Boyfrienders – The Lower East Side Blues | Track Premiere

Today I’m excited and honored to present the newest song from Boyfrienders called “The Lower East Side Blues.” This is the fifth and final single off the band’s upcoming album Scenes of Brooklyn or Meditations on Mid​-​Twenties Mediocrity out March 20th on Good Luck Charm Records. The track recounts lead singer Benny Morawa’s process coming to terms with being nonbinary and what that means both for themselves and to those around them. It’s a remarkable statement, a vital perspective, and a downright groovy synthpop cut from what’s sure to be another breakout act from the exploding Michigan scene.

First off, while I think the song speaks for itself, I’d like to give you a space to explain the background and your process of coming out to the world as a genderqueer individual.
When I was seventeen years old, I started questioning my personal gender identity and came to the conclusion that I didn’t feel like I really fit within the social construct that is the man/woman gender binary. Originally, I did not know how to really let that manifest, but I started building a social circle of other genderqueer/trans/non-binary individuals and it became clear that there absolutely was a community that I belonged to. I didn’t start coming out to close friends and family until about three years ago, and “The Lower East Side Blues” will be me coming out to the rest of the world. This is terrifying in a way because I’m coming out to all of the people who would give me the most scrutiny over it. The thing that helps is knowing that I have the confidence in myself now to not care what other people think of me. I’m happy with my life, and the fact that they are so miserable with themselves that they have to look down on me for not fitting within “gender norms” or whatever is honestly kind of sick because I know that I’m leading a much happier and fulfilling life. Also, it’s honestly dope that someone would care that much about something that does not affect them because it’s very entertaining. 


This song feels very pointed with a clear message. What was the writing process like for you?
My writing process is very influenced by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, so therefore I always am writing lyrics that immediately come across as blunt and straightforward. In regards to writing the lyrics, they came to me very naturally because they are things that I’ve been feeling about my gender identity for a very long time, and I felt as if writing the driving instrumental first really helped with that. I feel that both lyrics and instrumental fit together absolutely perfectly.

Speaking of the instrumental, the song feels like a spaghetti western future disco, how did that come to life, and why did it feel like the best fit for these lyrics
For the past year, I’ve been on this 80’s synthpop kick, both in regards to the music that I’ve been writing and the music I have been consuming as well. I originally wrote this track on a Suzuki OmniChord which can actually still be heard during the choruses of the studio recording, and then decided to take it into a super drive-y and Mountain Goats-esque direction from there. After the groundwork was laid, I brought in Boyfrienders rhythm guitarist/synth player Matthew Stonebraker to record some electric guitar, and the instrumental was completed. I feel that the tone of the instrumental fits the lyrics perfectly because they are both immediately blunt and in-your-face.


This track has some of the wildest guest features I’ve ever seen. How did you link up with Felix Beiderman and Garrett Hunter?
Strangely enough, through Instagram DM’s. In regards to the intro part, I was hearing it in my head in front of the actual track ever since I wrote it, and I could only instinctually hear it in Felix’s voice. I had talked to him before about things such as workout tips and the like, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to him about recording the intro, and he was immediately down to do it. The fact that Garrett is doing the outro makes me feel super pumped because he was technically where the band name came from in the first place, so the fact that things come full-circle in that regard is something that makes me very happy. I reached out to Garrett the same way I reached out to Felix, just through Instagram DM’s.

The record is out in one week and is easily on the shortlist for the best album title of the year. How does the story of this song fit into Scenes of Brooklyn or Meditations on Mid​-​Twenties Mediocrity?
Thank you so much for that! Honestly, the album name was a relatively last-second decision; it had been called “The J-Train" up until about mid-January, and I decided to change it to the current title because it made more sense when thinking about the tracklist and settings. Originally, I had the concept of each track being its own self-contained story taking place on sequential stops of the J-line subway train in Brooklyn, but as things started developing, I began to feel weird as some of the track locations weren’t lining up with the J-train line and stops. So, with that in mind, I changed the album title to the current one because it makes more sense to set the concept in Brooklyn overall instead of just the J-Train stops. Also, the themes addressed in each track are things that I’ve noticed myself and many of the people around me in their mid-twenties have gone through. These relatable themes, loosely connected by setting and location, fit within the album concept of going through changes and being okay with those changes as you begin to consider yourself a full-on adult. 



