If ever there were a postmodern-day Renaissance man, he is Paul D. Miller. Painter, philosopher, social scientist, DJ, author, and producer (among others) are all hats that fit snugly on his head. He is probably best known as “DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid,” but this is only one of many roles he has taken on and made a success of in a process he calls “social sculpture.” He’s also the only DJ I’ve ever seen cut up a Marshall McLuhan record, closing the loop in more ways than one. Continue reading “Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky: Subliminal Minded”
KRS-One: The Lyrical Superhighway
More than anyone else out there today, KRS-One embodies all that is pure and true about Hip-hop music. He is the only artist who had a record out in 1986 who can still rip mics live as good or better than anyone attempting the art form since. Continue reading “KRS-One: The Lyrical Superhighway”
…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
“We’re not just a band,” Conrad Keely stated rather matter-of-factly. Conrad is one-fourth of the now Austin-based and long-monikered …And You Will Us By The Trail Of Dead. He wasn’t trying to sound pretentious. I was probing him about the band’s dabbling in other forms of expression, specifically his own forays into the visual arts.
“I was originally in the visual arts. I was going to be a comic artist when I grew up. When I was a wee boy of 12, I was really into the X-Men.” Has this interest carried over into his involvement with music? Indeed it has. “One of the great things about music these days is that there’s so much emphasis placed on multimedia. And even if you’re just a visual artist, I think that there’s a lot to be gained from doing a lot of multimedia. And music seems to be like the pinnacle of multimedia where you’ve got a lot of pop stars doing these great installations on stage and they’ve also got websites and stuff like that. Entertainment on that level really runs the whole spectrum of communication: television, video, visual arts, costume design… We generally feel like everything – even the album cover art – is as much a part of the band as any of the songwriting.”
I made the mistake here of mentioning that Jackson Pollock once said that he was trying to paint what music sounded like. Or something to that effect.
“Well, I hate Pollock,” Conrad quickly retorted, “… but that almost gives me an appreciation for his stuff!”
“What was he listening to?” added Jason Reece, friend and band member.
Sonically, The Trail of Dead (as their cumbersome name is often shortened to for convenience) explore the darkest regions of emotion. As evidenced on their two full-length releases, Madonna (Merge, 1999) and their self-titled debut (Trance Syndicate, 1998), theirs is a heavy stack of despair, rage, regret and melancholy crumbling and falling like so many monoliths neglected and decaying. Taj told me that while he lived in Austin, he saw these guys play live five or so times and that they were completely different everytime: at once noisy and chaotic, another very orchestrated, another quite electronic-based and yet another straight-out punk rock. The shit is catchy though. Contagious even. It gets under your skin, burrows and festers until you can’t leave it alone. And they’re not really so sad.
In fact, they’re a bunch of jokers. Attempt any inquiries into the history of this foursome, and you will then know them by the trail of bullshit.
“We started in Plano, Texas,” began a smirking, unable-to-maintain-eye-conact Jason Reece. “A town about 75 miles away from Austin. It’s a small town with like one church and one general store, two bars and one decreped old movie theater… Basically we met in this church youth group and we had a youth minister who helped guide us. With his help, we managed to play music for the church for a while. It was like Christian rock with uplifting chord changes and modulations, but for some reason we started getting a hold of dangerous books and music and that seeped into our music and it created a darker sound. We started changing too. We started getting more and more corrupt. I guess to them we were going to the Dark Side. So we were cast out of our church and exiled to Austin and that’s where the Trail of Dead really got its start…”
“What was the question?” Conrad joined in, returning from getting himself a drink.
“I was asking about the history of the Trail of Dead and Jason here was giving me a line of crap,” I said to clarify the situation.
“Oh,” Conrad said laughing, “That’s what he’s good for.”
“We don’t like to talk about our history that much because our history seems to change day by day… We change history everyday,” Jason said and they both smiled.
“Somebody asked me the other day where we got our name from, and I made up something about it being the last warning Boadicea gave the Roman generals,” Conrad added laughing (Boadicea was an ancient British queen where, upon annexation of her kingdom by Rome, she led a ferocious revolt before finally being crushed by the Roman army).
The truth, as far as I’ve been able to discern, holds that Conrad and Jason met in Hawaii, moved to Olympia (where Reece was an explosive member of the notorious Mukilteo Fairies) and finally to Austin where the Trail of Dead proper was formed. When and where Neil Busch and Kevin Allen came into play is still a mystery. Like so many other things about the Trail of Dead. Reader beware though. Truth is relative with these guys.
