not that many people are into that kind of stuff. Turns out we had the same last name.

Bo: That’s what really started this band.

Mort: It was the last name.

Bo: Yeah, the last name

Eleven: Do you feel like you have any special sort of emotional connection?

Bo: I feel like we understand each other better than other people understand us.

Mort: That’s definitely true. People, for whatever reason, just don’t seem to get what we have to say.

Bo: Yeah, we always get these funny looks. It’s nice to have somebody who doesn’t give you weird looks when you talk about your [very long pause] whatever.

Mort: You know, rollin’ into different towns, it takes people a while to get used to us before they kick us out. St. Louis is a nice place to be cause it hasn’t happened yet.

Eleven: Where do you guys practice?

Mort: We hook up power behind a donut shop and—

Bo: They don’t really know.

Mort: —we just sit there for about thirty minutes.

Bo: One of the kids figured it out but we just gave him a bunch of cigarettes. You ever have any problems with the kids, just give ‘em cigarettes and they’ll shut up.

Eleven: So, what’s your songwriting process like?

Mort: Usually we’re just shooting the shit, maybe Bo’s telling me about this heartbreak he’s got, and I say “Bo, that’s a song!” and we try to remember what we just said.

Bo: That’s usually the next two to three days of writing a song is trying to remember what we were saying.

Mort: We don’t work fast.

Bo: We just listen to music that we like and we rip it off.

Eleven: So, what moves you about playing rock ‘n’ roll?

Bo: There was this one time, whenever I was driving my truck—I forget what Interstate it was—and I was rocking out to some music and I ended up hitting my head on the steering wheel. I blacked out for a minute and went off the side of the road, and I ended up seeing the white light and everything. And then all the sudden I hear coming into my head this sound: “Dun dun dundundundun dun dur now dur ne-ow!” And then “Susie Q” started playing and my whole world opened up. At this point I was only listening to Nickelback and Creed, and it’s like, “Oh, this is what heaven’s like!” But it was actually hell. I was supposed to go to hell. And ever since then I realized the true power of Satan is rock ‘n’ roll.

Eleven: Does Satan ever say things to you?

Bo: No. He’s kind of a quiet dude. He’s kind of a nerd, actually. He’s really prissy about everything. He’s one of those people you’d call a Rulebook Ricky.

[tempocannon]

Introducing: Astral Place

[From my 2014 Eleven Magazine column “Introducing.” This interview was even more nepotistic than usual. I was friends with everyone in the band, and later helped record their demo in my basement.]

At its heart, Astral Place is about friendship. Grace Hong (vocals), Becca Moore (guitar), Karen Mandelbaum (drums), and Christine Stavridis (bass) went to art school together, and now they live together in Asstral Place, their home in South City. They’re a tireless creative organism that chews up the raw material of life on Earth and turns it into prints, games, zines, plush skulls, photographs, films, illustrations, and computer programs, dusted usually with at least a trace of gold glitter. Astral Place (one “s”)—their first foray into music—played its first show earlier this year, and in mid-July, Peacebath Records will drop the band’s debut, a five-song cassette that showcases the band’s lighthearted hybridization of post-punk aesthetics with Deerhoofian shenanigans. Grace, Becca, and Karen were kind enough to chat at Riley’s Pub over pineapple and banana pepper pizza. Christine, who couldn’t make it, was represented in effigy by a plastic mushroom-shaped toy that glowed alternately green, blue, and pink.

[Cover art for Astral Place’s Hi Way Way, by the members of the band.]

Eleven: So, what made you want to be in a band?

Becca: I’ve always kind of promised myself that I would only be in a band that I took somewhat seriously if it was all girls, and this is kind of like a dream come true.

Karen: It was not really a moment of inspiration. It was sort of just like, “we’re all gonna have fun together, a lot of fun together,” and that’s, I think, the main thing we do. Just hang out and have fun, and make groovy tunes.

Eleven: Is it a way to spend time together?

Karen: Yeah, actually, it totally is.

Grace: Structure.

Becca: I feel like it’s an outlet for all of us, but it’s also a way to hang out and not have to stare at a screen, since that’s what we have to do during the day so often. So it’s a different way of getting to communicate and be present with one another.

Christine [interviewed later by email, her effigy glowing green]: It's such a joy to be able to mold and create music you like with your best friends. What could be cooler than that? 

