Stoner: ‘Live in the Mojave Desert’ Interview with Brant Bjork
Tomorrow, Friday, is Brant Bjork‘s birthday. Happy birthday, Brant. On Saturday, his new trio with drummer Ryan Gut (pronounced like “good” in German), who also plays in Bjork‘s solo band, and bassist/vocalist Nick Oliveri, will be unveiled. The band is called Stoner, the event is the last of five in the ‘Live in the Mojave Desert’ series of streams which has brought an exceptional level of production to the medium of bands-can’t-play-shows-so-here’s-this, creating something truly special in an indisputably difficult time.
I’ve been fortunate enough to interview Bjork on several occasions, and there’s always a lot of ground to cover. As he says in the video, he and Oliveri go back to before Katzenjammer — pre-Kyuss — to playing Ramones covers in his mom’s living room as kids in Palm Desert. That Oliveri would go on to be desert rock’s most notorious figure through his work with Mondo Generator, the Dwarves, Queens of the Stone Age, etc., and Bjork an Ambassador of Groove with a pivotal catalog of albums under his own name has not stopped the two paths from converging periodically. Kyuss Lives!/Vista Chino was one such instance, at least for a while. This is another.
Stoner — also stylized with an umlaut: Stöner — are something of a mystery as of this post. How much to Bjork and Oliveri share vocal duties? How much is punk, how much is rock, how much do they jam? Where do they go from here? The mission, as Bjork describes, is “no-brainer”; to strip everything away, forget audiences (because there aren’t any right now, though tour plans are being made for 2022) and everything else and just have fun going back to the basics, back to that living-room mentality. To hear him talk about it, it sounds like a good time. They hit the studio last Fall and will likely release that session through Heavy Psych Sounds — to which both Bjork and Oliveri are signed — sometime in the coming months.
So ‘Live in the Mojave Desert’ is kind of a welcome party for the new band. For Bjork, it is not unalloyed, however, due to an ongoing business dispute with now-former manager and mastermind of the stream series Ryan Jones. It’s a pickle, and something playing out as we speak.
You’ll notice a hard cut in the clip, and trust me, the original video was considerably longer as Bjork went into some detail about what’s going on. Why isn’t that here? Well, there’s part of me that feels like a fucking coward because it isn’t, but the fact of the matter is this thing might wind up in court and I don’t want to have anything said here come back around. The cut is about 18 minutes in, and there’s about 18 minutes cut, so yeah, a significant part of the conversation is gone. I feel shitty about that. Fact is, I couldn’t run the video unedited without comment from the other side, and looking at the totality of the situation, I’m not sure I’d be helping anyone or doing anything but stirring drama. It would not make anything better.
Actually the edit’s pretty clean, but you might notice the mood of the conversation has somewhat shifted and that nixed part is why. Maybe you wouldn’t have seen it at all otherwise. Whatever. I’m gonna take a xanax and go read some Star Trek.
Oh, and if you’re a fan of Bjork‘s solo stuff — his 2020 self-titled (review here) was a highlight of a tumultuous Spring — he says he’ll continue that in addition to working with Stoner, even if the focus is on the new band for this year and the ensuing album cycle. Good to know.
Enjoy:
Stoner, Interview with Brant Bjork, March 16, 2021
Stoner‘s Live in the Mojave Desert live album is slated to release in April in the US through Live in the Mojave Desert and in Europe through Heavy Psych Sounds.
Stoner, Live in the Mojave Desert teaser
Heavy Psych Sounds on Thee Facebooks
Heavy Psych Sounds on Bandcamp
Live in the Mojave Desert website
Stoned and Dusted on Thee Facebooks
Tags: Brant Bjork, California, Heavy Psych Sounds, Indio, Stoner
