Listening with an open mind. Writing about what I hear.
Do you have something interesting you'd like to share? Write Mick at thasoundblog@gmail.com.
Twitter @thasoundblog
Queen & Judgement. Not Queen of Judgment, but more of a "Yes, and..." type of situation concerning mythic forces, as in more is more in the cornucopia of the cosmos. They arrive together as each other's steed and hussar- Oya, the Yorùbá Orisha manifestation of winds and cyclones, appearing under the mantel of Queen, and the Sky Father, Obatala, creator of the human form, riding in under the banner of Judgment. Ostentatious, sure, but we all meet our makers eventually, and I could think of more ominous conditions to do so than through an album from Toronto's Battle of Santiago. I found their 2017 LP La Migra* pretty compelling, and their 2020 release is every bit of a revelation. Battle of Santiago plays a super fly and stellar seeking mix of Latin American dance music with heavy Afro-beat influences and an anxious strain of post-rock interlaced throughout. On Queen & Judgement, the band tilts into the Afro-folk parts of their sound in an even more unapologetic way, allowing them to spin up and flourish in a maelstrom of jubilance, exploding in a catharsis of hurricane-like proportions. According to the band, their music is written to "invite everyone to dance, have fun and forget about the problems of life..." and I think this is a worthy sentiment even when things seem at their bleakest. There is only so much you can do about the problems of the world, and once you've done your part, all you can do is take solace in each other's company and permit fate to weave its course with the Queen at its back and Judgment as its guide.
*The title is an informal name for "Immigration and Customs Enforcement," a reference to the terror experienced by displaced Latin American people in the current political climate.
"I can see a major system error in you / You think one plus seven, seven, seven makes two / If your story ever, ever, ever came true / Can you keep it together, ah?"That's the starting line of The Marmozets's track "Major System Error."It's such a juicy and viciously dramatic string of phrases, all of which fill me with an explosive nemesistic zeal- so much so that I'm willing to bend one of the many unwritten rules of this blog in order to cover it.* We've all encountered someone in our lives, some short-circuiting creep who needed to have a few inches shaved off of their pride, and lines like these, delivered with the passion and courage, really do the work of making one's righteous accusations stick while leaning in close enough to flip the kill switch on the bastard. It's a prickly species of lyricism that is nearly extinct in 2024 (at least in rock music), one that is equally directed at facilitating a parable of bad dealing with bad actors, defending one's self from ego-depending manipulation, and empowering the listener to dance in a manner of free-spirited flight that only their body and spirit truthfully comprehend. About 10 years ago, you could still find a dozen bands on the radio that could pen a lyric that strips the copper-coated nerves from a malfunctioning narcissist over a floor-pounding groove in about as much time as it takes to lay down 2/5ths of a chorus, but it's seemingly a lost art now, taken over by cloistered indie and pure pop artists with more or less uneven and middling results. Even when their strengths were more widely shared though, Marmozets still stood out from the troop of their peers, especially on their second LP, 2018's Knowing What You Know Now, on which the jittery head-rush "Major System Error" is the fourth, nail-through-heart driving, track. In their day, the British pop-punk and garage band cultivated a genuinely precocious train of roller-coaster chord progressions, air-tight rhythms, down-tuned guitars, polished production quality, and gripping vocal performances. They first broke onto the scene when the majority of their members were barely 18 back in 2007 and gained the attention of the British music press through their chaotic live shows and vicious stage presence. On Knowing What You Know Now, The Marmozetstake the raw material of their 2014 debut Weird and Wonderful and use it to sculpt something sleeker, angrier, and deadlier. These are rock anthems with fangs and a deathwish, with enough hooks and natural charism to charm the pants of the devil himself. Opener "Play" breaks in with a teeth-rattling beat and layers of danceable raucous riffs, “Habit” has gluey guitar hooks and a chorus that is pandemic levels of catchy, “Meant to Be" combines juicy vocal harmonies with vengeance-seeking guitars, and “Lost in Translation” swings and stomps like the Bride of Frankenstein on a bender. Knowing what we know now about how sterile and desiccated mainstream and radio rock has become, would it be too much to ask The Marmozets to come swing back into action? It might be me going out on a limb, but I'm going to say that it's not.
*I usually avoid covering releases on major labels... and Roadrunner is definitely one of those. I honestly can't keep track of which major they're even a subsidiary of now, nor do I truly care...
