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]
“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. 
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.
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. 
“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.”
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.”
“Without sounding too patronizing to the music public,” Godflesh mastermind Justin Broadrick says cautiously. “We’re too advanced for your average pop fan. They want something easy…” he pauses. “And we aren’t easy…” That’s a bold statement for anyone, but there’s very little about Godflesh that isn’t bold. In the most general sense, their sound combines the crunch of metal with harsh hip hop beats. There’s nothing here that doesn’t challenge the listener to keep listening or to think about what he’s listening to. Their newest record, Songs of Love and Hate has all these elements in spades. It’s just plain “uneasy listening” and Justin has plenty of philosophy to match.
“With Godflesh, we try to aim at something quite off balance, off kilter, a lot different from anyone else,” he continues. “[With this record] we were aiming at having that form of brutality of Streetcleaner (Earache, 1989). More so than last record. We looked at last record as quite drab and quite clean-cut and not really hard enough for what we want to do now. We aimed for more of the grooves which is where Pure (Earache, 1992) sort of started, but Pure just scratched the surface of that idea.” 1989’s Streetcleaner is still hailed as the seminal Godflesh record, even though their follow-up (after their foray into dance beats with Slavestate [Earache, 1991]), Pure,was more consistent and truly had more attention paid to beats and grooves.
Outside the realm of Godflesh, Justin releases a vast array of projects and collaborations with other people. He plays guitar on a regular basis with Kevin Martin’s noise/jazz-core outfit God, and he and Kevin also pair off as Techno Animal and play together in Ice. And as if that wasn’t enough, Justin has a solo project called Final and recently released an installment of the Sub Rosa label’s Subsonic series with guitar compositions by him and Andy Hawkins of Azonic.
“It was really in search of the groove I think,” Justin says of bringing in Mantia on drums. “When we were shaping up what we wanted to do with the material for this album, it became more evident to us that there was a lack of range in the dynamics of the rhythm. With Selfless (Earache/Columbia, 1994), in retrospect, the rhythms weren’t really coming across. We listened to the record a year later and felt like the rhythms just weren’t punishing enough. It was brutal. It was hard, but it just wasn’t funky or groovy enough, and I think we just lost it with just purely relying on the machine. We feel we’ve gone far enough with being completely mechanized. The aim was to get a drummer who plays like a machine, but we wanted a feeling of movement and motion as opposed to a machine where it’s very, very static. We were really searching for a break-beat sort of dynamic which goes further than just normal Hip-hop.”
“We’ve got about four new songs done already, and we’re trying to finish the record this year so we can get it out early next year,” he says excitedly, as if ready to show these punks who’s boss. Friend and fellow writer Adem Tepedelen recently wrote something to the effect of “Metal isn’t dead, it’s just wounded and pissed off.” In light of the nineties so-called “punk revolution,” truer words were never written. Just ask your local Slayer fan.