SECOND SCENE - ISSUE 10

SECOND SCENE ISSUE 10

SONIC BOOM KEELEY DONOVAN’S BRAIN COLIN MOULDING (XTC) CHRIS CONNELLY (MINISTRY/REVOLTING COCKS) THE SUNCHARMS GHOST PATTERNS & MORE NATTY BROOKER

HYPOSTATIC UNION

KLUUT GALBAK

BOLT DREG

MARK DIMARZIO

Welcome to the tenth issue of the

SECOND SCENE

Thank you: Bob McCutcheon, The Vault, Dave Pursh, Glenn Sebastian, Print Tech, Anthony “Rocky” Lamonde, Rick Radvansky, Judy Rosenfeld, Eric Wisiewski, The Electric Crush, Shauna McLarnon, Shameless Promotions PR, Gregg & Barbara,Kostelich, Get Hip, Steven Boone, Nether Street, Dave Franklin, Dancing About Architecture, Bolt Dreg & Pytr Baum.

Writers: Greg Jarvis, Dug Moore, Pytr Baum, Karla Doolittle, Bolt Dreg, Dave Franklin, Tom Sobilo, Eoghan Lyng, Michael Plater & Dave Pursh

Editor-in-Chief: Tim Thomas secondscenemagazine@gmail.com Distribution: The Netherlands - Pytr Baum

Spain - Jennifer McCauley

MATT KING & THE DUKES OF ST. CLAIR Second Scene talks with Matt King about The Dukes Of St. Clair’s latest single, The Stoned Ape. What can you tell us about your latest release, The Stoned Ape? I wrote the song last year after coming upon a YouTube video (Joe Rogan Exp.) of mycologist Paul Stamets explaining Terence & Dennis Mckenna’s Stoned Ape Theory. Terence was an ethnobotanist and a well-known advocate for psychedelic sacred plants and fungi. The theory states that the probability of our ape ancestors eating magic mushrooms while wandering out of Africa is really good. It’s also probable that this went on for thousands of years and, in effect, rewired the human brain. The result being the birth of consciousness, creativity, development of language, understanding of mathematics, etc. I decided that our pioneering ancestors deserved a song. It is written from the point of view of the ape who has just realized Self and declares “I Am I”...” I’ve been reborn/I’m an ape nomore/I’m a human being/better watch out world...here I come.”

What can we expect in terms of the sound and feel of The Stoned Ape? It’s stoner rock, of course.

Was this song a group effort, or was it an individual effort on your part?

Since it was written during the pandemic, I recorded the basic structure of the song by myself, and the rest of The Dukes added their parts later.

What’s next for the Dukes of St. Clair?

Hopefully, the world can come together and contain COVID and live music can thrive again. The Dukes will be part of it, and we’ll keep releasing new music in the meantime.

SUPERMONKEY Supermonkey’s main man Christian Groblewski talks with the Second Scene about the latest single, Elisa Bonita.

You have a new release available, Elisa Bonita.

Is there a story behind this song, or is it a combination of different experiences?

We’ll the story is real, and Elisa Bonita is a real woman. And if I told you who she really was, it would just make the line around the block of men vying for her affections even longer. So I’m just going to leave it at that. And I wrote the song in like 5 minutes, and I knew it was an awesome song as soon as I wrote it.

What has influenced your songwriting?

I’d say Nirvana’s simplicity in songwriting has been a big influence. Prince is another, Def Leppard, Led Zep, anything that rocks has influenced me. I come up with my ideas. I always start with a good guitar riff, and the lyrics come second. As far as where my ideas come from with I wish I could explain because then I would be able to tap into it better. Honestly, I have no idea. I just get these feelings/ideas, and I feel like I need to play guitar, and the ideas just start coming out.

What does Supermonkey have planned next?

New music, that’s my focus, which costs $ and takes time, & you can’t rush perfection. I have another song in the works with Dave Hillis called “You Can’t Lie To God,” which I think has a lot of potential across the dial—hoping to finish recording and get it mixed in August and out by September/October. Then back in the studio to start a new batch of songs.

Main photo: Rich Frollini

Group photo: Josh Land

DOPE SAGITTARIUS Photo: Jana Jeroz

From Funk to Punk: Fusion Fun with Harlem’s Dope Sagittarius

by Dave Franklin NYC-based rock-punk-funk fusion outfit Dope Sagittarius (aka producer and rocking music personality Luqman Brown) recently released the ‘Sacred Places’ album on 12” vinyl via Buddhabug Records. This rich tapestry of funky grooves, thoughtful synths, and rocking vocals features artists such as Ronny Drayton, Corey Glover, Mike Ladd, Marc Cary, and Roy Radics, Mazz Swift, and Micah Gaugh. The record also comes with a copy of the comic book ‘Dope Sagittarius In the Bumbaclout Strain,’ which was written by Luqman Brown with artwork by Tim Smith III. Let’s tap into the mind of one of New York City’s most dynamic creative minds.

Q: If we can start with a bit of background. You were playing in bands from an early age and, with FunkFace, found yourself opening for the likes of 24-7 Spyz and Fishbone. Can you tell me a bit about the musical path which brought you to Dope Sagittarius?

A: The musical path to Dope Sagittarius was a long one indeed. I have been in FunkFace for over 30 years and playing with the same guys since I was 17.

And you know, after a time, my taste slightly changed in music.

I always loved rock, punk, soul, blues, hip hop & reggae—especially roots rock and dance hall. However, I really got in to drum and bass in the ‘90s, which led me to UK Garage, which led me to electro music, overall. I could “chat” in a Dancehall style which got me into groups like the Wikkid Crew (with the not-yet-famous Idris Elba) as well as a small part in the documentary “Prohibited Beats” about JoJo Meyer (a famous drummer in the drum and bass world).

I got a little fame in that scene, but UK Garage music didn’t last. So, I took what I learned from that experience and went to Europe—Germany to be exact—where I met a really amazing music producer named Phillip Preuss.

He showed me electronic music in all its forms, really. He’s the king, in my mind, of all things electro. That’s where I felt comfortable enough to put out my first Dope Sagittarius release, “Ghetto Glitch.”. After going back and forth for five years, I had to leave Germany to reestablish my roots in the wild pastures of America.

Now, I had played trombone since I was a kid, so it made sense to start trying to use that skill more. I started playing with Burnt Sugar, an avant-jazz orchestra based on Butch Morris’ conduction system.

After a time with them, I found that my trombone playing sucked (ha), but I learned to read charts better and understood the complexity of jazz a whole lot more than I previously had. So I decided to go to music engineering school and learn more about the stuff I had been doing for most of my life.

Once I had an updated grip on recording, I decided to put out “Sacred Places.” And even though I’d come up with the name Dope Sagittarius 10 years before, it wasn’t until I finished that record that this project actually came to life.

Q: Dope Sagittarius seems to blend a riot of sounds and styles, like a musical magpie. Can you tell me a bit about your influences?

A: My musical influences are as eclectic as my sound. I love George Clinton from Funkadelic for his out-there recordings; David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen for their outrageousness; Ornette Coleman for his pure feel with the conciseness of playing beyond the consciousness of the mind; Bobby Womack for his cool; Bad Brains for the raw power; MF Doom for the lyrics; The Chemical Brothers and CX KiDTRONiK for the sound; and Greg Tate for showing me how to put an idea down an keep going and not to worry about it.

Q: Does the writing process come easily? It can’t be easy to sound like George Clinton, David Lee Roth, The Bad Brains, and mix jazz with reggae with hip-hop with rock?

A: Why can’t it be easy? I put my ideas down, and boom! That was easy. The only thing that’s not easy is predicting how other people hear or perceive it— when they try to make sometimes superficial comparisons and say it doesn’t sound like this one or that one. It’s very intuitive to me, it’s how I hear things, and it makes sense to me. And if it sounds good to me, then that’s how I want others to hear it.

Q: Your own future as a performer was in question a few years ago when health issues brought everything to an unexpected halt. How tough was it coming back from that, and how much was music a motivation?

A: It was really hard for me to accept that I might not ever play again.

Especially when I was in the hospital bed, there were two years between the

stroke and the heart surgery and then another eight months to recover from the operation that put the LVAD system in my chest. It’s taken these last two years to feel normal enough to play out again. And still, I’m not too sure. I’m redebuting on August 1, 2021, and we will see if I’m ready, LOL! And yes, music definitely played a big part in my recovery. My lady brought a radio into the hospital room for me. After a time, she also brought in my ukulele, and I fiddled with that too. But most of all, I was thinking about this record. I promised myself that if I made it through, I would go fully into making this record a success. And so far, so good. LOL

PSYCHODAISY

Q: With this pandemic situation and in the absence of artists’ ability to promote themselves through live concerts and touring, things can be really difficult in terms of getting the word out about your music. And you’ve had a few singles, videos, a comic book, and now this album to push to people’s attention. How have you managed to deal with these challenges?

A: Well, I can say I’ve been around the block if you know what I mean.

Shameless Promotion PR has been the best thing to ever happen to me with regard to this album. They’re stellar in promoting and telling my story in a way that goes so much further than what’s on the album. I couldn’t have asked for a better PR firm to represent me. I must say that I’m exceedingly happy with them.

Q: “Sacred Places,” the latest album, comes with its own comic book, Dope Sagittarius In the Bumbaclout Strain. Can you tell us about that? Is it just a bit of fun, or does it add new dimensions to the message, ones that work best in that medium?

A: First of all, I love the comic book medium. I am an avid comic book reader and collector and have enjoyed comics since I was 7.

I made the comic to tell the story of three musically gifted Tuskegee Airmen who were extracted from their space/timeline (in their B-29 bomber plane called the Dope Sagittarius) by the Great Bam Beyonder to stop the evil D’ Incredible from spreading mediocre music across the multiverse.

It’s a story about true heroes who are doing right by the galaxy. In a way, that’s what I’m trying to do, taking music from different realms and putting forth my truths about race, power, gender, oppression, ownership, class, gentrification, cultural pride, community, and perseverance. So there is a sort of message in the comic book, though you can’t tell from one issue. You’ll have to wait and see.

Q: “Black Empress” has been described as a “song for this Black Lives Matter age.” Are you intentionally political, or is it just up to others to find their own meaning in the songs?

A: When I read that description, I was honored that someone described the song in that way. Because that is what I was going for. Yes, “Black Empress” is intentionally political, from the music to the lyrics to the video. I made sure that it’s clear that the oppression of Black and Brown people and our allies, no matter their gender identity in this country and around the world, is unfair, and it must be stopped.

Q: And where next for yourself, the band, and also for music in general as we emerge into the “new normal” of 2021?

A: Well, for me, I hope to live a nice, long and healthy life filled with new music, joy, and happiness. For the band, we’re hopefully going to tour a bit and put out another record where we’ll push the boundaries further than we—or even others—have before. And for music in general, I don’t know.

We’ll have to wait and see. https://dopesagittarius.bandcamp.com/album/sacred-places

Photo: William Amenta

Psychodaisy Records is an extention of the Second Scene.

New releases, COMING SOON. Contact: secondscenemagazine@gmail.com

THE INNER URGE

A

dazzling fusion of Avant-Garde Jazz, Chamber Music, and Ambient Soundscapes. Dave Pursh digs deeper into the instrumental realm of The Inner Urge.

To truly appreciate certain styles of music, I, for one, am the type of person that has to experience it live. And it definitely helps when the band performing in front of you can take hold of your head and draw you into a deeper state of consciousness. That’s what The Inner Urge did to me. I had the pleasure of seeing these guys perform live at the 1st Annual Lorain/Stoneycreek Hiking Trails beer, wine & spirits festival back on June 5, 2021, in Johnstown, PA. I was so emboldened by their live performance that I had to sit down and talk to the guys to get the lowdown on what drives this band.

The Inner Urge consists of four incredible instrumentalists; Alexander Price (guitar/violin), Michael Garbett (vibraphone/percussion), Andrew Koss (bass/synthesizer) & Jesse Griffith (drums). Their musical style is rooted in jazz, but their appreciation of ambient and, more importantly, chamber music, really gives this band the chance to showcase their musical talents. Says Jesse, “This is a combination of all musical elements. We all had the chance to experience different styles of music in college, and chamber music and ambient sounds were what brought us together.”

The band came together by chance in the college town of Indiana, PA, while the guys attended the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). “We met at IUP and started jamming at in the local bar scene, playing special events and things like that,” says Alex. “From there, we began hosting jazz jam sessions and became somewhat of a ‘house band’ at one of the local bars. We would play classic jazz songs and instrumental jazz covers of popular rock songs.” After graduation, however, they all went separate ways but always kept in touch. Three of the members were spread over Pennsylvania, while Andrew ended up in Brooklyn, New York. During that time apart, Andrew wrote their first two

By Dave Pursh

songs, “Shiver” and “Fall Into Existence,” which would end up on their 2018 self-titled release.

That first release would allow the band to “put it all out there.” Basically, take all of their influences in the world of jazz, ambient and chamber music and fuse it all into one record. From the opening notes of “Norwegian,” you’re drawn into the hypnotic rhythms until 40 minutes later, you’re salsa dancing to the infectious beat of “Beer Me.” This record will take you places you’ve only dreamed of, believe me. And it also includes a Herbie Hancock cover!

“We like to use different sounds to keep everyone’s attention,” says Mike. “All of us have opportunities outside of the band to expand our musical capabilities.” Each member practices every day, or at least every chance they have, to play. And every member of the band composes the music. Alex began playing music on the viola, then the violin, and finally ended up mastering the guitar. “We all have a classical mindset that we use to texture all of our songs,” he says. Alex adds that “we all play off of the strengths of the other members, and we’re always changing things up and pushing ourselves.”

In 2018 the band embarked on a month-long tour of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. “The tour was to promote our first album and try out some new places,” says Andrew. “We made a ton of great connections and met a bunch of amazing people.” One funny story from that tour was when a venue booked the band and thought they were a previous band that played there, ironically called The Inner Urge. When they went to the gig, one of the other band’s members showed up thinking they were supposed to be playing that night because they saw it on the schedule.

“It was pretty hilarious. He ended up sitting in with us and playing a tune.”

The band’s second release in early 2019, a single entitled “Zakuska” (more on that later), was the result of (per their Bandcamp page) “a four-day musical lock-in staged at The Brown Hotel in June 2018. The four members of The Inner

Urge transformed the living room of the historic building into a mess of instruments, sleeping bags, recording equipment, and Genesee Cream Ale.” The result was magical. Zakuska was recorded in one take. The band went into the session with “just ideas, no written music. It was total improvisation.”

During that time, all members agreed that because Jesse just acquired a new set of drums, it was his time to shine. The drumbeat is infectious, and the addition of a small crash cymbal on the snare gives this song its cool backbeat. Alex added a sample of a “heavy dance beat bass” in postmix to really give it a fullness that was missing from the live take. The song begins with an organ drone. But not just any old organ. This was a (60’s) toy organ where Andrew bent a few playing cards to hold down three notes to keep a constant drone going throughout the song. The entire band actually had to tune down to the organ! To me, it’s a brilliant ambient masterpiece. With regards to the definition of “Zakuska,” Alex can elaborate. “I was working in a band on a cruise ship at the time, and I learned some Ukrainian from a few of the guys on the ship. My friend told me about this word, Zakuska, which is basically the food you eat while you are drinking heavily, so you don’t puke, and I thought that was the funniest word ever, so we just named (the song) that.”

In March of 2021, the band released “Ambient 1: Blossom,” which is a bit of a departure from their jazz-oriented sound.

The release focuses more on an, obviously, more ambient sound. There is somewhat of a theme with this recording in the fact there is a focus on soundscapes and “slightly more tension and melodic content.” Truly, beginning with the first song, “Spout,” this reminds me of “Meddle” era Pink Floyd, while the final track, “Six,” would fit beautifully onto one of Mick Harris’ more recent Scorn records, albeit with a little more bass.

When asked about their live performance, Jesse had to say, “We challenge ourselves live. Songs that are on the first record are now very different live. We took the improv part of jazz in order to reach a higher form of art.” Adds Andrew, “the songs change every night.” Alex expands by saying, “the songs are not dictated by words, so we are not limited to verse-chorus-verse, and then the song ends.”

So what’s next for the band? After an April 2021 Festival where they opened the day, they have a couple of eastern Pennsylvania shows coming up with a couple of gigs in western PA toward late summer. A new single is planned for a 2021 Fall release with a 2022 full-length release on the calendar as well.

The future looks bright for these four guys from IUP, but the future looks even brighter for all of us who appreciate music outside of the norm.

The Corner Table

Summer is in full swing, and that means only one thing… Beer Festivals! With the pandemic basically in the rearview mirror, the beer fests are back. Below is a list of some notable beer festivals in the Pittsburgh, PA area…and beyond. No matter what your end of 2021 plans are, make sure you have a smile on your face and a beer in your hand. Cheers!

Beers of the Burgh: September 4th, Carrie Blast Furnaces Historic Landmark, 801 Carrie Furnace Blvd. Pittsburgh, PA. A celebration of all Pittsburgh Breweries.

Barrel & Flow Fest: September 10th – September 12th, Southside Works, 424 27th Street Pittsburgh, PA. A celebration of Black brewers, artists, and musicians through collaborations and otherwise.

Brews and Bruises Festival: September 18th, Greentree Sportsplex, Pittsburgh, PA. A collaboration of wrestling and beer, all in the name of humanity.

Chicago Beer Festival: October 9th, The Field Museum, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL. Over 65 breweries, plus music, food, and a select number of museum exhibits open to attendees.

Orlando Beer Festival: November 13th, 2911 Robinson Street, Orlando, FL. In addition to beer, this festival features wine tastings, plus interactive games, food, and music.

Fremantle Beer Fest: Fri, Nov 12, 6 PM – Sun, Nov 14, 5 PM GMT+8. Esplanade Park Marine Terrace, Fremantle Western Australia, Australia.

Craft beer, wine, cider, and cocktails, plus masterclasses on beer/food pairing, gourmet food, and roaming performers.

The Festival of Beer: September 3rd-5th, Blackpit Brewery, 5LJ, Stowe Castle Rd, North Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom.

Beer, music, comedy, food, camping, canoeing, paddleboarding, funfair, tree climbing, walking trails, chili eating contest… what doesn’t this festival have?!?!

Currently drinking: Stick City Brewing “Dry Fly: Midge” Double IPA, Inner Groove Brewing “Melt With You” Waffle Cone Brown Ale, Fat Heads “Sunshine Daydream” Session IPA, 21st Amendment “Hell or High Watermelon” fruited wheat beer. Dave Pursh

Photos: Suzanne Kreitzer & Zach DeSantis

Hypostatic Union

By Michael Plater

Hypostatic Union is a boutique experimental record label based in Essex, in the east of England. Run by Colchester musician/band booker/impresario Stafford Glover, the label’s ethos involves putting out small run, limitededition releases from artists working in the fields of noise, experimental folk, ambient, grind, soundscapes, and other forms that challenge, provoke, or invoke. Set up in 2020, the label’s recent releases include “How the End Always Is – A Tribute to the Cure” (a double cassette release, featuring 17 acts reinterpreting and, in some cases, entirely deconstructing, songs from The Cure’s back catalog) and the latest release from Stafford’s own project, Enclosed and Silent Order, a collaboration with legendary Essex musician and recording engineer John Hannon. I interviewed Stafford back in May about his experiences setting up the label

and the key role John played in this. Unfortunately, shortly after this interview was conducted, the label received the devastating news that John Hannon had unexpectedly passed away. A tribute to John is included at the end of this article.

Tell me about setting up the Hypostatic Union label. I love how the U.K. has a real small label culture, interesting little labels putting out limited edition runs with bespoke artwork, etc., and your label reflects this. I know you’ve been on various labels yourself in the past, within such acts as Extreme Noise Terror and Doomed Bird of Providence - what prompted you to run your own label?

The initial catalyst was the release of my own solo project’s record – which itself came about as a kind of accident.

I had been asked to contribute some noisy bass drones for a new MacGillivray record.

My complete lack of recording know-how led me to contact an old associate John Hannon, who runs the celebrated No Recording Studio in Essex, UK, to get the parts down. On the way there, it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever been in a studio situation in which I had complete autonomy to do whatever I pleased – and so after we got what we needed, I put down a few ideas that had been kicking around for a long time, just to see what would happen. These were kicked around for a while, expanded upon, and later it seemed I had the basis of a coherent record on my hands.

Helped along by some big contributions from James Sarek (Zophocles), Lara Rix-Martin (Meemo Comma), and John Hannon (Liberez), the resulting OPUSTENY LP was initially just going to be put out on Bandcamp to see if anyone took a blind bit of notice – but then via John, I discovered the lathecutting genius Michael Lawrence of Bladud Flies!, and I decided to take the plunge and commit the project to a physical L.P. “What label is it on,” a couple of people said… so I thought as well put something on there to indicate the presence of a label, even though it only existed as far as a name and logo.

And we were off. Basically, I owe 100% of the inspiration to do the label to John.

your upcoming plans there?

Though initially thought of as a one-off project, I’m very pleased that Enclosed & Silent Order is set to continue with a number of releases planned over the next couple of years. The latest release is the Seraph E.P., which came out as a super limited lathe cut vinyl release and the usual Bandcamp download in May. There will be another limited-edition clear vinyl re-press of the E.P coming soon.

John was involved much more with the production and composition of this one, and I was also delighted to discover John’s partner Amy McKenny, whose vocals make a huge contribution, along with the video piece she created for the title track. Beyond that, there is another full length just a few steps away from completion – this will feature some collaborations with artists I’m hugely honored to have anything to do with, including Daniel Merrill (Dead Rat Orchestra), b0sch, Michael Lawrence (The Bricoleur) and not least your good self! It’s probably a bit of departure from the first one in terms of style – will be interested to see what people make of it as we really just went with the flow.

Hoping to decide the final format (Double L.P. or maybe two separately released L.P.s – and a cassette) in the next couple of months – the only problem being that I keep finding great work by other artists to release – the urge to get all this stuff out there is maddening at times, and unfortunately not so far matched by equivalent financial resources.

The label recently put out a wonderful tribute album to the Cure - How the End Always Is – featuring acts like Sieben, Mezzotint, Rev Simpkins, Pettaluck, Isnaj Dui, and more also released as a limited-edition double cassette. Why the Cure and why on cassette? Any response from Bob and the boys?

It came about as a result of my sometime study of esoteric thought, groups, and religions – the term Hypostatic Union as you correctly say, originating in Gnostic Christianity as a divine /human union. This is in no way indicative of me having personal delusions of Godhead – but an expression of my personal search for the divine within what feels like a particularly mundane existence. Neither me nor the label has any ties to nor endorses any one spiritual path!

The Cure is probably the only band I love as much now as I did when I first heard them aged 14 or so. In the middle of a huge lockdown listening bender last year, it struck me that I’d absolutely love to cover one of their tracks and how that might not seem as idiosyncratic as I first thought.

Having started this hugely self-indulgent but highly enjoyable process, I thought I’d ask a few nearest and dearest if they might be interested in doing the same, probably just for a free download somewhere. As it turned out, there was almost universal enthusiasm, and I went on to broaden my approach and even ask a few people to have a go who hadn’t ever really heard The Cure. I was really pleased by the strength and breadth of the interpretations and still think it stands out as a quality tribute, albeit by acts that most people have never heard of. I think everyone had fun being part of it – it’s not as if there was much else to do at the time in any case. Why Cassette? Well, there were too many tracks to put on an L.P. – and I hate C.D.s. So, cassette it was. Really pleased with how it ended up looking, with Pierre Puvis de Chavanne’s “The Dream” used as the cover art by kind permission. My old friend and Colchester legend Tom Wilcox helped with navigating the licensing – we did manage to contact the band via a friend of a friend and sent them the stuff - but never heard anything back. I expect they are inundated with this kind of thing. Still, I think they’d be pretty sideswiped by White Noise Winter’s version of The Funeral Party, which shows a glorious near-total disregard for recalling the original track.

You have your own project on the label – Enclosed and Silent Order – which has evolved from a solo project to a collaboration with John Hannon (Liberez, Woe). What are

The latest full-length release from the label is Nujumi’s debut album, Bayt Clarke. This is the latest project from Daniel Merrill of Dead Rat Orchestra, which I know is based in

Why the name “Hypostatic Union?” I believe it refers to a union between the human and the divine?