As a final case-in-point, Jason closed our talk with, “This is my last interview because I’m dying soon.”
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead is indeed not just a band. It’s a multi-layered, nonlinear, sonic enigma. It is everywhere. And it exists because.
[Copper Press, 2000]
[photo by Jessica Raetzke]
Unwound: Our Own Way
Unwound represents a true rarity in the cluttered and mundane music milieu that engulfs us here in the late nineties. Hailing from the small but prolific indie community of Olympia, Washington, Unwound does their own thing, makes consistently incredible records, and earns respect from everyone who counts.
Justin Trosper (vocals/guitar), Vern Rumsey (bass), and Sara Lund (drums) have proven themselves time and time again as an undeniable positive force against lame music and attitudes everywhere. With their sixth proper album, Challenge for a Civilized Society (Kill Rock Stars), they’ve once again pushed boundaries that they set with their previous records. Each recording has moved in a seemingly different direction around a solid hub of ideas both musical and socio-political.
“Well, sometimes you go into the studio with an idea, and you come out with something totally different,” Justin explains. “At least that’s what usually happens to me. Every one of our records has its own purpose. I don’t think we’ve aimed too high and I don’t think any of our records are perfect.” But they are very mindful of recording techniques and the studio as an instrument. “We just started building an eight-track studio and trying to learn more about recording.
There’s always been a veil of mystery surrounding this trio, partly due to their selectivity when doing interviews. “We’ve done lots of interviews just not with any major magazines,” Justin says, “but we’ve always done interviews with fanzines. We don’t have any problems doing interviews. We’re just cautious.” This understandable caution comes from music journalists’ propensity to lump bands into movements or scenes that they have nothing to do with in an attempt to pigeonhole the band’s sound or attitude. Unwound has been called “The West Coast Fugazi” and “The West Coast Sonic Youth” more times than I’d like to count, but they don’t have much in common with those bands other than their independence and the fact that they’ve toured with both. “I feel like we have our own thing,” Justin says seriously. “Definitely earlier on we were inspired by those bands, but now when people say that, I don’t really have anything to say about it.”
Unwound’s caution toward the music industry and their staunch independence also spill over into their emphatic dedication to their roots. All of their proper records have been released by Olympia-based Kill Rock Stars, and they’ve tried to keep ticket prices at their shows down as well. “It’s pretty hard to have five-dollar shows everywhere now. A band like Fugazi can pull it off ’cause they can kinda do what they want, charge five dollars, and everybody still gets paid. We can’t do that yet, but we still try to keep our shows down to five or six dollars. Then at least if we play a shitty show, it was only five dollars, and that’s not that big a deal. The money was still better spent than going to see some bad Hollywood movie. We’re just into sticking to out roots with the five-dollar shows and staying in Olympia instead of moving to a big 
city and trying to have a higher profile. Sometimes it’s really boring, but there’s definitely a community here.”
As it gets harder and harder to find a decent listen through all the shit that just keeps coming out, rest assured that where there is a fertile independent music scene like Olympia, there will always be an Unwound putting out true-to-the-core good music.
[Originally published in the June 1998 issue of SLAP Skateboard Magazine]
Godflesh: Heads Ain’t Ready
“I think Hip-hop is more important than any sort of Rock music,” states a resolved Justin Broadrick matter-of-factly. “Most of the beats are fatter and heavier than your average Rock n’ Roll riff.” Justin is the head of one of our planet’s most brutal ensembles. England’s Godflesh plows monolithic basslines and ear-searing guitar riffs over Hip-hop’s most brutal breaks. Their sound has been pummeling eardrums for nearly a decade now, and most of their fans don’t even get where the music is coming from. You see, Justin is a total Hip-hop junkie. Continue reading “Godflesh: Heads Ain’t Ready”
White: Jon Skuldt’s Rotating Cast of Noise-Makers
If K.K. Downing and K.K. Null would get together, they could be the supergroup of the new millennium. — Jon Skuldt
Sitting on the fence between genres sets an outfit up for problems from all sides. No one, from fans, to labels, to writers, knows what to do with you. Sitting decidedly on the firm line between rock and noise, Pittsburgh-via-Chicago-via-Madison’s White represents an enigma well-worth figuring out. Continue reading “White: Jon Skuldt’s Rotating Cast of Noise-Makers”
Kiss It Goodbye
“Our mission is to put the fear back into hardcore,” says stern Kiss It Goodbye guitarist Keith. Rarely does a band actually scare me, but given these guys’ varied backgrounds — believe me, no one is safe.