“The Lower East Side Blues” is the only track that doesn’t take place in Brooklyn proper, but the themes remain relatable and important to many of the people around me, and at the end of the day, this takes priority.

What do you hope that the listener takes away from this song?
That it’s absolutely natural to feel the feelings that you do in regards to gender identity no matter how confusing they may seem, and it’s completely understandable to be afraid to come out. I recognize the inherent privilege that I have in regards to being able to come out publicly through this method. You will forever be loved, and you will forever be valid to a community of people around you who feel the exact same feelings. Gender is absolutely, 100% fucking fake, and you will always be welcomed by a community that will love and care for you for eternity. 

Invite The Neighbors Podcast Interview

Ever wondered what my voice sounds like? Ever wanted to know the origins of Swim Into The Sound? Do you want to know what my favorite thing I’ve ever written was? Well, the answers to those questions and more will all be revealed in the newest episode of Invite The Neighbors.

Bryan Porter of In A Daydream invited me on to his DIY podcast to discuss this very blog. We covered the first posts I ever wrote, the (questionable) first concert I was ever paid to review, and why I love doing this despite how much time, effort, and money it consumes.

So please give it a listen, and check out some of the other interviews. Thank you Bryan for the awesome chat, and for being such a gracious host. 

Give the podcast a listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or through this link.

Welcome To Stars Hollow: An Interview with Tyler Stodghill

If nothing else, our lives are marked by constant change. People can enter your life without warning and leave just as fast. Sometimes their departure is your fault, and sometimes it’s out of your control. Sometimes you form lifelong friendships, and sometimes you find a soulmate just for one night. No matter what these connections look like or what form they take in our lives, these intertwining stories mean that nothing in life is ever permanent. 

This feeling of irreversible loss is exactly what Stars Hollow have captured on their 2018 EP Happy Again. The idea that these important figures enter your life and then leave… that’s an inevitability. At first it stings. Then you feel numb. Then life leaves you no choice but to move on. How we handle those losses is what defines us.

On Happy Again, Tyler Stodghill took this process of loss and crystallized it in a concise and emotional 11-minutes. It feels as if the songs are leading you through every stage of grief in a hyper-compressed timeline, spitting you out on the other side a stronger person. It’s pure catharsis. It’s every breakup you’ve ever experienced. Every death that’s affected you. Every ounce of unrequited adoration that ever went unreciprocated. 

To capture these feelings in such a condensed piece of art is nothing short of a feat, so I sat down with Stodghill, the vocalist, guitarist, and principal writer behind Stars Hollow to learn about his creative process and what’s next for him. 

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How did the throughline concept for Happy Again come about?

I was doing my internship for college at a grief support organization. They were having me format and check these grief fact sheets that focused on different topics. I read some of them when I was bored. I came across one about spousal death, and it said something about how being happy after their death is possible, even if things are different. I started thinking about my own life at the time. I was going through a rough patch and I was kind of homeless. I wrote down “it’s not that you won’t be happy again, you just won’t be the same as you were before.” And it just felt right to revolve all of the songs around that concept.

What are some of the biggest influences for your upcoming full-length, and what has changed since the EPs?

The only emo I really listen to at this point comes from bands I’m friends with. Charmer and Origami Angel are two of my favs, and I think I learned a lot from each band about songwriting. Both can make really simple things sound beautiful and really complex things sound intuitive which has impacted my writing I think. 

Otherwise I listen to a lot of pop/singer-songwriter music that has influenced how I approach lyrics and melodies. Our new songs are definitely still super riffy, but what has changed a lot is the approach to making sure the whole song is good rather than just having a cool riff. I want anybody to be able to hear a Stars song and like it, not just Midwest emo kids.