Egypt. The two of you are old friends – how did the idea of putting this album out on the label come about?

I’ve been in awe of Mr. Merrill for many years – since he first appeared on the scene with post-rock trio Upstream Assembly, morphing into the Dead Rat Orchestra, and later his own solo material under his own name, by way of several brilliant side projects, many of which took the form of only a single live performance and sadly remain undocumented. I suppose the motivation behind many labels is to document particularly fertile periods in a scene’s history – when I heard he was doing something that he described as sounding like a neo-Romantic Kraftwerk with big string sections, I immediately said I’d like to try and release it – in fact, this was the prospect that made me seriously think about trying to be a “real” label. Anyway, he either forgot or didn’t read the email, and I took his silence to mean that he wasn’t keen on the idea. Much later, when he sent me some tracks for some feedback, I repeated the offer, and he was instantly on board! I didn’t need to hear the rest of it as I knew it would be great – and of course, I wasn’t disappointed. Working with Dan has been a hugely enjoyable experience, despite my nervousness around making sure the finished product is a worthy reflection of his work. I think it’s turned out great. We’ve already got another one planned – heard it last night, and it sounds fantastic – a further development on the new path he’s carving out for himself.

You live over in Essex and help run the amazing Colchester performance venue, the Colchester Arts Centre. How’s the music/arts scene over there?

There’s a pretty healthy local indie scene – maybe fewer acts than in years gone by but certainly capable of pulling in bigger crowds. There’s a few being courted by big labels now, so who knows what the future will hold.

In terms of the experimental / leftfield scene, things are a bit smaller these days, even taking into account the fact that a lot of the main protagonists have got older, moved on, and have even greater demands on their free time. The days of big crowds in for Goodiepal or the Constellation Records nights seem a long time ago. It’s certainly a lot harder convincing people to give new or left-of-center things a go at the moment – the heartfelt recommendations of a 43-year-old man who likes free noise and esoteric folk doesn’t seem to carry so much weight these days!

That said, there are some great local projects out there.

Mezzotint is a new one that has popped up, doing a take on dark dream-pop with a gothic nod in the vein of Drab Majesty and the like, and the same members have their fingers in loads of other things ranging from Dark Ambient to crushing sludge-metal. B0sch is an interesting one, a guy making epic drone synth compositions, and I adore the found-sound/field recording performances by Philip Mill.

Of course, the Arts Centre itself is much more than a pure music venue – the performance and live art program has been a real eye-opener in the last few years – a petri-dish of new forms and ideas. Then we’ve also had spoken word performances from legends such as Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore – both real nights to remember.

Hopefully, the appetite for live performance will be heightened when restrictions finally come to an end.

And by the way, well done for not mentioning Blur.

What’s up next for the label?

Well, there’s an actual website now, so that seems a big leap forward. There are releases planned in the immediate future from Nujumi and Entwined, as well as Michael Plater’s Ghost Music L.P., plus the second full-length adventure from Enclosed & Silent Order. We’ll also be putting out John Hannon’s solo album, which is one of the best things I’ve heard in recent years. We also intend to press a run of 100 with the next Gate Master record, which has seen a lot of interest. There’s some merchandise coming, and of course, some live shows when circumstances allow. All the planned future releases are now up on the website. The aim is to keep things manageable and concentrate on small quantities of physical product which has had some thought and love gone into it – by artists that just hit the indefinable zone where my tastes lie. I’d love for the label to be a launchpad for getting artists up to the next level of visibility and hopefully picked up by bigger labels who can really make things happen if that’s what they desire. All artists retain 100% ownership of anything they release with me, as well as receiving 100% share of the digital sales (minus what Bandcamp charges). So, things run at a small loss at the moment, but one that brings me a lot of satisfaction.

Label Statement regarding John Hannon’s passing: I’m still in shock at news of the passing of John Hannon on the 5th of May. John was key to the creation of the label, having a hand in the recording and production of every release as well as bringing his exceptional musicianship and creative skills to the song-writing and structure of many - and giving me the self-belief to attempt it all in the first place.

He was also generous, kind, encouraging, wise and modest, never one to shout about his achievements, which were myriad - from the critically acclaimed Liberez to a brush with major label stardom in Understand, and the vast number of recordings for acts big and small whom would seek out his skills at his legendary No Recording Studio (or just No as he preferred it).

He leaves a huge musical legacy that will be marked in the fullness of time, but for now, a heartfelt thank you to the man who made all this possible, was a best friend and musical mentor and will be missed by so many.

Hypostatic Union Bandcamp: hypostaticunion.bandcamp. com/ Hypostatic Union Website: hypostatic-union.com/

6

MARK DIMARZIO

Instagram: mark_di_marzio.

email. dimarziomark@gmail.com

THE SUNCHARMS After a sixteen year wait, The Suncharms finally release their debut album, Distant Lights. The second Scene speaks with Marcus Palmer about the group split and reformation and the time in-between.

The group was active between 1989 – 1993. Why did the group decide to split, and what brought you back together in 2018?

There was never a massive fallout, like Lemmy leaving Hawkwind or the band doing different drugs than each other. It seemed that we had been on a wave from selling out our demo tapes in our hometown to getting two EPs out on Wilde Club records (home of Catherine wheel) and appearing in the indie charts alongside the Pale Saints and strangely Kylie Minogue. The record label finished, and we were at the point in our lives when some of us were settling down or going off to college. Life took us in different directions. The cruel part which we put right in 2018 (releasing our comeback single Red Dust on Slumberland Records) was that as we were here

splitting up, Slumberland Records approached us to record a single, which we regretted not doing for years.

What were members of the Suncharms involved in post-split (1993-2018)?

After we split, only Richard, our Bass player, carried on with music and joined The Screen Prints. I jokingly say it’s like he had an affair or like John Lennon’s lost weekend away from Yoko.

Matt and John let their guitars gather dust, and Chris put away his drum sticks for a quarter of a century. I can only imagine doing music with the Charm brothers as it’s the close friendship we have and the musical chemistry that works for me. First, however, Matt and I made a few short films, Matt as the director and cameraman

and me playing an unhinged character filmed in black and white.

How did it feel to get back together?

It feels great to be back together. We met up in 2016 for the first time in over ten years after Cloudberry Records owner Roque got speaking to Richard at the indie tracks festival.

He watched The Screen Prints and asked if The Suncharms would be interested in releasing a retrospective CD album. Richard had contacted Roque previously after spotting a blog that he had written about the band years after we had split where he was wondering whatever happened to us.

The band met up in a pub in Sheffield with the sole purpose of gathering photos of old press cuttings for the retrospective CD booklet. It was at this meeting we decided to book a rehearsal room just for fun. The day of the rehearsal felt so bizarre but again so normal as though we’d rehearsed the week before, not a quarter of a century. It was amazing to see the same guitars and pedals appear again that I’d not seen since 1992. And also the same banter and in-band jokes. The old chemistry was there, and we all just loved the feeling of being creative again Tell us about the Sunday Records compilation that features “Liquid Through My Hands.” How did it all come together?

After reforming in 2016, our sole purpose was to put together a debut album finally. It’s taken us up until this year to get the new songs written and recorded. When the songs were written, we approached some of our favorite record labels who had released stuff by bands that we all loved and asked if they’d be interested in releasing something. It just felt right to us and

seemed the perfect fit when Sunday Records liked our new songs.

How has the group changed from its first incarnation? Also, has it stayed the same in any way?

When Sunday Records agreed to put out the album, they asked if we wanted to be on the new compilation album. There are some amazing bands on it currently out to download on CD and lovely vinyl later this year. It’s a buzz to be alongside contemporary guitar bands.

When can we expect a full-length album from the Suncharms?

The band is still the original members from 1990, and all of the original guitars appear on the new album. The writing of the songs is exactly the same. Matt plays us a tune he’s been working on; we all add our parts, and it completely changes and becomes a Suncharms song.

The debut album is coming out later this year on download CD and vinyl. Unfortunately, there is a backlog at the vinyl pressing plants, so that will hold it back a bit.

What does the group have planned for the second half of 2021?

The second half of 2021, we hope to get together in our rehearsal room, write loads of new songs, and play some gigs again. After all those years being split up, we feel like we are on a roll and want to keep doing what we love doing.

Photos coutesy of The Suncharms

The Broken Opium Table WHEN MOTORIK BEATS, POETRY AND PSYCHEDELIC SOUNDSCAPES COLLIDE. THIS IS THE BROKEN OPIUM TABLE. What are you trying to achieve with The Broken Opium Table?

The Broken Opium Table began with me wanting to put my poetry with soundscapes, just as an experiment to see if I could make the two collide in a way that elevated the two forms.

Having previously been in bands where I wrote the lyrics and played bass, I suddenly found myself free of others’ input and that I could follow any musical landscape that I saw fit.

To my surprise, I began getting good feedback, gig invites, and some local label interest.

This encouraged me to push further with the music and to heighten my lyrics/poems.

There was never a game plan, just an instinctive thrust forward that I continue with now. To achieve anything I thought impossible, my main aim is to keep pushing everything forward, keep everything original and as much my own as possible.

What influences do you pull from when it comes to songwriting.

My main influence is to try not to show my influences. I have such a wide variety of musical tastes that to jumble everything together in my mind and see what spews out of the other end had always been my main aim. I’m a massive fan of the darker sounds of 60’s psychedelia, the motorik of 70’s Germany, and the wild abandon of the new wave era moving into to rave culture of late 80’s Britain.

Yet saying all that, for my new album that I’m in the process of writing, I have attempted to stay with the same aesthetic of layered guitars, big drums, and chaos in the realms of Spaceman3, Wooden Shjips, Neu, and The Jesus and Mary Chain.

For those who haven’t heard The Broken Opium Table, describe your sound.

I’d describe the sound of The Broken Opium Table as the sound of instruments being thrown down the stairs and landing onto a nice soft feathered bed. My words tend to veer down dark alleyways, tackling my many demons from past and present, yet hopefully telling a story that is universal in context. I mean, it’s 2021. Who hasn’t struggled with mental health problems, addiction, death, and corrupt governments?

Is The Broken Opium Table a solo effort, or do you collaborate with others?

The Broken Opium Table is most definitely a solo project. It was born out of my wish to merge my writings with sounds, which has now developed its own life, kicking and screaming at the world. Though I have had some interest from other people looking to collaborate, I’ve never found the time to do so. But without naming anyone and jinxing a project, I have had contact from someone recently that I admire hugely that has made some outstanding records and music through the years.

What do you have planned for 2021?

Well, 2021 was the year that I was intending to finally make my live debut as The Broken Opium Table, yet the fates and gods and inept governments have pretty much-laid waste to those plans. So in the meantime, I’m finishing writing the words to album number four, called ‘Static Electric.’ I’m constantly fiddling with tracks and creating new music looking for the next way into the next project or album. So despite what the world throws up, the best thing to do, I find, is to keep moving. Stay creative, lose myself in waves of sound, and await what comes next. As what comes next might just be the best thing you’ve ever done. So 2021/22 is going to be hard, beautiful, distressing, and amazing, whatever the outcome may be.

Roll the dice, flip a coin, throw the cards and cares to the wind and let’s see how the land lays after that.

PS… My new single is called “I See Colours” and is available from Bandcamp.

Paul Den Heyer

Photo: Ian Holmes

Liverpool’s Paul Den Heyer releases his first solo effort, talks about collaboration, songwriting, and influences.

Let’s start with what has influenced you as a songwriter?

Firstly, I think it has to be other songwriters. It’s an amazing thing to hear a song that moves you and makes you feel something. It might be uplifting, dark or mysterious, or just plain beautiful in the way it affects you. I’ve listened to music all my life, and still, nothing compares to that feeling when you discover a new songwriter or band that sends the shiver up the spine, and you connect with them completely. You instinctively know it’ll be a permanent addition to the Waterloo Sunsets and Dear Prudences that are already the soundtrack to your life.

Everything So Far is the first release under your name. Why did you decide after all these years to step outside of a group lineup and do a solo release?

Ha! Well, ironically, it’s still very much a collaborative effort. There’s no way the record would’ve been made without everyone else’s involvement and support. You probably already know that these are the first songs I’ve written in almost 20 years, and I suppose with them being a bit more personal than songs in the past, it felt quite natural to release it under my own name. At least, no one else seemed to mind, haha. Also, it felt like a milestone record, for me at least, being able to produce it myself too. I’m really, really pleased with how it turned out - very proud of it.

Do you mainly write on your own, or do you collaborate with others?

I guess writing has been mainly a solitary thing for me over the years, but I enjoy collaborating too. I’ve been really lucky to have worked with some great and like-minded musicians in my time, and their

contributions can’t be overlooked. More recently, I’ve relied more and more on Chrisy Jones (of Sunstack Jones) for help with ideas.

We’ve been friends a long time, and I can always trust his honest advice and input. He should take as much credit for the album as I like to do.

What is your writing process? Where do you find inspiration?

To be honest, I try not to think about the process too much. I guess there’s a fear that if I understand how the songs come to me, maybe they’ll stop. An idea can pop up any time and any place.

I’ll always try and scribble down the chords or words or even just the feeling or mood until I can get a moment with the guitar. These days there is the wonderful voice memo app on my phone that’s really handy for not forgetting things.

Inspiration, I suppose, comes from everyday experiences and feelings. I remember reading somewhere about why we sometimes jump like we’re having an electric shock as we’re falling asleep.

The writer suggested it was our nervous system’s way of reacting to events of the day that we may not have reacted to at the time. I wonder if writing songs is a similar thing.

What are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

Since Everything So Far, I’ve been mostly producing more music for Sunstack Jones and recording new songs that will hopefully make up my second album. England, like everywhere else, is fucked up with the pandemic but also with the added disaster that is Brexit.

It’s hard to say when any of this music will see the light of day hopefully, sooner rather than later - we live in very uncertain times.

Ideally, the music will come out, and there’ll be the opportunity to get out and play some songs live again. There were offers of some gigs in Europe and the U.S last year and, if they are still there when the world returns to some kind of normal, I’ll be on a plane with some friends and guitars. Hopefully, there’ll be a few people at the other end who come along and listen.

The Dublin, Ireland-based singersongwriter Keeley talks with the Second Scene about her debut EP, Brave Warrior.

The murder of German tourist Inga Maria Hauser. A difficult and poverty stricken upbringing. The soul-saving power of music. And finally, SUCCESS.

case and cause, through the creation of The Keeley Chronicles from 2016 up to the present day, to the writing of the single Plundered Past by my previous band Session Motts (a radio hit in Ireland in 2017) to the creation of my debut Brave Warrior EP under my own name and the four singles and short films accompanying each of its songs, has been borne out of love for this missing link in life and a strange, spiritual calling of sorts that I’m still trying to get my head around more than five years on from when I was passionately drawn to the flame of this case and this magnetic young woman’s cause.Being a songwriter, I think it makes sense that I would have a desire to take the work that I’ve done in an investigative sense and bring that into my songwriting. This is something interesting as it’s the first time this has ever been done for someone to have written an

KEELEY Interview: Tim Thomas

Photo: Andy Marke

entire body of work about a murder victim. And it’s also the first time to my knowledge that music and true crime have been brought together under the same umbrella in this way. I’m amazed that hadn’t occurred to anyone else to do before.

Inga’s case is unique for a number of reasons. The exact circumstances of the case are very strange, unprecedented even.

On the night that Inga Maria Hauser arrived in Northern Ireland and was murdered almost immediately, at that time in 1988, this was the first instance of a sexually motivated murder of a tourist in Northern Ireland ever. And here we are now, more than 33 years on. And it’s STILL the only instance of a tourist murdered in Northern Ireland with a sexual motive, which is incredible when you think about it.

Brave Warrior, it’s not merely a collection of songs. There’s a more resounding underlying theme. Explain?

“Over the past five and a half years, I’ve been building a blog called The Keeley Chronicles that delves into the depths of the darkest, strangest, saddest, and most moving story I’ve ever known - the unsolved murder of Inga Maria Hauser. Inga was an 18-yearold student, artist, and musician from Munich, Germany, who was murdered in Northern Ireland in bizarre circumstances on her first-ever solo trip away from home. The Keeley Chronicles ties in with all of the songs on the Brave Warrior EP and all my forthcoming releases because the subject of the blog is the subject of all of the music that I write and all of the lyrics I write.

I developed an obsession with Inga’s case from the moment I first learned about it five and a half years ago, and I haven’t been able to let go since. Or rather, it hasn’t let go of me. Writing The Keeley Chronicles and producing all the other related artworks Inga inspires me to create takes a lot of time because I’m very dogged and detail-oriented; it’s all quite a protracted and painstaking process.

There’s a very factual basis to my approach, but perhaps unusually, there’s a very strong emotional core too.

Everything I’ve done in relation to my work on Inga’s case, from the public campaign on Inga’s behalf that I’ve participated in over the last five years that has involved a number of initiatives with the intention of trying to make a positive contribution to advance Inga’s

When I began working on the case in 2016, one of the things that I discovered in my research was that back in 1989, on the first anniversary of Inga’s murder, Inga’s mum Almut and her dad Josef had traveled from Germany to Northern Ireland and participated in a press conference, in which they spoke only in German because they didn’t speak English. One of the things Inga’s mum said that day that was translated from German into English was, “I hope that the people of Northern Ireland do not forget my Inga.” When I started writing about Inga, at that time, there had been no fresh media reports for five years. 2011 had seen the last new media reports. Anyone that I mentioned her name to in Dublin hadn’t heard of her. So I assumed that the case was dead. There had never been anyone charged, let alone convicted in the case. By 2016, the last media reports in relation to it were five years before.

So I thought, this is just going to be my thing, something that has stirred my interest but that I assumed no one else would be interested in. I decided I was going to go all-out because I felt such a burning commitment to it, like being drawn to a flame.

I think when you feel something, the logical next step is to want to DO something. So I thought, well, I’ll try to write a blog. I’d never written a blog before. And I thought, well, in order to do this properly, I’ve really got to research it in depth. So I spent four months researching and writing what became part one and published that online. To my amazement, it went viral; on the very first day. At that point, it occurred to me that what Inga’s mum had said back in 1989, “I hope the people of Northern Ireland do not forget my Inga,” if I could tell Almut that after these years later, the people of Northern Ireland haven’t forgotten Inga I thought it would mean a lot to her. If it helped Almut in her grief, I felt that’s something nice I could do for Inga in a way, like reaching out to her across the sky.”

You’re currently in a studio. Correct? Working on the full-length album. Will this be a continuation of the Chronicles?

Yes, very much so. My main bugbear at the moment is time because since the EP came out, things have been so hectic, and I’m simultaneously working on the album and several other EPs as well as undertaking a lot of promo and press every day, and managing all the social media accounts. In the midst of that, I’m trying to find the time to do basic things like eating and sleeping!

What are your expectations for the future? I mean, do you feel like you’ve already exceeded your expectations with everything that’s going on?

Yes, in a way. It’s so strange experiencing something like this for the first time, a rise of this nature. I’m fascinated by bands and how a rise in stature affects them, their personal chemistry, and their working practices.

I find myself reviewing my expectations and constantly having to revise them. And I think that’s the case for the label as well because there’s one particular thing that started happening, which has blown everyone involved in the campaign away. There’s a very high-profile radio station in the UK called BBC 6 music. And it’s become the most listened to radio station in all of the UK. And they get 2.6 million listeners a day. It’s a huge amount. They have this one show, in particular; their flagship afternoon show is hosted by Steve Lamacq, a legendary figure in British broadcasting. He started playing The Glitter and the Glue. The crazy thing about it was, this is the first time the label that I’m on Dimple Discs, a fantastic label, has had a song by an artist played on Steve Lamacq and on any BBC 6 Music show other than Gideon Coe. This is something that the label did not expect to happen, especially at this very early stage. The EP has only been out a short time. I was listening to Steve Lamacq’s show today, not expecting to hear myself. I was genuinely listening as a fan while I was working. I heard myself, and for a split second, I thought I was hallucinating. I thought it was because of sleep deprivation! But no, there it was, my song The Glitter and the Glue!

And he’s played it several times on BBC 6 Music now and added it to his Recommends playlist, which blows my mind.

Let me ask you about your influences and what set you on the path to becoming a musician and songwriter?

I like talking about this because I can trace the roots of it very specifically. What happened was, I was essentially lost in my life. I didn’t have a father around, and my mum didn’t know anything about cool music. I didn’t have any cool relatives. You know, usually, people have a cool uncle or brother. My younger brother, he didn’t know anything about music. I was sort of...lost. There’s a thing in Ireland called the Gaeltacht. It’s like a camp where kids go to learn to speak Irish. I left the Gaeltacht after three weeks speaking no more Irish than I had arrived with (laughs), but I had a great time there. It’s a rite of passage for Irish teenagers, or it was back then. While I was there, I had this “Eureka!” moment where I became friendly with a boy. We struck up a conversation on the train down, and then I went to visit him in his room. I remember it was a Saturday morning, and I walked into this room he was sharing with another boy. And this extraordinary music was playing. It was the American-only compilation double album Louder Than Bombs by the Smiths.

When I heard that, my life changed in that instant. I knew that this was what I needed and wanted, and it was just one of two pure eureka moments of discovery in my life where I went, “THIS IS IT!” (Inga Maria Hauser being the other).

I fell in love with The Smiths in that moment, and that was my “Year zero” musically.

Then I asked for Christmas for a book called ‘Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance by Johnny Rogan, and I credit that book with enabling me to learn how to speak and write the English language because I read that book inside out and learned more from it than the 13 years I spent in the Irish school system. It taught me so much

about Indie music and music history in general. And I fell even more in love with The Smiths and with Indie music culture. The Smiths was the first band I heard that I felt weren’t trying to paper over the cracks, and they weren’t trying to deceive me. It was showing me life as it is, as it was, and as it will be. I just knew they weren’t trying to bullshit me.

Did you find it like you felt that you became part of a community?

My life had always been very unsettled, from infancy into childhood and throughout my adolescence. All my life, I was moving constantly due to a dysfunctional family situation. And my mam and dad were constantly breaking up and getting back together, breaking up and getting back together, over and over. Each time they would break up, my mam and my brother and I would have to leave because my father refused to leave what he saw as “his” domain in his very self-entitled, patriarchal, emotionally mute way.

So we’d have to leave our home, leave our schools, etc., and my mam had very little money. We were practically destitute at points.

Sometimes on a weekly basis, we would move place to place. I remember we lived in one particular flat in Ashbourne for a week.

So by the time I turned 14, I had already moved house 15 times. As of the present day, I’ve clocked up 28 house and flat moves. But at that time, when you’re 14, every time you move house, you’re also losing your group of whatever friends you managed to make since the previous move. By the time I turned 14, I moved school again.

And moved house again; by this time, I moved to a very brutal, very intimidating North Dublin environment, which in the 1990s was totally resistant to individuality, alternative culture, and anything outside the norm. I was perceived as an outsider, the only “alternative” weirdo in the school, actually. Usually, there’s a gang of weirdos, hip cats, whatever, that gravitate towards one another. But I was the only person in that school and in my area into alternative music and culture. I was getting beaten up for this and for being LGBT on a daily basis.

And this stuff was happening outside school too. For four years, I had not one friend in the world. It’s an experience that that shapes you, that never really leaves you because no matter how crazy things are now with all this media attention, there’s still a part of me that is like, “how is this happening?!” remembering the kid getting my head slammed against a door. So it’s so weird from that perspective. But all I had back then - music - was all I had.

And in some instances, it’s all I wanted. I would just bury myself and lose myself in a world of sound. And that was the greatness of my Walkman or Discman; I could just go to this other place.

And I’ve been kind of living there ever since. It’s left me feeling to this day that as long as I have access to music, as long as I have the latter-day equivalent, which is a phone with music on it, I’m fine. I don’t need anything or anyone else. I just need music. So it’s kind of like my sonic security blanket, in a sense. Eventually, I found my way and did find friends. But it took four years of being friendless and isolated. But it took a long time because when you’re running at a different speed, it can take a while to find others to run with.

