Posted in Whathaveyou on April 27th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Stöner recently announced tour dates for UK and Ireland next Spring, and that honestly had me thinking their first album wouldn’t come out until around then, but hey, I’ll take it. The new trio with Brant Bjork, Nick Oliveri and Ryan Güt were a high point among high points in the ‘Live in the Mojave Desert’ stream series (review here), and the resultant live album, Live in the Mojave Desert Vol. 4 (review here), is out this Friday, also in part through Heavy Psych Sounds.
Accordingly, it’s not really a surprise that the three-piece would sign to the label for a debut studio outing as well — both Bjork and Oliveri are on the label too, it should be noted — and if you saw the interview with Brant Bjork back in March (video below), he said that indeed Heavy Psych Sounds would be on board for the record they made in the studio last Fall while also preparing for the performance that would become the stream. See how it all ties together? Isn’t that nice?
The grooves certainly are. Nice to know more are coming sooner than I thought.
Preorders start May 6 — next week already — and there will be a song out then too. Here’s the info with the short bio I wrote for the band:
Heavy Psych Sounds Records&Booking is really proud to present a NEW BAND signing: *** STÖNER ***
– brand new band feat. desert legends Brant Bjork and Nick Oliveri –
We’re incredibly stoked and honored to announce that the California super-band. STÖNER is now a new member of the HPS family!!
!! Heavy Psych Sounds will release the band’s debut album this summer !!
The release was recorded at The Rad Cabin, Joshua Tree, CA on October 12, 2020 by Yosef Sanborn.
DEBUT ALBUM PRESALE + FIRST TRACK PREMIERE START: MAY 6th
Rad stays rad. A few ideas are timeless. Stöner is Brant Bjork (guitar/vocals), Nick Oliveri (bass/vocals) and Ryan Güt (drums), and from flowing jams to all-out punker blasts, they know what they’re doing. It ain’t anybody’s first time at the dance, and you don’t call your band Stöner if you’ve never heard the word before. Stöner, however straight-ahead their moniker, encompass varied styles and the songwriting of Bjork and Oliveri – both founders of Kyuss, also Mondo Generator, Ché, Fu Manchu, Bloodcot, and more between them. Atop the classic-style swing and flow from Güt (also of Bjork’s solo band), Stöner keep it casual and wear the name as only those who helped create the sound could.
STÖNER – APRIL & MAY 2022 UK & IRELAND TOUR : Fri 22 Apr : Monroes Live, Galway, Ire Sat 23 Apr : Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick, Ire Sun 24 Apr : Cyprus Avenue, Cork, Ire Mon 25 Apr : Limelight 2, Belfast, UK Tue 26 Apr : Opium, Dublin, Ire Thu 28 Apr : The Garage, Glasgow, UK Fri 29 Apr : The Warehouse, Leeds, UK Mon 02 May : Academy 3, Manchester, UK Tue 03 May : The Mill, Birmingham, UK Wed 04 May : Thekla, Bristol, UK
STÖNER is: Brant Bjork – Guitars/Vocals Nick Oliveri – Bass Ryan Güt – Drums
Swedish heavy rockers Greenleaf released their eighth full-length, Echoes From a Mass (review here), on March 26 through Napalm Records. At 20 years removed from their debut album, 2001’s Revolution Rock (discussed here), it is only their second full-length in their career to be made with an entirely consistent lineup. With founding guitarist Tommi Holappa as ever at the core, Echoes From a Mass brings him together again with vocalist Arvid Hällagård and drummer Sebastian Olsson, who both arrived with 2014’s Trails and Passes (review here), and bassist Hans Frölich, who made his first appearance on 2018’s Hear the Rivers (review here). What started and was for more than its first decade a classic, heavy ’70s-style side-project for Holappa from his main outfit at the time, Dozer, has now been a working, touring band for seven years, consistent now in a way they’ve never been before.
Tommi Holappa, in addition to being one of his generation’s foremost heavy rock songwriters, has a smile that is infectious. We’ve spoken any number of times over the years between Dozer and Greenleaf, and it was a pleasure to do so again. He’s a nice guy, and when he talks about writing music for Greenleaf as an increasingly complex process of chasing what feels right, it’s easy to believe it. There has always been an organic sensibility to his craft. Not that the songs aren’t worked on — he talks about hammering out the tracks on Echoes From a Mass in jams with Olsson from which Frölich was excluded due to pandemic restrictions; former bassist/producer Bengt Bäcke stepped in for some — but that even for being thought through, they hold onto the inspired spark out of which they flourished.