 Grace: And I think that writing together is one of the most fun things for us to do. Because we’re working together, collaborating together, making something together, and that’s exciting.

Karen: There’s also a limit to what you can take in without expelling a little bit, too. We were all taking a lot of influences from a lot of different places, and just wanted to apply it to what we did.

Eleven: Musical influences?

Karen: Everything. Like interactive art, and really really bad stories. And drag queens, they’re an inspiration.

Christine [glowing pink]: Astral Place might be garage rock, it might be trash pop. I'm not sure. Maybe we've transcended the genres so closely tied to the material plane. Maybe we've ascended into a few genres on the astral plane. We're in the space waste genre. 

Eleven: Do you think being in an all female band has impacted the way you’re received?

Becca: Yeah, I’m not into that. Well, I’m into being in an all-girl band, but I’ve had people tell me that like, “Oh, you’re all girls? Don’t worry about being able to play your instruments.” And I hate that! I think that sucks!

Karen: I think we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard than “we’re female, so we just need to show up.” I mean, we will show up, but I want it to be more than that.

Becca: I don’t want it to be about sex appeal. I want it to be about the ideas that we represent.

Christine [glowing blue]: Sometimes when we get compliments, I internally append "...for a girl" to any statement I hear. I'm probably ascribing too much negativity in that way to my gender. But topics about inequality have been on my mind a lot lately. Despite what I said, I don't feel like we're being written off as "good for a girl band." I think those insecurities are more personal apprehensions and not reflections of our reception. 

Eleven: How would you say making music relates to the rest of your undertakings?

Becca: It’s a way to let go of perfectionism, because I definitely struggle with that, and knowing that I have limitations with my guitar playing, but I’m playing with my best friends, so I know I can just do whatever and it’s okay.

Karen: That’s so exactly what it is, too, for me. It’s me just knowing that I’m with people who totally aren’t judging me and we can just create without having any of that internal critic saying “you’re doing this wrong.” With these girls, its just way easier to turn that off and just make stuff.

Grace: And it’s an exercise in trust, too, because you get up together and you promise each other indirectly that you’re going to do something together. And that’s the really amazing part.

[tempocannon]

Introducing: Willis

[From my 2014 Eleven Magazine column “Introducing.”]

Everybody’s thinking it: we live in darkness. Conned by our ancestors’ morality, doused by time’s torrential passage, and baffled by a universe we don’t understand, we’re deaf and mute, seven billion isolated brains bumbling our way to extinction. Luckily for the three million of us living in the St. Louis metro area, though, there’s Willis to give the void a face and a voice.

The band is goth in the pre-mall sense of the term—black-clad, suspicious of conventional culture, and interested in graves and stuff—but in their shows and recordings, they take the genre in a new direction. Which is impressive considering they’re all in or just out of high school. Keyboardist and bassist Milena Kanak, drummer Paige Smyth, and singer Bella Kanak have honed a highly personal style that fuses new wave keyboards with repetitive beats and Bella’s oddball spoken-word vocal delivery. Milena and Paige (Bella was out of town) were kind enough to meet me one Friday recently to talk about their origins, inspirations, and theatrics.

Eleven: So had you guys known each other for a long time before you started the band?

Milena: Not really. We met at a birthday party, and then we went to church camp together. And Bella’s my sister, so I’ve known her a long time.

Paige: I think Willis is what brought us all together, though.

Eleven: What role did church camp play?

Both, together: None.

Paige: We just skipped the activities and sat under a picnic table.

Eleven: Was it out of boredom, or was it revolt?

Paige: Our friend made all of us go. It was funny. They were insane there, though. It was really scary.

Eleven: Would you say there was a degree of seriousness early on?

Milena: Well, we take what we do seriously in a goofy form.

Paige: When people take things more seriously, I don’t know, people grow apart.

Milena: We don’t take it seriously, but it does matter. So there’s that level of seriousness, but overall if we took it too seriously it wouldn’t be fun.

Paige: That’s good. It’s not serious but it matters.

Eleven: But you play a lot of shows, right? So when did you start doing that?

Milena: After our first show, people just started asking us to play.

Paige: Last summer, though, we played a ton of shows, like once or twice a week. And that’s awesome.

Milena: And even throughout the year we’ve played twice, three, four times a month.