Keeley publishes a blog with a devoted global following, “The Keeley Chronicles,” documenting the many facets of this unique, harrowing, and mysterious case. For a more in-depth analysis, visit The Keeley Chronicles.

thekeeleychronicles.wordpress.com Brave Warrior is availabe at dimplediscs.bandcamp.com

Black Market Karma’s Stan Belton talks with the Second Scene about the new album, ‘The Technicolour Liquid Audio Machine,’ and how it all came together over the past year. Facing lockdowns and working under limitations, Belton recorded lo-fi electronica for trying times. With live shows on the horizon, things are looking bright for Black Market Karma. Fingers crossed.

BLACK MARKET KARMA You just released a new album, ‘The Technicolour Liquid Audio Machine.’ What can we expect to hear?

You know that feeling when you have a kind of longing for something that you can’t place?

It’s almost like nostalgia but a little different. A longing for a time or place in which you haven’t lived, but it’s not necessarily the past either. It could be the future or beyond. Or maybe you did live it, but you have amnesia of the soul. Like it knows there’s more, but your physical body just can’t quite recall. That’s what I was trying to capture when I made this.

Also, when I was growing up, a lot of ’60s and ‘70s kids TV programs were re-runs. That kind of sonic aesthetic has always been in me because of that, and I think it comes out here in the overall texture of the music.

How is this album different from previous Black Market Karma albums?

Well, apart from a few spoken vocal samples here and there, it’s totally instrumental. It also has basically no guitar from start to finish. These are both firsts for BMK. It leans more towards a kind of lo-fi electronica with some tracks that I’d say are even a bit trip-hop. Some of these flavours have appeared in previous music of mine but not to this extent and not for an entire album.

How did lockdowns, social distancing, and the overall madness of 2021/22 affect your writing process and the feel of ‘The Technicolour Liquid Audio Machine?’

It definitely put me in a situation where I had nothing else distracting me, which is a pretty ripe time to make an album in. There were other factors that influenced it more, though, I think. My

Grandad reached the impressive age of 94 and took his leave at the beginning of 2020. I wanted to make a musical tribute to him, but I was in the middle of moving home, meaning that almost all of the band’s equipment was in storage and unreachable. All I had to hand were keys and some old drum recordings from previous sessions of mine. I wanted to do something for him so badly that it kinda pushed me to work with the bare minimum. The result was the last track of this record, ‘William’ (You can actually hear him talking on it) I was so pleased with how it came out that it inspired me to make an entire album that way. That’s how ‘The Technicolour Liquid Audio Machine’ was born.

Does Black Market Karma have any shows lined up to finish out the year?

We have a run of dates around the UK towards the end of October. London, Glasgow, Leeds, Lancaster & Liverpool for Happy Daze’s Phantasmagoria.

What can we look forward to from Black Market Karma in the future?

Our next album will be coming either end of this year or early 2022. Flower Power Records have already placed the order for vinyl. We’ve also been cooking up some new things over there, which I’m really excited about. One of them being a collaboration with Sonic Boom, who’s in this same issue, right? Keep your noses peeled and your eyes to the ground.

DONOVAN’S BRAIN

Second Scene talks with Ron Sanchez about the new Donovan’s Brain double set release, Two Suns Two Shadows and Sandbox Dispatches.

Ron, you are a prolific songwriter. The latest Donovan’s Brain release is a two-album set but not a double album. Tell us about these two new albums and what separates them.

Back in 2017, I was looking at a stack of maybe 15 songs, more than enough for a new album.

When I gave up five songs for the Australian split album Burnt Trees In The Snow, I had to rethink.

Three of those songs were A-list songs for the new album—one each by Kris Hughes, Scott Sutherland, and myself. One more was written for that record, and one another had come out in a different arrangement as our Green Monkey Xmas contribution.

I just got back to work. It was a very prolific period.

Scott had a lot of Brain material too. One of the major songs was something I wrote based on a riff Bobby Sutliff had around for ages. My first attempt to use that failed, but the second effort became River Of Tears. Kris helped to sort out my lyrics and wrote the chorus. Now that song is a clue to the difference between the two albums.

2017 and 2018 were full of unexpected upheaval in my life. Retiring was the least of it. SandBox Dispatches is a musical translation of my journal. I use Joni Mitchell’s term, a song cycle, to describe it. The opening song Failure To Achieve (Escape Velocity) says as much as I might care to spell out.

The details are cloaked in terms of science and technology. Most of the songs were written in the same state of mind—a deeply personal bunch of songs. A couple of the Sandbox songs ended up on Two Suns. Rice Paper Kite got bumped off Sandbox because of space. Telegraph Ave was the last one written for the album. It’s about another major event in my life, from the mid-70s.

Much to my surprise, one of the subjects of that song just resurfaced to say hello, exactly a year after I wrote those words. The music is Bobby’s. By accident or design, Sandbox Dispatches feels like it is connected and flows as a result.

Two Suns Two Shadows is a collection of Brain-like songs. There are two older songs on that. Scott’s Alternative To Me was offered up for Heirloom Varieties but was held back only because we had way too many songs, and he had a couple on there already. The Ministry Of False Alarms dates back to 2008. The original version was written for Fires Which Burnt Brightly. It didn’t get used. When I came back to it, I liked the end section but lost confidence in the song part. I wrote a new song and added that very same end instrumental section to that new one. It wasn’t until Ric’s friend John Goodsall came around and added the solo that I felt like it was complete.

The songs on Two Suns are whimsical. Character songs. There was a great period in UK psych when there were some of my favorite songs written about curious people. I’ve written a couple of those. It’s not as easy as it seems. Eden Pariah, A Trip With Auntie, and Scott’s Dolly Jim are good ones. It sets up the album. Secret Society is a bit more of that. I work very hard not to come across as a retro band. I just write songs and music; I don’t study obscure 60s singles to try to recreate. All that is just in the memory. It leaks out through my own filters, which is colored by 60+ years of personal experience and then digging back to music from before I was aware/born. I think everyone in the band suffers from the same brain-melting pot. That is why we sound like we do. There are a few hundred years of musical experience in the band.

Is there a running theme between Two Suns Two Shadows and Sandbox Dispatches?

Musically yes. That is just how it works. Donovan’s Brain is a non-stop operation. It evolves because the band is fluid, and the songwriting is spread across everyone in the band. We have a broad set of tools to work with. Bobby and I share an interest in orchestration and arranging. We are a guitar band, but there is always a layer of strings and keyboards to color the songs. I haven’t asked everyone, but my guess is we all write about what’s going on in our heads and lives. There is no formula hit factory writing.

How did you put these albums together as far as songwriting and recording?

I have a full-blown studio in my basement.

Everyone else has some sort of setup. For me, the songwriting seemed effortless. Automatic. There were times when I had to stop work on a song to record a new idea before I lost it. I wrote several more songs last year after I had decided that we had the two albums of material needed. I couldn’t ignore the creative process. At one point, Sandbox had 13 songs. Bobby wisely pointed out that was too long. I reconfigured the track listings.

And just shifted the extras and newer songs to the folder for the next albums. There are six new songs that have come together since January. Ric will be here this week to add drums.

I don’t usually record demos. I write straight to tape, so hard drive more accurately. A lot of songs start in the program Logic. I find it to be a good place to work up the ideas. I’ll put up a drum loop and work out the tempo. Then I try out ideas and record them quickly. Logic makes it easy to cut and paste and build an arrangement. Once I’m satisfied, I move over to Digital Performer for the real work. The basic ideas are done quickly.

There were a couple of problem children this time around. Lime Twist was the second song written

and recorded. I just could not get the guitars to sound right. Then I realized I couldn’t sing it in the key it was written. I wrestled with it, rebuilding it a couple of times. Finally, I redid it in the key of C. That helped the guitar sound as I wasn’t using a capo, and I was now able to hit the notes. There was one more round of guitar work. I stripped off all the parts and started fresh. That is what appears on the record. The other difficult one was Broken Ladders/Crumbling Wall. I wrote it thinking it was a two-guitar song. I might have mentioned Wishbone Ash. It then went heavier with distorted bass and crunchy guitars. I got a good track happening.

When I returned to it to do the final vocal, again,

I realized it was at the top of my vocal range.

Like Lime Twist, I redid it in a key I could sing. That also changed the guitar approach. I played a busy part all the way, though, and then edited it down to the good bits—that made room for the piano to weave in and out with the guitar. In the end, it’s more like John Cipollina and Nicky Hopkins. I followed John around for about five years, listening to what he did and watch how he did it. Luckily the bridge section still worked. I didn’t have to redo it. That’s when I realized I had borrowed the feel from the Man song Bananas.

Man is another band who are a big influence and good friends. The slide guitar and organ owe more than a little to Micky Jones and Phil Ryan.

There are a couple of other Phil Ryan references hidden in the songs. Joe Hughes was one of the two friends I asked to step in to finish the bass parts after Tom Stevens died. That was a huge shock.

I’d just talked to Tom earlier in the week, and he was ready to get back to the Brain work. Joe got the feel I was looking for, which pulled the song together. He acknowledged having to fill some very big shoes.

Music and words usually appear at the same time. Words might be the starting point, the music coming when I sit down two see where the words take me. One exception on this record was Inquisitor. I got the idea I was going to write a piano instrumental in the style of When The Eagle Flies era Traffic. The music came together in one sitting. All the action was in the middle section; the front and back seemed empty in comparison.

The words Inquisitor Non-Sequitur were in my notebook. That was all I needed and ran with that coming up with a heavy concept. That song is all about fear. You can hear the wild animals screaming down on the jungle floor. Or maybe it’s me.

Before I started the final round of mixing, I took a break to work on a remix of Deniz Tek’s album Glass Eye World. There was interest in reissuing it in Australia. I requested I get a chance to have a fresh go at mixing it. Deniz had asked me to remix one of the songs for a comp a few years ago.

It came out well, so I figured the whole album could be improved with a fresh mix. Den asked me to add some keyboards on a couple of songs, which I was happy to do. The studio tools I have now are a vast improvement over what I was working with 20 years ago. It’s come out well. That exercise tuned up my mixing chops. I was able to really focus on my work. I’d done some mixes as I finished songs. I think, in the end, I used a few of those early mixes. It wasn’t too overwhelming of a task to get the album finished. I had everything mixed except the four that needed bass. I banged those out as soon as the parts arrived. I think I was done by the beginning of March. If that weren’t enough, I used any open time to remix the Brain album Tiny Crustacean Light Show. It was our best seller for Get Hip, but I never cared for how it sounded. It’s sitting on the shelf for now. I haven’t had time to think about what to do with it. Needless to say, 2020 was full-on. That hasn’t slowed down any in 2021.

Was this an individual effort, or did you collaborate with others? If so, who did you work with while creating these albums?

It’s always a collaboration. The band members all reacted differently to the plague lockdown. It was difficult for us all, but a couple of the bandmates struggled. Bobby Sutliff focused on recording a solo album. It’s been a long time since he’s

done one. It’s been slow going for him. At one point, I went through my computer and found all the little fragments and unfinished songs he had sent me. I think there were a couple of bits he’d forgotten about. More recently, I realized there was a finished song from 2012. When I checked the date, I had to assume it had got lost when Bob had his car wreck. He was thrilled to get that one back and has reworked it for his own record. I also found the original Tom Stevens bass part for Let It Go. The version the Brain released was my guitar instrumental idea over Bob’s chords. That required Tom to redo the bass to fit the new groove.

Bobby had returned to his original idea, which he rediscovered recently.

While none of this was for Donovan’s Brain, it is how the two of us work together. In return, I got the track he wrote and recorded, which became Telegraph Ave. I liked his demo and made some small arrangement changes, and asked him to recut it at a faster tempo. Peter Holsapple was very kind to add the guitar solo to that one. This year Bob sent me two more tracks to finish. I’ve written lyrics and sung both. I did an inventory of all the unused tracks that Ric played on, hoping to find something I could use for a new song. Waste not want not. There was a song of Bobby’s that he disowned due to the caustic sentiment. I mapped out the sections and wrote something of my own over that. A different sort of collaboration, but fruitful.

I was working very fast on the songs. Most of them were just my own creation. There is just no space for the others to add anything. I don’t want to be telling anyone exactly what to play if I can just do it myself. I think there are ten songs that are just Ric and myself. Scott was the other writing force. He had five songs, three of which are on the records.

He sends fairly finished ideas. I played bass on one and guitar on another. All three got some keyboards and strings too. Scott sang and played guitar on one of mine. The other contributions were from the stunt guitar players Deniz Tek, Matt Pucci, Holsapple, and Goodsall. Jim Dickson also helped out with the bass parts. Jim is an old friend I met through Deniz. He has a long history. I knew him as the bass player for the Barracudas, one of my very favorite 80s bands. He currently plays with Radio Birdman, the New Christs, and Paul Berwick’s Magnetic Quartet. I gave Jim the two psych tunes, A Trip With Auntie and Secret Society.

We share a common interest in such things. He thanked me for recognizing that. He said no one asks him to play that style of music. I suspect Jim will be or principal bass player going forward.

What are some of your favorite highlights about putting this latest Donovan’s Brain collection together?

Every minute of the process is a thrill—that instant when the song idea appears or when someone sends over a great song. I sit and try to visualize where it’s going to go. I honestly get lost in the process. I often wonder where did that come from? Who played that? Building up the song on top of the framework. I start hearing things and just figure out how to play it. I don’t write out the parts. I just add the bits I see. I can see the shapes of the sounds. As dense as the songs might seem, the actual playing is very economical. In the end, it’s easy to map out the sound stage for the mix.

With so much material, it was a grand puzzle to assemble. There were a few different versions of the albums. I make CDs and listen to the possible running order and to check if the mixes are working. Every song has to stand up to the test.

By this point, I know the songs are valid. There is a failure bin when the mistakes go. They are never considered for the records.

It was a trick to keep track of twenty songs. I was writing more as I moved into the final phase. I always fear that when I finish an album, I’ll have

exhausted my creativity. I had to clear my head and concentrate on finishing the mixes. I don’t want to find any surprises after sending it off to be mastered. Gary Hobish is not going to fix anything; he’s just going to make it all hang together. That moment when it comes back, truly finished, is when I am forced to live with my decisions. I’ve been doing the business of the release since April.

This week is the first one this year that I haven’t done any work in the studio. I’m just waiting for the finished CDs to arrive so I can start the promo effort. I am content. Once I have the package I dreamed up in my hand, I know it’s done. I collect images for possible use as cover art. I started work on the cover idea over a year ago. I got it in my head I wanted to recreate a poster cover like Hawkwind Space Ritual, Glastonbury Faire, or The first Deviants lp. My manufacture did some good work for me, seeing if it could be done. In the end, I decided the poster wouldn’t be sturdy enough for retail, so I decided to add a cardboard slipcover. The albums each have a design theme which spreads across the whole package. Chad Jones sorted out the back cover and did the lettering and logo. I knew a second set of eyes would find what I could not come up with myself.

Since vinyl wasn’t an option, a deluxe CD seemed to be the way to go.

What’s up next for you and Donovan’s Brain?

What’s next is well underway as we speak.

There are fifteen new songs in various stages of completion. They are all written and the basic tracks recorded. I was just now setting up for the drum session coming up this week. The songs are so new; they aren’t fully in my memory banks.

Reviewing them is exciting. I can see this next one is going to be different. I plan to keep writing and recording. Kris and Scott are finally getting back out and playing live. I hope this shakes loose some new songs for the Brain. Another album next year.

Maybe. This one was a lot of work and is a lot of music for people to digest. That said, I sat down the other day to tally up what we’ve released since 2013. Including Sandbox Shadows, there are 4.5 albums of new material. There are the two archive releases, which equal seven albums.

Add to that five compilation tracks and the ep.

I count twelve albums worth of material spread over those releases. That is shocking when I look at it that way. No one has complained to me about this yet.

There is a parallel project, the mythical krautrock band Armchair Explorers. I’ve recently recorded several more pieces for that. I’m talking to a friend in the UK about collaborating on something for that. A couple of songs recorded for Donovan’s Brain have moved over to this folder. The synth experiments are learning exercises which are then applied to Brain songs. It keeps me from ever falling into a rut.

Photo: Karen Sanchez

THE BORSTAL BOYS Second Scene talks with Anthony “Rocky” Lamonde via Zoom about the latest Borstal Boys album Crumbs, songwriting, and what keeps the fire burning.

The Borstal Boys have a new album set for release. Tell us about the album.

It’s been in the making since 2019. It’s called Crumbs. So I guess you’re going to ask why Crumbs? Well, we released this album, and it seems like crumbs because we put out one song in 2019 another one at the end of 2019—two more in 2020 and one more in 2021.

Five of the twelve songs have been released as singles. I’m really happy with the work we put together on it.

What’s the songwriting process with The Borstal Boys? Individual or collaboration?

Usually, me or Vinnie [Lamonde, guitar] write the songs. A lot of times, I have the whole song, the music for it, or I might just have a chorus or a riff. And we’ll record it at practice. Mark is just singing whatever comes to his head, melodies. So if I hear a phrase or something that I liked, I’ll catch that phrase, and I’ll use that as a chorus and then write verses.

When Vinnie writes, he usually has the words and the music because he’ll write a story around it. Sometimes I’ll just write music, and then I search for a melody for weeks, or we will record me jammin’, and I’ll listen to it all the time and try to come up with a melody.

What can we expect from the latest album?

They’re good rock and roll songs. They’re mostly about, you know, either losing or leaving a relationship, wanting somebody, or driving a fast car. I’m not breaking down any walls with my lyrics, but I think they’re catchy. The most important part to me is a catchy song.

When Mark [Ponsonby, lead singer] writes, he gets a little deeper into things. Mine seems to be more rock and roll where Mark gets into saving the world.

Walking Away, which we feature Gallo, who’s a rapper. I would say these are rock and roll numbers, straight rock and roll numbers.

There’s a couple of slower tunes, a funky one. We did a couple of

borstalboys.com

songs with a horn section. Bob McCutcheon’s [owner of The Vault Recording studio] son got some kids from his school to play the horn section, and Brett wrote the horn parts for me. We sat in the room, and I was digging what he was doing.

What keeps you motivated after all these years to keep going?

I played my first gig in 1986 when I was 14 years old at the Decade.

I’ve been playing music ever since. My first band was a cover band. You got to work your way in, and we played covers. We had three or four originals. We progressively got better, so people came out to see us. You know, down the line, what keeps me interested now is I would have to say Bob McCutcheon involvement. He’s put his trust in my band and me. At this point, I dig writing songs. I’m into writing and making it sound good. In five years from now, looking back, I want to be like, wow, that was done really good and be proud of the quality of work. Bob lets me do this on a weekly basis.

Right. So that’s really what keeps me motivated.

Is all the recording done at the Vault?

Yes, except for one song on this album called Rust Belt, and I recorded that at my house. Bob has been supportive of our band and the projects that we do. We pretty much have unlimited time.

And whatever we get done, we get done. We started this out in 2019.

What’s next for The Borstal Boys?

I have another 12 songs for a new album, which has already been recorded and is probably 75% done.

Thanks, Rocky! You can find The Borstal Boys Crumbs on all digital downland platforms or order the CD directly from the group. Also, catch The Borstal Boys live at a venue near you.

Photo: Josh Montedoro

SEND MEDICINE Photo: Bret Lemke

The Los Angeles-based group, Send Medicine released their third album, By Telepathy & Reputation. A genre-blending of rock & roll, deep psych, and electronics.

Tell us about your latest album, By Telepathy & Reputation, and what went into creating it.

By Telepathy & Reputation encapsulates where the band was at over the course of 2019. The songs were written and recorded in three separate parts of the year, spring, summer, and fall. There was a lot happening around us at the time. We were playing live a lot, and there were breakups and new relationships occurring in our personal orbits. We were hanging out a lot as a group, writing music, camping, taking DMT, our drummer had a baby - there was a lot to pull from to bring the record from the abstract into the thing it is today. We’re very proud of it.

By Telepathy & Reputation is the group’s third album.

How do you compare it to the previous releases?

I’d say the album is the most rock and roll of the three and probably the most collaborative musically; you can really hear everyone’s ideas coming through.

Also, you can start to hear more piano-driven parts start to creep through, which will be even more prominent on the next record (our 4th).

How does the group work as a creative entity? Is it a group effort when songwriting or individual?

Typically, I’ll (Julian Hacquebard) bring the skeleton of a song in and throw it at the fellas, and then we’ll throw it around the room and see what happens.

Sometimes someone will have an idea, and that idea starts to steer the ship and informs the new course for the song, and we start re-organizing ourselves around what is now a new anchor.

What has influenced the group the most when it comes to songwriting and overall creativity?

So many things... long-form jamming, travel, literature, cinema, seeing other bands play live, listening to records together, things overheard at a bar, a dream.

What’s next for Send Medicine?

Our next record and our first trip to Europe is scheduled for May 2022!

BOLT DREG

The lords of the electronic punk rock party return with a new line-up and new songs.

Sean Murphy and Candrika Rice fill us in on what’s happening with The Molecule Party.

Tell us about the new lineup. With the addition of Candrika, how did you meet, and what has she brought to the mix?

Sean Murphy -Hey Second Scene!!!!--great to talk with you again!!!!

Well, to discuss the new line up I have to start at the beginning of 2020... as the last Molecule Party show with the old lineup was a local bar early of that year....twas typically a great time ... the distorted quantized thump providing the platform for our unhinged party sermon then....**insert thermonuclear explosion sound byte with waling sobs ...the pandemic thang booted the entire planet hard in the face....the whole shaking Earth on pause and the death rattle of all of our scheduled live performances..... We had lots of things on the books. BIG gigs, little gigs, an annual seminal festival....even a crazy horror cookout.....

it!!!--Her voice immediately grabbed me like fucking deja vu...total juju magic ---I thought, “This was foretold by the GODS....a chosen one shall descend and lead the congregation to the end of the world party “--So one fateful night, Candrika and GR1FT3R came over for an audition/party, and the deal was sealed. Right out of the gate, she brought something fresh, intense, and fun... I demoed a couple of songs I had been working on, and she immediately started putting melodies over em’-Candrika Rice- Music has always been such a huge and important part of my life. Being around it is what makes life worth living, and I’m sure we were all feeling a little lost and purposeless without the presence of live music during this, although it did leave a lot of really talented musicians a lot of extra time to experiment and write without the deadlines and all the other distractions of life in the way. I’ve been in it since I can remember, my dad taking me to any all-ages DIY punk and metals shows when I wasn’t even tall enough to ride any roller coasters yet. The people, the loudness, the crazy hair and outfits, the rebellious air, it’s a world I’m lucky I got to be exposed to so young I remember when Collin first sent me the message saying he knew someone looking for a new female singer in a band. It was funny because I was sitting with my friend, and we had JUST been

work well with this type of mix, and the possibilities were endless. By the end of the night, I was just amazed that this opportunity had seemingly come out of thin air. I was ready to do something different, commit to something fun, and hope right on a stage and go crazy…of course, first, we had some work to do.

The Molecule Party has a new single coming soon.

Fill us in on what we can expect.

Sean Murphy-- The new single “Punk Rock Party Girl!” was dropped in July 2021. I had actually written the rough demo for it a couple of years ago. I had been experimenting with some samples from The Bar-Kay’s track “Soulfinger” I always loved that song....-spliced it into what I was working on- and instantly tapped into the cosmic party vibe. Later, Allinaline and I jammed with it in his practice space and came up with the basic framework for the vocals--he started freestyling the chorus with his signature delivery, and it instantly put a smile on my face. The two of us performed it at one of his shows, and it slayed. Then I retooled it for The Molecule Party’s lineup --It was primarily just a live jam at first, as I felt something was missing.

During my first meeting with Candrika, I played it for her, and she dug it.

I sent her home with a copy and told her, “ you can do anything you want...if you come up with a better verse than me, we’ll use that instead” A

THE MOLECULE PARTY but all that shyte slowly disintegrated.... Whilst stuck at home...I watched with astonishment as the masses lost their fucking minds on social media.....the new confession booth and A.I. priest to absolve our sins, -everyone shut in.... an endless loop of “homeroom forever”....SO when everyone was having a mental breakdown, I just kept my head down and focused on my writing....countless all-nighters... the sunlight was a stranger to me.... anything and everything being explored...I reached out to the guitarist Dave Buzard (13 Saints, We Came From Space) and to all of my artist friends that I always wanted to collaborate with and said...”I am sending you something cool...put something even cooler on it!”, and they most certainly complied. The summer of 2020 passed with me just working on new tracks --and then in early fall, allinaline (Jeremy Creamer) The Molecule Party’s producer/longtime collaborator informed me that our latest album, “Revolution,” was mixed, mastered, and finally ready to drop!

