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N0 . 5

HEALTH

“WE’RE HEALT regular wor Plus:

BEANS MOUNT EERIE KINGS OF CONVENIENCE MILES BENJAMIN ANTHONY ROBINSON ISLANDS B&W PORTRAITS KID KOALA

TH. Just a rd.”

DO YOU CARE WHAT THIS ASSHOLE HAS TO SAY? FOLLOW US ON TWITTER, TUMBLR AND FACESPACE.

THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED DEBUT ALBUM

LUNGS

AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE OCTOBER 20TH florenceandthemachine.net

myspace.com/florenceandthemachine Š 2009 Universal Republic Records, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc.

universalrepublic.com

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 Contributing Writers Cassie Marketos, Richard Thomas Staff Photographers Travis Huggett, Alexander Wagner Contributing Photographers Shawn Brackbill, Phil Elverum, Hobo, Jen Maler, Bryan Sheffield, Turkishomework Contributing Illustrator Kid Koala Advertising, Submissions & Other Iquiries Andrew Parks / self-titled 685 Metropolitan Ave. #1 Brooklyn, NY 11211 718-499-3983 aparks@self-titledmag.com

N0 . 5

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.

BLOG CHATTER

the 19 best comments on self-titledmag.com — Their tap water is to die for. — Note the masks from the first Unicorns video on the shelf. — I wish I could isolate myself like most of these artists do. Get some serious stuff done. — Reznor getting depo-testo shots in the ass? — I knew them before they were famous. — Thanks for turning me on to something amazing. — Must’ve been a tricky camera. — “Blip-farts” LOL — ThE ArCtIc MoNkEyS FuCkInG RoCk!!! — A Harvey Milk gig is a commitment. — He was a looker back then! — Actually it’s his third flake…he also ditched Brainfeeder NYC. — Music critics and music bloggers have more influence on the masses than they realize. — I take issue with “white people” being used in a pejorative sense—I don’t care for Fleet Foxes either, but still. — When comes the repressing of God’s Money? — Really just interested in wings and merlins. Hook us up! — Bout time these 2 dropped a new album... — Battles, dear lord, those new songs were just awful. — Hot dayum these boys are cute. I swoon. //

CONTRIBUTORS As a student at Pilgrim High School in 1994, Richard Thomas was a frequent visitor to Shatto 39 Lanes, though his bowling escapade with HEALTH marks the first time he has legally drank there. This L.A. native’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Flaunt, Ray Gun, URB and The Fader. When he’s not attempting to make out with Bactrian camels, he’s refreshing the goodies at MiningTheLandfill.com.

Never in the history of self-titled has a story been turned in quite as late as Cassie Marketos’ interview with Nicholas Thorburn of Islands—nor has a story been hijacked and taken to Greece (really) only to be lost when an unbackedup hard drive went erase-o surprise-o. But Cassie’s piece was worth the wait. When she’s not missing deadlines, Cassie is hard at work organizing self-titled’s first printed book, due out next spring.

LA photographer Bryan Sheffield has taken pictures for Nylon, Neon, Adidas and Warner Bros., among other clients.

He misses the rain and the seasons of the East Coast and dreams of shooting Patrick Wolf and Agyness Deyn (together).

Though we don’t know for sure, we get the impression that Bryan likes to go by his last name (“Sheffield”). Guess we could just ask him. But that would be too easy, right?

350 WORDS OR LESS From the Editor

A

lthough most curators of cool won’t admit it, the idea of “doing it for the kids” is about as tired as “doing it yourself.” Take the current shitgaze explosion, which celebrates just how bad some bands sound. But any idiot with a laptop can capture ideas in a cleaner format than Robert Pollard’s four-track. That doesn’t mean the music will be good; it just means it’ll sound better than the bullshit many artists peddle to hide their inability to write a decent hook. There’s a reason we’ve put the Black Lips and Jay Reatard on the cover of self-titled: They write killer songs, funneling their influences through distortion and decayed effects, yes, but a reason to sing along always remains.

Which leads us to HEALTH, the first noise-popish band we’ve given a damn about since No Age. And what do you know? They’re from the same LA Smell scene as Dean and Randy. But while No Age is a two-man wrecking crew powered by a love of decades-old punk, HEALTH is onto something caught between the ether-like bliss of My Bloody Valentine, the gnarled nihilism of hardcore and the piston-powered industrial leanings of Nine Inch

Nails. The group’s recently-released GET COLOR finally bottles all that energy into an actual full-length, making it the year’s go-to album when we want to freak...the...fuck...out. But to understand HEALTH, you really need to see them live. As our art director, Aaron Richter, wrote in a review this past summer, “HEALTH perform as if they hate their instruments.