Did you know there is a Dario Argento-directed film with a heavy metal soundtrack? It seems hard to believe that anything could improve upon the aesthetic perfection that his typical repertoire of sonic accompaniments achieve in cultivating a dense atmosphere of creeping danse macabre... and such skepticism is warranted because the 1985 film Phenomena (released with the title Creepers in the US) starring Jennifer Connelly, about an American teenager who uses her psychic powers to spoil the splatter-streak of a serial killer who is menacing a Swiss boarding school, doesn't actually benefit in any way from having Iron Maiden and Motorhead on its playlist- even if such coteries would seem like a compatible to the average horror fan and coke-blasted studio executive alike. Argento soundtracks are Goblin's turf, after all, and it's audacious to dethrone the Cherry Five of gore-mountain when they have the home crypt advantage- not to say that it couldn't have happened, though. Had Aggressive Perfector been stalking around three decades earlier, they might have been a suitable substitute for the job (and maybe if they could catch a jetstream through a wound in the fabric of space-time, they still could be). Despite their name paying a spiritual tithe to the thrashing blood-god Slayer, Aggressive Perfector are much better compared to groups like Venom or Merciful Fate, as the Manchester trio rarely sacrifice their penchant for camp and grimy theatrics for the sake of impressing the listener with their speed and ferocity on their debut LP Havoc At The Midnight Hour- not to say that they don't sound threatening, just their promises of peril are balanced with seedy sense of mirth. Aggressive Perfector is playing fast and loud to the cheap seats, tossing rotten meat to blighted swine, and drawing vitality and rich motivation from the chaos they reap in the surrounding squalor. They are a dragoon of sewer-zombie biker-bards, spreading the disease of perverse epicurean horror like a pox of oozing scuppers dotting the hull of listing ghostship. Gruesome giallo guardsman, eliciting a chuckle before replacing most of your teeth with their fist. Aggressive Perfector is the last thing you'd hear on a Saturday night before your blind date turns into a werewolf and eats you alive at the stroke of the midnight hour.
In keeping up with the conversation around cybergrind bands groups like Blind Equation, Zombieshark!, and others, coming across a monstrosity like Bloodbox is analogous to reeling in a "doomsday fish" somewhere in the South Pacific. At first, you're like, is this a cryptid? Is this a sign that the end is nigh? Should I call a priest? Then your frontal cortex kicks in and you realize that you've just hooked a rotted oarfish. It feels like a bit of a letdown until you realize just how weird and uncanny this lanky scallywag of the deep is in its own right. As for Bloodbox... same same in a parallel parade of introspections. Hearing their 2022 Post Human Disorder is an encounter with a creature that seems out of place in the modern world of reason and scientific explanation, but upon closer examination, it reveals itself to be categorizable, if still bizarre. The djenty guitar parts jut out with force like shards from a shattered windshield cutting through the air around your face, and the pained lab-animal-like cries that claw their way over tranquil turquoise-tinted synth melodies are drawn out like a wedge of sandpaper scraped across the ires, combined with other sinister elements, it all is giving off some seriously malevolent shades of violence, heightened by occasional breaks of bone-cracking, beat chiropractics and super-sub-terranean bass bellows that leave one entranced to groove amongst the waves of goreletting. Even though the bombardments of blastbeats, errant electronics, and frantic wreckage of chords is initially confusing and disorienting, a thread of familiarity does eventually emerge- for the better I would say. The more I make sense of what I hear, the more apparent it is that Post Human Disorder emerges as the offspring of warehouse-filling, late-last-century EDM and a wiggly window in the '00s when grindcore and d-beat seemed like constantly scrapping, conjoined twins. You could call it digital hardcore, or the more common parlance now is cybergrind (note, the band refers to themselves as breakbeat-grindcore), but Bloodbox are siphoning inspiration from a very different donor pool and are tuning in with severed ears to a distinctly chimeric chorus of muses from the metalcore and emo that preoccupies today's youths. Bloodbox, instead of synching compatible trends from the past 30 years of extreme music, are contemporaries of many of the artists that inspired today's cohort of techno-terrorizers*, meaning that they are not recycling the past so much as finding points of compromise between genres that did not co-exist happily in decades prior and forcing an accord within their living memory of desperate scenes through the tyrannical will of their maligned genius. In other words, Bloodbox isn't wading into the current flow of interpretation and simulation; they're possessed of a mutant strain of a gene that evolved into its own terrible taxonomic category long before such anomalies were considered theoretically possible by the tastemakers and take-droppers of yore. They are the OG digital debasers.