So we unleashed that esoteric demon at the end of October and got an incredible response from the public....mad love for our “Revolution”!! --but by that time, I had parted ways with a longtime member---and I found myself in need of someone new to fill that spot, as I wanted to continue the concept of dueling male/female vox. It’s all about that ancient energy...one compliments the other.

I first contacted a friend, as I admired her work-- to come lay down some vox stuff. She was totally down but heavy in the process of revamping her own project--so it just wasn’t gonna work out...

In the midst of this, I was beginning to assist on a demo with this guy, Colin St. John Belmontez, who goes by “GR1FT3R”, he does insane moody dub rave stuff... Anyways I mentioned my dilemma.... and he forwarded my latest album to his good friend, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist, Candrika Rice. She loved it, was interested in a meeting, and sent me an unreleased track she recorded back in the day with a member of a very wellknown national punk band.....I was FLOORED

talking about how they thought I should get back out there and then bam, like a sign from the universe. I opened the link to Revolution with no idea what to expect. I loved it immediately. What I love about The Molecule Party is on first impression; it almost leaves you confused, like in a good way, like you don’t know what just hit you, but you want to hear it again. I said to my friend sitting next to me “…this is weird….I like it!!”

I was definitely intrigued. We got in contact and set up to meet. I had no idea what to expect. I’d been around music all my life, but this was a genre I’d never worked in before. Sure, I had a past as a raver and a punk rocker, so the vibe fit just right, but I’d just spent all winter writing angry songs on acoustic guitar. This was a whole new energy, a new world to me. One I connected to immediately when I heard it. It was just a matter of how well I fit with the rest of them. I remember coming up to Murphy’s door, meeting his wife Stephanie, and immediately connecting over appreciation of style, coffee, and cigarettes. Their house had that year-round Halloween feel. It was a really cool atmosphere. I immediately noticed all the Bowie magnets on the fridge, another huge influence and important figure to me. I was instantly very excited about seeing what would happen.

Next, I could already tell I loved these people. We talked about goals, what they were looking for, influences, and what would be different. Part of my background that I think is a unique change is that I do love low, loungey, jazzy, or reggae vocals on top of having riot girl roots. Amy Winehouse has always been one of my biggest inspirations, and I definitely threw some Gwen Stefani on one of the instrumental tracks he showed me. I love the blending of genres. The Molecule Party is hard to pinpoint because Sean is so innovative and creative with how he pieces it all together. I felt all the pieces in my could really

few weeks later, My wife and I had a party with all of our musician friends-- Candrika shows up, meets Allinaline for the first time, cracks a couple of beers--.and announces that she wants to debut her new vox for the track. So in front of the entire party, all complete strangers to her at the time, She belted out her new vocals over the stereo with Jeremy and me singing our parts...The room was in shock. “Holy shit..what did we just hear??”....we knew we had a classic now. She was the missing piece. Within a couple of days, the three of us went up to his studio and began laying down her

new vocals. Dave Buzard showed up soon after and did all the guitar work. Allinaline laid down live bass, psychically mixed in the new components, and did his mad science on the knobs. .. and voila. A brand new song..the ultimate reboot..... think of “Fury Road,” but with cocktails. This track also began a more intense collaboration with Allinaline as he was to join us on stage performing.

He will be releasing new material soon...I have heard it....one listen, and you’re hooked.....

Candrika Rice-- When Sean told me the first song he wanted to work with me on that was sitting in the vault ready for some action and contribution was called “Punk Rock Party Girl!, I was already full-on in. Anyone who knows me could probably see why that was so fitting and ready to have me on it—a perfect and personal intro, in a way. The first time I heard it through a speaker, I was blown away. This was just so fun, dancey, full of spunk and attitude. Like any Molecule Party song, it’s not one you can sit still during even if you tried. The challenge here was taking a song that was already like a complete and awesome-sounding thing without me and find something to add to it that would actually bring it higher rather than take away from what I already loved that was going on. I scratched my head for a minute, and then it came to me to do what I know best, spit some lines about punk rock and rock n roll icons that kinda got me into this boat I’m in now, make it rhyme, make it trashy, make it a little funny, try to find a way to fit it around and between the lyrics that were already there because I didn’t feel right replacing any of that. This was still a little outside my usual box, and I was really excited about it but also not sure how the rest of the world would feel about it, especially since it was my first impression of showing what I might bring to the table. The first time I shared it at all, super rough draft, with a bit of nerve, was a night after a few nati boys, out on a balcony in Baltimore visiting my near and dear friend Matt Pless, who is also an artist that I consider to be one of the most talented songwriters one all time, who’s always been a great supporter of me too and encouraged me. And he was excited and thought it was cool and innovative, and if he thinks it doesn’t suck, it probably doesn’t suck.

The first line actually ended up being a nod to him, “cheap shots on the rocks,” being the title of his upcoming album that I also modeled for.

When it came time to turn it in, I had intended to arrive at a cookout at Sean’s house a little early and discuss it, but as the way parties go and new environments, it took a minute for the moment to be right, the more people coming in, the introductions, turns out a lot of people had been waiting to meet me and hearing a lot about me. Little nerves are natural. I must say I felt very welcomed and excited, the kindness and fun of everybody who came around was so refreshing, and I was really happy to be a part of it. This, however, did mean I had to show it for the first time not only in front of Sean and Jeremy but anyone else who I had just met that night who happened to be in the same room. We turned it on and turned it out—the rest is history.

Hit the recording spot immediately. The first time I saw Jeremy’s spot, I was bewildered, a colorful, dynamic, bright, and true original layout. Some like Andy Warhol meets Alice in wonderland with a dash of drag and horror as I walked up the stairs to record. It had been a few years since I’d done

a professional recording, but Jeremy directed me perfectly through it, and then to watch him work his magic in mixing, you could tell something really big was coming.

How is The Molecule Party planning on finishing out the year? What do you have planned for2022?

Sean Murphy-- Now that things have opened back up, we have begun playing live again.

Our 2021 debut was a huge gig opening up for The Electric Six. The house was packed as we performed songs from “Revolution,” the new single, and a couple of MoPa classics. Allinaline provided the Lemmy-esque live bass and vocals

along with myself and Candrika. We were three fighter jets in combat formation with the goal was to drop bombs until the audience submitted and partied...and after “Trigger Warning,” it was mission accomplished. Days later, our 2nd show was a tribute event honoring a dear friend who had recently passed away. Our entire set was a eulogy. Cutting up our set to include our version of Bowie’s “Starman” and a cover of our friend’s track. All of the bands showed up and gave it their ALL...a fitting tribute for an artist that all of Pittsburgh loved. RIP Bobby Lamonde. As of this moment. We have several shows booked for the end of summer/ early fall, with a handful of dates in neighboring cities on the east coast being worked out. We are in the process of getting on some festivals as well. We will be going back to the studio soon to record another single to be released late fall --and did I mention our first video? We have a lot of gems in the works. We can’t wait for you all to hear it!!

the same week just about. Jumping straight in headfirst. And of course, the biggest one being my debut, opening for Electric Six, a band whose music I had listened to when I was younger. No pressure, right? You just gotta take the jump sometimes. No baby steps, all out. It’s exhilarating.

Unfortunately, two of the three shows were during the vacation my family had planned. We made it work, jammed in as many practices as possible between busy schedules before I left, and I flew back home early the night before the big day.

This was so important to me, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Practicing all together with Jeremy and hearing his live bass additions was incredible, a whole new energy from just listening to the tracks and practicing along with them.

And Jeremy’s a genius all around. He knows his shit, the dude directed and pep talked us through metaphors and motivation and insight like no other.

It was all coming together so quickly.

The feeling of the days nearing closer and the amount of work and preparation all turned to ease almost instantly once we ran through it. I trust and admire these guys both so much. They are both so creative and passionate about what they do, and they make me want to do my all.

By far the best people I have ever worked with. We walked thru the door full revolution style, camo, and war paint, and the woman working the desk handed me little doodles she made of the three of us after our set because she loved our look. It was incredibly sweet. Besides leaving my microphone at the venue and having to retrieve it the next day, the show went great! It was really awesome to have everybody come out to see us, both my friends and theirs. Nothing but good things.

A sigh of relief after that big debut, and then right back to the grind to prepare for Bobby Lamondes tribute show a few days later. I was more ready and confident than ever before what had been arranged for this show, again, genius. They had created this big megamix while I was on vacation to get the most impact of this limited set time, and it was powerful!! And they had the idea to sample Billie Joe’s famous I heart radio meltdown over our song 1-900-Rockstar, again Green Day continues to resurface in my music life. It was brilliant. That show was such an incredibly beautiful night and tribute..the emotions and love were so high in the venue the entire time.

This community is incredible and loving and supportive, and I am beyond lucky to be a part of it. To be a part of this show was such an honor.

I am a bit softer than I look, so of course, towards the end of it, I was also crying like a baby and had to run over and tell Sean and Jeremy how grateful I was for them and for the music and for the opportunity to be a part of something like this.

It’s nothing short of a blessing. Hug your friends and tell them you love them often. Life is beautiful, and the way music brings us all together is such a powerful thing. We have some more lined up thru September, as well as new unreleased material in the works. I cannot wait to see what happens next, to perform again and keep trying to reach further out there and show the world something they’ve never seen before, so buckle up and keep your eyes out. We’re coming out full force.

Candrika Rice- Once we were ready to go, we had two awesome shows lined right up all within

Photos: Bala Rice

W

hen it comes to the world of alternativeindustrial music, there are few names as well-known as Al Jourgensen, Skinny Puppy, Pigface, KMFDM, and collaborators. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Chris Connelly, who is associated with not one, but two of these groups (Ministry and Pigface), along with numerous other projects, new and old (Fini Tribe, The Revolting Cocks, The Joy Thieves). But as it turns out, there is entirely another side to Connelly’s persona that is lesser known to the masses but no less talented. On his latest album, ‘The Birthday Poems’ with Scottish songstress Monica Queen, his music is more in line with bands like The Chieftains, The Proclaimers, The Pogues, and The Clash than anything from the industrial realm. And a great album it is (stream it below). For now, we had a little chat with Connelly, and here’s how it went.

I love the literacy that runs through Birthday Poems, not just the song’s subject matter but their narrative nature and even the rich titles. Do the words come first, or is the process different every time?

I tend to work with a guitar on my lap, melody & words at the same time, that’s just the way I have always done it, this time was different in that I already had a storyline, a beginning, middle, and end, and I wanted to write the whole story in a song from Stella as a teen, George as an Orkney transplant in the big city for the first time, up to Stella’s death three decades later. By working with melody and words at the same time, it helps me with the rhythm of what I am saying in the song Stylistically, Birthday Poems swaggers between many camps - folk, alt-pop, rock, and many places in between - what artists and influences do you feel have helped shape the way you make music?

For this album, I found myself referencing the album “berlin”

by Lou Reed, “Berlin” is a song cycle, so each song works by itself, and together there is a story. However, it’s not thrown at you that way. The listener still has to use their imagination.

But I was also aware that I was referencing one of the greatest poets of our time in George Mackay Brown. I was very conscious of that; it’s like being asked to paint a portrait of Picasso. I read a lot of his poetry and short stories while I was writing.

However, in general, my influences are lifelong, and in middle age, they tend to be a bit of a muddy swamp filled with Ornette Coleman and David Bowie and everything in between!

The album is a fictional account of some real-life people and relationships from the recent past. Can you explain a bit about the story and why you wanted to tell it?

When I was young, I befriended the children of the poet Stanley Roger Green, Malcolm, and Alison; they did not live with their dad, but when I found out he was a poet, I bought one of his books, and there was a poem in it called “Bavelaw in Winter” which to this day is a fountain of inspiration. This would be about 1980. There were other friends in my life whose parents were involved either directly or tangentially with the arts scene in Edinburgh, although at

that point, I was only really interested in people my age and being in a band. Years later, I mean 35 years later, I bought Stan’s book “A Clamjamfry of Poets” which is about the literary scene in Edinburgh in the ‘50s and ‘60s, this is where I read about George and Stella and thought it would make a great historical fiction novel, but I ditched that idea in favor of an album.

Both you and Monica Queen have a rich history of making music that echoes with the sound of where you are from. Is there a sense of tradition or preservation helping to create some very Scottish vibes, or is this just what comes naturally?

I don’t live in Edinburgh any more, so I think that my sense of belonging and cultural awareness of my homeland is a lot more keen, I have had dreadful homesickness, and part of my process in writing keeps this at bay, But I do think the music on the birthday poems is natural, none of it forced, I was not about to do a sort of folky traditional record like The Chieftains or something, plus, I don’t play that music, it would be like doing a record about Miles Davis and suddenly deciding I was going to play jazz, the music is from me, what intuitively felt right You have some shows planned for Chicago which go beyond merely playing the songs from the album. What can people expect from those?

Dynamics! Songs from the past three decades and a bit of reading as well, I think it’s a great set This new project and your album seem to be mentioned everywhere I turn these days. The net seems to be cast very widely, so to speak. How have you managed to get the word out about this album with such a great reach?

No idea, a lot of people like my manager Kimberly and my publicist Shameless Promotion PR have been working very hard! And I would like to think it has struck the hearts of people and they like the music! I also think that now I can see the project. It’s a unique story. I think Monica brought so much to the table, and that’s new for me. Also, the production, which was my friend Chris Bruce, he worked so hard on it, thinking and rethinking things, while I just go “oh it’s fine!!” I need people like that around me!

And finally, what does the future hold for you, music, playing, and also what are you looking forward to personally no the world seems to be returning to some sort of normality?

Sometimes, for me, the best bit about a new release is that I can start to think about the next one! So, writing is in store! The pandemic has made me a very comfortable recluse, which I was heading towards anyway, so I plan to aggressively grab as much solitude as I can!! However, if these gigs go down well, I would like to do more! Some sort of normalcy might be on the horizon?

CHRIS CONNELLY Interview: Dave Franklin

Photo: Derick Smith

SONIC

Exclusively for Second Scene’s 10th issue, Greg Jarvis of the trans-Atlantic space rock orchestra The Flowers Of Hell caught up via Zoom with his long-time friend & mentor Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember. As the Spacemen 3 legend embarks on a September 2021 tour of the UK and France, following the release of his first full-length solo works in decades, 2020’s All Things Being Equal LP and its 2021 remix accompaniment album, Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough. Meanwhile, Jarvis is preparing a vinyl version of the Flowers Of Hell’s 2007 self-titled debut that they collaborated on.

BOOM Photos courtesy of Pete Kember

GJ: Right, let’s go!

PK: Someone asked me recently where I met you, and I said, (laughing) “I’ve known Greg for ages, but I’ve no idea how!” I mean, I’ve got lots of memories of us hanging out and that, but my memory is terrible; goldfish have better memories. Was it from a show?

GJ: Naw, it was 2005, and I was still living in London, and I had your address because you’d reused an envelope for a Spectrum thing I’d mail-ordered.

was 14 or something like that. I was into The Specials. I bought Gangsters, their first 7 inch when it came out. There was an article about the Two Tone house in an early issue of The FACE that had photos of the front of the house, and I’m pretty sure that it also said that it was in Albany Road - and it wasn’t that hard to figure out which house it was. I went round there and just knocked on the door one day, and Jerry Dammers was like, ‘Come in, do you want a cup of tea?’ (laughs), like it was a regular event.

Yeah - I’d sent you the demos for the Flowers Of Hell’s debut and said I was going to be going through Rugby sometime in the next weeks and that I had some good skunk, and might you want to meet up? You wrote me back the next day saying, “I like the music, and I’m out of weed. When can you come?”

I don’t really remember the conversations, it wasn’t super verbal, but Jerry Dammers was quite a character. He was an interesting dude; he would just let me hang out and listen to his records and look through his collection and stuff. We just used to hang out, really, and I don’t really remember what we used to do (laughing fondly) other than listening to music. But yeah, he was just a friendly, chilled dude. I’ve been lucky in my life to have met a few really cool dudes, and they just always knew what was really cool somehow. I’ve DJ’d with him since, and we pretty much have the same non-verbal relationship. (Laughs) We just both like the same sort of music and hanging out, I guess.

Ha! That should have been that album’s sleeve notes!

What sort of records was Jerry Dammers playing for you back then?

Now that I’ve known you through these years, I realize how lucky I was to catch you out of weed - I can’t imagine you running out.

He’s got eclectic music taste. I remember all sorts of things, the original Sock It To ‘Em JB, soul stuff, ska stuff, punk stuff, older stuff, obscure exotica. Back then, if you had 150 records, you had a fuck of a lot of records, especially if they were 150 good records.

I remember he had a cool piece of art on his wall that I think was his as well - there’s photos of it that are around; it’s like a pop art rendition of graffiti on a brick wall. It was very memorable.

Oh, that’s right, you said you were passing by and that you had weed!!!

(Laughs.) I hope not, Greg, I hope not! Yeah, I don’t see the need to run out. I like it to be around. I’ve been a habitual wake and baker for most of my life. Really, the majority of it.

It was great reading all that old Spacemen press that was getting posted in the Spacemen 3 Facebook group last summer. Had you seen it in a while?

I saw some bits, but I didn’t read everything that was there for sure.

When I do read things that I said, I kinda think of my younger self as a stupid, dumb, fucked up kid, really. But, I see the same person pretty much that I am today, though I think maybe I’ve rounded some corners. I think in the same way today. I’ve always been someone that questions things a lot. My religious studies teacher was particularly fond of my questions, poor old fool that he was!

(Laughs) Between reading most of that old press and the new interviews, I realized you’ve got some great stories that aren’t really out there, like your connection to The Specials. It’s kind of amazing that young you was hanging out with people who were making music on that classic level.

I

Through him, I went to see some Specials shows; he put me on the guestlist. That’s where I first smoked weed. It was with Rico Rodriguez, the trombone player. Rico rolled up a big spliff, and I was like, mmmm. I guess he didn’t think that much of giving kids spliffs.

(Laughs) By then, I was probably 15. I mean, hey, I’m not criticizing him for it on any level - I’m very, very glad he did. He was a very cool dude. Although I hardly said a word to him, just grinned mostly (laughs). It was a trip for me as a kid. I’d never met anyone like a half-Chinese, half-African dude from Jamaica before. He was cool.

All The Specials were an interesting bunch of people, I mean, quite a weird range of people. They were all very cool dudes in their own way. I hung out with Roddy a few times. Super cool, dude. I used to go smoke a joint with him. Lynval, Neville, they were all super friendly dudes. None of them played the rockstar. Terry Hall didn’t like to talk to people in general, I think. He was super recognizable & always looked sort of ‘hunted.’ Neville, though, you used to see hanging out in Cov a lot, smoking cigars, being a rude boy. There were loads of rude boys in that era, but he looked like the OG Jamaican rude boy.

Was it Coventry that you nearly saw Joy Division in but ended up at another gig instead?

Yeah, sadly so. I would have liked to have seen them, though I didn’t particularly get into them in that era. They were playing with Buzzcocks at Coventry Theatre. My brother was going to see Tom Robinson Band. I was like 13, and it was like ‘78 or early ‘79. You had to be 18 to go to these things. There was no “I’m going to a show,” it was, “Maybe, I’m going to a show.” And I think my logic was (laughs) if I was with people who were 15, I had a better chance of getting in than if I was with people who were 13 - and unfortunately, that’s what got me to the Tom Robinson Band show instead of Buzzcocks with Joy Division. I was aware of Joy Division for sure at that time, my brother and his friends were of the trench coat posse that were really into Echo & The Bunnymen and Joy Division, but I think they wanted to go to TRB instead as they had that pumped fist symbol, which when you’re 14, 15, it’s like, “Symbols! That says everything I’m thinking! Can I have one of the peace-anarchy symbols, please? haha” You’ve talked about being rougher kids in a rougher time. Can you tell me that one again about Spacemen 3 being attacked in the streets of Rugby?

We were doing a show, and it was at the Reverberation Club in Rugby, our little Spacemen 3 club night. I remember this glass smashing on the wall behind me as we were playing, and I looked to the back of the room, and I could see some dudes who were there to fucking cause trouble! (Laughs) Which was a thing back then, back in the caveman days. When the show ended, we packed up the gear and loaded up my car, and I drove to the house. But Jason, Rosco, and Pete Bain were going to walk carrying some stuff as it was only two streets away.

As they walked, the same kids jumped them. There was some minor scuffle, nothing really, I don’t think. Except Pete Bain decided he wasn’t having any of this - and Pete Bain was a bit of a fucking Tazmanian Devil in those days, I have to tell you. He was a force to be reckoned with. (Laughs) People didn’t fuck with Pete Bain! He had a certain reputation. He might still have that reputation! He might not need to do anything ever again. He chased one of the dudes, and I think the dude got thrown through a glass door on the front of someone’s house. (Laughs) And I think the police turned up as Pete Bain was chasing one of the others up the street with a big stick. He’ll probably tell you a totally different version of the story, but that’s my memory of it. I wasn’t an eyewitness, of course.

As a band, we didn’t have too many of those moments, though I’ve personally been thrown out of venues in New York and places.

Yeah, I’ve been thrown out of the ICA [London’s Institute of Contemporary Art] with you!

Oh yeah! I’ve been thrown out of the ICA twice. I was very glad to get thrown out of the ICA, this was a couple years ago, but it was a supreme fucking tosser fest. I saw Mogwai there. Every time I went there, I had an allergic reaction.

Some venues, it’s funny; if you’ve got one person running the place who’s got a shitty vibe, it sometimes can emanate through the whole place. Like there’s a place in Seattle where they wouldn’t let me drink on stage, I think I got thrown out of there, actually. They’ve had that law in Seattle forever where technically you’re not meant to perform with alcohol in your hand, but the amount of shows I’ve fucking done in Seattle, I’ve never had it said to me before.

I was, “Alright, cool. I’ll just put it into a bottle, so it doesn’t look like a drink.”

And he goes, “No.” “Oh really?” I went, “Okay, I’ll drink at the bar whenever I need a drink.”

So whenever I wanted a sip during the set, I’d put my guitar down and go sit at the bar for a bit!

I heard Mark Refoy talking on the Spacemen podcast about how he’s really happy Spacemen 3 sits as its own thing, not connected with anything like indie dance (C-86, or shoegaze, or whatever). I wondered how you see it and your thoughts on psychedelic art in general.

Spacemen 3 were never trying to be part of anything. We were a misfit thing which is why I think it doesn’t fit into anything. Yeah, I’m glad too that we’re not part of all those but have connections to them. I can tell you I had no career plan. I’m mostly an instinctive animal rather than a five moves ahead dude, and I’m dealing with what’s coming at me. On some levels, I believe there is no future, and the here & now is what you need to be dealing with and dealing with in the right way. The future and the past are just constructs of our mind that we use to get a grip on things.

Everything is based on our perception, and there is no perception of the future that’s real. It’s a dream. You can call it the dreamland where you can think how things could be or might be, but probably won’t.

I do really like psychedelic art, I don’t know Vaserely ever took

any psychedelic drugs in his life, but his art is deeply psychedelic.

I think there’s something as fundamental about the psychedelic experience as DNA. And that’s why you look at Vasarely, some pieces much more than others, and you see the same thing. The first time I ever tripped, I had a really strong feeling of deja vu about it, like I knew that realm. It’s in our DNA. A critical psychedelic moment for me was smoking crystal DMT one time - and I’ve seen these sort of inhabited zones on DMT in many different ways - but one time, the deepest connection I had was this emanation, this person, I don’t really like to use the word spirit as people have a weird connotation for it, but let’s say this spirit appeared to me. The communication that I had with it telepathically was about suddenly having this really strong sensation, this strong ring of truth. There’s no way that experience, as specific as it was and so deep and awe-inspiring as it was, happens randomly or without a very, very, very, good reason, a very deep reason.