Paige: But I had like, high school and stuff, so shows were limited.

Eleven: Is there anything you’re trying to accomplish with this band?

Milena: Well, we like to get a lot of reactions out of people, and we tend to get that.

Eleven: What kind of reactions?

Paige: Sometimes anger.

Milena: Sometimes people are angry. Sometimes people are annoyed. Sometimes people just laugh.

Paige: Sometimes people just say, “I don’t know what I just saw, but I’m really glad I saw it.”

Eleven: Why do think they’re angry, or miffed?

Paige: Because we’re not doing what everyone else is doing.

Milena: Yeah, I don’t really know any other bands that are like us around here, I guess. When they book us, they book us with bands that aren’t like us. So I guess people aren’t expecting it.

Eleven: What is the desire when you’re making people mad?

Milena: We’re not trying to make them mad. But if that’s the reaction we get, that’s what we get.

Eleven: So what would your ideal reaction be? Or does it just not matter?

Milena: I think if everyone threw up at the same time, that would be good. Or maybe constant nosebleeds.

Paige: Is that a reaction?

Eleven: Is there any particular statement you’re trying to make?

Milena: Well, we use a lot of props. I don’t know if that’s something to talk about.

Eleven: Yeah, you mentioned the confetti cannon. I’m curious about that.

Milena: Well, we bring a lot of doll heads and mannequins to shows.

Paige: I actually have a story about that. I got my car fixed because there was something wrong with the engine, and I had all the Willis stuff in the back of my car. And when I went to pick up my car my mechanic was like, “What is wrong with you? Is that real blood?,” ‘cause I have a mannequin covered in fake blood with plants where its head is supposed to be, and it’s not real blood, but I was like, “I don’t know,” and then I left.

Milena: Yeah, we use a lot of fake blood.

[tempocannon]

Introducing: Hess/Cunningham Duo

[From my 2014 Eleven Magazine column “Introducing.” I recorded a three hour interview with Hess and Cunningham only to drop my phone and delete the recording. So I wrote this piece, the Q&A format not being feasible.]

[Cover art for Hess/Cunningham Duo’s FALSEHOOD, by Alex Cunningham.]

Joseph Hess and Alex Cunningham are the core of a free improv band. Hess plays drums, and Cunningham plays electric violin and guitar. They pretty much play what comes to mind.

They made a recording at Webster University in December with Nicholas Horn of Brotherfather on guitar and Mabel Suen of Spelling Bee on saxophone. It’s a strange bunch of tracks, with moments of skittering weirdness and crushing distortion placed right up against sparse, dreamy passages.

The lineup is continually evolving. They recently played a couple of shows with Dave Stone, Nicholas Horn, and Sean Ballard of Stonechat, and they’re toying with the idea of concocting some songs, or maybe some songs with improvised sections.

When I got to the coffee shop to interview the dudes, there was a kid—nine, ten years old—sweeping the place. I bought my coffee, he ran around the counter to pour it, and then he ran outside to shout down customers.

Joseph Hess is in Spelling Bee, Braining, and Totally Gay Cop. Alex Cunningham is a SLU student and Music Director at KSLU. The two of them met when Cunningham was arranging for the reclusive Houston musician Jandek to come play a rare show at the Billiken Club. Jandek doesn’t travel with a band: he assembles a group of local improvisers in every city he visits. Jandek selected Hess to be the drummer, so Hess and Cunningham became friends.

The band arrived, and now the kid had an audience. He started hawking pizza to Hess and Cunningham. We negotiated, and got him to promise not to come back for fifteen minutes.

Improvisation is the basis of most music around the world, but in our musical culture, the stream has gotten dammed up.

When we say “music,” most of the time we mean “recordings,” which are snapshots. The craving for consistency has created an expectation that live shows be superloud rehashes of recorded material, plus maybe a confetti cannon. The proliferation of backing tracks has wedged us in a position where performers aren’t just trying to replicate their prior performances: they’re pretty much doing karaoke.

This band is part of an effort to chip away at the dam, to free things up.

That said, improvisation isn’t some magical spring. According to Hess and Cunningham, improvisation is the arranging and rearranging of patterns they’ve learned over the years. As they get better at improvising, the patterns get more personal and nuanced.