*Bloodbox formed in 2001 and released their first album a year later. To be fair, said album (Structure Against Self) is more of a noisecore outing, but it lays the blueprint that Post Human Disorder builds on and it is very clear that they are still (spiritually at least) the same band despite the decades that have passed between the releases.
I had a delightful encounter of the 5th kind with an enigmatic and musically inclined entity going by the codename SkyJelly Jones. SkyJelly is the ring lead of the (what else) SkyJelly, a merry band of galactic bards who made landfall earlier this year with their album Spirit Guide with the aid and abatement of I Heart Noise Records, delivering a mix of psychedelic desert rock and North African folk that is (literally) out of this world! You can check out my conversation with SkyJelly Jones below:
There is a bar and venue here in Chicago that used to have a feline employee named Radley. Radley sadly passed a few years back after a storied career of mousing, bouncing, coaster-shuffleboard-playing, and witnessing enough amazing live music to fill nine lives and then some. I'm pretty partial to pretty kitties in mascot roles (I mean, Jesus, look at the banner of this blog!), and it was the opportunity to potentially meet Radley that first tempted me to attend a show at said fabled venue. Alas, Radley and I never crossed paths (not in this life at least- although I did have a dream about him once...), but that hasn't deterred me from continuing to look into just about anything music-related that has a fuzzy, domesticated killing machine* as its public face- which (confession time!) is the reason I picked up Riley!'s Keep Your Cool- it's truly just a bonus that it came out on Counter Intuitive (who I like a lot) and that the band plays a super impassioned brand of 5th wave emo (something I'm also into). What gets me from the get-go and keeps me in this album's sway through its entire runtime is just how well the band manages to sell the drama that propels these songs- regardless of how mundane or trivial the slight, squabble, or snafu, I unquestionably accept that vocalist Ryan Bluhmm is going to shambles over it. Their dynamic and uncompromising performance can overwhelm you suddenly with a flash flood of emotions, catching you off guard with its sweetness before tackling and tossing you aloft in a raw-nerve twisting typhoon of piss and vinegar. It's a performance that very much matches the subject matter of these songs- we've all felt ourselves losing our cool a bit when a friend or significant other won't explain why they're mad at us, or someone disrespects you out of the blue and treats you like a disposable known quantity, but it can also be enough just have a shitty boss you dread seeing every day- more often than not, life feels tailor-made to make each and every one of us lose our god damn marbles, and it's therefore vital to have consolatory performances, like the ones on Keep Your Cool,to vindicate our ire while reassuring us that processing our thoughts and emotions in a manner that dissuads us from social self-immolation (as compelling as it might seem in the moment) is likely the best course of action. Beyond Ryan's vocal contributions and gold-standard lines like "brace yourself for the impact / close your eyes and let it go black / left the light on, thought you'd come back / eat your heart out, are you full yet!," the group has mastered a taut and rhythmic acuity for tension and release- mesmerizing the listener with sparkly guitars, balanced-but-frothy bass-line, and galloping, kick-skip drum patterns, all of which combine to contribute to the feeling that you're being pushed over the edge of a cliff by a bulldozer along with a smattering of debris from your so-called-life which you have to jerry together to construct a makeshift parachute before you Wile E Coyote all over the pavement- every near escape and ankle splintering landing is imminently met by yet another big wave or riffs and cresting hooks which drop over you like a hungry vulture and sweep you away again almost against your will. A consent calamity that still somehow manages to feel convivial. Life demands that we maintain a certain level of composure to be considered for a place amongst polite society, but when a record like Keep Your Cool is on, cracking the seal on your pent-up catharsis is not just expected; it's unavoidable.
* It's estimated that house cats kill 1.3–4 billion birds each year in the U.S... which, let's be real, is probably a way higher number than you would have told me had I asked you to simply guess at their annual body count.