I feel psychedelic art forms are really connected and can exist on a lot of different levels. I want something that sounds and feels psychedelic but also really connects with me in the language that I know as a human and that resonates with me - with, like, key changes. I don’t think random jamming Trout Mask Replica sort of jazz craziness - for me, that isn’t psychedelic. For me, I want something that has some connection.

It doesn’t have to be Tibetan spiritual music. It could be the Jesus And Mary Chain or My Bloody Valentine. They’re doing it in the same framework as Spacemen 3, four people with guitars and drums, which has many benefits and a whole lineage, but it also has limitations. To me, the people who say psychedelic music can only be made on guitars, well, that’s absolute nonsense. I think electronics is a really nice medium for it if you can control it perfectly.

And maybe you can control it with a guitar coz it’s an awesome interface - if you’re making guitar music with a lot of fx pedals, let’s face it, you’re really making electronic music. The pedals are processors. Jimi Hendrix is clearly someone who took acid and picked up a wah-wah and a guitar and realized that all those things were meant to talk to each other.

How do you feel about lyrics vs. non-lyrics in psychedelic music?

It depends, I tripped a lot of years listening to vocal stuff like The Electric Prunes, or The Seeds are quite a trippy band to trip to; it’s an interesting voice. Or other times, I’d listen to something like Duane Eddy, some reverbed out instrumental stuff. I know some people think when you’re tripping, you shouldn’t have lyrics. I think Kraftwerk were an awesome band to trip to, particularly that sort of earlier period, the first two albums, plus Autobahn for sure, Radioactivity. I think that lyrical element is cool. I’m not sure I want to listen to Bob Dylan on acid much (laughs). Maybe if I did, I could figure it all out! (laughs)

bog-standard stuff, really. I can’t remember the other ones, but I can describe what they look like; I’m not that dude who’s paying attention to them.

I saw you’d mentioned Delia Derbyshire had taught you harmonic series theory, and I wondered what you use that for?

When I met Delia, which is around ‘97, I suppose, we started talking a lot on the phone. For some reason, she was excited to talk about all that stuff about electronic music. I suppose she hadn’t really thought about it in a long time, some of it I’m sure she had. I could tell that she really had this thing for the maths in music. Sometimes it’s a very good way to analogize things; maths is a fairly exact language. Of course, she was super fucking smart.

If I didn’t understand what she said, I’d go, “Delia, it’s not what you’re saying, but I just don’t understand.”

And she’d go, “Well, think of it like this then.” And she’d do it all from a different fucking perspective, and if I didn’t get it that time and I’d ask her some questions, she would enable me to understand. I don’t have a very academic brain particularly, but she just really loved sharing that information.

What’s your relationship like with guitar now? You don’t seem to play it much, rarely have I seen one sitting round your place, yet you’re a guitar hero to a lot of people hunting for six-string Vox Starstreamers.

Dean (Wareham) is a guy who sits around, and there’s never a guitar more than two fucking feet away from him, and it’s awesome that works for him, you know, you don’t get any fucking worse for it.

But I always had a really simple style. I mean, I make The Troggs look like rocket scientists. I found this natural sort of style based around bastardized chords because my fingers don’t bend beyond straight.

Most guitarists can actually bend the top of their fingers; Jason for sure can. If you want to make a full bar chord, you can’t do it with my fingers. I’m not the only person who has this problem.

So I sort of figured out that sort of power chord where it’s four Es and a B, and a dunk ( muting the G ). The dunk is critical. You need dunk in every chord, a little bit of dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk. I always tried to find chords where I could play it in a really simple way. Friends showed me shapes where you could transpose it all up and down the neck and the pentatonic scale up and down the neck, so occasionally, I use things like that.

Before touring, I play to harden my fingers up, get back into the rhythm of it, tighten up and get sort of, you know, not sloppy. I enjoy playing guitar on stage a lot. Playing Revolution or When Tomorrow Hits or something, you know it’s fun. But it’s not that much fun that I need to do it every day. I’m a dude that needs variety. That’s my curse.

What are your favorite plug-ins these days?

The Sound Toys ones are awesome. I love those - the Crystalizer, which is a sort of Harmonizer-esque delay, the EchoBoy, PhaseMistress, Tremolator, their distressor for distortion and overloading things. I really dig them as not only do they have every modulation waveform and shape known to mankind, but you can actually open up the wave shape and change it to anything you want. I was using the Uhbik stuff for a long time; their reverb, the Uhbik-A, is still one of my favorite reverbs. The stock EQ in ProTools that has no color or characteristic to it at all is a really good EQ. It’s my favorite. But I try to add the juice to the actual track itself from the start and not be looking for a valve to put things through.

The R-Comp is my favorite ducker. I use that for side-chaining a lot. I don’t use compression hardly ever, but I use the L1 for limiting,

She spent a lot of time by herself thinking. And when really smart people spend a lot of time by themselves thinking, they get to some pretty deep levels of thought, and I think she was like that. She was very planned and thought through about everything. I think it came from being at the BBC, ‘Delia if you want to do this electronic music well that’s on you if you want to piss around with all that oscillator shit, oh - and also none of that stuff’s available, but you can have it for two hours tomorrow if you book it.’ I suppose she developed the habit of thinking things through first, so when she got that hour or two, she knew exactly what she was going to do. She wasn’t going to get it and go, “Hmmm, where should I start?”

I knew I was incredibly lucky at the time and privileged, even though people then weren’t as aware about her. I mean, there were some people out there who knew of her and respected her, no question , but there was not the cult of Delia Derbyshire that there is now with films and plays & documentaries and all.

And what about that story of when you met Tommy Hall while he was living all reclusive?

Yeah, I met a dude from Warners around Forever Alien era, so about 1997, who gave me Tommy Hall’s address and phone number, but I had no real reason to call him up - it wasn’t worth calling him to go, “Dude, I love the way you play the jug,” or, “Your lyrics are deep dude.” (Laughs) I didn’t feel inspired to do that particularly.

And then, I guess it must have been about a decade later, I was doing a show in San Francisco, and I remembered the name of the hotel Tommy was living at, the Artmar Hotel, in the Tenderloin.

At soundcheck, I asked someone who told us, “I know that hotel.

It’s a total fucking dive.” And we were like, “Fuck it, let’s go and see if Tommy Hall’s there.” So we trudged on down. It looked like something from the 50s. There was a glass security booth protecting the dude at the entrance. Always a bad sign when you go into a hotel, and the reception dude’s behind a glass bulletproof fucking thing - even before covid!

I went up to the hotel dude and said, “Um, Tommy Hall?” And he gave me this fucking look. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, he just looked at me really weird. And I was, “Is Tommy Hall living here at the moment?” And he went, “37”, or some number. So we went up, knocked on the door.

He wouldn’t know me from fucking Adam, so I said, “Hey Tommy, I’m Pete, I’m a friend of Paul Drummond’s, uh, how’s it going?”

And he was like, (in this little voice) “Arwoa, arwoa, gimme a minute, yeah, gimme a minute.”

And then he opened the door up a crack and was like, “So, you’re a friend of Paul’s?”

And I was like, “Yeah, I’m a fan of your music and a friend of Paul’s, and I just thought we’d come by and say, hey.”

And he was like, “Arruwa, arruwa, okay, you wanna come in?”

So we were like, “Yeah, sure!” We’re going to smoke a joint with Tommy Hall!

We walked in his room, this little hotel room, wall-to-wall CDs, some bad sorta SFDeadhead posters on the walls high up, no trace of the 13th Floor Elevators in the whole place. No jugs, nothing.

And I was, “Is It alright to roll a joint?”

He nodded, “Sure, sure, sure.”

And he sort of turned to us, yet not looking at us, said something like, “It starts in the East, and it comes to us in the West, and it’s really hard for them in the East, and it’s harder for us in the West, but what we get from the East is making it easier in the West, and I was watching Deutsche Welle and...” He’d been watching this German news channel like it was the voice of reason or something. And yeah, he went off into a psychedelic, philosophical, proto-religious, quasi-nuts, um, nonsense - well sense and nonsense in equal parts. It was psychedelic. He liked my weed as well....!

He was one of those dudes who’s like, “I’ve got some weed!” and he gets it out, and it was the classic thing of all the dudes from that era often are still smoking - Mexican ditch weed with loads of seeds in it. It’s cheap, though... Yet San Francisco weed these days is a psychedelic proposition unto itself!

You introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson’s old assistant once, but I can’t remember if you’d met Hunter S. Thompson or not?

No. I wish. His assistant was a really awesome dude. He was a cool guy, worked for Rolling Stone. He had some good stories, as you can imagine. I think he’s written a book about it all. I think his job basically was to make sure there was loads of coke around for Hunter. Some artists get really, like, “This is my method. This is what I have to do. I have to go to the Arctic, and I can only take a fourtrack because that’s how I made my last record, and it was good.”

If you think like that, you’re already setting limitations. Personally, I think whatever you did last time, do something different this time.

But Hunter apparently had a thing where he had to hole up for two months with a massive pile of coke (laughs) to get inspired enough! I’m glad I never found coke particularly inspiring, coz to me, it sounds gritty. I mean, I’ve done my share. I won’t deny it, but not as a creative thing. I’ve never known it to work well in a studio situation. I’m sure there are some people it works for, though.

I turned up at UB40’s studio one time to pick up some equipment, and there was the most awesome crazy jazz coming out of the intercom into the street. I was, “What the fuck is this?” and when we went downstairs, there were three dudes from a sorta jazz band - I wish I knew the name - just sitting around, smoking crack. (Laughs) And we went, “Okay, sometimes it works out, I guess!” (Laughs) I wish I knew who those guys were.

And how is it you know Angel Corpus Christi?

It must be through Dean Wareham, but it might not be. So this is my memory of it, and I looked at her I Love New York LP the other day. I do love the whole record; actually, I’ve been listening to it a bunch lately. I had her first two records, I guess. I think I was just a fan who’d written to her. It might have been around ’86, ‘87. Me and Jason were hanging out then listening to all the same records.

Jason later had her play on one of the Spiritualized records, of course. Back in the fanzine days of Spacemen 3, I used to do a lot of writing to peeps.

Yeah. I love her version of Lou Reed’s The Day John Kennedy Died.

I think its - this is going to sound harsh on all sorts of levels - but I feel that Bob Dylan, sometimes his songs are better done by other people. That he knocks out the demo, and they sort of finish it off.

It’s a part feeling I have about some of his things. And I feel the same way in this one case about Lou Reed.

Some of his things, I think he did them just perfect, no question.

Like Sister Ray in that early era. But his recording of The Day John Kennedy Died never connected with me in the way that hers does.

It’s such a fucking awesome song. It’s classic Lou Reed, coz again he sings a song about something no-one else would sing about, using lyrics like, “Someone shot him in the face.” But she, I think, does it better than him. She does awesome covers, though, in general. She’s a real sweetheart.

How have you found this whole new landscape of Spotify and Instagram? I was shocked when you went on Instagram.

Let’s take Instagram out of the picture, and my general feeling about people looking at their mobile phones about every 18 seconds is: I don’t think it’s good for you. In fact, I’m fucking sure it’s really not good for you. Social media, it’s a bit like the press, isn’t it? You can’t really believe the good reviews unless you want to buy into the bad reviews, so it’s all equally meaningless. These things all have elements about them that are really good, but most people get too sucked into them. I think they’re well designed by people who are smarter than we think that are out there manipulating us, and this week they’re trying to sell us things. Next week it might be using the same lifestyle data to whip you off to the gas camps. I’m joking in a dark way, but are we going to sit here and tell each other humanity can’t do that to each other?

The Nazi round-up would have been quick if they had access to Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram. Bam, got ‘em! It’s dangerous.

The data observation is a big pandora’s box. We’re being seriously manipulated. Orwell thought this was something that would be foisted on us. He didn’t think we’d be inviting it into our homes, clicking ‘I Accept’ without reading the terms. (Laughs) Hands up anyone who’s ever clicked ‘Accept’ without reading them.

One thing I loved that you said to me a couple years ago was that if Spacemen 3 had wanted to be popular, the music wouldn’t sound as it does. And currently, I’m seeing a whole new generation of musicians who are getting obsessed with how many monthly listeners they have, how many followers they have, rather than being obsessed with what sound they’re making.

Maybe it’s just me, and I know I’m not the average dude out there in a band, but - and I think we’ve talked about this before something I learned from Lou Reed is that if it’s a little bit too catchy, make sure there’s something about it that’s going to thin out the crowd a little bit. It’ll be the right thing to do, and you’re keeping the important core, but that little thinning thing is good - and I still do it. I’ll think something sounds too normal if it sounds like someone else could have done it. I get juiced to fix that. The All Things Being Equal album was going to be way too pop if I didn’t build any crazy electronic shuddering & energy fields into it - and that, for me, is what makes the record. I mean, anyone could do the songs.

They’re like two chords and fucking half a verse. But what makes it for me is the motion of things, world’s colliding in sound, and I know that’s also going to disenfranchise the easy listener. I can’t help myself from doing that, I’m afraid. (Laughs) And now, tell me again the Tommy Weber saving Timothy Leary from the Black Panthers in Algiers story.

That’s expanded! That story now has a new chapter.

Fantastic - tell me the whole thing, so I get it written down for once.

Tommy Weber was a Danish rich kid. He was from an aristocratic family in Denmark. And he was famous for making the video for A Day In The Life with The Beatles, amongst other things. He made some others with Spencer Davis, Hendrix, etc. - early promo films. He was a Mercedes rally driver for a while. He flew fighter jets, I think for the Danish air force. He was Keith Richard’s big drug buddy around

Pete Kember & Greg Jarvis

the Exile on Mainstreet period. Eventually, he had a ‘moment’ with Anita Pallenberg, which was the end of him and Keith. He was excommunicated by the Stones—big junkie. And, anyway, he somehow washed up in Rugby in the 90s.

And he was an all-around psychedelic dude. He was one of those proto Sixties fucking dudes, you know. He was in the audience at Rock’n’Roll Circus and things like that; he was a cool scene dude.

Super good-looking as well, so I can see why he might have been popular.

Yeah, so he washed up in Rugby. This must have been around ’97, ‘98. Some older guys would tell you, “I saw Hendrix at Isle of wight,” or, “I saw the Sex Pistols live ” or some story that, hey if it’s true, great but often it seemed maybe not - people used to tell some absolute bullshit stories, But Tommy’s had the ring of truth - but they were so good & bizarre, they couldn’t be bullshit! And you couldn’t just Google it back then and go, “Oh my. He actually was big drug buddies with Keith.” You couldn’t do that. You could maybe try and find the one Rolling Stones book that had maybe a paragraph of this going on. So, it was interesting.

He told me this story that he rescued Timothy Leary from the Black Panthers in Tangiers. And I couldn’t quite form that in my brain, but I remember him telling me this story, and me being like, “Timothy Leary? Black Panthers? Tangiers?” cause again you couldn’t Google it! You had to go find a fucking book about the Black Panthers - and now there’s probably a hundred of them on the bestseller list, Black Panther this, Black Panther that, but back then, there was like a handful. Anyhow, I knew a lot of crazy people who told me a lot of crazy things.

So one time when Spectrum were in LA, and we were playing, I think it was the Whiskey or The Troubadour. I got back from dinner with Ausgang, and people were like, “Dude, where’ve you been? Timothy Leary’s here to meet you.”

I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? What the fuck, Timothy Leary’s here?”

“Yeah, man, and he wanted to talk to you. But dude, you’re almost late. You’ve got to get onstage.”

So I went on and was playing Transparent Radiation as the first song like I often have, and as we ended the song, I could hear someone beside me clapping going, “Rugby! Rugby!” And I was like, ‘What?” and I looked over, and there was an old gent sitting on a stool on the side of the stage going, “Yeah! Rugby!” and it was Leary. I hadn’t really processed it but was like, “Yeah, I should have expected this to be psychedelic, shouldn’t I.” So I carried on with the set, but, shoooom, he was gone after the show.

It was a cool dude who was driving for us on that tour who’d brought him. Sadly, I forget his name, but I came off stage and was, “Is Timothy Leary still here?”

He said, “Naw, he’s tired, man. It’s late. He had to go. But he asked do you want to come hang out with him tomorrow at his house in Beverly Hills?”

And I was like, “Uh, yeah!”

So the next day, we trouped off up to Beverly Hills and went and smoked a joint with Timothy Leary, spending the afternoon with him.

At some point, we were chatting & joking and it came to me, I was like, “Ah....I just have this weird...uh, a friend of mine, I don’t know if you know this guy called Tommy?” (muttering) “who might have rescued you from the Black Panthers?”

“He went, MAD Tommy!”

I was like, oh good, sounds like the right Tommy! I mean, this is Timothy Leary calling someone mad! “ Tumbling Dice ( the stones song ) is about Tommy,” Leary said.

And I was like, “What?”

And he said originally the lyric for that song was, “Tommy, it’s only the tumbling dice.” But Tommy’d fucked Anita Pallenberg while Keith Richards was in the same bed. They were all gauched out, and Anita made a move on Tommy, and he couldn’t resist, and you know, therein lies the fall of mankind. But the Stones stuff in that era, that’s right up their street. When you listen to the lyrics of some of those songs up to Emotional Rescue, it’s fucking hell. Someone did some mileage for this. (laughs) It’s funny because you know you look at their videos from that later era, and they wrote the fucking songbook on how NOT to make a video. If you want to spend an evening pissing yourself, watch their videos from about ’76 on. Actually, you can piss yourself from about ’72, though they sort of pull it off initially. But eventually, there’s Mick dancing round the classroom. Someone’s taken down She Was Hot. Probably due to people laughing themselves to death at how ridiculous that video was.

For me, it’s the one of them in sailor suits in the room getting filled up with bubbles.

That’s nothing. You wait, you forget, you forget. Noah (Lennox/ Panda Bear) would say to me, “Rolling Stones or The Beatles?”

And I’d say, “It’s not really a comparison. I love the Beatles though I’d probably say I’m more of a Stones guy.”

And he couldn’t get it. Then I realized, oh, of course, he’s fifteen years younger than me, so he’d have grown up seeing those shit videos of their sometimes horrible singles on MTV all the time. Even if they had a good song, the video killed it.

Yeah, I was born in ’71, so my introduction to Bowie and The Stones was the Dancing In The Streets video. It took me years to understand how either of them could be considered cool.

You’ll never recover from that, actually. Maybe 45 years of psychotherapy could get you over that Dancing In The Streets video.

So anyways, Tommy, mad Tommy. Tumbling Dice was apparently about him, nice little snippet there.

And I was like, “What the fuck was that Algiers, Black Panthers thing all about?” and Timothy Leary gave me a brief rundown of him fleeing the fucking cops, the American authorities (he was broken out of a California prison with help from the Weather Underground and The Brotherhood of Eternal Love), then the Black Panthers once he reached them in Algiers. Everyone’s version of that story is a bit different, but the Panthers thought Timothy Leary was a grass - an enemy to the counter-culture, I think was the main charge. And they kidnapped him. They took him at gunpoint, and they held him.

I don’t know what the hell they thought they were going to do with him. Maybe ransom him. They’d hijacked a plane and gone to Tangiers. So Tommy, being mad Tommy, no job too small for him, he scaled up a wall onto a balcony, opened a door, and him and Leary escaped.

So Leary was telling me, “Yeah, yeah, it totally fucking happened.”

Yeah, it was pretty psychedelic.

And then! When I moved to Portugal, it turns out one of those Black Panther dudes – George Wright who was involved is living here - he, dressed up as a priest and put a gun in a bible to hijack a plane, after escaping jail & joining the Panthers, and had the FBI bring him ransom money wearing speedos to show they didn’t have any guns or anything. (Laughing) I bet they never forgot that. Yeah, he had kids here; apparently, he used to sometimes be the token black dude at the American Embassy’s soirees. I haven’t met him yet, though.

Three different elements of that story came into my life at ten-year intervals. I feel that’s what happens if you go out there with a good frame of mind and see what happens.

Do you believe there’s any magic in A432 or not?

I do think it is, and I’ve never analyzed it enough, but there’s a sort of bright, more treble mid. The upper mid for me was always really important to me in music, even on bass instruments. There’s a lot of stuff around 1k that I think is really essential.

I remember one time when I was working with Alf (Hardy), he was like, “That needs eq’ing.”

And I was, “Where do you think the frequency needs adjusting ?”

And he went, “About 1k, same as everything.” (laughs) In the Spacemen days, we used to tune to the right-hand side of the tuner scale. We all used the same tuner, so we were all dealing with the same inaccuracy. I think it was Korg who made that tuner, and it had a needle on it. Tuners come in different flavors, and some are a little skitty and jittery and unreliable. But this one was solid and steady. It showed where a semi-tone higher was, and you weren’t meant to use it that way, but that was us as a band. How things were designed to be used was never a big problem. We’d always find ways to do things a little bit different. (laughs.) Originally we used to do it via varispeed on the tape to tighten up the track, and then we liked it, so we started tuning like that. The E string on a guitar can sound a little pitch-free at times, and I think that little bit of extra tension on the string helps a lot.

Once, an engineer in a studio went to me about some gear, “That’s not the way that’s meant to be used.” And I went, “Well, it’s not the way you believe it’s meant to be used, but will it break it? “ When he said he thought not, I said, “Well, let’s do it then and see.”

Now that you’ve got All Things Being Equal out, what are you going to do with all the stuff you’ve recorded over the last 20+ years? I remember you playing me some work-in-progress tracks in the 2000s that were going to be on the (never completed) On The Wings Of Mercury, and they were great.

I still have all that stuff on discs that probably still function. There might even be something that plays that stuff still in existence

(laughs). There’s a few of those recordings that are really cool. I don’t see that it’s incompatible if I use those tracks now, which I think I probably will. I wouldn’t make them retro-sounding, like just guitars and bass. It’ll be what it’ll be, keyboards with the guitar and the synths. I was thinking about one of those songs today. There’s twenty tracks or something, and maybe fifteen of them show some promise of being contenders. Sometimes I have a song that lurks around for ten years, and it grows a little bit, and I find a bit more of it, and eventually, I’m ready to do something with it. War Sucks was a bit like that, though it’s not my own song. I messed around with it in many ways over the years and then eventually found the right way to deliver it or the right people to deliver it. That’s also important, I think for certain songs, people’s attitude towards them.

I don’t have a massive plan to keep making records, but I’d like to finish some of those tracks off. I’ll see.

I put a lot into the All Things Being Equal record. I felt I got into a specific space for three years and got inspired about that space. I wrote things down and collected them. I write lyrics the whole time where it flows great, it looks great, and as soon as I try to put it out of my mouth, I hate it. I know that happens, so there’s a filtration process, and I like to filtre a lot. I like things to be considered. So I need to build up my lyrical stores again as I feel I really juiced everything I was really psyched about. And if I’m not really psyched about it, I just don’t see the point, really.

I don’t think putting out a lot of records gets you anywhere. I think Spacemen 3 have their reputation because we were a band that didn’t put stuff out just for the fucking sake of it. Even in our own, didn’t-know-what-we-were-doing way, we knew we wanted some different stuff, try and expand, and grow, and develop, and focus, and that sort of thing. It’s funny cause literally in the last day, or so I’ve thinking about it, but I’m not in a big rush to do it.

And what’s next for you?

I’ve been working on a new record with Noah (Lennox/Panda Bear). Very upbeat, but about our tough issues. The arrangement of percussion has been big on this; the songs suggested already a very Latin vibe, and we wanted to use guiros and castanets & woodblock - I’ve had castanets since Spacemen 3 but never really used them on a record. Noah’s really good with percussion.

He’s actually really good with most instruments. But we put down percussion stuff which I then arranged afterwards. Lots of clapping “rocking robin“ vibes afoot, too -Listening to the Phil Spector type things, and Dion & the Belmonts & doo-wop where there’s awesome percussion arrangements - I mean those Wrecking Crew dudes, so good. I just love what percussion arrangements can do. I tried to put some of that on All Things Being Equal. But it’s a challenge for me as I was never a rhythm dude, though I love it, so I try and find it. Slowly, slowly catch a monkey.

But yeah, my collab “Panda Bear & Sonic Boom” is my main direction right now. I’m super happy with it.