I was particularly interested to talk about Greenleaf as a full, stable-lineup band with Holappa not only for the novelty, but for his being able to put material together with these players in mind, the trust that must inherently emerge from working together over a longer stretch of time. I don’t think Greenleaf‘s lineup — fluid as it’s been — has ever included outright strangers as opposed to friends and peers in other bands, up to and including Dozer, Lowrider, Truckfighters and others, but that’s different than being in the same band with someone for years, and you can hear that difference in the space Holappa gives Hällagård‘s vocal melodies on the opener “Tides” and other songs from the record. That trust is there. And also some jazz, apparently.
It was Friday afternoon after a long week, but great to chat just the same. I hope you enjoy and thanks for watching.
Greenleaf, Echoes From a Mass Interview with Tommi Holappa, April 23, 2021
Greenleaf‘s Echoes From a Mass is out now on Napalm Records. More info available at the links below.
Posted in Whathaveyou on April 27th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Once upon a whenever it was, I said of Swedish doomers Malsten‘s 2020 debut album, The Haunting of Silvåkra Mill, “I’d watch this band do a live stream playing this record front-to-back. Just saying.” Well, turns out that very opportunity will present itself as the band will take part in Electric Sabbath‘s virtual DoomFarmFest 3, which as you might guess is the third ‘online festival’ — of 2021, no less — to come from the booking concern. Malsten are one of two Swedish-native acts, the other is the sludgier Kråkslott, and because why the hell wouldn’t it, the lineup goes from Bulgaria’s Obsidian Sea to New Zealand’s Nameless Grave to Paraguay’ Mudum and the multinational Inkarnation, as well as several others throughout continental Europe.
And indeed, Malsten will perform the entirety of The Haunting of Silvåkra Mill live. They hit me up to tell me so themselves, so I know it’s true. No clue what anyone else is doing, but the streaming event is set for May 8. I have no idea how long it’s running, but there are nine bands involved, so it might just be your evening spoken for. If it was in-person, it would be two days’ worth, but if it was in-person, you probably wouldn’t have a band from New Zealand playing, so take what you can get.
Info follows here as per the PR wire, and
Electric Sabbath presents DoomFarmFest Online Edition #3 of 2021
9 bands from all over the globe, bringing that heavy riffage to your screen. Join us once again as we indulge in some dirty distorted riffs to ease our isolated earlobes.
Follow us on Electric Sabbath and hit that like button!
Berlin trio Samavayo are by no means the only outfit to take the opportunity to develop their visual presence in the absence of broader touring, and you can’t really fault the method by which they’re going about it. Instead of trying to mimic a full concert experience, they’re giving their audience a chance to peek at their songwriting process as it happens. They’ve begun what purports to be a series of videos called simply ‘New Riffs Burnin’,’ and fairly enough so. As the next few weeks play out, they’ll be posting clips from their rehearsal room of them working on new songs for what will be their follow-up to 2018’s Vatan (review here), tentatively to be recorded this Fall with an eye toward releasing in Spring 2022, at which point — hey how about that? — they’ll also be returning to the road.
Sounds like a plan? That because it is one, and kudos to the three-piece on that. Unless I’m mistaken, the band’s last run was Fall 2019, so they’ll be at a decent remove from that — of course the circumstances are well beyond their control, and all ‘plans’ should be taken with the acknowledgment of being pandemic-pending — and having new material is all the more reason to get out again. One hopes the timing works out, for them as well as, you know, the rest of the world. Spring 2022 puts them in the midst of a resurgent and perhaps somewhat tentative festival season in Europe, so it will be an early chance to see what shakes out as regards bands, venues and gatherings in various countries of the European Union and beyond its borders. What does touring post-Brexit actually look like? How often are these poor guys going to have Q-tips shoved up their noses? We’ll find out together as the world attempts to move out of the hellscape that the last year-plus has been and into (hopefully) a more hopeful time.
And it’s in a spirit of that hopefulness that Samavayo focuses on moving forward, on their next record, on getting back to shows, and so on, that they bring this video and the ones that would seem to be set to follow to light. All the better.
It’s a short, under-two-minute consumable — but they’re not kidding when they call it “Sludge Burner.” Here’s looking forward to more.
Check out a heavy Stoner Rock Riff in Drop-C Tuning from Berlin based Stoner Rockband Samavayo. We are presenting you some kewl new riffs in the next weeks, so you can follow our songwriting for the next upcoming album. Let us know what you think about it in the comments.
Samavayo is: Behrang Alavi, Andreas Voland & Stephan Voland
[Click play above to stream the premiere of Snail’s video for ‘Mission From God.’ New album, Fractal Altar, releases April 30 on Argonauta Records. Video edited by Matt Lynch with footage by Kevin Spencer, Jennifer Hendrix-Johnson, Weston Radcliffe, and Laura Chavez and art by Ella Lynch.]