Mics get tossed. Drums get obliterated. Pedals get abused. And guitars get utterly manhandled. Yet HEALTH performs as if they cannot live without their instruments, like they’re all part of one body, integral pieces of the whole HEALTH experience, without one and the whole thing crumbles to bits.”

Or in the words of singer Jake Duzsik, “In LA the attitude is like, ‘Hey, let’s get drunk and do some crazy noise music. Everybody’s gonna mosh, freak out and have fun!’ ” And people wonder why a sojourn to the West Coast sounds better by the day.

Andrew Parks, Editor-in-Chief / Publisher

1MM

A Titus Andronicus Fan / Monster Island Basement, NYC / 09.04.09 photography by turkishomework

1MM

The Drums / Williamsburg, NYC / 08.27.09 photography by aaron richter

1MM Chairlift / The Bell House, Brooklyn / 05.10.09 photography by alexander wagner

Angel Deradoorian / Remedy Diner, NYC / 06.30.09 photography by alexander wagner

1MM Frank Black / Siren Music Festival, Coney Island / 07.18.09 photography by aaron richter

The Raveonettes / Downtown Los Angeles / 08.19.09 photography by jen maler

1MM

The Boredoms / Term photography by

minal 5, NYC / 09.10.09 y andrew parks

photography by hobo

BEANS CRIME SCENES

The MC sifts through his stack of mystery novels.

Some of my earliest memories are of my father reading in his bed at night. He’d come home from work with a new paperback and finish it by morning.

As a kid, I remember his collected volumes of science fiction. I remember saying I wanted to be surrounded by books when I got older. Now I have enough books to fill my own shelves—except my books aren’t sci-fi; they’re mystery and crime novels. These are a few of my favorites.

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson This is the story of Lou Ford, a small-town cop who appears harmless but is hiding his true nature as a depraved sociopath resonsible for a string of murders.

The Black Ice by Michael Connelly An LA detective investigates a narcotics officer’s alleged suicide but uncovers a conspiracy to protect the police force and drug gangs across the border.

High Life by Matthew Stokoe Where do I begin? It truly disgusted and aroused me at the same time! This brutal story follows one man’s extreme attempts at stardom. Proceed with caution.

Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block Matthew Scudder is an alcoholic detective coming to terms with his drinking. The author is known for great characters, including John Keller, a stamp-collecting hit man with a heart (Hit Man), and Bernie Rhodenbarr, a burglar who solves mysteries in his spare time (Burglers Can’t Be Choosers).

HeartSick by Chelsea Cain Meet detective Archie Sheridan. He once led the Beauty Killer Task Force but is captured by the Beauty Killer herself, who tortures him before turning herself in. Two years later, he’s hunting another killer with the help of a beautful but deadly journalist.

Anti-Pop Consortium’s latest album, Fluorescent Black, is out now on Big Dada.

MOUNT EERIE NIGHT VISION

Nothing is what it seems in Phil Elverum’s photo collection.

I

n a recent interview with The Believer, Phil Elverum said that he’s always written songs with photos in mind—surreal shots that “don’t look like the real world. The film distorts them, and the colors get exaggerated. A lot of them were taken at night. And so the feeling that those photos have is kind of the visual world that I picture when I’m recording albums. And it always has been.” Considering his inspirations, we asked the Mount Eerie/Microphones frontman to reveal a stack of personal prints that reflect his records from the past decade, including this year’s frostbitten Wind’s Poem full-length.

The Microphones: Don’t Wake Me Up (1999) “I originally called my project the Microphones because I loved being surrounded by recording equipment and wrote songs about the human qualities I imagined in gear: feedback as an expression of love from the speaker to the microphone. This photo with me as a ghost combines the equipment I lived among with the dark cloudy distortion I was using as the main tone in my recordings when I first moved to Olympia and started working at Dub Narcotic Studio. That album is about ‘air’ and ‘clouds’ and ‘dreams’ (all kind of the same thing in a way), and here is me embodying that cloud.

Plus, I hadn’t yet expanded to color.”

The Microphones: It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water (2000) “The album, and my whole life around then, was closely tied to the feeling of a few beach trips from Olympia out to the coast with a close girl friend. I was fixated on the sea, and the woman.

Cold Washington state ocean beaches in the off season, lying on the sand wearing many layers of wool, occasional light through thick clouds—this was the dream I inhabited to make the album. Also, the fact that her face is invisible is significant.”

The Microphones: The Glow Pt. 2 (2001) “ ‘Darkness warshed over the dude.’

This doesn’t represent the whole album, but it’s a major theme—driving to the city at night and, immersed in distortion under the radio towers, battling bland fog with moments of intensity.”

The Microphones: Mount Eerie (2003) “Climbing a mountain, entering another world, and looking beyond over the hills through a cloud to see more peaks. I actually have a million photos like this that I always wish I was in.”