MURDER FOR GIRLS

I usually assign a placeholder name that is an actress or a woman director, or a female fictional character. The idea is that the bass line reminds me of her, or it might be a song appropriate for one of her movies. Occasionally, there is a reference to my private life, but that’s rare and is almost immediately eliminated from the song.

Then if one of the girls likes the bass line, she claims it and writes lyrics and a melody to it. Sometimes the placeholder name stays, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes bass lines aren’t used initially, but they might come back around a couple of years later.

And everyone writes their own parts. Sometimes people make suggestions, or they collaborate on backing lyrics, but no one is giving orders or compelling anyone to sing or play anything. It’s an equal partnership. That said, the two more recent albums have songs that originated with Steph, from her own songwriting, and then I wrote bass lines or modified the bass line that she came up with, as with “Tsunami.” As I have told her, that’s a little awkward for me and can take longer. It’s like a radio station, and I have my own signal that I’m used to, and then I change the dial to her station. She has a different format and frequency that I then tune into.

Melodic, Garage Rock, and sometimes riotous, Jonathan Bagamery and Tammy Wallace of Pittsburgh’s Murder For Girls talk with the Second Scene.

How did the group cope during quarantine/shut down this past year?

Tammy. The immediate concern for our band right after the shutdown happened was our plans for the release of our new full-length recording, “Done In The Dark.”

We had recorded the previous fall in Hudson, NY, with Tommy Stinson, and we were excited to finally be getting the results out - so it really was the worst timing. We had a release date and show planned in early May 2020 at that time. We tried to be optimistic at first, but then when we realized that we either had to sit on the recording for an undeterminable amount of time or release it online/ through mail order - and we chose the latter. We still released the recording and got CD orders sent out that May. Luckily, we had also filmed our first video for the song “Goth Girls” that previous fall, and we were able to release the video premiere online around the same time - sort of a substitute “release show” in a way. We also did some interviews virtually, a socially distant photo shoot, and got some nice press for it.

Some bands accomplished a lot during the pandemic, and some took a break - I think we fell somewhere in the middle. After a few months, we carefully started practicing again - and for many months, it was always on and off, as we took precautions. During the last year, we managed to play one outdoor show, a live stream show, and filmed a couple of songs for a live performance series. We also recorded a song for a compilation released earlier this year.

How does the group function as far as songwriting? Is it an individual or a group effort?

Jonathon. The majority of the time, we start with a bass line. It might be a bass line that I wrote in the 1990s, it might be something that I came up with at home in more recent years, or it might be something that Michele and I spontaneously generated during a break at practice.

Who or What has influenced Murder For Girls? (Music, art, literature and movies, etc.)

Jonathon. This could be a complicated answer that few would ultimately want to read, but I will keep it limited to two points: The band was originally based on several different ideas, and one of them was that I wanted to work with different types of people who had had different experiences and with music. This is influenced by William Blake and by my reading and teaching of his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The application of that influence is not strict, but it’s there, with the idea of balancing contraries and welcoming tensions between opposites. In other words, the women in the band and I have different influences, and that was part of the vision.

Another point is something I have believed in since I was young, and that is that music, the creating of it, should be as selfless and as unconscious as possible. The music doesn’t serve us; we serve the music. It’s not about our ego or pleasure. There is pleasure in the music, but that’s because of its own energy and spontaneity, not because of us and whatever we consciously want.

Related to that second point—I once read a brief essay about Sonic Youth in which the author was describing Kim Gordon performing “Shaking Hell.” What he saw was Kim releasing control and letting the music surge through her, without any regard for ego or esteem. He termed it as the subordination of the self to the music.

Thus, it’s silly to say, “I’m the next great songwriter” or “my band is the next so and so” because then we’re just emulating someone else while trying to claim some ephemeral notion of greatness.

The music is work that will outlive us, like art or some other product of the energy that Kim was channeling, so it is, therefore, more important than any egocentric nonsense.

Tells us what you are currently working on and what you have planned for the second half of 2021?

We just finished recording a new batch of songs this past May of 2021 with John Stoecker at Razorblade Recordings.

We’ll hopefully be releasing those songs sometime later this year with a show to celebrate them. We have a couple of shows in the next few months and should have a new video (or two) to release as well. As always, we’ll start working on new songs in the meantime. We’re on all the streaming platforms and social media, and you can find all those links at murderforgirls.com

Photo: Suhail Baloch

hALF wHEEL GutterRich – THE VILLIAN Second Scene talks with Jazz Byers.

Tell us about the latest hALF wHEEL release, “Believe.”

We were working on a full-length album, but with the success that we had from our previous full-length album, “Good Days” and the single “Good Day,” we started to get offers to perform at a lot of music festivals this summer. So, we wanted to make sure we had a new album released in time for those festivals. That’s why we put out an EP instead of a full-length album. We recorded the album at Rattle Clack Entertainment (my place in Pittsburgh) and then traveled to Ohio to mix it at Innovation Studios. We wanted to have some additional performers on it and put in the necessary time to make the production even better than the last album, which I think we did.

The album is available on every major digital download and streaming platform worldwide and at www.halfwheelband.com.

We also sell the physical CDs from that website.

For those who haven’t heard the new EP, what can they expect in terms of style, sound, and feel?

For the most part, it’s mid-tempo rock that’s sort of happy in terms of the sound, but not necessarily, “poppy.” Maybe that’s not exactly how it is, but that’s sort of how I see it. I’ve always had a heavy influence from bands like The Cure and The Replacements and such, and I think that comes through a bit, but there’s also a bit of influence from some of the bands of the ’70s and ’80s. So, if you think about The Church mixed with Tesla combined with a couple of other bands from the late 80s, that’s probably us… in some weird way.

What’s next for hALF wHEEL? We recently released a lyric video for the song “Everything” on Facebook. It got about 5K views within a week. We are editing footage for the next single, “Me & You.” There’s already been some country radio stations that have picked up the song, which is weird to me because I don’t consider us to be country. However, we were able to perform at the Blame My Roots Country Music Festival, which is a huge, huge festival. Partially because of that song. So, we just threw on some cowboy hats and went with it.

All in all, we’ve had a very busy summer playing music festivals throughout western Pennsylvania and Ohio. We won a Grassy Award for our song “Good Day” from 97.7 FM, The Rock Station, in Butler, Pennsylvania. That was very exciting for us because it validated what we are doing. We were able to perform on a TV show in Florida because of the success of that song too.

I think we will probably do another album and try to have it ready for next summer. We also want to continue to shoot videos, and hopefully, we can continue to travel more and increase our fan base. We want to build upon the success we’ve had recently and continue to move onward and upward. Maybe a tour or two or three.

Photo: Shawn Donahugh

The Villain is a dark, brooding song. From the outset, The Villian can best be described as a finger-pointing song directed at a former lover, friend, or possibly the world at large. Aggressive Acoustic guitars drive this track along with a wicked slide guitar complimenting and adding depth—caustic vocals with lyrics that spit venom and rage. This song is not for the faint of heart— Daggers at dawn.

GutterRich is a psycho/gypsy rock act from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A collective of accountable original hymns known as “the doomsday gospel.”

Murky Waters - Vocals/Guitar, Frankie Beans Bass Guitar, Dave Whaley - Drums

SOMMELIER Centered around the songwriting partnership of Brian Ferrell and J. Trafford, this indie four-piece from Pittsburgh, forming in early 2020, with the pandemic lockdowns looming, Sommelier began experimenting on a range of songs. Eventually releasing these experimental, remotely-produced “Quarantine Versions” throughout 2020. With brighter days ahead, Sommelier released the EP “Don’t Express Yourself” in 2021. Second Scene asks J. Traford.

About writing with Brian...

My work with Brian is the first true songwriting collaboration I’ve done in the traditional pop sense. In my previous group, Suavity’s Mouthpiece, I wrote 99% of the material parts for each instrument. I’ve worked with musicians before in writing capacities, but these have all been limited engagements. Working with Brian, there is growth and development on both our ends. I find that we pass off threads to each other and that we instinctually know what to do, with an eye on the future.

What is next...

We actually have written quite a lot. In performing, we would be hard-pressed just to stick to the songs we have already put out because we’ve come up with so much that we want to show everyone. We’ve sketched together our next few releases.

Influences...

Some of Brian’s favorite bands are Ratatat, Interpol, the National. He’s got a lexicon that I don’t have and is familiar with styles of songs I’ve missed out on, which is massively helpful, I find. From strangers, we’ve gotten to a point where we influence each other, and isn’t that what being a good citizen is all about?

What I bring to the partnership...

A filthy spade.

Photo: Brandy Beard

SADURDAY This four-song EP is a blistering, bare wire to the wrist blast of post-punk. The lyrics reflect the current state of affairs in the USA, channeling the anger and frustration felt by so many. Sadurday is leading the charge that so many musicians seem to shy away from these days.

Sadurday is songwriter/guitarist Nicholas Cary Comanici with special guest Dylan Hundley of (Lulu Lewis) on vocals. Working through the 2020 pandemic lockdown, Comanici crafted a series of songs that make up this debut EP—described as inhouse therapy. Eventually, leading to remote recording with multiinstrumentalist Derek White (Mystic Seers) contributed drums, and longtime friend and pianist Gaven Sauers added keys — final mixing and mastering were handled by Gabrial Gonzalez. Produced by Jim Ward (Co-founder of At the Drive-In, Sparta & Sleepercar)

Photo: Andrew Swainson

XTC’s Colin Moulding presents ‘The Hardest Battle’ video, CD out now via Burning Shed.

Music legend and XTC co-frontman Colin Moulding is back with new music, this time as a solo artist, presenting his new single ‘The Hardest Battle,’ released as a CD single in 4-panel digisleeve via Burning Shed.

Containing two songs – ‘The Hardest Battle,’ ‘Say It (original version),’ and an exploratory demo of the title track, The Hardest Battle represents XTC founding member Colin Moulding’s first-ever fully solo release.

In celebration of this release, Colin Moulding also presents the video for the title track, directed and filmed by Henry Meredith at St Mary’s Uffington (interior) and Salisbury Cathedral (exterior).

Featuring Tomas Silberberg as George IV, the costume was provided courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

This mini-EP offers a tantalizing glimpse into the creative process of one of the UK’s finest songwriters, showcasing Colin’s English pop vision with XTC’s trademark qualities of melody, rhythm, variety, and idiosyncratic subject matter, mixed in with nostalgia and a degree of pensiveness.

Following two releases with original XTC drummer Terry Chambers under the TC&I moniker – the ‘Great Aspirations’ EP and the album’ Naked Flames: Live at Swindon Arts Centre,’ ‘The Hardest Battle’ is the first new material from Moulding in many years.

“To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight”… I saw these lines in a book I picked up in a secondhand bookshop and thought…maybe there’s a song there …I think it’s by the poet EE Cummins,” says Colin Moulding.

“And there it was. All I had to do was come up with some music to marry to this notion. I do think most people aren’t themselves,

really, or become themselves eventually. And that struggle isn’t easy. I recorded this pretty much in isolation, as most people have been this past year or so. One crazy year for all of us. Perhaps ‘The Hardest Battle’ we humans have faced externally, as well as the one we fight internally every day,” Founded in 1972, XTC only had their first UK charting single in 1979.

Moulding wrote the first three charting singles (‘Life Begins at the Hop,’ ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ and ‘Generals and Majors’). Moulding continued with frontman Andy Partridge through the group’s dissolution in 2006. In 1984, they also, along with XTC bandmate Dave Gregory and Ian Gregory, formed The Dukes of Stratosphear, anticipating and celebrated by retro-minded movements such as the Paisley Underground.

“About ‘Say It,’ I just felt this track deserved a better fate than it got, really. I wrote it for the XTC album that never was. But it ended up on a promo disk amongst XTC’s ‘Last Days of Rome’ This version feels much more akin to my original song mindset compared to the expedient I agreed to at the time,” says Colin Moulding.

Regarding ‘The Hardest Battle (First Exploratory Demo),’ Moulding adds, “I think demos are much more of a demonstration to one’s self than for other people. You have to find out what works and what doesn’t. Therefore, you shoot from the hip and just fire it out and see what sticks. Larkin always said that he didn’t know what his poems were about initially until he got some way into them;- that’s what this is;- I’m just ‘Larkin’ around until it presents itself. Then the crossword puzzle can begin.”

Released on July 2, ‘The Hardest Battle’ can be ordered on CD single exclusively via Burning Shed at https://burningshed.com/ store/colin-moulding_store/colin-moulding_the-hardest-battle_cd

Dave Franklin

KLUUT GALBAK

Interview: Pytr Baum Kluut Galbak is an artist from the Netherlands. He has been playing in punk bands and is currently making “music” with noise combo Lik De Kikker [Lick the Frog]. He also makes installations, assemblages, drawings, and paintings. His work is relatively unknown outside of the punk rock/ noise scene, but he deserves wider attention. So here goes: Kluut, you are making music, but also art. When did you get started with that?

KG: I have been drawing all my life, but stopped when I was 20 because I thought my drawings weren’t good enough. In 2016, my GF at the time told me I had to embrace my own style and continue with it. I am still grateful to her for that...

I began making music in 1999, when I started screaming in punk band Galbak, we played for 13 years. After that, I played in some other punk and hardcore bands, then we started a new band with three other people from Galbak, called Locura, with which we still play. I didn’t get into making electronic noise till 2017 when we started Lik De Kikker (Lick the Frog).

Where do you get your inspiration from? Which artists inspire you?

KG: Inspiration and ideas for drawings, assemblages, and lyrics come from everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes from the smallest and weirdest stuff, locations or situations, there are no limits to it. Artists and comics that I truly dig are, among others, Eric Schreurs’ Joop Klepzeiker [famous Dutch comic figure- PB], Gumbah, H. R. Giger, Penthouse Comix, and Zone 5300. But also artists in my immediate environment give me lots of inspiration; everyone has their own way of working and style. Often you tell, by just looking at the work, who made it. Real cool!

Before Corona, Lik De Kikker started to gain momentum. You guys played a lot and seemed to become quite popular on the scene. Do you consider LxDxK, a live band, or are there plans for recordings? The only thing out at the moment is the ‘LxDxK vs. G.’ CDr. KG: The first Lik de Kikker vinyl is on the way. In May 2021,

we recorded frognoise for two days in studio Moerwijk in The Hague. There we recorded enough for 3 12” split LPs and a couple of 7” splits. The first 12” will be released in the fall, together with a tearjerker/booze band from De Samenscholing [famous squat in The Hague – PB], that’s gonna be gold! One side will be merciless rough frognoise, and the other side polonaise drinking songs, really far out.

This is a shout-out to other bands that would like to do a split with the Frogs or DIY labels that would like to join in: bring it on, contact us through Facebook or email!

We have also been busy in the recording studio with the FCKN BSTRDS [famous Dutch noise combo PB] & Lik de Kikker split (Lick the BSTRDS/FCKN Frogs) that we will continue this fall and hope to release in 2022.

And in June, we were in the studio recording with Parasnol for the Parasnol & Friends tape, that also includes collaborations with Vestas and Kutwyv [all well-known Dutch noise acts – PB], due to be released later this year.

Besides noise and punk, what other outlets do you have at the moment? How do you distribute your art?

KG: My focus has been largely on drawing and painting lately; due to Corona, there are too few gigs. I sell prints of my canvasses and make paintings and designs on commission. People mail me, and I ask what objects, situations, feelings, or whatever they want, and then I create a personal piece of art for them. That always gives cool and sometimes bizarre results.

Besides that, I still play with crust punk band Locura, with which we also record some tracks recently. That is going to be a 12’ split with punk band Kavala, which we also hope to release at the end of this or the beginning of next year.

Really, there is no better outlet for me than shouting for three hours or push buttons and puke out frognoise!

NATTY BROOKER Mr Uglys’ Beautiful Drawings Natty (1963-2014) Nick ‘Natty’ Brooker, aka Mr Ugly, was the primal drummer on the first Spacemen 3 album. His artwork was used by bands such as Spacemen 3, Spiritualized, Electrahead & The Guaranteed Ugly, of which was also a member.

He also designed a series of ‘witchy’ plates, kept scrapbooks full of collages, painted murals & produced comix. Nattys life was one long act of creativity, he would find animal skulls, feathers, string etc., and construct something ugly - the rugby Bagpuss on acid.

His business card read “Spacemen 3 Recurring & Big City Reproductions . . . Pop Art Hallucinations . . . Psychedelic Extravaganzas . . . Drug-induced Flying Saucer Attacks . . . Opiate State of the Art Dreamscapes” Natty passed away in 2014 after long battle with cancer. He lives on in his artwork . . . the high priest of Hicksville voodoo. - Bolt Dreg These drawings are from Skunk Comix (1992) “Beauty is only skin deep . . . ugly goes to the bone”

Tell us about the latest Royal Honey release, “Sweet Heat,” and what can listeners expect?

More of the same hard rockin’ street walkin’ rock and roll. High energy, great production, make you want to get up and move music! Big-time attitude!

How does it compare to previous RH releases?

You can hear the progress of the band from the first ep to this ep. Dave Musik and Eric have really learned how to play off each other. The songwriting is a bit tighter than the first release. We recorded a bonus track with Johnny Razorblade, “Pull the Plug.” That is my favorite track. Johnny does a great job at catching the band’s live energy.

How does Royal Honey work as a group as far as songwriting?

Does the group write together, or is it an individual effort?

Dave writes the bulk of the material. He comes to the band with the base idea and structure, then we all add our flavor.

Dave’s an excellent songwriter. Eric adds his parts as well as producing the tracks along with Bob M from the Vault.

After a year of lockdowns/social distancing and life being on hold. How does it feel to be performing live, again?

We performed a bit in 2020, playing double bills with our good friends, The Borstal Boys at Jergles and Rock for life. It obviously feels great to be able to play for people again at full capacity. We thrive on our crowd, and I believe it truly energizes us. The better the crowd, the better we bring it!

What can we expect next from Royal Honey?

Photo: Emmy Susani

SLEAZY, STREET WALKIN’ & HARD ROCKIN’. Pittsburgh’s Royal Honey release their latest recording, Sweet Heat.

Frontman Bobby C tells it like it is.

You can expect more of the same sleazy, hard rockin’ music and that LAMF attitude. We will continue to be true to our roots and our scene. We have some great shows lined up for the fall with The Cheats, The Legendary Hucklebucks, TuK Smith, The Ravangers, and The Molecule Party. We hope to see folks at some shows!

ROYAL HONEY

TRUTH & RITES Photo: Theresa Legler

Pittsburgh’s Legendary Reggae Band By: Karla Doolittle

Truth & Rites have been together for nearly a decade, playing original as well as roots reggae.

However, founding members Jah Ques, Kavin Paulraj, Bob Lampenfield, and their bandmates have been working together in various music ventures for twenty years.

Universal Roots Band (which backed Fyah Wyah) included members Lloyd Willacy, JJ Smith (of SWAMMP Band notoriety), and Bob Lampenfield (of Kingpin), who then joined Stu Braun (of B3s) to form what would become the foundational band known as Man in the Street. There was a heavy focus on representing all forms of reggae from original to Ska, modern Dance Hall, and Rocksteady.

Through their instrumental form, Man in the Street collaborated with many artists, including Jah Ques.

Froggy Francis (also of SWAMMP Band notoriety) was asked to join the trio with Jah, Kavin, and Bob. Shortly after that, the band was rounded out when drummer JJ Smith became a part of the Truth & Rites family.

Truth & Rites have provided entertainment ranging from a 3-4 piece band to as many as fifteen musicians joining in.

The band is known for playing its eclectic and soulful style at Kayafest, Pittsburgh Reggae Fest, Jerk Fest, Reggae Fusion Fest, and Jamaica Independence Celebration. They’ve played some of the biggest reggae festivals in and around the tristate area including opening for legends such as Toots and the Maytals, Luciano, The Wailers and Ziggy Marley.

In addition, they performed recently for the Holiday at Hartwood television broadcast and were the feature act to kick off the 2021 concert series at Hartwood Acres.

Truth & Rites first came together when Jah Ques met Kavin Paulraj, a well-known guitarist and vocalist. In fact, it was Kavin who came up with the name for the band.

The heart of Truth & Rites continues to beat as they have a full-length album set to be released in the spring of 2022.

The group began playing steady bi-monthly gigs at Casa Rasta in Beechview, and it was at this time local singer

Bob Marley said it best, “One good thing about music when it hits you feel no pain.”

TRAMP FOR THE LORD around and was in a few different garage bands, one called Miata. I loved that band, but it kind of fell apart. Based on that band, I started to realize that I could write songs and sing too. Very reluctantly, I started my own band as a leader. With the experience I had been in a signed band and seeing how a well-functioning band happens, I modeled things after that.

Second Scene: You’re still in touch with Brian Small (founder of the Hangmen)?

Doug Cox: Oh, yeah. We opened up for them a while ago. That was cool. Brian loves Tramp for the Lord.

Second Scene: It seems like Tramp for the Lord should be playing in the background of a Wim Wender’s movie, like Paris, Texas. It is such an eclectic American band, a bit offbeat. And just the name, it sounds Christian, but it isn’t.

Doug Cox: No, I am not a Christian (chuckles).

We are named after a book. I saw the book at my friend’s house and thought that should be the name of the band. It’s like being promiscuous for the Lord.

Mary Magdalene, God. I mean, people immediately think of Christianity, but to me, it’s more about a pagan thing. There are lots of pagan Lords.

Catching up with Doug Cox of the Americana band Tramp for the Lord Photos and interview by Dug Moore Second Scene: I saw your recent show at the Cinema Bar in Los Angeles when you played with the Groovy Rednecks. It was a killer night, and Tramp for the Lord was tight. Did it take a lot of time to get back in the pocket after the Covid shutdown of the clubs?

Doug Cox: Oh for sure, it had been a year since we rehearsed as a fourpiece. The shutdown was definitely a bitch. But thankfully, everyone got vaccinated, and we started rehearsing again.

Second Scene: There’s a historical lineup in Tramp for the Lord with regards to indie music in LA. I heard. Kurt Markham (drums) played a few shows with the original Iron Butterfly.

Doug Cox: Yeah, I mean, he wasn’t part of the original lineup, but he did some shows with them.

Second Scene: I heard the original drummer was sick or had some kind of problem, and they needed a temporary band member. Kurt was only 16!

Doug Cox: Yeah, that’s crazy. He’s a great musician. Kurt was in Overkill on SST Records. They were one of the first heavy metal punk groups and have been around since the old punk rock days in the South Bay scene in California. He was asked to play in the Circle Jerks, but at the time, he didn’t want to tour. DB on guitar has a huge history locally. He was raised in New Jersey and moved to Hollywood and hooked up with Rock City Angels, and worked with David Geffen, and he shipped them off to Nashville and Memphis for two years. He toured opening for one of Jimmy Page’s bands.

Barry Stevenson on the standup bass had his time in the White Liars and Too Many Joe’s. He is an OG in the Long Beach and Orange County music scene.

Second Scene: But you had your cool stuff going on at the same time, opening for some other iconic artists.

Doug Cox: I was with the Hangmen for the first six years o the band, from the gutter to Capitol Records. One of our more epic shows was on New Year’s Eve at the now-defunct Palomino in North Hollywood, opening for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. But there were other great shows, like The Ramones, Iggy Pop, X, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Johnny Thunders, lots of great bands.

Second Scene: Tramp for the Lord is a different situation from the Hangman.

Doug Cox: In the Hangmen, I was a bass player, and I learned a lot. I used a lot of that knowledge to decide how to structure Tramp for the Lord. I kicked

Second Scene: Tramp for the Lord sounds so different from the hard-rocking sound of the Hangmen.

Doug Cox: A lot of that is because we were twenty years old at the time. I’m not dancing on the grave of my youth. That’s not what the band’s about. I was never really a metal person. When I was in high school, everyone was listening to Led Zeppelin while I was listening to the Jefferson Airplane.

Second Scene: You’re an accomplished painter. When you paint, how’s that process differ internally from songwriting? Is the intrinsic reward different? Or is it the same?

Doug Cox: It is very different. But at the same time, they’re both obsessive, allconsuming experiences. So in that way, they’re both the same.

Second Scene: I love your last EP, Black Cows, and Slo Pokes. How did it progress from the prior releases?