After the future... that's quite the proposition, isn't it? A little while back, I got my hands on a very cheap copy of Jack Womack's socio-political crime drama Let's Put the Future Behind Usset in post-Soviet Russia, andwas struck by the portrayals of violence and corruption the book depicted as well as the ruthless fungibility of human values and social connections which such violence necessitated in a mise-en-scène where the future had abruptly and irrevocably been postponed. But what I still think about the most is the end, howafter all the murder and mayhem had ebbed, the reader is led to believe that the surviving characters were going to continue their ironic and twisted adventures well into the ensuing decades, undaunted by the perpetual patterns of gruesome misadventure that splayed out before them.This brings me back to my initial ponderance... what happens when the future's over? Do we all just roll up and die, or is there still something worth living for when all our castles have turned to ash? I'm not sure NYC's Kaleidoscope have all the answers, but they're clearly interested in prodding at the mists of time to see if they can't find a passage to the other side of this opaque cloud of destiny. After the Futures (yes, they imply that there may be more than one) is the group's one and only LP as of this writing, a rough and apocalyptic blend of hardcore and anarcho-punk that hums like a bandsaw and handles like a convertible skimming the rocky rim of a long desert canyon- tempted by gravity to topple to its doom while clinging to the rough terrain with almost more resolve than rubber. This carcass crashing burnout is brimming with chastising screeds against austerity and the "sub-prime" nature of proletarianization, the tightening noose of surveillance technology, and vampiric arrangments of extraction which drain the life force from people and places for profit. Kaleidoscope bears their oppositional political posture with every charged second of erratic, economical aggression on this album, doing everything in their power to wake the listener up and confront them with the epiphany that the dumpster fire they thought they were observing at a distance is actually the room they presently occupy, reflected back at them through the fun-house mirror of neo-liberal hegemony. Even with all these points well made, the question still remains: When that fire goes out- when this hell finally freezes over- what's next? Поживем, а там посмотрим.
If pressed, I'd tell you that I think Lumpy's honest-to-goodness place in this world is in the corner of a wood-paneled den somewhere in the Midwest, a guitar slung around his shoulder and plugged into a mini-amp, shouting out friends between songs he penned on his lunch break and talking about what an honor is to be opening for Joe Gittleman on this leg of his solo tour... I also would expect that, in a perfect world, he'd have at least one record co-signed by Rosenstock's Quote Unquote Records... But you know, sometimes the stars don't align as they should, and the former scenario, while not precluding the latter, is a whole lot more likely. What I hope you've gathered from this winding little farrago so far is that Lumpy, aka Bryan Highhill, is a musician with a low-key, home-spun, help-you-move-on-a-Saturday-no-questions-asked, nice guy sort of vibe, and a busky, tow-tone-tinted, pop-punk sound complimented by a semi-flat affect, a vocal delivery that dispatches a peppering of irony amongst fistfuls of earnest affection, ie all of the approachability of Greg Katz sans the ego-suffocating sag of sarcastic-self-awareness. His self-titled is a collection of songs that he's played for years, solo, and with the assistance of friends, for which he's finally got around to recording with a full band. His ska influences are pretty inescapable here and come out in a big way on tracks like the mopey but cautiously mirthful "House Plant," the upstroke-tickle-fight "Got a Plan," and the dubby, sun-set stained coaster "Stickler," with his two-tone tendencies emerging not just in his selection of guitar licks, but also his thrilling trumpet trills and the accompaniment of Matty Harris's boisterous sax playing. Other tracks throw the lever and jump lanes into down-tempo indie rock like the buzzy-fog of "Brainal Fatigue," which lands somewhere the aisle of Rentals-esque pawned but still serviceable spinners, while closer "Never Saw this Coming" has more than a few grams of a penny-loafer-pinching, heavy mod-molded gusto in its tank, especially near the end. This might be Lumpy's first full-effort recording with this particular set of musicians, but from my vantage point, things are already going rather smoothly. Hopefully, he'll pick it up* (ie full band recordings) again soon.
Vapor is the fifth full-length album from Brazilian ten-piece funk band Bixiga 70. Hailing from the Bixiga neighborhood of Sao Paulo, the band’s sound is deeply nurtured by the sounds of the African diaspora, mixing elements of afrobeat, reggae, and dub in a kaleidoscopic celebration of their Brazilian heritage and West African roots, serving up tracks defined by danceable grooves, liberated horn guided melodies, and an indomitable sense of fluid kinetic drive. While all this could be said of their previous work as well, there is something new and fresh about Vapor, like a gasp of cool morning air. The band had to, in many ways, reconstruct itself after the long pause that COVID imposed on Brazil, a national period of intransigence that forced many members to move on to other projects and prevented the group from inhabiting their natural habitat under the halogen glow of a warm and well-lit stage. During this phase of coalescence, the group managed to attract the talents of Pedro Regada, a keyboardist who sheaths the band's earthy boogie in a capsule of future-forward reverberation that helixes the promise of '70s utopianism with a palpable, interminable joy that rises to catch the clouds like the Mantiqueira Mountains. These tunes are so smooth they'll run through you like smoke between the fingers of an outstretched palm, swaddling you in the summary advent of an exuberant, groovy flow. Vapor feels like a message of peace beamed down from an advanced cadre of our ancestors who escaped to a nimbus-mounted castle, gliding through the stratosphere and offering instructions on how to achieve their level of enlightened apex while keeping our feet shuffling rhythmically on the ground.
