ST006

N0 .6

COLD CAVE

— Look outside, world is exploding. — Plus:

DANIEL JOHNSTON SLEIGH BELLS DARK MEAT WASHED OUT LIGHTSPEED CHAMPION MICK BARR ´ MONOTONIX OLAFUR ARNALDS FREE ENERGY

Editor-in-Chief / Publisher Andrew Parks, Pop Mart Media aparks@self-titledmag.com Art Director / Associate Editor Aaron Richter arichter@self-titledmag.com Managing Editor Arye Dworken adworken@self-titledmag.com Photo Editor Sarah Maxwell smaxwell@self-titledmag.com Staff Photographers Travis Huggett, Alexander Wagner Contributing Photographers Shawn Brackbill, Jen Maler, Valdís Thor, Turkishomework Advertising, Submissions & Other Iquiries Andrew Parks / self-titled 685 Metropolitan Ave. #1 Brooklyn, NY 11211 718-499-3983 aparks@self-titledmag.com

N0 .6

Display through forever—we’re digital, remember? Published by Pop Mart Media. All self-titled content is property of Pop Mart Media. Please do not use without permission. Copyright 2009, Pop Mart Media.

— year-end promotion —

THE BLACK HEART PROCESSION “Rain-slicked noir rock for the Raymond Chandler in all of us.”

RIYL • Fava beans and a nice Chianti • Bum-rushing back alleys • The two D’s: decadence and deviance

350 WORDS OR LESS From the Editor

I

don’t know how to describe it,” a friend said after seeing Cold Cave live. “The music got... inside of me.”

Or as another self-titled associate told me after spending a few days with Cold Cave’s singles compilation, Cremations, “It’s like the sounds in my head set to music. I can’t stop listening to it.”

Cold Cave’s synth-guided songs are bleak and strangely beautiful, as if someone finally remembered to put the dark back in darkwave. It’s uncertain music for uncertain times, a restless reflection of just how fucked everything is. Yet it never sounds oppressive or overdone. With all that in mind, we decided to look deeper into the year-old project—more specifically, its leader, Wesley Eisold.

We’ve found ourselves drawn to the despair and subtle pop tendencies inside Eisold’s head because they seem to come from a place that’s pure. It’s not like the guy woke up one morning and decided there’s money to be made in morose dance music.

Contrary to his hard-earned reputation as the howling frontman of such post-hardcore acts as Some Girls and Give Up the Ghost, Eisold always

preferred the Smiths and Primal Scream to Black Flag and Bad Brains. Take a listen to his old lyrics; the influence was always there, as Eisold delivered his deeply personal takes on life and love from behind a wall of pure chaos.

With Cold Cave, Eisold’s carefully constructed words—a crucial element in all his work—finally have a suitable soundtrack, one he’s been dying to deliver throughout the past decade. For the whole story of how he got to this point and what’s next, be sure to flip between this issue and the bonus content offered on our daily site, including extensive interviews with Eisold’s past and present collaborators. That includes Dominick Fernow of Prurient, easily one of the most mind-expanding artists I’ve ever encountered.

Goodbye, decade.

And as the Zombies once said: This [2010] will be our year.

Andrew Parks, Editor-in-Chief / Publisher

— year-end promotion —

RIYL • Sleepwalking • The movie magic of Danny Elfman • What Björk sounded like before she went completely crazy

VIA TANIA

“The starryeyed soundtrack to being stuck in a snow globe.”

CHOIR OF YOUNG BELIEVERS — year-end promotion —

“A chorus of one cast against shifting orchestral pop soundscapes.”

RIYL • Thom Yorke tendencies • Downtrodden Danes • Saying, “Well, that was epic”

— year-end promotion —

“Front-row seats to the last rites of a flat-lining relationship.”

RIYL • Concept albums that aren’t cloying • Funeral proceedings • Breakup albums that are big on metaphors and light on lovey-dovey nonsense

THE ANTLERS

1MM

A Surfer Blood Fan / Market Hotel, Brooklyn / 10.23.09 photography by turkishomework

1MM

Daniel Johnston / Austin City Limits, Texas / 05.10.09 photography by jen maler

Sleigh Bells / Brooklyn, NYC / 06.30.09 photography by aaron richter

1MM Dark Meat / “Clusterfuck” at Glasslands, Brooklyn / 10.24.09 photography by turkishomework

Washed Out / Santos Party House, NYC / 10.19.09 photography by andrew parks

1MM Lightspeed Champion / Brooklyn, NYC / 10.24.09 photography by jen maler

Mick Barr’s guitar and amp / Union Pool, Brooklyn / 09.19.09 photography by aaron richter