Your album covers, merch, and tour art feel like they all perfectly encapsulate the sound and feel of your music, how did your relationship with Alexis Politz begin?

Thank you! Alexis is the literal best. She was recommended to us by a friend from Minneapolis when we were looking for artists in 2015. She designed our first EP artwork and a couple of shirts and it just clicked. It felt like everything she created fit our music so well. She just kept getting better, and by the time we recorded Happy Again, it was a no brainer. I definitely want her to do our full-length art/branding as well. 

She also deals very well with me sporadically asking for designs and gets them to us when we need them. Couldn’t ask for a better artist to work with because not many would appreciate my scattered brain.

There’s a really cool scene happening right now centered around you guys, Jail Socks, Origami Angel, and Commander Salamander. How have those relationships changed your creative process and/or how you interact with the community?

I mentioned above a bit how Gami’s influenced how I approach songwriting a bit. That whole crew has helped me loosen up in relation to how I present the band online, which helps people relate to us better. I think the biggest thing is the fact that we feel like we belong somewhere now. We didn’t really have that feeling until we started talking to Gami and Comma Salad. We met them and Jail Socks on a tour with Charmer and that was a pretty cool tour for that reason alone. It’s super cool to know we have good people who are great artists backing us. 

Earlier this year you released “Tadpole.” How did that song come about, and where does it stand in relation to Happy Again?

I just kind of started trying to write after Happy Again came out. I actually wrote the first riff for Tadpole when we were recording a music video for a song from our four-way split a couple of years ago. I sat on it for a while and then revisited it last year and ended up making a song out of it. We demoed it all out and all liked the song so we were like “let’s go record it.” It’s a pretty solid representation of where our music is going and it’s my favorite song to open our set with. It was actually supposed to be on a split, but I wanted it to be out because I’m impatient.

You’ve posted a video of yourself at sixteen screaming to blessthefall. As someone who also grew up on that “era” of metal, how important was that genre of music on your life? Are there any acts from that scene you’d cite as a major influence on your current vocal style?

It was super important! I still listen to that era of music pretty regularly. I loved mallcore and I was a major scene kid for a bit. I joke around a lot that the song structures I use (or lack of) come from Woe, Is Me and Attack Attack and it’s honestly pretty accurate. Their songs just jumped from part to part and I loved that unpredictability. Vocally, it’s not much of an influence anymore. It was a good introduction to start using my voice in weird ways though!

Where does I’m Really Not That Upset About It stand in your mind? You’ve described it as ‘songs you wrote when you didn’t know what you were doing’ is that just self-deprecation, or a case of three years changing your relationship with the music?

A little of both. I think “Embarrassed” is a good song. I think the rest are okay, but I don’t like my vocals or much of my lyrical content on that EP. I become detached from music I write fairly quickly if I don’t regularly play the songs. I think it was important, and I’m grateful some people cared about it, but I don’t hold any songs close from it besides Embarrassed. 

*trying to research Gilmore Girls* Team Jess or Team Dean?

Team Logan

What led you to vocal therapy and how has it changed your approach to performing?

I got super sick and stayed sick for about three weeks. My voice stayed messed up for another couple of weeks. I thought I had a nodule on my vocal cords because I lost a lot of range. My voice kept cracking and didn’t seem to be improving. I had an endoscopy done, which was weird as hell. They said my vocal folds were super irritated, likely from silent acid reflux and allergies. So they put me on meds for that stuff and referred me to the vocal therapist!

It’s made me think a lot about how I treat my voice. I’ve always had a very “fuck it” approach to vocal care and going to vocal therapy has helped me value it. I’m learning a lot about warm-ups and relaxation techniques and breathing and I think it’s going to help a lot moving forward. Especially in the studio, recording for hours a day can get really difficult. I’m hoping what I learn can help in that setting the most.