It is fitting and perhaps not coincidental that Snail‘s fifth album, Fractal Altar, should arrive on the cusp of the band celebrating their 30th anniversary next year, since it is arguably most the work they’ve done since to harken back to their beginnings as a band. Their 1993 self-titled debut (review here) and 1994’s All Channels Are Open EP document those early days and even as its Seldon Hunt/Ella Lynch front and back covers embrace a yet-unseen complexity of design, the eight songs of the release itself work to in part to pare down some of the layering aspects and push the buzz tone of Mark Johnson‘s guitar to the fore with Matt Lynch‘s bass and Marty Dodson‘s drums accompanying with punkish speed on opening duo “Mission From God” and the righteously Fu Manchu-y “Nothing Left for You” — the latter also previously released as a single — before “Not Two” urges with proto-grunge-meets-desert-rock backing, “Bring your appetite/And we’ll devour each other.”
Of course, Fractal Altar, which is released through Argonauta Records some six years after Feral (review here) came out on Small Stone, has its dynamic and still finds the band trying new things. With recording by Lynch at All Welcome Records in Inglewood, California, and mixing/mastering at his own Mysterious Mammal studio, as well as some home recording by Jennifer Hendrix-Johnson in Seattle, and Lynch‘s daughter handling the back cover, Fractal Altar is nothing if not a family affair, but that perhaps emphasizes how much the band itself has become a kind of family, if one spread between Los Angeles (Lynch), San Diego (Dodson) and Seattle (Johnson), and it makes the elements of growth they showcase in their songwriting, be it in more nuanced arrangements of backing vocals from Lynch in “Hold On” or the subsequent “The False Lack,” or the rhythmic patience that allows for a sense of space in the latter there without resorting to an effects barrage, feel suitably homegrown.
No doubt part of the idea that Snail have stripped down somewhat on Fractal Altar comes from the fact that, at eight tracks and 37 minutes, the record is a full 10 minutes shorter than was Feral, but it’s also the band’s second long-player since returning to a three-piece configuration, their lineup having included guitarist Eric Clausen for their 2009 return-from-ether second album, Blood (review here) and its 2012 follow-up, Terminus (review here). To listen to the relative sprint with which they execute “Mission From God” at the outset or the later mellow-Nirvana-into-rolling-nod of the penultimate “Draining White,” Snail don’t sound like anything so much as themselves, and they sound free in terms of their craft. On their fourth release since coming back from a 16-year break, the most immediate attitude one can glean from listening is that they’re doing what they want to do.
It’s not necessarily a turn toward the humble, but as the video for “Mission From God” finds Johnson playing the lead role of someone having taken enough acid to meet with the divine, the band come across as both willing to have fun — see also the Queens of the Stone Age-style handclaps and strum as “Not Two” approaches its midpoint and the all-out low-end-showcase lumber of the eight-plus-minute closing title-track, on which no less than Ed Mundell turns in a guest appearance on backward guitar — and aware of what they want to do and who they want to be as songwriters. “When the Tree Spoke,” which follows “The False Lack” and opens side B, is elemental Snail through and through. Johnson‘s vocals are melodic and laid back, topping a fervent but not necessarily aggressive groove, and the tones are subtly rich without being overdone. There’s flourish of keys and backward sampling and a call and response hook, but nothing that couldn’t be reproduced faithfully on stage, and they bring it all back around to the chorus in a way that’s atmospheric without veering into such overly cerebral fare as to be inconsistent with earlier pieces.
Further evidence that Snail know exactly what they’re doing here? The progression of the album. Even Feral, which was their most accomplished record to this point, didn’t draw the listener in with as much clarity of purpose as does Fractal Altar, and speaking as a fan of the band, these songs are a trip that’s a pleasure to take, from the hestitate-to-call-them-“simple”-bit-will-anyway-for-the-turn-of-phrase simple pleasures of the choruses in “Mission From God” and “Nothing Left for You,” down through the slowdown in “Not Two” and the bit of Pacific Northwest that shows up in “Hold On” (that main riff calling to mind earlier Red Fang all the more with the backing vocal treatment) ahead of “The False Lack” and “When the Tree Spoke” setting up the longer-unfolding “Draining White” and “Fractal Altar” itself, which, true to classic LP structure, prove to be as stratosphere-bound as Snail push on the album.
Lynch, who you’ll recall also mixed, seems to have been saving his bass punch for the start of the title cut, and fair enough. If the band are in direct conversation with Feral anywhere on Fractal Altar, it’s in the song that shares the release’s name, but they’re more willing to freak out in the apex here than they were on, say, “Thou Art That” or the similarly-extended thudder “Psilocybe” from the prior record. Ed Mundell shredding guitar in another dimension is never going to hurt either as regards setting that mood, and it’s as fitting as anything could hope to be that they end the lysergic march with a sudden stop as though, having finally tipped off the end of the world, there’s nothing left to greet them but vacuum. One wonders how long that section actually went, but cutting it cold serves its purpose, and perhaps the last message they’re sending to their audience is that Snail realize that too. Fractal Altar is the offering through which they are most themselves in songwriting and performance. They may dip here and there in terms of influences or pick out aspects and vibes as they go from others — hello, Blues Brothers — but there is no master being served here more than the songs, and that is as emblematic of their work on the whole as anything could be. Far out.