Confessed to as a record examining his inner turmoil and reckoning with a history of depression and insomnia, Tyler Costolo's self-titled EP of his Ghost Fan Club project is a worthy detour from the sundrowning, distortion-well-diving trance of Two Meters. While easier on the ears and more soluble to one's consciousness, the self-titled record still grapples with a mess of constrictive emotions that bind the author to a flotsam of weighty, digressive dissolutions concerning permanence and purpose. At one point, Tyler discusses the fact that he nearly ended his own life before it had a chance to start (apparently, he was wrapped in his own umbilical cord at birth), and this revelation sets a certain tenor for the album's wider explorations of death, the void, and the parade of small tarnished wonders that strings the two together like a length of flickering and fractured Christmas lights. There is a certain affection for absences here, one which is filled out with bendy nods to the contorted psychic-musculature and preferential chord progression of Modest Mouse as well as the serenely caustic and pacifying style of strumming reminiscent of Mount Eerie's plaintive grip, styles which combine with the lyrics to give the impression that things are both out of place, and in places where they are slowly evaporating and won't be for long- a procession para-quotidian flutterings and ghosts in the process of becoming rooted to oblivion- the settling of space and erection for a clubhouse for those who have gone missing while standing in plain sight.
Superdestroyer and Leave Nelson B are two underground musicians and high-stats avatars within the greater-online DIY/emo scene. They have known each other for more than 20 years and yet have somehow managed to avoid making a record together all that time. They've released records with each other's help and guidance, of course, but they've never combined their talents before into a single project... something that's left the world wanting in its absence. That all changed this past February when Nelson dropped in on Superdestroyer for reasons that the universe has destined but not disclosed, and Nelson Come to Visit is the result, a hip-hop saturated smorgasbord of heterodoxical chiptuned emo-pop that roguishly appropriates Sega Genesis sounds to tell a SNES compatible story of IRL cooperative play with friends who are making the most of what little time they have on this hazardous and obstacle-laden map we call "Living on Planet Earth." We get into some surprisingly deep lore about the album in my recent interview with both of these gentlemen, so you might want to put on your hard hat before you dig (dug) in.
Perennial might be from the depths of Connecticut, but something about them... makes me think their real home is rubbing shoulders with casual perusers at a loft gallery studio- one with an open fridge full of off-label beer and wine- they seem like the kind group who enjoy their modern art with a chaser of brewed and micro-batched that keeps the social juices flowing- sophisticated but not snobbish- cultured without condescension, refinement sans regalia. They're a garage rock band, and somewhat of a retro-styled one at that, but not of the trucker hat, denim tuxedo dawning, Mellencamp glazing variety. No, Perennials have swerved around the draw of said backwaters drift, emerging from the tides of time looking fresh and pretty from the rinse on their third LP Art History. Taking a stucco-strewn, art pop approach to classic R'n'B brushed mod rock, the group performs a bristly, pip-cleaner tapered testament to '50s flair and new wave-esque lightly varnish pop-glimmer. Not quite as filthy as the Dirtbombs but more viscerally keeled than the Lyres, they strike the center of a supple cleft between bombast and bridled restraint that cuts a vital edge around each hook with a sculptor's eye before dropping them in succession on the listener like a stack of limited-run flatware from three stories up- the impact is immediate and lasting, and you're going to be marveling at the precious little bits of bejeweled porcelain and ditty-bop melodies you'll be picking out of your skull for weeks following the encounter. Small-batch, sparingly shaped, but with mass appeal, Prennial's hi-fi high jinks are the kind of art that aims to make history.
Back in 2022, Detriot four-piece Saajtak released their LP For the Makers on American Dream Records. Built primarily on improvisation, the 10 tracks on the album present a flavorful and exotic breath of cosmos-spanning operatics and sinewy, sweat-and-blood stained pit-orchestrations, with the vibrance and chaos of a clique of early '80s post-punk musician squatting in a dilapidated machinist's loft. Somewhere between Bjork's '90s work, found sounds collections, clambering echos of post-industrial-folk, the local philharmonic, and the brazen, worn-heal boogie of Primal Scream, For the Makers crystallized as a singular axis point of clear and constant creative energy.