You post acoustic covers of your songs on social media pretty often. Is this a major part of your songwriting process? Have you ever considered recording a fully-acoustic EP?

I really want to do an acoustic EP, but it’s just a matter of taking the time to do it. I tend to practice songs on my acoustic a lot and sometimes write that way too. I write my vocals while playing on an acoustic pretty frequently. It’s just easier to get a good foundation that way and then adjust when we play full band and I yell a bit more.

You’re about to embark on a nationwide tour with the awesome Origami Angel. Aside from sharing your music, what are you looking to get out of that experience and what’s most important for it to be a rewarding experience?

I’m excited to get closer to my bandmates. I haven’t done a full tour with a single person who will be in that minivan. Gavin joined pretty recently on bass, Sage from niiice. is filling in on drums, and our friend B is tour managing and doing photos and basically being mom. It’s a lot of fresh faces for me and that’s exciting. I’m way excited to meet new people too, including internet friends. I’m excited to play shows in places I’ve never seen before. And we get to hang with Pat, Ry, and Lex (Chatterbot) for three weeks and it’s just going to be so fun. I love those people so damn much.

Being in a band is literally just about saying fuck it and doing something, whether people care or not. No one has to care. The whole point is to make people care and give them a reason. Just doing the tour will be rewarding in itself because we get to show people every night why they should care about what we’re doing.

You can purchase Happy Again on Bandcamp or stream it on Spotify. Stars Hollow is about to embark on a nationwide tour with Origami Angel this summer, find the dates here.

Photos provided by Shiara Crilly.

The Elephant Visual Album

When I trace my musical history back to its origins, there are four or five key discoveries from my childhood that have gone on to become foundational cornerstones of my taste. I’ve written about many of them here from my first iPod and 2006 pop music to entire genres that I stumbled into by accident all thanks to people with better taste than me. I measure my life with music, and these events have all become part of my personal mythology; milestones that have gone on to inform not only my taste, but who I am as a person.

I was fortunate enough to grow up with a dad who cared about music. While that mostly relegated itself to me raiding his CD collection to rip classic rock albums onto my iPod, there were also a small handful of (then) modern bands that we bonded over as I began to show an interest in music. The shared section of our musical Venn Diagram has expanded over the years as my taste has continued to mature, grow, and spiral in unexpected ways, but the first “new” band my Dad and I found common ground with was none other than The White Stripes. 

Luckily, because my dad loved The White Stripes, this meant I had the band’s entire discography at my fingertips. He owned their studio albums, B-sides, singles, live albums, demos, side projects, you name it. As a result, I have a worryingly-deep connection to (and knowledge of) Jack White’s musical catalog.

Around this same time, I was also taking guitar lessons. Aside from the standard “starter” songs like “Smoke On The Water” and “Pipeline,” The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” proved to be low-hanging, easy-playing fruit for a 10-year-old Taylor. Between borrowing the CDs and playing the songs, I showed enough of an interest that my dad decided to take me to see the group on tour in 2003 for my second concert ever. 

While I’ll admit that the 1.5-decade marination time of nostalgia plays a huge part in it, Elephant remains one of my favorite albums of that genre, this era, and my entire life. Hits and overplayed singles aside, there’s a lot to love about Elephant, and there’s a reason it remains the band’s most enduring release this many years later. 

Literally every track on Elephant hits. “Seven Nation Army” is an unparalleled anthem of the early-2000’s. “Hardest Button to Button” bears one of the best drumlines of the decade. “Ball and Biscuit” is one of my favorite songs of all time with its lumbering blues riff that slowly erupts into blistering guitar solos. There isn’t a wasted moment or an unpolished idea. Elephant is rock in its purest form. A feeling that can’t quite be put into words made by two people with two instruments. Perfect.