Mount Eerie: Eleven Old Songs of Mount Eerie (2005) and Dawn (2008) “In the winter of 2002/2003, I lived in a small cabin in northern Norway. Alone for a long time, I ended up writing many songs in the dark. This is one of the few photos of the inside of the cabin, and the project space is visible: a desk covered in ink-stained butcher paper, letters from home, notebooks, a candle, half-read books, a roll of film, a mountain of blankets, all in faint arctic winter light. It’s not a photo of an exaggerated fantasy world like the others.

This is a photo of the literal spot where my mind wandered so extremely deeply in the dark for months.”

Mount Eerie: No Flashlight: Songs of the Fulfille “For a year I lived in a small hut on a hill outsid Washington, looking out over the islands. Every from the studio in town, we had to walk up a tr Eventually I started doing it without the flashli that as my eyes adjusted to the dark, my other s sharper and my view got wider. That discovery In my mind the album takes place here among looking at mysteries.”

Mount Eerie: Black Wooden Ceiling Opening (2008) “Living in a normal house, the old battle between lucidity and fogginess took on new implications.

Taking the comforts of modern living for granted, was I missing some sharp sense of clarity I had before? I started writing about ‘Mount Eerie’ being this invisible dark looming force that inhabited the space directly above the house, ever present but never seen or acknowledged. Seeing the moon and not making such a big deal about it anymore. Growing up. This photo is the exact feeling of weird beauty happening outside and above the house while life goes on inside obliviously.”

ed Night (2005) de Anacortes, y night returning rail in the dark. ight because I found senses became inspired this album. the trees at night,

Mount Eerie: Wind’s Poem (2009) “I didn’t have this photo in my mind when I made the album, actually.

You can tell the pine needles on the branches place the trees on the eastern side of the mountains, and I am too patriotic to my western slope to be able to identify too deeply with these arid trees. But this beautiful forest fire I saw once was in my mind in spirit. The beauty in destruction and continuous decay, the sun or moon shining through debris and smoke and fog, these are the themes of Wind’s Poem. Flames are beautiful, but maybe we’re not always allowed to think they’re beautiful? Flaming homes? Yes, destruction is totally beautiful.”

KINGS OF CONVENIENCE

photography by travis huggett

Kings of Convenience’s third album, Declaration of Dependence, is out in October through Virgin.

MILES BENJAMIN ANTHONY ROBINSON

FREE ASSOCIATION by andrew parks / photography by alexander wagner

“It’s made me stop and think, ‘What am I doing?’”

M

iles Benjamin Anthony Robinson is thinking about quitting music—pondering an escape from the industry that sometimes makes him feel like an antiquated “milkman at the dawn of the refrigerator.” Which is unfortunate, because his second album, Summer of Fear (Saddle Creek)—an emotionally draining effort he started writing back in 2007—isn’t even out yet at the time we speak. “I had a long conversation with my mom about it,” says Robinson, as he sits with self-titled for drinks at Brooklyn’s Tea Lounge. “I just feel like I’ve been obsessed with one thing for the past twelve years, so it’s made me stop and think, ‘What am I doing?’

I’m between a rock and a hard place, though, because I’m not sure what else I’d do.”

Forget what Robinson could do; the important thing here is what he’s supposed to do. And that is write the sort of autobiographical, blackhumored songs that dot his two discs, examining the highs and lows of the artist’s decade-long stay in New York City. “I’m thinking about writing a rom-com—a romantic comedy about myself—called Summer of Fear,” says Robinson, smirking. “It’ll be like a ’90s indie movie about a bunch of slackers.”

He can laugh about them now—some of them, at least—but the circumstances surrounding Summer of Fear the album (produced by TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone) aren’t as funny as the film in Robinson’s head. Not when they involve first-person accounts of September 11 and an unhealthy on-again/off-again relationship that’s marred most of Robinson’s post-NYU years. Here the songwriter tells the stories behind Summer of Fear’s best tracks.

“I went up to my

“Shake a Shot”

“This was originally supposed to be the last song on the first record. It sounded like a heavy folk tune then, like Neil Young or something. And it turned into a Bruce Springsteen song briefly. It was always our opener live, with the drum beat from [Nirvana’s] ‘In Bloom’ in the beginning—just really intense. But then our bass player didn’t show up to our sessions one day; the same day, I wasn’t in too good of shape. So we got that done while I was in a mellow mood. I ended up playing organ on it, actually.

The lyrics stayed the same, though.

They’re supposed to be like ‘Buriedfed’ [off Robinson’s self-titled debut] but from a different perspective.” >

y roof and actually saw people jumping out of the building.�

“Always an Anchor”

“I wrote this when I was still together with my ex, but the relationship already felt like it was going to be over. This was when I started playing a lot of shows around Brooklyn and writing all the time. It’s funny listening to the first album, actually. You can tell [the relationship’s] not going to work out.