I was able to get in touch with the band for an interview about their LP around the time of its release, but for various reasons, I wasn't able to post it until now. For the Makers is still a wonderful album, and I think the life of everyone who hears it is slightly richer for having encountered its strange and incongruous grace. Anytime is the right time to let an album like this one fill your ears and preoccupy your waking mind with dreams.
AK: Alex Koi JBT: Jonathan Barahal Taylor
BW: Ben Willis SAA: Simon Alexander-Adams
How did you settle on the name Saajtak, and what does it mean?
JBT: There’s some amount of mystery enshrouding the origins of the name, and that’s kind of the point. The sound of it (pronounced sahge-talk) rolls off the tongue and to me elicits a feeling of deep presence, like a sacred space. On its own it means nothing but in the context of our music it somehow describes everything.
Tell me a little bit about what it has been like for musicians in Detroit these past couple of years.
JBT: I don’t think it’s been appreciably different than in other cities: Everything ground to a halt [during COVID] which was hard for everyone, then after a few months people started to emerge and there were all of a sudden a slew of lovely and creative performances in non-traditional spaces. I participated in and witnessed some really wonderful shows in various public parks that drew a much broader slice of the community than your typical club or performance space, which was very refreshing. Detroit is a place where you can make your own opportunities, and I think the pandemic reinforced that conviction. I also noticed, at least among those closest to me, a clarification of purpose. Detroit values the hustle and musicians in particular can really spread themselves thin, so it was nice to see what could be accomplished when people finally had time to figure out what matters most to them. A lot of friends abandoned the things that no longer served them and devoted themselves wholly to making the most affecting, impactful and personal work that they can.
What is your favorite place to play in Detroit?
BW: Trinosophes has an energy that can’t be beat, it’s been a special place to me over the years, and playing there is always a treat.
AK: I like Trinosophes also - they have great programming. We haven’t played at Third Man, but I’ve enjoyed going to shows there.
Where do you like to play in Chicago?
BW: There are many lovely spots in Chicago. My favorite shows with Saajtak have been at the Hideout and Empty bottle, where the sound and vibe were really excellent. I’ve also had many great experiences at Elastic Arts – and sharing shows with Chicago bands is always fun and surprising.
JBT: Also have had great experiences playing at Cafe Mustache and Constellation. Always floored by the number of amazing spaces to play in Chicago.
How did you get connected American Dreams?
BW: I believe we first met Jordan at a bill we shared in Detroit with ONO at the Strange Beautiful Music Festival. We stayed in touch over the years, and set up some shows for each other in Detroit and Chicago – I remember Jordan telling me he was starting American Dreams when we played with him at Cafe Mustache, on a really cool bill he’d arranged. I’ve admired the work that Jordan’s done platforming and creating interesting music, and he’s built up a real nice team of folks at ADR. It was a real honor that they had room for our project by the time we had For the Makers to offer.
Which "Makers" is For the Makers dedicated to specifically?
BW: For me, the time we were writing the music of FTM was a time of deep reflection on those people who’ve kept me going over the years, and who have been examples of the kind of person I’m aiming to be. There have been numerous times for me when life has felt like a slog, and some creative person empowered me to push through: bandmates, inspiring performers. The first person to do this for me was my first role model, my sister. She’s now an educator and mother in Detroit.
AK: Our album is for the Ancestors, to those who came before.
JBT: We started working on this music at the height of lockdown, when there was really nothing going on. I felt extremely fortunate to be engaged in this project with people I loved and to have meaningful creative work to take my mind away from the crippling uncertainty we all faced. So many friends and artists experienced profound pain without that kind of outlet, and they were also the “Makers” that I had in mind.
What are some of the music reference points and influences for this album in particular?
SAA: We all have relatively diverse music tastes and influences which all come together when we collaborate on our compositions. At the time we were writing this music I was listening to a fair bit of Floating Points, The Comet is Coming and Amon Tobin’s side project Only Child Tyrant. I’m sure there are subtle elements of these artists that made their way into my own contributions to the album, though it is always difficult to point to specifics in the way such things go.
BW: When writing and working on music I tend to explicitly avoid drawing specifically from any particular influence, because I feel like it’s important to allow the music to lead me into its own space. While we were writing this album, I was not listening to much music, but when I did, I was almost exclusively listening to the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. A few artists who I have found really inspiring musically and otherwise over these past few years are Ingeborg von Agassiz, Annika Socolofsky, Anna Meredith, clipping., and My Brightest Diamond.