As eye-opening as Elephant was, sometimes your favorite albums can slide into the background of your life without you ever noticing. New music, other mediums, or life events can keep you from venturing back, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, this had absolutely happened to me with The White Stripes. It’s almost like taking art for granted. I’d listened to Elephant so many times, heard “Seven Nation Army” in so many different movies and TV shows and commercials that at a certain point it just kind of feels like “well, yeah, everyone knows this album is great, so what’s the point?” 

While my relationship with Elephant is ongoing, a chance encounter with a designer completely renewed my love for the record with a project that was crafted as lovingly as the album itself. Sometimes the classics are not only worth revisiting, but worth diving into on a microscopic level, and that’s exactly what Chandler Cort did with this beloved album. 

Creating what he calls a “visual album” Chandler transposed Elephant onto a 9-foot scroll that tracks the entire record second-by-second. Interpreting each instrument’s volume and the exact starting point for every word sung, Chandler’s creation is one-of-a-kind and unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in my life. There’s something to be said for standing face-to-face with one of your favorite records and taking in the entire thing as it towers above you.

While it’s impossible to translate the feeling of interacting with the scroll itself, I wanted to share this beautiful and original piece of art with as many people as possible. Not only was Chandler kind enough to let me share his incredible work on Swim Into The Sound, but he also sat down with me to talk about the process that went into making it as well as his personal background with the band. So without further adieu, I’m excited to present The Elephant Visual Album. 

Full-resolution PDF version of the Elephant Visual Album at the end of the article.
 

The Visual Album and Its Creator: An Interview With Chandler Cort

Much like Taylor, I have a very distinct memory of my introduction to the White Stripes. I came to the party very late, as my parents found it borderline impossible to break away from anything outside of the typical 60’s - 80’s hits they grew up with.

There aren’t many specific events in my life that I would refer to as “life-changing,” but hearing “Rag and Bone” for the first time in my high school art class was absolutely one of them. My obsession with the White Stripes began with Icky Thump and worked its way back to the very beginning of the group’s discography until I had completely immersed myself in everything they had ever produced. The White Stripes were something I listened to exclusively for months. When I wasn’t listening to them, I found myself watching interviews with the members, reading about their history, and completely immersing myself in the group’s mythology. I had never quite felt myself become so taken by a band before.

Six years later, the White Stripes are still one of my favorite bands, if not my all-time favorite. Jack and Meg White have taken hold of a very big piece of my heart, and I don’t know if that will ever be able to be eclipsed.

The way the project really came about was kind of funny. I was in my first infographics class at Portland State University, and we were told to make a timeline for our first project. The professor made sure he kept things very open-ended, so we had the choice to do an incredibly accurate historical timeline, or we could do something more whimsical like a timeline of the Harry Potter Universe.

I remember going on break one day listening to Elephant, and thinking “it would be funny to do an infographic on the number of times Jack White goes, ‘WOO!’ in one album.” So that’s where it really kinda started. I refined my guidelines a little bit further and decided that I would track the main instruments: guitar, drums, and piano, as well as the vocals. 

The process for this piece is something I feel just as proud of as the actual work itself. All of my research for this project was done entirely audibly. I printed all of the lyrics to every song, and I would sit down at my desk every day, listen to the song, and get the second-by-second timestamps for every lyric, and then go back through, and repeat the same process for the guitar, drums, and piano. This means I listened to every song at least three or four times in full, not counting pausing, rewinding, and playing again to make sure the time signatures were as accurate as possible.

In addition to the individual instrument timelines, each song also got a “genre gauge” that I had designed too. Because Elephant is such a diverse album, I feel like it was very important to describe how each song was different in comparison to the others. Every song was ranked on a scale of punk, blues, folk, and pop, with the end result being a circular graph that represented the track’s sonic texture. 

This was then translated into a second graph that I constructed to help best visualize the album in its entirety. I’d guess this project took somewhere between 40-45 hours total. It was truly a monster, which can be seen in the final 9-inch by 9-foot print. I remember people telling me in class that I was doing was ridiculous, and that I was crazy for even attempting something like this, which honestly just kind of pushed me to do it even more.