The kid came back, long before fifteen minutes was up, and started crawling under the couch to grab the hem of my pants.

The duo hasn’t really been writing songs with chord progressions, rhythmic structures, lyrics, and so on, but they and their collaborators have refined a sound through jamming. Everybody has a sense of what should happen.

The patterns themselves come from practice. Hess sits in his basement and practices by playing drums with each limb in unison, slowly subdividing the beats to isolate each appendage.

And according to Hess, improvising is actually about listening. Practicing builds up the forms in your mind, but real, flexible improvisation is about responding to the other players and remaining in the moment.

I asked the old genre question, “Do you guys see yourselves as coming more from a free jazz or a noise angle?” and immediately felt like I asked the pope whether he thinks running the Church is more like air hockey or laser tag. Alright, they said, yes, genre distinctions make things easy for music writers, but they’re not really good for anything when you’re actually doing the thing.

The biggest problem with applying a genre descriptor to your music, Cunningham said, is that when you say “free jazz” it turns people off. To his friends, he’s in a band: cool. As soon as it’s a “noise” band, though, people get suspicious.

And in a kind of music where part of the point is to strip sounds of their usual significance, where does picking a genre get you? Hess doesn’t believe in the concepts of “shrill” and “harsh.” What makes him cringe is yet another big A-major chord.

After some time, the kid comes back, this time with a butane lighter. He lights a candle on the table, and then holds the flame up to my paper coffee cup, burning the bottom black.

[tempocannon]

Introducing: con trails

[From my 2014 Eleven Magazine column “Introducing.”]

There’s something magical about a two-person band. Maybe it’s the frank conversation between the guitar and drums, or the strange turns the songwriting can take when there aren’t four or five band members following along. Maybe it’s the lack of keyboardists. Luckily for us, the new St. Louis two-piece con trails is up there with the best, distilling the shambling strains of ‘80s and ‘90s indie rock into songs that are alternately inventive, tender, and heavy. Luke Sapa, the drummer, and Kevin Guszkowski, who plays guitar and sings, were kind enough to meet me one Friday afternoon to talk about how they work, their influences, and the possibility of a con trails cassette release.

Eleven: So, how’d you guys start doing your thing?

Luke: Well, we go to school together, we go to SLU. We met pretty much right away freshman year, and Kevin had some stuff he’d been doing solo, just recording guitar and adding drumbeats.

Eleven: Was that the same kind of stuff you’re doing now?

Kevin: Definitely similar, but different. I never really played any of that stuff live—it’s just recorded. I don’t know anything about recording, really, but some of the techniques I used for that we used for con trails. I mean, some of the riffs or the chords are the same, but they’re not really the same songs a lot of the time. I think it sounds different.

Luke: But that’s how it originally started, just like, “Oh, these are great, I really want to play on these.”

Kevin: I think adding real drums made them sound more aggressive, I guess.

Eleven: How do you record now?

Luke: The drums are done by themselves at his apartment, with just one mic, which is probably something we should definitely improve on. But yeah, it’s just one mic and then he goes back through with his guitar.

Kevin: Yeah, I just go back and put a couple guitar tracks and a bass in. We started adding bass to our songs, to the recorded stuff.

Eleven: What role does the lyric writing play? Is that important at all to you?

Kevin: I mean, I do spend a considerable amount of time writing the lyrics. Like I said, I’m [an English major], so I’m into that kind of stuff. But I also like the idea of the voice as a real instrument, so I think that’s how it comes across, especially in the recordings. But I don’t know. I’m thinking about putting up the lyrics on our Bandcamp. I guess I just have some reservations about really letting people see them.

Eleven: That is one of the advantages of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s noisy, so you can hide a little bit.

Kevin: I think overall, it’s about the guitar work. That’s what I’m more interested in ultimately, is letting the guitar kind of speak. Part of it is the fact that a lot of the things I’m playing are too complex for me to be able to sing over, and since there’s just two of us, I think I’d just rather play the guitar.

Eleven: Do you guys ever sit down and think “We want to sound like this band or this thing, or is it more just like two brains colliding?”

Kevin: We both listen to a lot of music, and a lot of different kinds of music, so I think that definitely has a large influence, but it’s not something we’re actively thinking about.