Doug Cox: Black Cows and Slo Pokes is about four people rehearsing in the garage for a couple of years. It’s a four-piece project, even though the songs are mine. It’s totally about representing what the four of us did. My other releases under Tramp for the Lord are a bit loose.

Second Scene: I was raised waking up in the morning, and the local radio was on playing. Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, the Johnny paycheck type of stuff. Were you exposed to this kind of music as a child, or was it something else different?

Doug Cox: One of my earliest remembers of listening to the radio was Cat Stevens. I was obsessed with Kiss, the Tubes, and Ramones.

Second Scene: What about the very first bands?

Doug Cox: I was in a band called the Symptoms, and we played a cover of Gloria but changed the words to spell Valium instead of Gloria (laughs).

Second Scene: I know you recorded acoustic versions of some of your previously released material, and you have some new songs that you have been working on. Are there going to be any new releases?

Doug Cox: Oh yeah, sure, man. We keep on rolling.

Second Scene: What about a cover of Gloria in the future?

Doug Cox: Oh yeah, for sure, as soon as people start covering my songs (laughs).

trampforthelord.bandcamp.com

Ghost Patterns has a new album soon to be released. What can you tell us about the feel and sound of the new album?

Our debut album is called ‘Infinite’ and is being released on September the 3rd for streaming, download, and limited edition cd. It’s fair to say that our source inspiration comes from various psychedelic, shoegaze, and also post-punk influences along the way. These could be traces of music from way back to the late ‘60s through to the early 90’s shoegaze/ alt-rock era, so we think the listener will be able to recognize something from these periods in the sounds and atmospheres that we have created. We also have tried to ‘re-assemble these various inspirations rather than sticking rigidly to a particular style. In that sense, we think it makes for a more interesting journey to go on and can adapt to whatever mood or type of story we want to tell in our songs.

How was the group able to write and record during these trying times?

We all have recording software at home, so that was the only way we could develop, arrange and record the songs for this album.

It has been challenging to write completely remotely, and a lot of initial demo ideas and recordings were solidified into what became the final takes and mixes once we could see that the lockdowns were never-ending! So there’s an element of the original inspiration in there and something which almost certainly would not have happened this way if we were heading into the studio to do an album.

At the start of the initial lockdown, we had little contact as a band, so a lot of the writing was done separately in terms of overall musical arrangement and structure, like guitars and drums, for example. Then things like keys, bass, and vocals were gradually added over time towards the latter end of the process. We exchanged an incalculable amount of .wav files between us to make the album and just the right amount to avoid us going completely insane! We also did the final mixing and mastering ourselves.

Two songs from our last E.P, ‘Oracle,’ have been carried over into the album, with new mixes to fit in with the production of the other new tunes. So overall, yeah, we thought this collection of tunes would best sum up the eighteen-month period we’ve been through.

Photo: Ria Sarkar

Surviving the pandemic and lockdowns, the UK group Ghost Patterns return with a new album and a few tour dates. Terry Hale speaks.

It’s been a while since we last spoke. How have you, the group, dealt with the pandemic and the lockdowns that have shut down just about everything?

Thanks for having us back! We, like everyone else, have had a tough time through the various partial and full lockdowns and opening upcycles (we have lost count by now!) But we managed a few online meetings as a band last summer and a few more recently in person as things were gradually opening up in London.

We were finally able to get back together as a full band in July for some practices, and more importantly, to see each other again!

Ghost Patterns have a few exciting shows coming up. Tell us about these shows. How does it feel to get out in front of an audience again?

Yes! Now that gigs are starting back in September, we will be supporting psych heavyweights Cult Of Dom Keller at one of our favorite local venues, the Victoria in Dalston, London.We have also just booked our first gig of 2022 supporting Qlowski in January at the New Cross Inn, South London, so I’m really looking forward to that one too. We imagine the first show will feel a bit strange after such a long layoff, but we’re sure it’ll be good fun, and we will be making the most of it!

What can we expect from Ghost Patterns in the future?

Much more gigging, of course! We have gigs booked but looking to fill more gaps in the schedule to play a lot more. We are also looking to make more videos of songs from the new album and to develop our visual representation of the band. So there’s lots more to work to do on that front! We also have other demos in progress that didn’t quite make the album in time. These tunes could possibly come out as an E.P. early next year.

GHOST PATTERNS

sounded off, and I thought, “Oh no.” He asked, “Do you want me to fix it?” And of course, I said yes. He took it apart and did all kinds of things, and it sounded great afterward. No doubt that Albini knows what he is doing!

That’s a cool story. Then a couple weeks later, you got a mixed record. That’s kind of how it worked out.

We just have to get it mastered. They do their magic. It’s supposed to be ready pretty soon. I’ve been sending it around to labels.

If that doesn’t work out, we’ll just figure out a way to put it out ourselves.

Is Manhattan Murder Mystery still having the same lineup as when you are based in Los Angeles?

Manhattan Murder Mystery Matthew Teardrop and Manhattan Murder Mystery’s new album with Steve Albini Interview by Dug Moore Live Photos by Amy Darling Hi Matthew Teardrop, how does it feel to be in Detroit?

Good but humid!

I heard Steve Albini made the new Manhattan Murder Mystery album! That’s so great to hear!

Matthew Teardrop: We wanted him to make our album Dumb, the last album we did. That was just kind of a dream. But it was all the traveling we’d have to do; everybody would have to get off work to get to Chicago to record, so it never happened. Then I moved to Detroit at the start of the pandemic, and everybody had a little extra time and flexibility because most of us lost our jobs. I was thinking since I was really close to Chicago, maybe the Steve Albini approach would be a good thing to do right now. Then, the same night that I was thinking that we got a song in a movie trailer, just kind of totally out of the blue, which was trippy, like a good omen to go for it. I got in touch with him, and he said yes, he would do it.

How much time do you spend recording with Albini?

We were there for five days. Everybody came from LA to my house in Detroit, and we practiced. Most of the songs we had played for a couple of years. The nice thing about having a house was that we could all stay here and practice each day in the basement and then go to the studio for five days straight. We’ve never been able to record like that. It’s mostly always been in a garage. We lay down the tracks and have to go to somebody’s apartment for overdubs. Then we get a finished recording six months later on somebody’s computer. This time we got everything in a straight shot.

Was Albini the recording engineer, or did he have some other title?

Matthew Teardrop: Yeah, he recorded it. And he mixed it at the end of our time there, so it was just us with him for five days, although there were a couple other guys who work at the studio.

He placed the mics and everything. He did it all.

Kind of, our old bass player came back to play on a couple of songs. She was the bass player for a long time, it wasn’t like she left the band per se, but she had a baby and got some property in Mexico. And when she heard which heard we were doing this, she wanted to be a part of it. It was great. Hopefully, we can at least figure out a way for it to come out on vinyl somehow.

Do you usually write the lyrics?

Yeah, I usually write the whole song, and everybody will come to play whatever they want. Everybody I know will play something good; almost always, it will be perfect. That’s usually how it works.

You’ve got all these new songs I like, and I don’t really know what any of the songs mean. I don’t want to get too much into that because it’s usually better to have the mystery. But I see new titles like Greensboro, Imperial County, and there are so many different places with the same names. Which places are you talking about?

I’m curious.

I don’t know if you watch wrestling, but I was inspired by a wrestling match I watched, and it involved pro wrestling manager Jim Cornette, an old show from the 80s. Basically, teams were fighting on top of a scaffold, and the loser gets thrown off the scaffold.

People would break a leg every night. And here’s this manager, that guy gets thrown off the scaffold. He’s looking down. The first match I was watching was happening in Greensboro, North Carolina. The other ones about just about roaming around drunk in the desert.

There was no double entendre about another place other than the Salton Sea? That is a place I like to go whenever we can. We did one of the first music videos there. I never lived there, but I’ve spent a lot of time there just camping and hanging out.

Your new music, as always, is pretty strong, in my opinion. Just like I love the other albums you have. I latched on to the album Dumb as well as Women House, and I love your new music too. Nine songs coming out strong, hopefully out on vinyl, and get someone like Colin Ambulance to do another cool album cover for you. Is the name of the LP going to be Baby WrestleMania?

Seems like that’s where it’s headed unless something else pops up.

Hopefully, we can get it on a label soon, and we will have vinyl available.

The current mix is great. Thank you for the sneak peek. Baby WresleMania is gonna be a keeper too, and we can’t wait to hear the final mastering!

Wow, he even did the mics. You got the personal touch of magic from him.

Right? When we started playing, I remember he said that my guitar

miedlena.com/manhattanmurdermystery

The Innocently Inappropriate Coleman Moore wants to Scream!

Second Scene: You have made a big impression on people at the underground venues. Your music has this dichotomy of light-hearted humor but also angst but is still optimistic. Do you write all the lyrics and music?

Coleman Moore: I write all the lyrics and music, and it’s funny that you say it’s optimistic. I think that’s somewhat true. It’s my deepest feelings on whatever I’m thinking about. And I think laughing in the midst of pain is a bit cathartic. Music is definitely my way of connecting to people on a personal level, without necessarily knowing everything about each other. Art finds a common ground.

Second Scene: That’s the great thing about music. It brings people together for at least a little bit. What are the musical influences that have inspired you?

Coleman Moore: I definitely straddle a world of pop and bliss. Some of the people that have inspired me are Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Tegan and Sara, Backstreet Boys, Max Martin, the movie Spring Breakers. I’ve also kind of always been into punk or any kind of rebellious music—artists like Tom Waits, X, Sonic Youth. There’s a lot of influences, and I use those attitudes from Prince, Cocteau Twins, Lil Wayne.

Second Scene: It seems like there’s a lot of influences that are diametrically opposed, and on the other hand, complimentary.

Coleman Moore: Right! I want to find that popular catharsis in rebellion, so to speak, and vice versa. I definitely like to poke fun at what is subversive or perverse in the popular idiom. Even the corporate, I like to work within that, and make it feel fucked up!

Second Scene: It’s certainly refreshing! Your reputation on the local music scene is very positive. At the same time, this rebellious side comes out. Kind of innocently inappropriate on stage. It seems like such a different type of character than you are in real life. How did you develop this persona and dance routine?

Coleman Moore: I think with each one is something different. I get a different satisfaction out of DM Tina, and Tara and the Little Stars, and my own project, and also my meditation music project, Conscious Choice. They serve different purposes in organizing different facets of my music life. My vision is in my own music; that’s something I value a lot, but the other ones are a blast too. Or they give me a relaxation, as in the case of Conscious Choice Second Scene: Do you always write the songs on one particular instrument or another?

Coleman Moore: I play bass, guitar, piano, and I’m an electronic producer. I generally write the songs on piano or guitar or to a beat. One factor for me I get is that I get very restless. I wish I was comfortable jumping in on any instrument, electronic gadget, or toy because I think it’s always the most inspiring when you’re in a new context. So sometimes I will switch between piano and guitar because I’ll get bored of one of them.

Second Scene: You have also produced and engineered some other bands.

Coleman Moore: I used to do some soundtrack work and commercial music work. Although mostly soundtrack work on some cool projects, but not any super large projects. And commercial work was a challenge to sustain. Those are both the things I did in the past. I definitely love to produce bands and singers. Even before I was doing Coleman Moore, I was collaborating with a lot of songwriters doing pop tracks. I’ve been a producer for longer than I’ve been a stage performer.

Second Scene: Is there something that you sometimes enjoy more when producing another artist and collaborating?

Coleman Moore: There’s something in the persona where I do try to be endearing, but I think that we all go through the world with a certain essence and that true self, more often than not, shines through. But sometimes, you don’t feel fully expressed in that embodied way of being, so the character on stage, for me, is a version of what I really want. The freak I really feel myself to be, and also the giver. I really like giving people a lot to work with in terms of innocence or inappropriateness, which is what feels good to me. More historically speaking, I did come up with a character when creating a lot of pop music for different artists. I really didn’t know what my voice was. I’ve always had trouble knowing what I truly sounded like as a singer. And then I was inspired by Tom Waits when he said, he said,” I’m ready to scream” or something like that. And he had a 10-year career at that point! I just thought that was very visceral and inspiring. I wanted to take these of coy, sexual RnB songs I’ had been doing and mutate them with a gravelly roar; that’s how it started. I also didn’t want to make any music on stage, like with a looper or any kind of technical gear. I wanted to engage completely from my heart to the people in the audience. I decided to just go up and dance because I’ve always loved to dance. The more I danced and sang on stage, and the absurdities showed through, the more I realized I had to make it something consistent and memorable.

COLEMAN MOORE Interview: Carl Gentry

Second Scene: You play bass and are in a few other bands that I’ve seen; DM Tina and the Bumps, Tara, and the Little Stars. Those bands are very different from one another musically, yet each band is really strong. Is there a thread that runs through all of them? It must be very different to be a member of a band than doing your own project.

Photo: Dug Moore

Coleman Moore: With someone else’s vision, I am less invested emotionally. However, the group and collaborative work really speeds along so fast and has so much inert motion. When you’re getting together with people in a room, and they have demands, they need things. I wish I had a personality disorder with all the different personalities. Then we could be just super fast-moving and quick to fire off the dialectics as it would be in a group of different people (laughs).

Second Scene: Can you tell us about the last single and the new one that you have coming out? And you have a new music video coming out soon too!

Coleman Moore: I recently released a brand new single, as well as a video called Spill Me Out video directed by Dug Moore. I’m just trying to get get back on the dance floor again with this one and, and with the new sound, am experimenting with some crunchier stuff; a little bit more of that “I want to scream” vibe, and nerdy voices. Spill Me Out is a kind of rejection of rationality and rational arguments. It’s a call to listen to the complaints of the heart. I created a music video for my past single called Precum, which came out last year. That is an old song, but a new video. That’ll be out before the end of the summer heat, and looking forward to everyone seeing it.

Second Scene: We are looking forward to seeing it too. Keep on keeping on! Learn more at coleman-moore.com

YOUNG GUN SILVER FOX

I went to school in black neighborhoods and heard a lot of 70s Soul / Funk / R&B, which gave me strong American musical roots in Gospel, Roots Music, and Rock.

I learned to play guitar and drums when I was ten and played with my brother.

An older neighbor, six or seven years older than me, was a real musician and had a big influence on me. He played me a lot of records, showed me chords and riffs, we jammed together.

He got me into Fusion Jazz – e.g., “Headhunters” by Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius’ first album, George Duke, Flora Purim (playing percussion with Airto Moreira). Unfortunately, he died of COVID 19 last year.

Either way, I didn’t fit in with the musical mainstream, adopting the beat of a different drummer (laughs)! In the 80s, I got into early Hip-hop and was always thinking about going to Los Angeles as the next logical step.

TS: What was the first album you bought?

Isaac Hayes’ “Shaft” soundtrack, Chairman of the Board – “In session.” First 45 was “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder. My taste could not be pigeonholed. There are multiple things to enjoy. I never concentrate on only one thing.

Then Chicago’s debut album, “Transit authority,” and various 45s, such as Steely Dan, Earth, Wind & Fire.

Photo: Yvonne Schmedemann

NOT FIT FOR ONE MUSICAL BOX

By Tom Sobilo

Photo: Yvonne Schmedemann

“Making a living as a musician is not easy, but somebody has to do it,” says Shawn Lee aka Silver Fox, multi-instrumentalist, a man of musical taste and one half of Young Gun Silver Fox, an American-British band, tipping his hat while holed up in his studio, The Shop, in Finsbury Park, about 10 minutes from Camden Town, London. Pursuing a career and working for more than forty years as a musician on stage and in the studio, composing, producing, recording, and performing all over the world, he has seen the highs and lows the entertainment business implicates.

With Young Gun Silver Fox and his partner in crime Andy Platts (Mamas Gun), aka Young Gun, he finally found fame and fortune with Westcoast Rock music by showing his 70s / 80s influences and paying tribute to the great artists of this era yet taking it to today’s next musical level and adding his own eclectic musical marks.

Tom Sobilo reports from Frankfurt am Main. He discovered YGSF via their most recent 2020 album “Canyons,” released by the Hamburgbased Légère Recordings run by Helmut Heuer. An album full of musical gems oozing the Westcoast lifestyle, the sun, and the beach with three potential smash hits (“Kids,” “Who needs words,” “Baby girl”) destined to top the charts all over the world. Ten beautifully crafted and arranged melodic songs with verse, chorus, bridge, and always including that little twist that makes the song not merely good but great. Be it funky horn arrangements in the Phenix Horns vein (“Dream Woman,” “Danny Jamaica”), unexpected musical breaks, or a Power Ballad (“All this love”), YGSF has many musical aces up their sleeves. *** TS: You were born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, in 1963?

Yes, that’s true. I grew up in rural Kansas, right in the middle of the conservative bible belt. So, there was an influx of people. My mum’s dad was from Syria and came to the States in the 1930s. Mum was half Indian, and my dad came from Ireland, so I have a multi-ethnic background which influenced my musical preferences. My mum played clarinet in school, and my dad did not play any instruments at all.

TS: I hear a lot of Earth, Wind & Fire influences as far as your horn arrangements are concerned.

Nichol Thompson (Robbie Williams, Annie Lennox, Gregory Porter) arranged those. I dug the Doobie Brothers with Michael McDonald at the helm – Takin’ it to the streets, Livin’ on the fault line – I loved those albums.

TS: I have noticed that you have a 1978 Doobie Brothers promo poster in your studio!

Our single, “Can you feel it,” paid tribute to the Warner Brothers classic 70s palm tree label. I loved all the Westcoast labels such as Asylum, A&M. In fact, I did a thing in Burbank with a guy named Bronx Style Bob. Old school Hip-hop, he’s worked with Ice T. In January 1988, I had saved enough money and moved to Los Angeles and never looked back. I never worked outside of music.

After six months, I got a job in the music industry, never worked 9 to 5 anymore.

TS: Did you like Grunge?

I recall somebody making a remark about Nirvana at a party in Los Angeles on “the album that is going to change everything.” It didn’t. Of all the “Grunge” acts, I liked Soundgarden the most as they had that classic 70s Rock thing going à la Led Zeppelin. To me, Nirvana was a Punk / Heavy Metal amalgam – a lot of energy, Angst, and loudness with a “black spirit,” darkness in it.

In 1992 I was playing Lollapalooza with Bronx Style Bob, sharing the stage with Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. In 1995 I recorded my first solo album, a 10” EP, which was was not released at the time—a very eclectic mix of styles with Soul, Rock, Acoustic songs, experimental, weird sounds. Lo-fi stuff, Hip-hop – on the other hand, I liked harmonically rich Jazz-influenced chords, Steely Dan type of stuff, Indian chants with odd meters, minimalist soundscapes. I had complete artistic freedom, which was very liberating. There were no limits, and my whole life went into this album, including one thirteen-minute long track. Very hard to sell for labels (laughs)!

I think it is ok to like things at odds; people should have a broader perspective. In the 1990s, I didn’t fit into one musical box as I worked on this weird patchwork quilt of music. The listener/musician should always try to find the “thread to everything,” meaning “trying to find the Funk in something, not Funk,” soulfulness and authenticity.

In my collection, you find under “E” stuff like ESG, Brian Eno. In the “F” section Jose Feliciano, Folk Implosion, Robert Flack, Fifty Foot Hose (a 1969 psychedelic record from the Bay area, kinda like Portishead before there was a Portishead or Silver Apples)

Then I ran into Gilles Peterson, who brought me to London in 1995.

The album was released in France on CD, and Gilles had a promo tape of it.

TS: You worked with a lot of big names (Jeff Buckley, Lana del Rey, Amy Winehouse, Alicia Keys, Princess Superstar a.o), and your songs were used on TV (Malcolm In The Middle, Lost, Desperate Housewives, CSI: Miami, Ugly Betty, Boston Legal, Rodney, Damages, Good Morning America) as well as motion pictures (Ocean’s 13, The Break-Up, The Bank Job, Pool Hall Prophets).

I am not trying to work with these people/colleagues, but one person likes you and recommends you. So, they want you to get involved (laughs).

It is very likely that Elton John will come to my next gig, a celebrity swanky place/birthday party, an A-listy thing. In fact, I met his band while I was flying back to London from LA. I have heard that Elton likes some of my guitar playing for Pop session recordings I have done.

I am a big Michael McDonald fan, too. He sang on a Grizzly Bear track, “While You Wait for the Others.” He is an open-minded guy, and I like that.

TS: What is your approach to recording?

I have always been a mercenary. I work quickly and get as much as possible done. Studios cost money.

Thus, the quicker you get work done, the better. I am very fixated on getting things in one or maximum two takes. Otherwise, you lose the vibe.

I am very intuitive. In the moment, trust my instincts. I know what to do. First thought, best thought!

Step two would be getting to it with a fresh ear.

Adding overdubs, mix, then finish. Otherwise, you lose perspective. Stay sharp with focus! Do something, finish it. Move on, keep going on.

TS: Like David Bowie or Prince.

Yes, they were obsessed with doing something else. I’d love to work with Michael McDonald; that would tickle me. Now that would be amazing.

And the stories he could tell. In fact, I wanted to do something with Mike Finnigan, another Kansas native who has played with Crosby, Stills and Nash, Dave Mason, Etta James, Dr. John, Carlos Santana, Joe Cocker, The Manhattan Transfer, and Bonnie Raitt. I am friends with his son. Six years ago, I had dinner with him in London. No pictures were taken. We were peers; that was cool.

TS: How did Young Gun Silver Fox come into being?

I wanted to make a Westcoasty record, and then I met Andy (Platts), a singer-songwriter. I thought we can do this together. A 70s/80s type, dream team, I worked on a couple of tracks of Andy’s band (Mamas Gun). We had chemistry together, so we ended up working together. I did instrumentals, send them to him, and he started working on it.

Magically it all came together. Our success in the Netherlands came as a surprise to us. There was no promotion going; we went over to Amsterdam, sold out the show quickly, the second show the next day, too. People loved us and gave us standing ovations! So, we did a tour over there, and radio DJs loved us. The venues got bigger, 700-800 sized venues.

This pushed us to the mainstream, but it was not intentional. Weird how people responded. It was very uplifting, emotionally invested.

The Dutch have good taste in music. In the UK it is vice versa – if we would be played on the radio, we would be big. We were on a BBC Soft Rock documentary (“I can go for that”) and sold out a show soon thereafter. In fact, we have fans all over the world. I was recording in Brazil, and people knew who we were—never been there before. If the music is good, it works. The same with Thailand, record stores had our CDs. I played in Indonesia and Japan to lots of young fans. Japan is such a wonderful unique place to play. They treat musicians with respect and honor. It feels amazing to go to Tower Records in Japan and see a cardboard standup of yourself.

I have loads of other projects, working off / on, doing so many

things relentlessly, various income channels, constantly crafting. I do a gig occasionally if I am in it for a little money. Hey, I am a working musician.

The famous session drummer James Gadson played birthday parties for 50 bucks in the valley, and he had played with Bill Withers at Carnegie Hall and Jimi Hendrix. Some play in bars with cover bands.

That’s a good attitude. I carried that with me. Been professional and kept my enthusiasm. I am still learning, and it paid off.

I have been a professional musician for 40 years, and it has been a blessing. I never hit a super high.

TS: Tell me about your live band featuring Adrian Meehan on drums and David Page on bass.

Both stem from the London area and have sessioned around. Adrian played for Roddy Frame (Aztec Camera), Data Rock a.o., Dave played with Edwyn Collins, Colorama, Black Pumas, Jonathan Jeremiah a.o.

TS: Adrian’s drumming is supertight. Somebody remarked on his playing on your version of Bill Withers’ “Lovely day,” “The drummer’s discipline rivals that of a North Korean government servant’s.”

Now that’s really funny. Our horn arranger Nichol Thompson toured with the Eagles and worked with Robbie Williams, Quincy Jones, and Tom Jones a.o., he put out a super smooth album.

TS: What are your future plans?

Andy and I rehearsed yesterday for the first time in 18 months, ever since our tour got canceled. We could not promote “Canyons” properly as it was released in February 2020 when the COVID 19 pandemic hit.

Bad timing.

Young Gun Silver Fox are playing gigs in November in the Netherlands and Germany, plus we are finishing the fourth album in 2021. Then tour freely again and pick up where we stopped pre-pandemic.