A lot of my design work has been very music-focused, and I have done very intense pieces about other albums I love, but I feel like this one is probably the most accessible, and the most interesting. I describe this piece as a visual album because I feel like it is the most literal visual translation of an auditory piece. I’m so happy that this piece has received the reaction it has, and I’m incredibly thankful that Taylor was moved enough to offer me this opportunity, and I hope to be here again someday. 

Until then everyone, be good, and love what you listen to.

To see the Elephant Visual Album in its full hi-res glory click here.

James Li Explains 'Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound' Track By Track

Last month, UK-based musician James Li released his expansive ambient album Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound. The second record released under the Ministry of Interior Spaces moniker, the album is a soul-searching 39-minute meditation on depression, beauty, and life in the face of obliteration. 

While we caught up with him earlier this month for an interview, each track of the album is a multi-faceted work that’s deserving of its own analysis. Luckily James was willing to give us the details of what went into each song’s creation on both a technical and spiritual level. Here is his track by track guide to Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound.

Track 1. Katie’s Apartment WA

The opening track was meant to be recorded live guerrilla-style at the Tate Modern. The London museum holds these repurposed oil tanks with an incredible fourteen-second reverb. But when I finally got there to record they’d just put in a new installation, so I recorded it at home instead. This was probably for the best.

After making a scratch track, I asked my incredible Seattle musician friend Katie Kuffel to send me vocal parts. I stayed at Katie’s apartment in Seattle when I went cold turkey on my SSRIs. It was a really dark time in my life but I think going out to visit her and other kind friends helped me stay alive. This is what I thought about while writing this track - a starting place of peace amid great turmoil overlooking Puget Sound.

Julianna Barwick was the biggest inspiration for this piece. There was a whole other version of Katie’s Apartment that was three minutes longer and more noise-based with samples of Seattle boats and foghorns. I was committed to it for a long time, but it didn’t work well as an introductory track.

Track 2. Hoyt Arboretum OR

I talked about its story extensively in this premiere - but on that same Seattle trip I took a bus to Portland alone, staying with a fan I’d never met before. It was raining, I was getting bad withdrawal symptoms, and listening to a leak of Carrie & Lowell.

At the crux of it I got lost and found myself in a nature preserve on a hill overlooking Portland. It stopped raining, the sun shone, and everything sort of came together at once. I felt the most incredible pain and joy at the same time, which is also a withdrawal symptom. That experience is what this track is about.

Hoyt Arboretum OR is made mostly from warbly guitar pushed through two delay pedals, and an improvised upright piano recorded from a significant distance (an SM57 six meters away). The OP-1 fills in the rest, while the reversed sample is a Totally Legal recording I took during a Sufjan concert in Cincinnati. It’s from the outro of Blue Bucket of Gold.

Track 3. C64 Falls ID

This particular piece was inspired by Bing & Ruth. I wanted to create a flowy piano-based piece with post-rock guitar as an ethereal undercurrent, representing the sensation of being carried underwater. The growling underneath is my electric guitar being fed into a granulator - I was scratching and scraping the strings while tapping the body. The broody trombone parts are by a Liverpool musician called John Denno - I love how mysterious and bodily they sound. The Montana river sample I used here is actually the last recording I made on my first TASCAM before losing it later that day (more on that next).

C64 Falls kind of looks like Lower Yellowstone Falls, except there are streams of code running down it if you look carefully enough on a sunny day.

Track 4. TASCAM Mountains MT

This was one of the first tracks I made for this album. The bulk of it was recorded in Japan during a work trip. 80% of it was done on the OP-1 and mixed on its inbuilt DAW. Denno plays the trumpet here which I think really completes the track, giving it its lyrical voice.

Musically it’s very inspired by Disasterpiece as I’d been playing Hyper Light Drifter a lot, an indie game that he’d soundtracked. I love how Disasterpeace uses entirely virtual instruments but degrades them until they sound undeniably physical. Destruction is also a recurring theme on this album, and you can hear it clearly in this track - the way the synths crumble and tailspin at the end of every sequence.