Much like the elusive Theory of Everything in physics, with Hills‘ universal psychedelic premise is underlined by almost unaccountable gravity. Released in 2011 through Intergalactic Tactics and Transubstans Records following a 2009 self-titled debut, Master Sleeps basks these 10 years later in its breadth of influence and establishes its aesthetic on a per-track basis, presenting two vinyl sides of resonant, spaced-out intergalactic fare with an awakened nature that’s nothing if not contradictory to the title. It’s a record about which much was said at the time by the in-the-know-telligencia, and that’s cool, because it’s cool, and, hey man, cool, but any and all past hype aside — it’s amazing how the years turn these things into wisps of recollection; the fervent talking-up of records fading to echoes even as attention spans are criticized for their shortness; hypocrites to a hyperlink, everyone — it’s a cool record and to deny it is to deny oneself the pleasure of a 35-minute, mostly instrumental outward journey of jams and in-on-it-early-next-gen heavy psych. Suffice it to say, if this shit was due in June instead of a decade gone, you’d still see as much desperate preening of feathers in order to curry its vaunted favor. And fair enough.
I have the CD, which was the Transubstans version, that I apparently picked up later in 2011, but I’ll be damned if Master Sleeps doesn’t hold up. It was ahead of the game on vinyl structuring, presaging the larger-platter-as-format-of-record (pun absolutely intended) explosion by a year or two, and each of its two sides brought three tracks in a nearly even break of structure to what seems to be utterly fluid throughout the listening experience, opener “Rise Again” and closer “Death Shall Come” creating a loop from one to the other that feels all the more geared to encourage multiple listens in a kind of sonic reincarnation. Accordingly, the more you hear Master Sleeps, the more you hear in it. First? Swirl. “Rise Again” fuzzes and unfolds a careening spaciousness that calls out early space rock and psych drift with shoegaze vocals buried in the mix à la The Heads where you wonder if anything’s really being said or you’re just imagining it and does it really matter anyway. I don’t know.
True to the band’s moniker, the air gets thinner the higher you climb, both into “Rise Again” and across side A and B as a whole, ascending from longer tracks to shorter toward the middle of the record — the two shortest cuts, “Claras Vaggvisa” and “The Vessel,” close side A and open side B, respectively — then longer again at the finish. In case, the sick hypnosis of “Rise Again” holds firm even as Hills wander elsewhere, “Bring Me Sand” tapping Mideast scales and rhythmic patterns in classic fashion, a marked turn from the preceding opener but that’s the point. There’s a heavier burst in the middle — watch out for it — but they’re never so volatile as to lose control, and the far-off-ness of “Claras Vaggvisa,” which an organ line as its most forward factor backed by some quieter but foreboding tom hits and vague, manipulated voice echoes, is intentionally drifting and atmospheric and, yes, weird. Delightfully, delightfully weird. Weird as means and end both, but golly that’s fun.
Even more when “The Vessel” kicks into action, bringing that organ up in volume and putting a reignited kosmiche thrust behind it, the drums still having a chance to swing as they nonetheless push forward amid the channel-shifting, amorphous-sounding guitars. Next time someone asks you what “molten” sounds like, it sounds like Hills playing “The Vessel” on Master Sleeps. There’s a sample there, who knows what, but the point is the jam, and the jam sounds like they took a regular song and melted it into so much lysergic goo. True, they find some shape in the second half, coalescing around a dreamy guitar figure to cap, but the breaking-down-of-elements had to come first. The finish in “The Vessel” makes a suitably right-on lead-in for the soft-boogie drum foundation of “Master Sleeps” itself. Guitars, bass, organ all follow the bounce those drums lay out, grooving casual-like through the initial section of the longest piece of the album that shares its name, and as they jam through, they seem to acknowledge the funk they’re making — a bit of cowbell here, a bit of wah there, some easy-soul vocals, all very deep in the procession, all very spacey, very improv-feeling. And yeah, this sounds like what’s next, still. A band and a record out of time, maybe, leaving everybody else to chase their warp trail around the other side of the planet where some trap or other is set but our sensors can’t get a reading, Cap’n.