How do you think you've grown as artists since 2017's Spokes EP, and how do you feel that growth manifests on For the Makers?
BW: Over the years, we’ve continuously grown and evolved our voice as a band. There is some consistent musical language from Spokes EP through the present, but to me, For the Makers feels significantly more mature and intimate than our previous music. As we crafted this album, I was consistently surprised and impressed to hear the best work that I’ve heard from my companions: Alex’s lyrics and melodies, particularly (for me) on Leak in the Shielding and For the Makers, have reached new levels of wisdom and personal expression. Jon’s explorations of timbre and orchestration, adding electronics and vibraphone on tracks like "Mightier Mountains Have Crumbled," and "Oak Heart," extended the emotional reach of the worlds of these songs in new ways. Simon’s part writing was really essential to heightening the impact of the forms of these songs, and his instincts for crafting sound worlds is ever sharper. Working with this band always makes me reflect deeply on my musical practice, and makes me challenge myself to reach for more.
JBT: Our group dynamic, both musically and interpersonally, has developed so much since Spokes. Back then we were just starting to understand our group sound and figuring out how to work with each other. Collaboration requires so much patience, compassion, clarity and compromise, and can be fraught with tension without open communication. Crafting For the Makers was a very long process that included a lot of deep, passionate, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations. It could be frustrating at times for all of us, but I have no doubt that it made the music stronger. To me that reflects the profound trust in each other that we’ve cultivated over the years.
Are your compositions still largely based around improvisation? What is it about this writing style that suits you?
AK: Improvisation serves our music most when we’re composing together in the same room and when we’re performing. When we’re improvising, our four voices are simultaneously establishing the atomic structure and characteristics of the sonic elements in a song. Because For the Makers was recorded and composed remotely, we played individual executives in one-on-one time with each track, and could make personal decisions on the very nature of the song’s elements. FTM became thus less improvisational as a whole than our previous work. Improvisation has suited our music because it supports every member’s authentic voice to be heard. The flexibility of improvisation has taught us to be truthful and thoughtful in each moment, which lets our songs be malleable in a live setting, which is more fun to me than playing a song the same way night after night.
JBT: For me it comes down to intent and sincerity. From a process standpoint, I don’t see much distinction between a spontaneous and immediate improvised musical setting and plotting out a composition over the course of days, weeks or months. In either case I’m focusing on making decisions that resonate with me emotionally in the moment and that I feel genuinely compliment the surrounding material. The only real difference is temporal. Improvisation is at its core the practice of being present, which is extremely powerful in all aspects of life. Musically speaking it (among other things) keeps ideas from calcifying and to that end, I think one of our strengths as a band is our willingness to change our material, sometimes drastically, to better suit the energy of the moment.
BW: For me, the process of writing this album felt like a protracted improvisation lasting the entire year. I’m probably the only one, haha. Improvisation is the core of my musical practice, and so it is the starting point for anything I would try to do.
Do you see For the Makers as a different sort of album in terms of your general discography, and if so how?
SAA: Before this release our method of writing music relied heavily on composing music together in a room. We would improvise together, and through multiple rehearsals and performances slowly hone the form of our songs. Even after recording them they would continue to shift through improvisation and exploration in performance. Because of their fluidity it always felt challenging to fully capture them in the recording process. The songs were created for live performance, and felt best in live spaces. With For the Makers, we were pushed to write music remotely out of necessity due to the pandemic. The change in process led to music that was created as a recording first, and I personally think they are our strongest recordings for this reason. It also allowed us to explore the songs individually for longer periods of time, which meant we could each craft our parts extensively outside of a group rehearsal setting. We’re now in the process of arranging these songs for live performance. It’s been exciting to find creative ways to pare down these songs for a live setting.
BW: Beyond the process being quite different, For the Makers feels to me like the most complete work we’ve been able to make, for the reasons Simon cites. While I’m still quite proud of our other recordings, they were recorded with limited amounts of studio time–and I feel like in some ways they are documentations of songs whose energy was really conveyed in a live setting. With FTM, there were certainly challenges to being separated, but since we were each working in our own studios, we could take the time to state exactly what we meant, and negotiate things to the point that we were sure we were saying what was intended. It was also awesome to have Chris Koltay mixing this record; it helped to have someone we trust to really “get” our music to send these sessions to. We’d started recording a different album in the studio with Chris in 2019 (still finishing that material up!) so we had an established rapport and appreciated his wavelength.