The sample was taken in the California desert with an airplane flying overhead. The gross wet sounds at the end are the “Paint Pots” at Yellowstone. I also utilised the same guitar-granulator method I used on “C64 Falls.”

I refer back to this narratively in the very last track, but I lost my first TASCAM and hundreds of hours of audio in some Montanan foothills. I went back looking for it many times, sometimes somewhat recklessly, before finally giving up. It symbolised a lot of unexpected grief I was experiencing at the time.

Track 5. Cassettelands ID

This is the album’s William Basinksi piece. I took a John Adams composition (with the label’s permission) and slowed it down dramatically, ie. “screwed” it. After that, I ran it through a guitar amp with lots of distortion to create this crumbling tape effect.

Narrative-wise this was inspired by Craters of the Moon National Park in Idaho and the drive back from it. I describe it in better detail in the zine, but basically, I was riding shotgun with a very quiet, very conservative professor called Cheryl who only listened to Christian music. By the end of the night we were driving through Montana dancing and singing along to Queen and New Order in our seats. I wanted it to go on forever. It was perfect.

Track 6. Platonitudes National Park WY

I don’t know how to play piano, so this piece was written in the key of C. Inspired by Max Richter - in particular “On the Nature of Daylight” which is a lucidly gorgeous and melodramatic work. It’s basically a poor man’s Max Richter piece, but I’m fond of it in the same way that I’m fond of my own dubious cooking.

The violinist on this track is a high school friend who’s now the CEO of his own Korean-American pharmaceutical company. Platonitudes National Park doesn’t exist, but in my mind it’s a perfect combination of Yellowstone and Glacier. I recorded this during my worst week of 2017 when both my mental and physical health was failing and I literally couldn’t speak. So I guess this spoke for me at the time.

Track 7. VHS Valley WY

The guitar part is a recording I took in 2014 of my old roommate, Andrew and I messing around on guitar and two delay pedals in my bedroom late at night. It’s honestly one of the coolest things I’ve heard from my guitar, and I’ve tried to recreate it since with no success. I’m grateful I recorded this at the time though, not knowing that I’d use it in an album four years later.

Narratively this is actually about Timber Canyon in Montana. I had a magical walk there with a friend I had a stupid unrequited crush on. It was great. Unfortunately the night turned disastrously bad soon afterwards, and we had to escape death via angry moose.

Track 8. Raton Pass Number Station CO

This song is actually the very first thing I ever made on the OP-1, a month before my first Ministry album Dying Towns of the Midwest. The .wav sat on an old hard drive, and I’m glad I rediscovered it.

After rescuing and mixing the levels on the .wav, I added a few more tracks. The radio chatter is from a Montreal police scanner. The woman counting numbers is my ex (mapped to my OP-1 and triggered by hand). The really heavy distortion is from an electric cello I borrowed. I fed it through an octaver, a reverb pedal, overdrive and a delay pedal which I fooled around with in real-time while playing. Which is a really difficult yoga balancing act to do with a cello.

The piece is inspired by a solitary Amtrak trip I took in the Summer of 2016 after graduating. It was 28-hours each way (actually a bit longer on the way back) from Chicago to Albuquerque. Raton Pass is a mountainous train tunnel by the Colorado-New Mexico border. Going through it feels like a rite of passage.

Track 9. The Needles UT

This track is fairly straightforward and was very linear to make: Swell guitar via volume pedal, very distorted feedback guitar, OP-1 for a recurring synth line passed through a distorted reverb filter, and then two appregiators. I wanted to keep it simple yet beautiful through growing repetition.

During Sophomore year of college six guys from my floor and I drove 24-hours straight to Canyonlands National Park from Grand Rapids. Those few days in the wild transformed my life for good. I didn’t know how nature could be that powerful or make one wish to live forever. I also didn’t know how gross it was to walk behind your friends’ massive shit swinging in front of you wrapped up in a plastic Meijer bag.