1MM

Monotonix / Santos Party House, NYC / 10.09.09 photography by turkishomework

´ REYK JAVIK IN THE CITY

By Ólafur Arnalds

photography by valdís thor

I

was born and grew up in a small town in Iceland called Mosfellsbær, just 15 minutes outside Reykjavík, but moved into the city once I’d reached a proper age to do so on my own. Mosfellsbær is a beautiful place, but it’s really only that. There is not even a cinema, and there’s one bar—where everyone goes and gets into fights. I live in the 101 area of Reykjavík now. It’s lively and as active as a large city but with the atmosphere of a tiny town. And if you ever get tired of city life, you only need to drive for 15 minutes and you’ll find yourself by a lake and a mountain, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

— Here, the Icelandic composer—whose latest release, Future Sounds, is out now on Erased Tapes— shares his personal guide to his favorite city.

Kaffibarinn

Probably the most famous bar in Reykjavík—a tiny, dark, schizophrenic café during the day and an even darker center of nightlife for musicians and arty types at night. Everyone knows everyone here. This place gets so crowded that you can’t really move; you just have to kind of float around and hope you don’t get stuck next to a tall person that will spill his or her beer in your hair (or someone you vaguely remember going home with, but whose name you can’t really recall).

Nonnabiti

Sweaty subs and sandwiches at their best. Lots of cheese and lots of sauce. If you’re vegetarian like me, get the ham sub without the ham. They will laugh at you at first (this place is famous for lots of meat), but ignore that. Don’t go here between 4 and 6 a.m. on weekends, or you will probably end up in a fight with an orange jock person with yellow hair.

Go Swimming

Iceland is famous for its geothermal pools. There are quite a few in Reykjavík. They are cheap, warm, and you are quite likely to end up in an argument with a 70-year-old socialist about the economic crisis in the hot tub. The Blue Lagoon—just 30 minutes outside the city—is a popular place to get intimate with your better half (because you can’t see through the water).

So popular that they’ve installed a giant spotlight to detect such sinners, which they will point at you until you stop.

Karamba

A more youthful, less jaded alternative to Kaffibarinn, this place couldn’t be more indie. Its interior walls are painted by local comic book artist Hugleikur Dagsson. Members of FM Belfast run the place with several staff members from Retro Stefson and regular DJ sets from members of múm. Did I mention it’s indie? Yes. Expect lots of underage fan-kids dancing on top of tables and making out to the Aeroplane remix of Friendly Fires’ “Paris.” Every time I go here, I feel like I’m 18 again.

Austurvöllur

This area is around the corner from my home and the location of the now world-famous “riots” (basically a bunch of people singing, dancing and drumming on pots and pans) that overthrew the government this past February. In the summer it’s the best place to sit in the grass with a book and a couple of beers. //

— year-end promotion — RIYL • Bumps in the night • Lonesome highways • Watching Dead Man at least once... a month

“That guy in the woods sure seems upset, doesn’t he?”

CASTANETS

FREE ENERGY

photography by travis huggett

Free Energy’s debut album, Stuck on Nothing, comes out January 26 on DFA/ Astralwerks.

ALL OUT OF LOVE

by andrew parks / photography by shawn brackbill

After 30 years of changing bands and cities, Wesley Eisold may have finally found his calling with Cold Cave.

“The songs you love never let you down, move away or fuck you over.”

W

esley Eisold is moving again. He signed the lease this afternoon, the latest dotted line in 30 years of failed friendships and bands that barely made it past the five-year mark.

The move was just a matter of time if you ask Eisold, a singer/writer/multi-instrumentalist who’s always relied on records instead of people. Life’s so much easier that way: No need to fit in. No need to explain why you’re missing a left hand, even if it’s simply how you were born. Why bother when people will make their own assumptions anyway? (“I bet he blew his hand off with a firecracker!”)

Records have all the answers if you just ask. And as Eisold discovered early on, it’s much easier to slip a 12-inch back in its sleeve than it is to start over at a new school, one with its own set of playground politics and problems.

“The majority of the people I met [growing up] had known each other for a long time, sometimes their whole lives,” says Eisold. “And if not, they at least knew the area.... Stopping by these towns for a year or two and trying to get to know people who already have their own friends, complications and history—eventually you don’t bother. I just had to do whatever it is I needed to do and not take others into too much consideration.”