Luke: I think we each have our own little ideas of what it sounds like, obviously, but then what’s been really interesting is hearing what other people think it sounds like. And a lot of it is the same. We get a lot of different early nineties alternative bands, which is pretty cool, I think, because its something that we’re both clearly influenced by. But when I first heard it I was like, “I don’t think that’s what it is.”

Kevin: The best band I think I’ve ever heard that we’ve been compared to is Swirlies. I was the most excited by hearing that.

Luke: Yeah that was a little mindblowing! And Duster. I think Duster was a good one.

Eleven: So are you guys into cassette culture? Is it just that you happen to be hanging out with people who are?

Luke: Not really, but I think I’m gonna get into it!

Kevin: It definitely seems to be coming back, a little bit.

Luke: So my theory is that you have two things here. You have people’s cars, which, you know, the younger crowd’s gonna have shittier cars with cassette players in them, and then also like with the record player comeback, a lot of the old record players have cassette players as well.

Kevin: Really? I didn’t know that.

Luke: Yeah, the first record player I had had a cassette player in it. So I think that’s how it’s sorta creeping back in there.

[tempocannon]

Introducing: Shitstorm

[From my 2014 Eleven Magazine column “Introducing.”]

Southside impresario Matt Stuttler is a busy dude. He books shows for a living, he runs the cassette label Eat Tapes, and he just released the first issue of a combo zine/tape comp, Meat Bundle, with some friends. The zine is the paper and toner equivalent of Voyager 1: it’s being launched into the great unknown of the U.S. to spread the good news about our city’s excellent music. One of the featured acts is Stuttler’s solo project, Shitstorm, a fuzzed-out annihilator of a one-man band.

Shitstorm is Stuttler’s follow-up to his previous musical project, the garage outfit Burrowss, which played its final show in January. Shitstorm channels the same snotty influences as Burrowss, but the new act is starker and more mechanical, just a blown-out guitar and a yell over a cassette of beats ripped from an old electric organ. Shitstorm is raw, but the songs’ spare arrangements reveal a lot of sharp songwriting underneath the noise. There’s a lot on the horizon for the project, including an extended tour and a May cassette release from Already Dead Tapes. Stuttler was kind enough sit down at his house and give me the lowdown. Skittles, a Chihuahua-Pomeranian mix, chilled on my lap throughout.

Eleven: The time I saw you play as Shitstorm, it struck me that volume is a pretty big aspect of what you’re doing. Is that something that you’re going for? Sensory overload?

Matt: That was probably the most extreme volume I’ve done, but my earlier shows were like that too. Recently I’ve dialed down the feedback a lot. It really depends on where the space is, because you get different feedback depending on where you are. I played at Café Ventana and the feedback was crazy because the wiring is not set up for a music venue, so I was plugged into a wall outlet. It kind of just depends. If I’m getting a lot of feedback, I’ll roll with it, and I’ll revel in it, but if I’m not, I’m not gonna force it.

Eleven: So when you’re songwriting, is your approach different because it’s only you? You can’t rely on bandmates to come up with stuff.

Matt: It’s a lot quicker, which is great. I think most of the Shitstorm songs are pretty simple and simple for the sake of simplicity. There’s three parts at most, and it’s usually just the three parts repeated twice or something. So I’m not trying to do anything overly groundbreaking or overly complex or anything. I just want to play dirty songs that are kinda punkish, or whatever.

Eleven: Do you think of what you’re doing as part of a one-man band tradition in rock n roll? Or is it more just for convenience?

Matt: Yeah, convenience. Convenience and simplicity. It’s the most simple kind of music played the most simple way possible.

Eleven: So, you just recorded a tape?

Matt: Yeah, I recorded with Tom from Boreal Hills, at his house, and it ended up sounding pretty cool. He put some kind of gate on the drums, so they sound more 8-bit-ish than they do live.

Eleven: You still use the organ’s preset drums?

Matt: Yeah definitely, and we used that for the recording too. But he put some effects on the drums to mix it up a little bit.

Eleven: That’s an interesting move, because as a one-man band you definitely have the option to go all out and just pretend to be a full band on your record.

Matt: It even crossed my mind to record all the songs clean. The recorded version would be just totally clean, and then the live version would be the opposite.

Eleven: Do you think that you’re trying to fill a void here in town? Could be doing this thing anywhere, or is it important that you’re in St. Louis?