That’s right. It’s the kind of record that might make you lapse into fan-fic. No regrets. There’s nothing missing from “Master Sleeps,” and for those Stateside, one might find its inherent swagger similar to the always-off-the-cuff musings of Endless Boogie, but there’s a personality at work here too, and the band are having fun exploring almost in spite of themselves. Thus the drones and chants of “Death Shall Come” arrive to put not just a memento mori on the party they just incited, but an end to the LP as a whole, a patient unfurling across the song’s first half leading to a surprise of a crash about three minutes in as guitars intertwine in loosely mystical fashion and the dirge truly comes together, hitting an apex still somewhat undersold but nothing less than it needs to be to highlight just how individual each part of Master Sleeps is and likewise just how intensely the pieces feed the whole.
Rocket Recordings picked up Master Sleeps in 2013 and likewise stood behind the band’s 2015 outing, Frid, and their 2017 Alive at Roadburn LP, captured the year before at the festival where I’d been lucky enough to see them (review here). The band aren’t so much active at this point, but Rocket has newly issued a debut outing from psych-jazz outfit Djinn, which boasts membership from Hills and sibling purveyors Goat. And that’s not nothing, as you can hear on Bandcamp.
As always, I hope you enjoy.
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Distractible, so the internet is probably the worst place for me to be. So it goes. Those eight-year-old SNL clips aren’t gonna watch themselves when I should be writing.
This week… was a thing that happened? I guess the highlight was when I talked to Genghis Tron and they weren’t jerks. I really like that record. Stick around in the interview long enough and you’ll hear me tell them it’s my album of the year so far, and it is. I know there’s a lot to come from some big names, but it’s a high standard just the same, and they’ve set it, and yeah, it’s just always a relief to talk to someone you haven’t interviewed before (actually I’m not 100 percent that I never interviewed them back in the day, but close enough) and they don’t ruin the record by being a dick. That hasn’t happened to me in a while, for which I’m thankful.
Next week I’m doing a cool thing. On Monday. I’m already kind of nervous about it. I’m also interviewing Tommi Holappa from Greenleaf in a couple hours — also quite cool — and I’m kinda nervous about that too, but I know damn well already he’s a good guy based on copious past experience, so no actual worries there other than the usual I’m-talking-to-a-human-being type. Need to send him the Zoom link. I’ll get there.
But the cool thing Monday. Can’t talk about it. Very cool though. Hoping to post about it Tuesday, but timing might be weird, so it may be Wednesday before I get there. So Monday looks like a Snail album review with a video premiere — hey that’s pretty cool too! — and then Tuesday will either be Cool Thing or the Greenleaf interview, and Wednesday is whichever of those two didn’t run on Tuesday. I’ve also got two premieres lined up for Thursday and one for Friday, so the week’s spoken for in its entirety, and that takes us through the end of April. Time both drags and flies. Nothing makes any sense.
Far out.
The Pecan starts tee-ball tomorrow for the first time. We bought him a glove last week, then this week we bought him a glove he can actually squeeze closed, though he hasn’t quite worked out the mechanism of doing so yet. That kid fucking hates me. Oof. Rough week. Everything’s a fight. Everything. The Patient Mrs. comes down the stairs and it’s like he flips a switch and is good to go. She goes back to work and he’s back to whining and bitching about fucking everything. All week. Dude does not believe in union breaks. I’m hoping it’s a phase but I’ve seen zero evidence to-date that it might be. To wit, I couldn’t stand my father pretty much from the outset and now he’s dead, so there you go. Find me a point to anything.
I’d like to record some vocals this weekend for nascent-project, but I’m not sure I’ll get the chance. The weekends lately are the worst. I end up with less time than the weekdays because there’s no preschool in the morning. What a wreck. Sundays are awful, and I still refuse to do anything on Saturday because god damn, give me a day, but then I spend half of Saturday thinking about all the crap I need to get through on Sunday and it’s just a waste anyway and then Sunday’s still a pain in the ass. I guess if you have two kids, or, god forbid, more, you just cancel the rest of your life and that’s what you do. One kid, there’s still some semblance of an existence beyond that kid, so you’re kind of struggling to keep yourself sane. Or you’re negligent as fuck, and certainly there’s an appeal to that as well.
I don’t know anything. I’d like to write a book of essays about it and call it Daddy Issues, but I’m sure that’s taken.
I’ll go shower. That will help.
Have a great and safe weekend. Hydrate, watch your head, all that fun stuff. Back Monday.
Posted in Questionnaire on April 23rd, 2021 by JJ Koczan
The Obelisk Questionnaire is a series of open questions intended to give the answerer an opportunity to explore these ideas and stories from their life as deeply as they choose. Answers can be short or long, and that reveals something in itself, but the most important factor is honesty.
Based on the Proust Questionnaire, the goal over time is to show a diverse range of perspectives as those who take part bring their own points of view to answering the same questions. To see all The Obelisk Questionnaire posts, click here.