Moreover, we like to break into other markets (gigs in France and Spain got canceled). We have played Finland; we are supposed to go to the States. I have 6 to 7 albums of my own resp. Collaborations all finished, so in the next couple of years, there will be stuff coming out, either as Shawn Lee, Superhighway Band, Misha Panfilov & Shawn Lee, Ultra Sonic Grand Prix, or Young Gun Silver Fox. I produce and mix other artists, too. The third album of Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18 was done in Cardiff (orchestral stuff for the BBC) as well as Rio de Janeiro with Brazilian influences. He is a talented singer-songwriter singing in Welsh.

Apart from that, there are random projects. I go down different rabbit holes. Concentrate on what I want to do, weird and wonderful directions. Expect a solo album in Summer 2022. Either way, it is fun, not work for me! It keeps you going, sustains you.

TS: Thanks for your time, Shawn.

Shawn Lee’s favorite albums of all time: 1.

Shuggie Otis - Inspiration Information 2.

Steely Dan - Aja 3.

Marvin Gaye - Let’s get it on 4.

John Martyn - Solid Air 5.

Earth, Wind & Fire - I Am 6.

Neil Young - Harvest 7.

Stefano Torossi - Feelings 8.

Bill Champlin (of Chicago fame) - Single 9.

Money Mark – Mark’s Keyboard Repair 10.

Doobie Brothers – Livin’ on the fault line YGSF Discography: • West End Coast (2014) • AM Waves (2018) • Canyons (2020)

Further information: younggunsilverfox.bandcamp.com/ facebook.com/younggunsilverfox/

RED HOT SHAME Interview with Xeff Scolari.

How about telling us about your background as a musician?

Well, I wish I had picked up a guitar at a much younger age, but I waited until I was in my late teens when I borrowed a guitar from my brother to use as a prop for a lip-sync contest I was organizing to benefit The Hunger Project. I was going to do Psycho Killer a’la David Byrne’s solo performance of that song in the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense movie. Ah, the 80’s... lip-sync contests. Haha!

Anyway, that whole event fell through, so I had this guitar sitting around doing nothing. I started learning by playing along with records, and soon enough, the bug caught me, and I was hooked.

I put together a band, then another, went through several, finally found some local success with Chowderhead, and even got signed onto a small label, Magnetic Oblivion.

Never heard of it? I hadn’t either, but they liked us, so what the heck. I did two albums with Chowderhead -’ Sinus’ and ‘Absence,’ a little bit of touring, and then the band imploded. I had a few other groups here and there, Sugardaddy, the Acoustic Gypsies, but eventually took about 15 years off of music to raise a family. I jumped back in around 2016 when I put together a small home studio to start working on what would end up being Red Hot Shame’ Curiosity’. From there, it’s been a constant stream of recording and playing live wherever I can. Just as things were starting to get comfortable covid hits. Live shows end. So I started Shelter n Play to scratch that itch for all us musicians that were suddenly forced out of the spotlight, providing a weekly ‘live from anywhere’ open mic. We musicians used Shelter n Play to raise money for our local food bank, which brings me back full circle to how I started in the first place - using music to try and help feed people.

What are your previous releases that the readers should know about?

Red Hot Shame’s first release was 2017’s ‘Curiosity.’ I did a side project under the band name ‘Vanity Project’ with lead singer Steven Pitsenbarger - we put out an album called Flawless, released in 2018, and then a Vanity Project EP called Second Coming, released in 2019, then 4 Red Hot Shame EP’s all released in 2020 each with one song off the upcoming’ Sounds Like’ along with 2 or 3 other outtakes, leading up to Red Hot Shame’s’ Sounds Like’ in April on this year.

What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on two RHS projects. The last single from Sounds Like is ‘Waterlogged,’ which is being released as a trilogy with two other songs to complete the story of Waterlogged. That’s the link I sent you. I’m still tweaking that. Hopefully, it’ll be out in about a week or so. Along with that, I’m working on the next RHS album, My Satellite. Jeff Jordan (artist on the other two RHS albums) is going to do the cover, which I’m stoked about. Check out his work with the Mars Volta album covers. Pretty cool stuff. I am also working on a solo album for my Vanity Project bandmate, Steven, as well as several demos for local artists/bands, including The Fluffers, Stable Vices, and Linda Faye Carson.

MoTruth

Taking it to the streets with Gene Shelby.

How about some background information on you and how you got to where you are today.

I grew up in a small town, Jasper, Texas. I moved to Pittsburgh, PA, where I met my beautiful wife, Jamela. We got married, and we had our first and only child (daughter), Bria, a year later.

I’ve been around and involved with music since my childhood.

I was recently signed to an international recording label, LBMRecords, out of West Virginia. I’ve traveled in and out of the country, performing and speaking to people of all ages from different cultures and backgrounds.

Tell us about the collective you work with and the other members.

I work with a very unique group/team of artists from Pennsylvania, Alabama, Texas, and West Virginia. Different Genres of music and instruments, ranging from hip hop, Guitarist, and classical Violinist.

LBMRecords artist Ben Acors, MoTruth, Jackpotinspirit, Zsel The Artist, Johnas and Graham Denmon. Owner/Manager of LBMRecords Troy Jackson and beat producer Gabriel Robinson We all bring something different to the table with style and creativity.

made it through and overcame. I hope to inspire people and artists dealing with some of the same issues in life!

What are your goals? Travel more, grow as an Artist/A&R Rep, learn more about the business side of the music industry, and push LBMRecords and MoTruth brand! To continue.

A big part of your outreach program is ministering to people in need by performing live shows. How were you able to continue your work with pandemic restrictions and social distancing?

It was tough in the beginning, but I still found ways to continue my work through social media, zoom, live streaming, small video clips I recorded. I used those tools to continue the movement. I personally believe the work will stop with little to no effort and not being able to adjust.

What do you have planned for the rest of 2021, and what can we expect in 2022?

I will continue to write and release my singles in 2021 that will lead into 2022. I’m currently working on a project called “VICTORY” that’s scheduled to be released sometime in 2022. LBMRecords is also working on a new video for my single “MPH,” and it’s scheduled to be released sometime in 2022.

What are you trying to create?

A relevant, transparent, relatable sound that will not only tell my story or talk about the struggle but that will also tell about how I Photo: Chris Brown

Dave Franklin Reviews

Burst Through The Borders – Caulbearers ft. Ruth Blake Having waxed lyrical about Ruth Blake’s tasteful and gorgeous Brave Ships not so long ago, it is great to see her as part of this latest single from Damien Mahoney’s musical collaboration, Caulbearers. Like Blake herself, Caulbearers make ultramodern folk music, music which takes perhaps only the vital essence of the folk spirit and etches and infuses it with all manner of contemporary genres, here leaning into a sort of graceful, ambient pop.

And suppose the music embraces a genre-free or at least genre-fluid creative process. In that case, its inspirations are similarly eclectic, taking in everything from “timeless texts by authors such as Idries Shah, Kahlil Gibran and Neil Douglas-Klotz” to musings on the positive effect that the pandemic is having on the world around us, the “beautiful revolution occurring in the markets, pubs, boardrooms, hospitals, and schools of our towns and cities.”

And if folk music, if indeed this song can be labeled that easily, often speaks with an archaic tongue, Burst Through The Borders talks in the everyday language of the man in the street and the pub, the park, and so on. It may rest on the creative shoulders of musical giants, as all music does, but it has its eyes set firmly on the future.

Total Recall – AMMO We know that all the best things come in small packages and ahead of a two-track release, which in the past would have gone by the ungainly name of a double A-side single, LA-based multi-instrumentalist, AMMO, releases just one of those tracks to light the way. And light the way it does, shimmering and shining in all its cinematic, dreamy glory.

The references are as brilliant as they are obvious, Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Dead Can Dance, even Enya in a more “out-there” and experimental mood, and Total Recall will have industry scribblers reaching for much over-used words such as haunting, ethereal and otherworldly. I’ll opt for candescent or perhaps might give kaleidoscopic a go, but any of these are perfect as a great springboard for the listener’s expectations.

AMMO’s own description of her sonic creations is “the kind of music that should soundtrack a sand-dune-to-shoreline road movie by David Lynch.” And as I can’t think of a better description for this single, I will just end there, adding only this final endorsement. Buy. This. Track. Now!

As I said in the opening, Ruth Blake’s music has turned my head already this year, and now I have another sonic avenue to explore with Caulbearers and over a decade of music to absorb.

Don’t you just love tugging at musical threads and seeing where they lead you?

Both are great songs, opposites that are both attractive and a reminder that pop music is an unstoppable force when done this well. I mean, the best a full-blown pandemic could do was to put it on hold for a bit.

Weather Vane - Emperor Of Ice Cream Many bands have had to resort to the wonders of modern technology to continue their collaborative creativity over the last 18 months but for Emperor of Ice Cream, making music this way became an even more heightened process.

After re-emerging last year, almost thirty years after forming, the band decided to mark this second chapter by putting out a revamped version of their debut album, which Sony had shelved 25 years previously, and a compilation of their early EP’s.

It is a delicate song that feels like an intimate conversation with Mahoney and Blake’s voices, happy to merge in gentle and close harmony rather than trying too hard to overplay the hand.

And the video is also perfectly understated whilst being texturally rich and gorgeously cinematic, essentially the images of empty lockdown streets and the beauty of the natural world captured on nothing more than iPhones. Less is always more, but I don’t have to tell them that; it is a phrase writ large across everything about this release.

put on hold due to live venues, rehearsal rooms, and even studios locking their doors for the duration.

But what better way to come roaring back than with a statement of life-affirming optimism and a sigh of relief all put to a chiming and charming pop tune. It is easy to hear the influences of the likes of Crowded House, David Gray, and Roddy Frame running through the song, but why not? If you are going to find inspiration, look to the best.

And, by way of balance, the song is joined

by The Sound of Heartbreak, a more groove-driven indie piece about those rites of passage that we all have to go through.

The message found across the two songs?

I guess it is something like celebrating the good times when you can because life will always put more than a few emotional obstacles in your way.

Alive – Gavin Murphy Songs Music, and perhaps pop music, in particular, can bring warmth, joy and happiness into the world in a way that few other things can. When done properly, a 3-minute blast of upbeat music and optimistic sentiments can be the perfect rallying call, sugar-rush, and an act of escapism all wrapped up in one small but perfectly formed package.

Alive is certainly all of those things and more.

Alive is the sound of Gavin Murphy looking for sliver-linings and finding more than he bargained for. The last 18 months have been hard for everyone, including musicians and creatives who have had their careers

“It’s a strange task, to make music with people you haven’t been in the same room as for over two decades, but the challenge was a welcome one,” says John “Haggis” Hegarty about the process which saw the different elements of their current recordings assembled in Cork, New York, and Amsterdam.

But the results speak for themselves, and Weather Vane is a gently shimmering, slightly blissed-out, sunshine-infused piece of indie-pop, one that seems to glide past in front of the listener rather than try anything as crass and uncool as trying to grab your attention. That’s the thing with beauty. It doesn’t try. It just is.

It comes with a slightly darker b-side in the form of High Rise, Low Rise, a more mercurial beast, and a tale of kids growing up as outsiders and misfits and how such a start in life can make you view and approach the world in a very singular and non-conformist way.

A great brace of singles and a great calling card for this exciting new sonic chapter.

One of the problems with listening to this new single from Cat Dowling is that she ruins pop music for everyone else. I mean, take a listen to this gorgeous and shimmering slice of indie-pop. There is no going back. Once you have heard just how good pop music can be, you can’t go back to the substandard tat that gets made in the genre’s name. Lines have been drawn, benchmarks raised, the game is afoot.

Ironically, what is going on here is nothing too revolutionary. It’s just that Freedom is more cinematic, more soaring, more charming, more chiming, more epic, more infectious….it’s just, well… more.

Although not necessarily about the sense of Freedom slowly creeping back into people’s lives as lockdown eases, it is certainly well-timed and might even be seen as a sort of rallying cry or anthem for the light at the end of the tunnel. Not that Cat Dowling would stoop to anything so crass.

And I can’t end without mentioning Cat Dowling’s extraordinary voice. It is at turns cool and accessible, anthemic and larger than life, deep and meaningful, soaring and seductive. I could listen to her read the telephone directory…do we still have those?…well, you know what I mean.

Pop music might never be the same again, which can only be a good thing. Right?

A few things happen when I listen to anything by The Mystery Plan. I brace for the unexpected. I think back to the sort of music being made on indie labels of my formative years, music that set me on a certain musical path. I expect to fall in love with what follows. That is what experience has taught me, at least.

And in the case of Silver Lining, I still do all of those things even though the music comes from an even more unexpected place.

Musically it still leans into their drifting and ambient creative urges, celestial voices shimmer, harps chime, and basses pulse and groove. But this time out, the beats seem to come from a more urban, R&Binfused, and influenced sort of place and the vocals, courtesy of Big Supreme, come in the form of dexterous rap flows dancing over the top of the ethereal middle ground.

It’s a fantastic juxtaposition, to say the least.

The cool, ambient sonic filling of the song blends and contrasts brilliantly with the more stark sound of the rap and the beat on either side. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. And does so brilliantly.

Silver Lining – The Mystery Plan ft Big Supreme

Here, The Mystery Plan joins the dots linking everything from 70’s conscious soul and R&B, 80’s indie, particularly that of certain small, underground labels, 90’s trip-hop, and more contemporary rap and hip-hop styles. You will probably recognize every sonic element you hear on Silver Lining, but you will never have heard them keeping the musical and creative company that it does here. Invention might be the name of the game, but re-invention and cross-pollination is a whole lot more tantalizing concept.

Dave Franklin Reviews pop vibe with angsty vocals, just before the halfway mark, It Is Finished… decides to reinvent itself into a swirling, post-rock landscape. Initially, guitars seem to squall and howl, chop, and charge as Nick Hudson punches home the message, often leaning into an echo of Jim Morrison’s rockcrooner vibe.

FAR FROM HOME – DAVID LONG/SHANE O’NEILL If you look up the phrase “more than the sum of its parts” in the dictionary, what you will find is the cover artwork of this threetrack collaboration between David Long and Shane O’Neill. Those interested in Irish music, indie music, underground music, actually…. just great music in general, will know these two master music makers from previous bands Into Paradise and Blue in Heaven, respectively. And, after leading largely separate musical lives, the childhood friends are back together.

Far From Home is one of those songs that sounds both DIY and professional through clever production. It’s indie music as you remember it from your own first bands or formative gig experiences, music which is slightly frayed and wilfully ragged, raw and honest, and all the better for it.

The gaps where clever studio tricks would be placed and space behind and between the instruments create a certain atmosphere, one that speaks of demo tapes and cheap studios, second-hand instruments, substance over style, passion over profit, and the wide-eyed innocence fledgling music makers first steps. Something made all the more impressive because it being a deliberate choice.

Far From Home echoes with the sound of New Order or The Go-Betweens and shimmers with the same cinematic qualities which graced Echo & The Bunnymen’s music. With an album lined up for August, this is the perfect way of dipping a toe before immersing yourself completely in the cool sonic waters to follow.

But then synths rise up, and guitars opt to chime rather than squeal, and the vocals seem to become slightly lost in a shimmering, psychedelic sonic wave, ebbing and flowing in a much more gentle yet skittish and nervous fashion.

It is a song of two halves, as sports pundits might say. Mixing an orchestral, chamber

And that is where Polaris comes in. Taken from the e.p. Turf Accountant Schemes, it is one of four songs that first appeared on last year’s Sinners and Lost Souls album and which has been given a new sonic outing thanks to the deft remixing of the Rat’s former bassist.

Ghost Foxes which, in a previous, more physically driven era we would have referred to as the B-side, is equally as unique*. Built on a tsunami of shuffling, fidgeting drums followed by raw-edged guitars that seem to tear jaggedly through the bustling beats as the lyrics come in snappy and snarky bursts—the full effect of being one of tension and sonic confrontation.

Regret missed opportunity, and the demon drink rub shoulders with celestial flights of fancy, stargazing, and dreams of escape in this wonderfully whistful and reflective ballad. It’s a gorgeous blend of soft cinematics and sparse soundscapes, slow atmospherics, space, and tension. Above this is a spoken word narrative that echoes both the rich Irish literary tradition and the band’s passion for writing songs that tell of the lives of ordinary folk from their own County Cavan home, an area that Mr. B. also hails from.

Like anyone who has been following his career, I have long ago given up trying to pigeonhole the music that Nick makes, either solo or as The Academy of Sun. It’s hard to find the right words to describe it effectively, which is a shame because as a reviewer, that is pretty much the job.

It is music in which our everyday protagonist breaks free of the confines of the rat race and the dead-end cycle of life and surfs through the heavens on his own piece of stardust. And who doesn’t need a slice of that sort of optimism in their lives from time to time?

Suffice it to say that Nick has to be one of the most original, adventurous, genrefree, and challenging music-makers of the moment. His songs blend beauty with chaos, grace with off-kilter grooves, intelligence with a brilliant out-there-ness.

And if that isn’t enough to get you heading towards his canon of works past and present, then perhaps music isn’t for you after all. * Of course, if you are quick off the mark and bag yourself one of a limited run of 100, 7″ singles, then it really is the B-side.

…from Prince’s Park to Farsley – Volume I – The Gorstey Lea Street Choir The best-laid plans of mice and musos, eh?

Although they have been friends since their 80’s youth, it wasn’t until 2016, 35 years later, that Michael Clapham and Russ Phillips finally collaborated on music. And after several singles, they now offer an ambitious full album, the beguilingly titled, …from Prince’s Park to Farsley.

Polaris – Sons of Southern Ulster (Pete Briquette Remix)

It Is Finished When It’s Destroyed/Ghost Foxes – The Academy of Sun

singles as a teenager, he probably didn’t think that one day the band’s bassist, Pete Briquette, would one day be remixing his music.

They say that you should never meet your heroes. But they also say that “many a mickle makes a muckle,” so perhaps we shouldn’t listen to the advice that “they” pass on. Case in point, when Justin Kelly, who makes up 50% of the Sons of Southern Ulster, eagerly bought Boomtown Rats

And, as they say in football circles, it’s an album of two halves…they say that, right? Sport’s not my thing, but it sounds like the sort of thing they might say. The two halves being four tracks re-imagined and re-tweaked from their previous album, “extended play one,” and four brand new offerings written in collaboration with an old friend from the circuit Choque Hosein.

Right from the start, you realize that you are in some rarified sonic territory, and Up With The Lark’s feels like the sort of thing that Richard Hawley would have wrestled you

to the ground in a less than gentlemanly fashion to get his hands on. Delicate, poised, and intriguing, it is everything that is needed in the mainstream pop world. We can but dream. We can but dream.

One Way Ticket shivers with psychedelic charm – hazy, pastel-colored, and shimmering with sonic delights and echoing Floydian vocal antics with the blasts of spoken word that pepper the tail end of the song.

questions than it answers but works as a wonderful piece of contemporary, abstract horror and the perfect platform to thread some performance footage.

Horses In The Abattoir, a full-length album, will follow soon, but in the meantime, repeated plays of Oh, Ballerina is going to keep more than you occupied.

The two recent singles appear here, Bluebird, Hollywood…Domino waltzing and whistful, That Chitty Bang Majik bouncing, buoyant, and with something of The Divine Comedy about it. Lowbyrne (Ascent) sends things spinning into more ambient dance territory, and Cinquante Cinq Six Huit is minimalist and mercurial.

It’s an album that blends quality songwriting with glorious adventurousness, toys with nostalgia which it then wraps up in sonics and styles that can smuggle those sounds, Trojan Horse-like, into the present day. In short, it’s a bit of “then,” a lot of “now,” and no shortage of “where do we go next?”

Oh, Ballerina – TRAITRS TRAITRS are at the cutting edge of a line of sonic evolution that links all manner of great pioneering, post-punk, and alternative rock bands. And although their pounding bass lines and programmed drums tell you plenty about the gothic mists from which some of their inspiration is drawn, bands such as Editors and Interpol are never too far out of mind either.

But it doesn’t pay to dwell too much on the past. There are also plenty of contemporary references for every chronologically distant touchstone, from the icy sonic strands of The Sea At Midnight to the psych-noir of Mayflower Madame.

There is also a fairly understated and unadorned vibe to the music, a reflection of band member Shawn Tucker’s exploration of the music and approach of Philip Glass, and it was this which turned an improvised minimal and abstract piano piece built mainly from atmospheric tones and textures into the highly charged and dramatic track before us.

And if the music is fairly straightforward, the video is less so. Deliberately vague and circular in its storyline, it raises more

There’s Something Tryin’ To Get In Harry Stafford & Marco Butcher We hear a lot of negativity about how technology, especially the side of it which makes the world a smaller and more connective place, is ruining the world.

And much of it is justified. But without such systems, collaborations between artists such as Harry Stafford and Marco Butcher would never have happened.

Song of Co-Aklan – Cathal Coughlan If certain wines seem to get better with age, the same is certainly true of the best musical artists. Sure, if you want some cheap sonic plonk to hit the spot, there is plenty of that available, but sometimes you want something to savor, relish, slowly enjoy, and appreciate. Cathal Coughlan is just such a bottle…I mean an artist. Age certainly seems to have been kind to him and this, his sixth album and first in a decade, certainly hits to spot and leaves you feeling warm, fuzzy, and slightly light-headed.

The opening, titular track, which we already know to be a great song from the waves it and its fellow singles have been making, sets the tone perfectly, and from here, you find yourself ushered into a musical world built on acute observations, rhetorical lyricism, social discussion, and rich, fullyformed narratives. It is also a world where the music takes on baroque forms, where modern indie sounds are subsumed under a wave of darker intrigue, cinematic chamber pop, odd angles, and unexpected sonic waves.

Crow Mother is a strange tale from the pet cemetery built from musical theatre grooves and Doorsian darkness. Let’s Flood The Fairground is offbeat and intriguing, full of edge and anticipation, and songs such as Falling Out North St. and Unrealtime remind us of the fact that in an earlier age, he could have had a very successful career as a classic crooner, albeit one with the reputation for not playing by the rules.

And if you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, then the fact that this album features the great and the good of the alternative music world…The Auteur’s Luke Haines, Microdisney’s Sean O’Hagan, Rhodri Marsden from Scritti Politti, and Fatima Mansion colleagues Eileen Gogan and Aindrais O’Gruama…tells you everything that you need to know.

They may have been molded from the same apocalyptic, punk-soul clay, but they have never actually met in real life, never mind worked together musically.

But, despite the pandemic raging around them and isolation and lockdowns making collaboration between like-minded musicians even more difficult than ever, the two have spent the last year collaborating on an album and this dark and majestic beast of a single is its calling card.

Bone Architecture is a collection of reworked older material, brand-new compositions, and even a dirty blues version of the Pink Floyd classic Arnold Layne. There’s Someone Tryin’ To Get In is a wonderful taste of what’s to come.

An apocalyptic lullaby that a younger Nick Cave would have loved to have written, a boozy saunter through a Waitsian soundscape, a bruising swagger through old blues territory, the half-spoken tones perhaps inspired by Shriekback‘s muse flying low overhead. I could go on, but I won’t. I’m sure you get the picture. And if you are left in any doubt, all you have to do is buy the album. Go on, you have to do something with all that money you have saved by not going to the pub over the last 18 months, and I can’t think of anything better to spend your hard furloughed earnings on.

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Dave Franklin [Dancing About Architecture] facebook.com/dabouta

Tear It Up - Pleasing Forms Todd Thomas releases his second single under, Pleasing Forms. The track, Tear It Up, was written during the pandemic, lockdown, and isolation this past year. This track was recorded and self produced in his apartment. This well-crafted song has a 1960s garage rock feel without parodying the genre. Thomas says, “It’s a step forward from the last batch of songs, [Happiness is a Wreck] more upbeat in general and overall in feel.” A four-track EP is expected in the fall.

“No Periphery”- Thrill Touch The Los Angeles-based Thrill Touch released “No Periphery” with their arthouse, minimalist style music video, coming out of the last year with new material. Fusing industrial and trance-like rhythms is reminiscent of early Wax Trax influences and layered with dystopian synth, solid songwriting.

Abstract layered images were created with chiaroscuro lighting, that while digital, feels analog in execution. This enthusiastic young three-piece band is one to be on the outlook for.