Things aren’t all that different these days. Eisold spent the past three years in Philadelphia and rarely stepped outside a house he shared with former members of Cold Cave, a synth-slinging trio that now features Dominick Fernow (Prurient) and Caralee McElroy (ex-Xiu Xiu). And as the ink dries on an apartment and private rehearsal space in Manhattan, Eisold can already see himself withdrawing into a world of writing and recording.

“When you are young and move consistently, you have few options to make yourself happy,” says Rob Moran, a guitarist who, in 2002, helped found Eisold’s previous band, Some Girls. “Music and books have always been Wes’ best friends. It is the one constant he can always rely on—the songs you love never let you down, move away or fuck you over.”

— rob moran

BOSTON IS THE REASON I’M FEELING BLUE

Born in Virginia, Eisold attended school throughout Wisconsin, Maine, Florida, California and Pennsylvania.

His father worked on ships in the Navy, and his mother was a teacher. At one point during high school, the military brat, raised on skateboarding and 7-inches, even relocated to Stuttgart, Germany, the country’s sixth-largest city. (“After living in Florida,” says Eisold, looking back, “it wasn’t much of a culture shock.”) His father was largely absent, and to this day, Eisold wonders why his family— including his sister, now a nomadic winemaker—followed the moves of a man he barely knew.

During his time in Maine, Eisold spent many weekends in Boston, where the diehard Swirlies/Mission of Burma fan found his second family at hardcore shows. “[The scene’s] sense of community was really important to me,” he says. “I loved everything about it, even the shows that were horrible.... That vanished as soon as I was in a band that had some attention.”

Eisold is alluding to American Nightmare (later renamed Give Up the Ghost after a small Philly band successfully sued the group), which he formed with Ten Yard Fight guitarist Tim Cossar. American Nightmare’s 2001 debut album, Background Music, was torn from the Beantownbruiser template of Slapshot and SSD. It was music meant to stir mosh pits—nothing more, nothing less. But the band waved a secret weapon: Eisold’s lyrics, which had

Cold Cave from left: Dominick Fernow, Wesley Eisold and Caralee McElroy.

more in common with Morrissey and Joy Division than Minor Threat and Cro-Mags.

An excerpt, skimmed from the chug-a-lug chords of “AM/PM”: I was hoping I’d never Have to write this song again The kind of song that makes You want to hang Your head-ached head And I was hoping That I would never fall in love again ’Cause that would be the end Of everything (you’re everything, you’re everything) My parents fell in love And all I got was life And all I ever wanted Was to not be alone Rob Moran hated American Nightmare at first. Like

many skeptics immersed in the hardcore scene, he couldn’t understand how a band with such a “shitty demo” was generating so much hype. His opinion changed when American Nightmare and Moran’s own wrecking crew, Over My Dead Body, performed at the same Boston music festival. “I was floored by [Wes’ performance],” explains Moran, who now plays in the tech-metal supergroup Narrows. “That night we went back to his house and talked until five in the morning about music. Like myself, he is rabid about it, especially British stuff. He didn’t seem like a typical hardcore kid that wanted to just talk about Youth of Today. We were much more interested in the Smiths and Death in June.”

Soon after their bonding session, Eisold made a copy of Background Music for Moran and e-mailed him the lyrics.

“From the second I read them, I knew he understood teen angst, heartache and what the future holds for all those young lives,” says Moran. “Few people can make you visualize what the words in a song are trying to tell you.

Morrissey does it, [Ian] Curtis did it, and so does Wes.”

EVERYTHING’S ALREADY BEEN SAID

Eisold and Moran stayed in touch and toured the West Coast together in 2001. During a four-day break, the two tracked a session that resulted in The Rains, a beautiful mess marking the start of Some Girls.

“The Rains was raw, dirty, and Wes’ lyrics had a dry wit, taking on more adult themes,” says Moran. “At that point he graduated from a singer to an artist.”

As Some Girls unleashed their first few releases (collected on the All My Friends Are Going Death compilation), Eisold continued to evolve with Give Up the Ghost, but tireless touring and the mounting pressures of the group’s second LP, 2003’s We’re Down Til We’re Underground, were tearing the band apart.

“It started to suck,” says former Give Up the Ghost bassist Josh Holden. “Wes and I tried to not be in the studio if we didn’t have to be.... Some of us were burnt on [the band] and some of us wanted to make a career out of it.”

Eisold quit Give Up the Ghost in 2004. “I had a midtwenties crisis,” he says. “There was an argument and I said, ‘I’m sick; I’m just not well right now, so let’s say it’s done.’ For me, the glory of playing hardcore is the youthfulness of it. Once that’s gone, the impact is as well.