Thank you for reading and thanks to all who participate.
The Obelisk Questionnaire: Jadd Shickler of Blues Funeral Recordings, et al
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How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?
I own and operate Blues Funeral Recordings, I’m the label director for Magnetic Eye Records, and I’m the label manager for Ripple Music. If I had to define it, I guess I’d say I’m a music industry professional in the independent heavy label world, although “music industry professional” sounds like a title crafted to sound good on LinkedIn. Basically, I work with underground heavy music for independent labels. I also sing for Blue Heron, the band that original Spiritu guitarist Mike Chavez and I started in 2018.
I came to do what I do when my best friend and I started All That’s Heavy, the world’s first online heavy rock mailorder, back in 1997 at the dawn of the internet, as well as launching our record label MeteorCity. We sold All That’s Heavy about 4 years later, and then sold MeteorCity in 2008.
I was a little bit disillusioned and left the industry for about a half dozen years, but started getting slowly drawn back in 2014 or so. I did some writing for The Ripple Effect and The Doom Charts, then finally ended up falling into a role with then one-man label Magnetic Eye Records in 2016. I had a day job at the time, but as my duties with Magnetic Eye expanded, my interest in doing more grew as well.
I got the idea for what would become the PostWax series around that time, and started working on it in the background of my day job and MER work.
In the spring of 2018, a couple things happened: the prospect of releasing a record myself propelled me to create a new label of my own so that I’d have the infrastructure in place for PostWax whenever it was ready. Ironically, the release which motivated that ended up not happening, but I’d already gone through so much of the setup to get this new label (Blues Funeral) off the ground that it inspired me to give it some attention.
Around the same time, I came to realize that I wasn’t super invested in my day job. My boss realized it too, and she started getting really toxic, which is somewhat understandable given what she was paying me while I was sneakily working on Magnetic Eye stuff from the office, but it still soured me on the job.
I finally decided to quit that summer, which I find a bit funny because I’ve been fired from nearly every “real” job I ever had, but for the first time, I took the step of leaving into my own hands, even though it was the best-paying day job I’d ever had by that point. I nearly took a new day job the following month to replace, but in a moment of passion-driven risk and with support from my wife, I decided to pass on it to see if I could try to make an actual living in the music industry for the first time in my life.
We racked up debt for the next year or so, during which time I joined Ripple Music to handle production and a variety of logistical stuff, as well as launching the first PostWax series. In mid-2019, I was able to facilitate the purchase of Magnetic Eye Records by a larger label group, and part of the deal was that they’d keep me on as label director once the buyout took effect. So, after getting my start in the music industry in late 1997, it became my full-time career on January 1st, 2020, and that’s how I got where I am today, running two labels and working for a third, and not having to supplement what I do with having a traditional day job.
Describe your first musical memory.
I’ve got a few and can’t recall which one is first, but it’s one of these two:
The first record I ever asked for and got which wasn’t a kid’s record was a vinyl compilation called Hit Explosion that came out in 1983 from K-Tel. It’s got tracks from Joan Jett, Rush, REO Speedwagon, Rod Stewart, the Steve Miller Band, and Survivor (yes, “Eye of the Tiger.” Hell yes.). I saw TV ads for it and my parents got it for me, and I would play it down in this big den with high ceilings and a red brick floor where the record player was set up on this wide wooden bookcase, and I’d lay in this brown beanbag chair on the floor with light streaming in from the huge sliding glass door and listen to those songs till I knew every word to every song, even the ones I liked less than others. I think it laid the groundwork for me to appreciate compilations and the idea of someone with a certain level of musical intelligence choosing songs from different artists to put together. It was also the first music I ever found for myself, instead of just listening to whatever my parents played. By the way, I still have this record, nearly 40 years later. It’s warped as hell and beat to shit, but it’s still with me.
My other early memory is listening to my Dad’s Neil Diamond records in that same den on that same stereo and record player. When you’re a kid and before you start to develop your own tastes, you just kind of absorb whatever those around you (like your parents) care about, and my God, did my Dad love Neil Diamond. So I was just kind of always around when he’d be listening to various albums and it got in my DNA. This was obviously not the beginning of my love affair with heavy rock, but it does give me a great connection to caring about music a ton from an early age, always having it playing, always spinning records, and listening to albums from start to finish and flipping the sides. I can still visualize that den and that record player and bean bag chair perfectly, better than I can remember a lot of other stuff from the past 20 years, haha.
Describe your best musical memory to date.