“Two of us were in Deadguy, three from Rorscach, one from Die 116, one from No Escape, and one from a German band called Ambush,” Keith says of this four-piece. He added it all up for me, but I couldn’t explain it to someone else even if I wanted to.
“Very, very few things come before any band I’m in,” lead vocalist Tim begins explaining Kiss it Goodbye’s genesis. “But on occasion some things do come before the band, and certain things led to Seattle, and me having to live here. So that basically broke up Deadguy.”
“From there me and Tim decided to stick together,” Keith jumps back in explaining how the above math added up to rounding up drummer Andrew and bassist Tom to solidify and relocate Kiss It Goodbye to Seattle. “The whole thing is based around the fact that Tim was moving to Seattle.”
“Jaws always drop when I tell people that I had some band and they followed me out here,” Tim says laughing.
“Like the stupid pet dogs that we are!” adds Keith.
Kiss It Goodbye run their grooves deep into your skull, whether you’re listening or not. Their songs pay no mind to your ears and bore directly into your brain. Live these four guys act as starving caged animals, prowling around the much explored territory between hardcore and metal (Keith is metal. Tim is decidedly not metal). They painstakingly seek out the heaviest and most piercing aspects of both and weild them with deadly precision. It’s more than enough to scare the shit out of you.
Kiss It Goodbye is currently negotiating a deal with Revelation records, with a tentative time line that puts them in the studio with Billy Anderson (Neurosis, Mr. Bungle, Melvins, etc.) in November, the record out in February, and them on the road in April. But back to the debate at hand…
“What do you think would get a bigger reaction: a Minor Threat cover or a Slayer cover?” Tim queries pondering the roots of today’s hardcore fans. “Isn’t it weird that it’s debatable?”
[SLAP Magazine, 1997]
[photos by Roy Christopher]
John Duncan Will Kill You.
John Duncan is a master of minimal sound-scapes and harshly intriguing collages of noise. He’s been creating sound and art projects for nearly twenty years now (since he was 15, he says), and he’s worked with everyone from Chris Keefe to Elliott Sharp. Some of his projects are painfully beautiful in their simplicity while others border on the absurd in their extremism. They often suggest that, if he thought there was something to be learned from it, he wouldn’t have a problem taking your life. Continue reading “John Duncan Will Kill You.”
Daniel Menche: Attack and Decay
Portland, Oregon’s own Daniel Menche is an undisputed master of noise. His majestic sculptures are sometimes soothing, sometimes infinitely grating, and always intriguing. He elicits a sense of control unparalleled in this oft out-of-control genre.
Throughout his tours during 94 and 95, he created and controlled said sounds using his usual contact mics and effects, but added a sheet of glass and a mound of iodized salt as sound sources. Crowds stood astounded as Menche poured the salt on the glass then let loose with the mics, grinding them against the salt-covered glass with one hand and twiddling knobs with the other. He built sounds so huge and threatening, you’d think you were standing next to a Boeing 747 preparing for take off, but he’d just as easily leave you awash in crackling near-silence with your heart racing, trying to catch your breath. Continue reading “Daniel Menche: Attack and Decay”
De La Soul: Stakes is Still High
In the mid-to-late 80s, I wasn’t much for Run-DMC or L.L. Hip-hop existed to me mostly through records by Public Enemy, Ice T, and Boogie Down Productions. I liked their stuff because it was about something. Rap thus far had been mostly about itself.
In 1989 when BDP’s Ghetto Music came out, my man Thomas (my main source for what was solid as far as Hip-hop was concerned) said he would tape it for me. What he failed to mention was that he was putting something else on the B-side… That tape changed the way I viewed the entire genre of Hip-hop. The songs on the flip of KRS-One’s usual positive raps were from De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising (Tommy Boy, 1989) . This was the first record that spoke freely about the ills of Hip-hop so far. It was the first anti-rap rap record, if you will. I wasn’t the only one geeked either: Kids who’d never thought twice about rap were all over De La. It was enough to make them denounce everything they’d established with Three Feet… on their next release, De La Soul Is Dead (Tommy Boy, 1991).
But Posdnous a.k.a. Wonder Why (Plug One), Trugoy the Dove a.k.a. Dr. Ama (Plug Two), and P. A. Mase a.k.a. Baby Huey (Plug Three) didn’t stagnate there. They’ve taken themselves and the whole genre with them (four records strong) to new heights with every release. Hip-hop is a genre that constantly rotates and changes. It’s nearly impossible to maintain any sort of popularity without selling your soul every time you come out (anyone remember when Ice Cube happily recorded his first solo joint in New York?). Longevity coupled with integrity in Hip-hop is truly reserved for the absolute cream of the crop.