“Some Girls was the opposite. Song structure wasn’t important, neither was pleasing a crowd. We just wanted to make raw music. Some people liked it; even more hated it.

And in a way, it felt great giving people something to hate.”

DECAY DEBASES THE DREAM

As seamless as it sounds now, Cold Cave’s breakout single “Love Comes Close”—the title track of the group’s debut album (Heartworm/Matador)—was an accident. Its original version, lost in feedback and distortion, was far from what it is now: a 21st-century stab at Fad Gadget, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. Mixing the record, engineer Eric Broucek muted several tracks, stripping away Eisold’s security blanket. The singer’s cocoon of controlled chaos tossed aside, “Love Comes Close” reveals a beautiful voice—one Eisold didn’t know he had—and the verses of a lifelong lyricist. Slipping through smoke-ring synths and a melancholic melody, Eisold sets the scene: Love comes close But chooses to spare me Death comes close But ceases to take me I want to twist, the knife a bit deeper To siphon the love from the hearts I believed in Look outside, world is exploding Stay inside, still never knowing Taking cover With each other Sleeping off the century of hope

“People think of love in terms of a relationship between two people.

I think that’s kind of petty.”

Coat Thomas Engel Hart

“Noise has the freedom to pursue p

Eisold feels spared by love yet unwilling to let anyone close. Meanwhile, we’re left sleeping off a century of songs that sold us a different story—one in which the arms of another were the only antidote to misery.

“Everything always seems so fleeting,” explains Eisold, as he sips coffee with self-titled in a NoHo cafe. “You don’t want people to rely on you—not when you don’t know how you’re going to feel in a year.”

We ask if he even believes in love, at least an abridged, not-so-storybook version of it.

“People always think of love in terms of a relationship between two people,” he says. “I think that’s kind of petty.”

We pause. “Because it’s bigger than that?”

“Of course,” he replies. “When there isn’t a point to anything, you just have to find the beautiful moments and tie them together. I think that’s really hard to do.”

A RESTLESS DESIRE OR LONGING

A few years ago, Eisold had an epiphany.

“It was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to do a band, and I don’t care if it’s good. I won’t ever have to quit, either. It’s gonna be my moniker, and I don’t want to share it with anyone.’ ” A 2007 cassette released under the name Ye Olde Maids was the first sign of this solo direction. The result of Eisold’s interest in working with a female singer, the tape—released by Heartworm Press, the music/book

personal obsession.” —dominick fernow Coat Risto

imprint Eisold launched a few years earlier with writer Max G. Morton—features the artist’s first home recordings with oscillators, pedals, samplers and keyboards. And the estrogen-infused counterpoint? Why, that’s just Eisold’s voice, manipulated with pitch-shifting effects. Whether this was a matter of convenience or a commentary on gender roles (sexuality has long been a theme of his writing) is unclear. Eisold says he simply wanted a softer voice.

“It’s like there’s some unwritten rule that you can’t play other music if you play hardcore,” he says. “It’s frowned upon, and to an extent, it doesn’t seem possible in a way.”

Avoiding the prying eyes of critics and scene police, Eisold developed Ye Olde Maids in relative isolation

at his Philadelphia studio. He also tested out tracks at the occasional Maids show, including a set in late 2007 at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge. On the bill that night was Prurient, the solo noise project of Eisold’s future collaborator Dominick Fernow.

Fernow was drawn to Ye Olde Maids’ icy soundscapes, as well as the music Eisold had begun crafting as Cold Cave with a rotating cast of collaborators. From the project’s early Coma Potion EP onward, songs such as “Sex Ads” and “Chrissie Sally” conveyed a fuck-all fusion of post-punk, noise and No Wave—like Soft Cell stuck in a state of decay.

“There’s something unsatisfying within all the contradictions,” says Fernow, speaking at Hospital

Productions, his label/record store on New York’s Lower East Side. “That’s what makes it so interesting: It’s too noisy for the pop people and too poppy for the noise people.”

In other words, Cold Cave’s initial stack of limited singles and EPs are unsettling—much like Prurient’s own Pleasure Ground, a noise record cut with screeching synths and asphyxiated beats. On the patience-testing LP, Fernow’s lean, soft-focus synth lines—inspired by a Ministry of Sound compilation called Trance Nation America 3—are reduced to rubble and coated in rust.

Persevere through the high-pitched noise strains, however, and a study of contrasts emerges.