Your music is very easy to move to. In your opinion, is this an intentional by-product or a secondary effect of your music?
AK: Thank you for saying this! I call us a dance band all the time.
SAA: I would say this is an intentional effect of our music. As a performer I’m always moving to the music, and I think to a degree this is part of the process of musical expression (not trying to make any absolutist statements here, just speaking from my own experience.) Some of our music uses odd-time signatures, but it’s important that it’s never done solely for the sake of complexity. The music needs to feel right and at least for me being able to move to it is a sort of subconscious litmus test. If I can’t move to my part—if it doesn’t feel right—then something needs to change.
Tell us about the collaborations and features on For the Makers? How did you approach these partnerships, and what did each bring to the album?
BW: For the first couple of months we were working on these tracks, I don’t think it was apparent we had an album on our hands. The idea to include other friends and collaborators came naturally – Marcus Elliot is a good friend, and we had previously done some live collaboration: he was the first we included in a rotation, and Jon took contributions from Marcus to compose the framework for Borders. Then these songs grew into a set of works, and a title emerged: For the Makers. It was really special for me to have Pat Reinholz play cello on this record – he’s one of my oldest friends, and someone who helped shape a lot of my musical processes and priorities–we lived together and wrote music as a duo for four years in Madison, Wisconsin. For this collaboration, I wrote a poem score dedicated to Pat, that he interpreted while tracking to "Oak Heart." As the tracks continued to take shape, I took all of his tracks off "Oak Heart" and composited them into the layers of sound instead on "Queen Ghost Speaks." Alex had the idea to work with the incredible David Magumba on "Oak Heart," and she worked together with him to craft their amazing duet on that song. Kaleigh Wilder and Kirsten Carey are some of our favorite musicians who we are lucky to have as friends, and we enlisted them to improvise and play with some layers of sound to flesh out "Big Exit" – they both did some amazing work that wound up fitting into the final track. Can’t wait for future opportunities to work with them.
With all your expressive prowess, Saajtak still strikes me as primarily a rock band. What is it about the dynamics of a rock band and rock music in general that is so accommodating to your artistic vision?
AK: Electricity is crucial to the meaning of this band. Electronic processing, manipulation, distortion, echo, delay… There’s a bending of sound and a bigness of sound that makes Saajtak a rock band, absolutely.
BW: The sound of the band has definitely been shaped by the spaces we played and the bills we played on. Most of the spots we’ve played have been rock clubs, DIY spaces, places that it felt right to play loud. In terms of the interaction of our parts and the way we listen as a group, I think we play a lot like a string quartet. But Energy and Heaviness are a big part of what we like to relay, and rock music is great for that.
Would you describe yourselves as avant-garde? Do you think the term is overapplied?
BW: As a band playing music that is more or less outside genre, it is a term that is hard to avoid. It can be a double-edged sword, in that while some find a search for “newness” to be exciting, it can turn off people who connect it with pretentiousness or a kind of adversarial weirdness. And maybe there is something a bit pretentious in describing your own music as “avant garde” because that’s a distinction that might need to be made over time. I think our music is often seeking to find new sounds, timbres, rhythmic combinations, so in that way it’s fair, I think, to describe it as experimental–but these ‘experiments’ are always in service of deepening our expression, and playing off of communicating with each other.
JBT: I don’t find it particularly accurate or helpful. There are so many musical territories that we explore because we feel it makes a stronger album or more complete song, but calling that avant-garde feels like a convenient way to avoid actually dealing with the music. If one song has frenetic textural elements in between a four on the floor repetitive dance groove, does that make it part pop and part avant-garde? At that point it’s easier to just talk objectively about what’s happening in the song and how we respond to it emotionally. I recognize the utility of genre classification for marketing purposes, and if I hear someone describe themselves as a “jazz” artist or a “rock” band or an “electronic” musician, as incomplete and problematic as those terms are, I at least can ground their music to some facet of a particular musical culture and tradition. That would have been the case in the distant past for “avant-garde,” when it connoted a social movement within the arts, but now most people that use it to describe themselves or their work are, in my experience, coming from a place of pretentiousness and exclusivity (on the other hand, terms like experimental music or creative music are more grounded to a vibrant culture, lineage and community). I view it as a reductive catch-all to dismiss something as weird and alienating, when we should instead be speaking about music specifically and on its own terms.