It’s impossible for me to pick just one as THE BEST, but here’s one I love: At the end of my sophomore year of high school, so May of 1990, my best friend Aaron and I went to see Motley Crüe on the Dr. Feelgood tour. It was my first concert. I’d never been to a real show before, and going inside after showing our tickets, we emerged from the tunnel at the far end of Tingley Coliseum and looked longways down the huge oblong auditorium. We were up in the area with the seats above the railing because we hadn’t paid for floor tickets (not sure why, maybe they were sold out, or maybe too expensive). So we were standing basically all the way down the other end of the place looking at the stage from about as far away as we could be. Just then, within like 90 seconds of us coming up from the stairwell and trying to decide what to do, we saw a fight erupt down on the floor between a concert-goer and several of the show’s security guys. All the other security people started running toward the fight, and as soon as they did, attendees on the other side of the auditorium started jumping the railing and pouring down onto the floor and running to go mix in with the rest of the crowd. Aaron and I looked at each other, and I don’t remember saying anything, we just jumped the railing and ran straight into the crowd. That was the start of our first concert – a risk of getting our asses kicked by security and a successful upgrade of where we’d see the show. The concert itself is a bit of a blur, but the two highlights I remember are Lita Ford, who was opening the show, playing “Close My Eyes Forever” and having the crowd sing the Ozzy part, which we did, and then Tommy Lee doing a drum solo during Crüe’s set where he rode some kind of suspended cable car drum kit out over the crowd, so he was basically hanging above us doing his solo as we watched from below. I don’t really ever think about Motley Crüe as a musical influence, but that concert was a great musical memory among many many many that I’ve got.
For good measure, another great music memory is when my old band Spiritu toured as an opener with Clutch and Spiritual Beggars in Europe in 2003. We shared the opening slot with Dozer, so every night for three weeks, we played all over Europe, trading the first and second slot with Dozer each night (and then getting to go watch Dozer, which was awesome), and then I would go out into the crowd and watch Clutch DESTROY. As a Clutch fan, getting to travel to dozens of cities across Europe and watch one of the greatest live bands of all time, who also happens to be one of your favorites, who you also happen to be opening for, is just indescribable. The highlight was somewhere in Germany when, during a short pause between songs when the noise briefly dropped, this giant 6′ 6″ dude yelled out, “Like Marlon Brando, but bigger!” in an almost comically-exaggerated German accent, carrying through the whole theater and making Neil and the whole band briefly crack up, then look at each other immediately launch into playing “John Wilkes Booth.” Three weeks of that! Amazing times.
When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?
Well, I’m not sure if this fits what you’re saying, and it’s going to sound like a sales pitch for PostWax, but it’s not, this actually happened: Maybe two months ago, my creative director Peder (from Lowrider) and I were talking about filling the last couple slots on PostWax, and he mentioned a band to me that basically has an all-star lineup but who I really don’t care for. I’m not going to say who they are because I don’t want to shit on them for those who dig what they do, but PostWax (to me) is about putting together a lineup of bands that at least one of the three of us choosing artists for the project absolutely loves, and never letting our decisions be guided by how big of a name someone is or whether having them on board might help sell the project. So I basically told Peder, if YOU love them, I might consider it, but if not, let’s not do it.
I’d consider this a test of a firm belief because otherwise, why don’t we go try to lure on some huge emo-metal band to join the project just so we can blow out another 2,000 signups? I’d rather pick bands we love that satisfy the ethic of only working with bands at least one of us deeply believes in and loves musically. And by the way, this belief was established quite a few years ago when I was running MeteorCity and put out a couple things that I did mainly based on the idea that they would sell, and not because I thought there were awesome bands. I did that Hermano record, and the Gallery of Mites record, and the Orquesta del Desierto albums, all first and foremost because of the names involved. There were moments on all of them that I enjoyed musically, but I didn’t go into them feeling moved or inspired as a listener, I was thinking of who the musicians were and how their names would get people to check out the records, not about what I thought of the actual music. So yeah, I’ll never do that again, and would much sooner get behind an unknown band with a niche sound and no fans but whose music I love than ever put my money or label name on something that’s coming from a place of, “people will buy this” ever again.
Where do you feel artistic progression leads?
Ha, probably to eventually making a record that not a ton of people besides the artist likes. Not trying to be cynical, but if you’re an artist, there are probably two paths: you make music you like and no one ever cares but you’re happy with what you’re doing, OR, you make something that some people like, and that sets an expectation for everything else you’ll ever do, and eventually, whether it’s your next album or your tenth album, you’ll be sick of trying to deliver something that lives up to what everyone else liked and just make a record you dig, and people will be like, “Too bad, I liked his old stuff better.” I think that’s inevitable, but not a bad thing really. You have to progress, even if followers and fans of your art aren’t always willing to stick with you while you go. I mean, if you just try to rehash what’s already been done, they’ll see through that as well and call you on it.
How do you define success?
Thank God you’re asking easy questions.