Matt: Yeah definitely, it is. I think it was part of why I started Shitstorm. When I moved here with Emily [Burrowss bandmate, wife] and we were playing in Burrowss, that’s all we were familiar with, the Americana scene, the folkier side. So at the time we were like “this is safe enough, we’ll do this kind of thing.” It was just what we were writing at the time. But the longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve seen the faster, snottier, punkier bands and the garage bands and stuff. And it was like “Oh! You can do this here. You can play something loud and fast.” It’s got a place.

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Introducing: Wild Hex

[This was the first edition of the column, Introducing, I wrote for Eleven Magazine in 2014.]

Wild Hex was only born a few months ago, but the band came into the world with a mandate to shred. The South City trio—Geoff Naunheim, guitar, Gabe Karabell, guitar, and Tom Nolan, drums—has been playing a show most every week, honing a trebly onslaught that calls to mind the best of heavy 1900s rock. The band has a bit of a head start—Karabell and Naunheim also play together in the glam outfit Bad Dates—but in any case, Wild Hex is ripping through the new-band checklist. In a few scant months, they’ve released a demo cassette, played most of the venues in town, and planned a weekend tour. How did all this happen? I invited them into my basement to get to the bottom of it. 

[Cover art for Wild Hex’s II, by Anya Liao.]

Eleven: So, how did you guys get together? 

Gabe: Well, Tommy went to a show, and we ran into each other. We grew up together, and Tom was like, “I want to play drums, let’s rock and roll,” so we got together in the basement and played for a little while. That was around when Geoff and I were writing songs together, so it all came together because of that. Set the two of them up, and now they’re friends for life. 

Eleven: So, you started as two bands, and then became one band? 

Gabe: It wasn’t really anything. It turned from two groups of two friends hanging out into one group of three friends hanging out. A threesome. 

Geoff: And then we rerecorded all the work we had done over the summer, working on the tape, because we were like, “This is way better now, with a real drummer.” 

Eleven: [To Tom] Had you played drums recently? 

Tom: Well, I’d played drums for like eight years, growing up, then in high school I gave it up. I knew [Gabe] had a drum set sitting in his basement, so that’s why we hooked up. I was just getting my chops back and it worked out with Geoff. This is the first band I’ve played with, ever. 

Eleven: I noticed you guys do a lot of guitar riff, guitar solo stuff. 

Gabe: Yeah, we try to. Since it’s just two guitars and no bass, we try to use that to the fullest. Some people call it hot leads. Some people call it wanking. It’s definitely a guitar-oriented band, though. 

Geoff: There’s a lot of guitar masturbation that goes on. But not too much. I hope. Maybe there is. 

Eleven: I think at least around here, most people have some patience for guitar masturbation. 

Gabe: Well, and the songs are a minute and a half long. 

Geoff: It’s hard to go on too much of a guitar solo tangent when your song’s only a minute and a half long. 

Eleven: Also, if it’s done in the spirit of fun, you can do whatever you want, basically. 

Gabe: Right. We’re not taking this too seriously. Most of the bands we’re in seem like a lot more work than this one, like tracking people down to practice and getting together to play. We’re basically just hanging out and being idiots with this band, and then somehow we write songs. 

Eleven: This is kind of a vague question, but do you see what you’re doing as filling a void in the St. Louis scene, or doing something that no one else has done? 

Geoff: The only real intention I had going in was to not be concerned about genre as much and have a band where, if you have a song that references a lot of heavy metal, it could fit in with something that was more like classic rock. I think that a lot of times bands are really concerned with like, “we’re a hardcore band,” or “we’re a doom metal band.” I know I was really trying to steer clear of that, to try not to get pigeonholed. I think that that is something that happens a lot here. Take that show last night, for instance. 

Gabe: Yeah! 

Geoff: The quote from the guy who booked it was, “This show is too metal for the punk kids and too punk for the metal kids.” And that’s probably true, but what a stupid thing to have happen in a scene. 

Gabe: And St. Louis is a lot better than a lot of places, where if everyone’s not wearing biker jackets and black denim, then they’re not gonna go out to see that band. We’re lucky to have a really diverse scene here. Everybody seems to play really heavy, and they’re very good musicians, and still very creative. So there’s a lot of talent that creates a genre for St. Louis that I think bleeds through to what we do.

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