Simply put, Fernow refuses to scratch the surface of anything. From relationships to records, he digs right in, examining positives and negatives, motivations and meaning, good and evil, beauty and brutality.

“Noise has the freedom to pursue personal obsession outside of an audience or genre,” explains Fernow. “I think of noise as an ideology, not a genre. In fact, I don’t think of it as music at all. People who want to make it into a genre are anti-noise. They’re missing the spirit of what made it so important in its infant stages.”

It’s an argument that Fernow’s pored over since he was 16. “Noise is really older than rock ’n’ roll,” he continues.

“It goes back as far as the Italian Futurists [of the early 20th century]. And it wasn’t born out of music; it was born out of war and conflict with technology. So for me, it has nothing to do with distortion, per se.”

Some might view Fernow’s philosophy—a search for a greater truth that Eisold shares—as thinking too hard.

Maybe so; maybe someone should tell Dom and Wes to smell the roses before they die, rather than dwell on the fact that we’re destined to follow an ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust cycle from here on out. But that would be missing the point.

“I don’t think of music as cathartic or a release,” explains Fernow. “A release implies that something is leaving you. It’s not that so much as a transformation.”

IT’S NOT MY DREAM ANYMORE, IT’S OURS

Eisold and Fernow seem born to work together.

“Wes sometimes says, ‘I like [dance] music, but I hate clubs’,” explains Fernow. “I’m the same way. When I think of a club, I think of an artificial environment with forced intimacy. The result is often disconnection and abstraction, a fire producing coldness and insincerity. Cold Cave taps into some of those ideas. It’s depressing dance music.”

This past May, Cold Cave and Prurient performed seven shows together in the UK. The brief tour featured onstage collaborations between the two acts, and spawned studio sessions and a dark ambient tape called Stars Explode.

Justin Benoit played on that collaborative cassette and has watched as Cold Cave shifted through numerous lineups.

“It was treated as a band, but one that could expand and contract as need be,” says Benoit, who roomed with Eisold in Philly. “Cold Cave can mutate into any form at any time.

Not many bands can do that without a level of instability.”

Fluctuations aside, Fernow—who joined the group officially in June—seems content to stay put. As does Caralee McElroy, a singer/multi-instrumentalist who left the side of her cousin and five-year collaborator, Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, to focus on Cold Cave this past May. “If I’d stayed in Xiu Xiu, I wouldn’t be doing it justice,” explains McElroy from her spare Brooklyn sublet. McElroy left her former home of San Francisco in 2008 and didn’t plan on quitting Xiu Xiu, despite Stewart’s own move to Durham, North Carolina. The duo’s split was difficult (“like breaking up with someone”), but McElroy insists there are no hard feelings. (In fact, Eisold will release a book of Stewart’s lyrics through Heartworm in 2010.)

Meanwhile, Cold Cave is trying to balance the commitments of press, touring and licensing (the oddly appropriate “Life Magazine” appeared in a TV ad for RadioShack) with the need to rehearse and record new music. Eisold sounds eager to transform more than 100 tracks—“I’m not exaggerating,” he insists—into one-off singles and another LP. So how does the trio plan on expanding upon Love Comes Close and this past summer’s rarities collection, Cremations?

“Whatever mood we’re in that day is how it’s gonna come out,” says McElroy. “The idea of doing things that are a lot harsher and more experimental are as interesting to us as doing pop music.”

“It’ll continue to change,” adds Fernow. “That’s healthy.

It speaks to the longevity of the project—that we’re all coming from very different places and interests. There’s the dance stuff, the pop stuff, the downer stuff. It’s all there.”

And at the center is Eisold—as creatively and personally restless as ever, yet eager to explore New York...for now.

“Oddly enough,” he says, “I think this will be the first time I’ve ever moved to a place I had friends in.”

Weeks earlier, when we’d first met with Eisold, he initially appeared guarded, even keeping his malformed hand out of sight beneath the table, but he was never distant. If anything, he was cautious but engaged, riffing on what’s really driven his art all these years: a search for the meaning of life, or lack thereof.

“I find everything so interesting because I don’t see a point to anything,” he had said, opening up with a nihilistic intensity that never came across as flippant. “It constantly blows my mind why anything’s happening, why anyone’s doing anything. It’s a little sadistic, but...I don’t see a point to doing anything.”

“What about music? Isn’t there a point to that?”

“I love music, but even then, I have to ask myself why. It’s like, ‘What else am I going to do? I might as well do this.’ ” //

“It’s a little sadistic.”

end.