I’d probably say success is feeling great about what you’re doing. I’m earning less these days than in at least a couple of my previous “career” jobs, but I’m far happier with what I do and thus feel more successful. I know that being able to buy whatever you want, travel wherever you want to go, eat out every night probably feels pretty fantastic too, but I have a hard time imagining being able to do anything I didn’t love or believe in what I was doing in order to reach that point. If I could have that AND do something I feel great about, then awesome. But if they’re mutually exclusive, then for me the road to success will always need to be paved by personal and artistic satisfaction first and foremost.
What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?
Literally this morning I saw a dead dog, a pit bull, in a dumpster. It was in its crate, which means this was someone’s pet, and regardless of how it died, the idea that someone felt that the way to lay this dog to rest was to pick up the whole crate with the dog inside and drop it into a dumpster on the street is fucking revolting. Some human beings are just slime, and this world loves to remind us of that fact.
Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.
Well, I’d like to make a record with my band that I want to listen to from end to end without questioning whether it’s good or if I’m being objective or noticing the flaws. This is probably something that’s impossible for any musician, so I’m not holding my breath, but yeah. My old band only recorded and released a few things, so I’m hoping that Blue Heron is able to make a record that I can enjoy without caveats as a listener, and just dig musically and be proud of.
What do you believe is the most essential function of art?
I love this question, because I think about this a lot: I think art is the only value humanity actually has. When I think about all the awful shitty things we do to the planet, animals, each other, etc., it’s hard not to wish for a comet to hit the planet and reset everything. But we create art, and that to me is our only saving grace. We transcend our urges and our pettiness and our destructive tendencies and tap into something more meaningful and lasting when we create art, whether that’s music or paintings or books, and if we didn’t do that, I’d have no hope for us whatsoever. So, I guess the specific answer to your question is, the most essential function of art is justifying humanity’s existence. A bit dark, I guess, but how I feel.
Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?
New Ghostbusters and Top Gun movies, which will probably both suck, but for the moment I’m excited. I know you said non-musical, but I have to say, being able to go to small-club shows again also. And my wife and I will be taking our first trip to Europe together later this year. She’s never been out of the country, and I haven’t been in fourteen years, so I basically haven’t been abroad as a grownup. Can’t wait.
It’s pretty clear Genghis Tron have been doing some interviews. They mention it a couple times in the chat below, that they’ve been asked a lot about the change in sound they’ve undergone with their new album, Dream Weapon (review here). Hey, fair enough, right? Not only did their third album arrive last month some 13 years after their last one, 2008’s Board Up the House (discussed here) — both are on Relapse, which also issued their 2006 debut, Dead Mountain Mouth — but it also saw the founding duo of Michael Sochynsky and Hamilton Jordan surrounded by half a new band, including vocalist Tony Wolski and Sumac/Baptists drummer Nic Yacyshyn. Then on top of that, you add the fact that their new work brings synthesizer and vocal melody to the fore in a progressive, almost psychedelic-New-Wave vision of electronics-inclusive rock, moving beyond the “spazzcore” or “cybergrind” of their earlier outings and into a newfound hypnotic ether of enduring swirl, and yes, absolutely you’re going to get some questions about it.
I honestly haven’t seen much of the response to Dream Weapon in terms of reviews, but I know for sure I dig the record, so the chance to talk to Jordan and Sochynsky about it was something I welcomed. It took some scheduling, but we managed to nail down a 9AM time earlier this week and as I finished off my morning coffee — Jordan noted he’s also an early riser — the two main songwriters in Genghis Tron talked through the process of writing largely pre-pandemic but still remotely, as well as restructuring their band both in personnel and sound. I didn’t get to ask about working with Kurt Ballou after such a long break, but you’ll note that Jordan credits the GodCity producer with making the connection both to Yacyshyn and Wolski, so one way or another, he’s definitely had a significant impact on who and what Genghis Tron are in 2021, and that’s before you get to recording the album. And in any case, I’m sure there are other interviews you can find out there that ask the question what it was like to be back with Ballou with the passing of so much time. I was happy to talk about the building of melodies and songs coming together pieces at a time, the birth of Dream Weapon around what became its de facto centerpiece in “Alone in the Heart of the Light,” and so on.
Before you dive in, if you stick around the video long enough, you’ll find Sochynsky and Jordan giving the “breaking news” — they laugh when they say it — that they’re starting writing again already, and are planning to get together next weekend in-person in order to hash out material toward new songs and, one assumes, an eventual fourth long-player. Something to look forward to there, but as you’ll see, there’s plenty to talk about with Dream Weapon in the meantime.
Enjoy and thanks for reading/watching.
Genghis Tron, Dream Weapon Interview, April 20, 2021
Genghis Tron‘s Dream Weapon is out now on Relapse Records. The album can be streamed in below via Bandcamp and more info on vinyl editions, etc., is at the links.