Track 10. Island in the Sky UT

I thought of this track singing in the shower and quickly ran out to write it down. I’d been listening to a lot of Erased Tapes Records artists at the time, so I used Nils Frahm’s Una Corda VST as the key instrument. This was definitely one of the hardest tracks to mix because of the violins.

This track is about the healing, almost other-worldly power of nature - you know, the sublime. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey is in this track’s blood. It also serves as the spiritual sequel, or second half, to The Needles UT.

Track 11. White Sands Chapel NM

Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972 inspired this piece, which is probably the most straightforward track on the album after Cassettelands. I used the OP-1’s FM engine to create the bulk of the song before placing a simple appregiator on top of it. I then reversed the track and added Valhalla Shimmer reverb and guitar pedal distortion which, for some reason, made it sound like a live church organ. About a third of the way in I fade the original unreversed track in but with a very heavy phaser. That’s it.

The field recording is from the Stockholm Public Library, sitting there quietly with my old roommate Anna. I tried to create a fictional cathedral setting in the desert by including hushed whispers. I think the illusion works.

Track 12. House of Eternal Return NM

Since the album starts at a home, I wanted it to end at another. A place of safety, creativity, and rest. The House of Eternal Return is an incredible interactive installation in Santa Fe. The concept is that it’s a house with multiple entrances to other times and dimensions, and I liked the idea of being free of this world’s physical constraints. Basically heaven.

However, when I listen to this track, I honestly think of the New Mexico desert more. I explain it more in the zine and also somewhere in this Imgur album. I was in a car with two strangers when we were so, so close to running out of gas in the middle of the New Mexico desert at night. We stopped the car in the desert and let the vastness of nothing sink into us for a while. And that’s what I think of when I listen to this track. Driving into an unknowable eternal darkness. Stopping the car. The ultimate ending.

Musically I lucked into this one. It’s two improvised synths (the Organelle) panned left and right, then screwed down quite a bit slower/deeper. Fittingly my buddy from Albuquerque, Audrin Niema, plays some percussion in the background which I mixed really low and cut a lot of the high ends on. He basically helps add a subtle human element.

Track 13. The Perpetual Wound

Out of all these tracks, “The Perpetual Wound” probably went through the most changes. I want all Ministry albums to end with a song with words that summarise the thematic intent of the record, like the songs that play during the credits of a movie. It’s a nice way to gently wake someone up after their Ministry of Interior Spaces floatation tank experience and to restate the album’s mission.

Here are the ideas that I started then scrapped:

• Recording the traditional folk song, “Hang Me Oh Hang Me,” live at an open mic. I liked the idea of ending with something live and human, like entering the album’s universe in a body for the first time. I made a few attempts, including drastically changing the lyrics to a New Mexico UFO encounter, but there were always too many uncontrollable factors, and none of the recordings turned out to be usable.

• A repetitive mantra song, like “Driving” by Smog or “The Wounded King” from Dying Towns of the Midwest. As much as I tried, I just couldn’t crack this one.

• A folk song I made up about a crust punk saving his boyfriend from an Idaho conversion therapy camp (I have no idea where I got this idea from - probably a crust punk).

I finally settled on a strange folk/Americana song to represent an ongoing personal struggle. It was largely influenced by Bill Callahan - I’d been playing Supper heavily around its writing. The idea of a recurring acoustic guitar hammer-on and the instruments interacting with the lyrics came from Our Anniversary. In Callahan’s song a panned electric guitar represents the chirp of crickets, while in The Perpetual Wound the snare drum represents the crack of distant fireworks.

The drums are by this very talented high schooler, Josh Frenier, who I met in line during Pitchfork 2016. He also helped give me the idea of reincorporating the vocal melody from the opening track, thus making Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound perpetually cyclical.

Stream Life, Death and the Perpetual Wound here, or pick up a copy on Bandcamp.