De La Soul is from the soul.
I thought hard about the prospect of talking to De La Soul. Not only was I nervous and excited, but I felt like I already knew so much about them. De La Soul speaks from the soul. This fact cannot be denied. Their records reveal so much about what’s going on in their personal lives, there’s almost nothing to ask.
“We as people outside of the industry are alway trying to learn more,” Posdnous explains. “And whatever we take in, we try our best to convey it on wax. So beyond trying to find the best beats and the best music, we try to convey the best we can the evolution of the group. And not justtrying to have th emost positive message, because it could be in a negative light or us being upset or us not finding peace and tranquility… We try to balance it correctly because sometimes, regardless of how you feel, the best tracks may be focused on negative things. We try to have a balance of positive and negative on an album because there’s a balance to what a the human being is. All we try to do is just stay true to who we are as people. We can’t just focus on doing what we wanna do and let it be on wax. We separate ourselves as rappers and realize we are just people, and we just try to do the best we can as people. And that just naturally shows in our music. I’m just happy people have stuck behind us.”
Where every aspect is vivid, these niggas no longer talk shit — these niggas live it.
Just two days after I talked to Pos, Biggie Smalls was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Biggie was only twenty-four years old and is the second well-known emcee to be killed by gunfire in six months. Events like this are adored by all forms of media because the drama makes good copy, but in the process it gives rap music a bad name. The whole damn genre needs rehab. Just like the kids debating in the first scene of Spike’s movie Clockers, heads claim you’re not hard if you don’t kill people. Doing the things you talk about on record is considered by many “keeping it real,” but the grammatical first person in a rap song doesn’t necessarily mean the rapper.
“Even on an entertainment level,” Pos says addressing the issue, “back in the day, even when there was beef, it was more lyrically focused. Whereas now it’s on more of a physical level.” Theatrics used to play a huge role in lyrical storytelling, but nowadays one is expected to be that person — theatrics or not. This clash of lyrical-character versus man-on-the-street is like walls closing in. And those walls are already closed for Tupac Shakur and Chris Wallace.
See but don’t do like the Soul, because seeing and doing are actions for monkeys.
“There’s a lot of groups trying to do positive things,” states Pos, “from Cool J to the Fugees trying to organize fund-raisers, Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys doing the Tibetan Freedom Concert every year… There’s a host of others trying to do positive things.” The most important thing out here is creativity. Like KRS-One says, “You can be a pimp, hustler, or player, but make sure on stage you are a dope rhyme sayer.” Hip-hop is still a young culture and genre, so creativity is a must if it is to expand as an art form and even to simply maintain its existence. De La Soul is easily one of the major benchmarks of innovation in the short history of Hip-hop, even though other groups have reached a larger audience by borrowing their style.
“I definitely feel we had some type of influence,” says Pos, “but sometimes I don’t even credit it to an influence, but just a reassurance of what we were already doing. I don’t like to think that a lot of groups were rapping one way and then when they heard us they started focusing on how we do things. There’s a lot of groups out there who had the same ideas, the same views, and the same energy, but we were just lucky enough to get on first so that helped a lot of record companies pay attention to the groups who were out there like that. When we were trying to put out unit together, there were a lot of rapers out before us that assured us that what we’re doing could be done.” Given, De La begs, borrows, and ganks from the old school, but they blend so much of their own lives into the stew that it can’t help but come out innovative.
Is it my De La clothes, or is it because we hate this song?
As irrelevant as it might seem to their true fans, De La’s record sales have dropped off since Three Feet High and Rising‘s surprise hit “Me, Myself, and I,” but that’s just not what De La Soul is about. “Obviously record sales have dropped because to us it’s not about trying to have this one radio hit that’s not really saying nothing at the end of the day — a year from now, or even a month from now and it’s not even remembered,”
Pos says seriously. “We can make those easily. I’m not saying that ‘Me, Myself, and I’ is something that was necessarily forgotten, but we can make those for days. It was just never about making that. A lot fo people do focus on that and at the end of the day for them, it’s about money. A lot of people want to get a lot out of Hip-hop and don’t put anything into it. Forget it. This is a dying art form and I wast to put something back into it.”
[originally published in frontwheeldrive #47]