“I remember the fifth anniversary of September 11 was around then, too. Because it was such a mass media event, everyone felt like they experienced it in some way. I had just moved about ten blocks from the towers when it happened, so I went up to my roof and actually saw people jumping out of the building.

It took me a while to access that image again. I blocked it out for so long. It fucked me up to a much greater degree than I’ve been able to address.

“That time [period] is one of those things I’ll never stop writing about. It was so profound to be evacuated from where I was living—from where I was just starting to feel settled—and then just float around for a while.”

“The Sound”

“The beginning of this song reminds me of Supertramp, but it’s actually modeled after ‘Since You’re Gone’ by the Cars. I had an unhealthy classicrock obsession for about three years, so it was good to pull myself out of it.”

“Hard Row”

“This is very much a breakup song, with a weird bridge where I screwed up the lyrics because I wasn’t in the right state of mind. It’s a good performance; I just say the same thing twice in a row.”

“100th of March”

“I was listening to a lot of Van Morrison [when I wrote this]. It was supposed to go on the first album, but there was something about it that I didn’t like.

It sounded a lot like Joanna Newsom then, with a harpsichord sound and everything. One day, the song was brought up in the studio and Kyp said, ‘You’re an idiot. Why are we not working on this?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think it was very good.’

It turned out great in the end. The horns on it are really cool.”

“It fu degree t

ucked me up to a much greater than I’ve been able to address.”

“Losing for Winners”

“This is another straight-up breakup song—a divorce song, really—with a Fleetwood Mac vibe and the best guitar solo I’ve ever played. It just randomly came out in one take. I always wanted to start a band called Losers Vs. Winners because Fleetwood Mac always talked about them.”

“Summer of Fear pt. 1/2”

“Part one ends with the same chord progression as the entirety of part two. It was always supposed to be like that—like a suite. The first part is such a relationship song and so accusatory: ‘You will not live this down / You will never escape the sound.’ But then part two is all about my years in New York, with a lot of references to September 11. It also explores the idea of growing up in a world you didn’t expect to be living in when you were younger.”

“More Than a Mess”

“I first started working on this in early 2005. It’s written like a screenplay, with dialogue and everything, so I spent a lot of time developing what it’s about and the lyrics—cleaning it up and making it all work. A friend of mine from Portland heard this and thought it was all about September 11. Actually, the whole thing is set in a house in Portland, where this party is happening. It’s fiction. I remember I went back and did the piano parts again so they’d sound a little sloppy. I like that.”

“Boat”

“I feel like this is the most honest, simple song on the record. I wrote it in the studio.

Something about it feels very direct to me.

There’s not a lot of words, riffs or artifice.

This has become one of our strongest songs live. People really love it, so I wanted to end the album with it. Man, this is a long fucking record.” //

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT by richard thomas / photography by bryan sheffield

“There’s a new art being created that’s fucking crazy, and the kids get it because they’re fucking nuts.”

E

very wall here is a different shade of muted pastel.

The books, shelved, are arranged alphabetically according to author’s last name. Franz Kafka rests next to Garrison Keillor in a strange display of heartland existentialism. It’s a warm summer day, and bed sheets hanging from nails around the window frames do little to keep out the heat. Jupiter Keyes and John Famiglietti sit near their girlfriends on a vintage leather couch, while Jake Duzsik rocks back and forth on a recliner in the corner of Keyes’ Echo Park, California, apartment. BJ Miller is absent, opting out at the last minute for a southwestern sojourn to visit a female friend rather than fulfilling press obligations. The guys present—who, along with drummer Miller, play in a band called HEALTH— are left to iron out plans for a forthcoming trip to Leipzig, Germany, where they will perform their new album, GET COLOR (Lovepump United), for a forthcoming DVD release.

HEALTH from left: Jake Duzsik, BJ Miller,

Jupiter Keyes, John Famiglietti

Dialogue among the band members is like a verbal game of hot potato.

Ideas start in one corner, bounce around the room and settle with a collective nod. Famiglietti and Duzsik spearhead the conversation, punctuating their speech with gesticulations and chin rubs as Keyes, his cotton ball of a cat slaloming between his legs, offers succinct commentary.

Famiglietti, who plays bass in HEALTH, is built like an indie-rock version of an Olympic swimmer, his broad shoulders and sixtwo frame looming over a small waist and skinny jeans. He is excitable yet cool, like a sixth-grader on the first day of school, and he assumes the role of ship’s captain with vim— even if the band insists its happily and dutifully run by committee. The loudest thing about Keyes, one of the band’s guitarists, is his orange hair. Raised in the primarily MexicanAmerican suburb of El Monte on a diet of astrology, Jimi Hendrix and death metal, Keyes grew up a “bro-lo” (half bro, half cholo) and offsets his compatriots’ animated discourse with a mellow attitude. Singer/ guitarist Duzsik is nursing a hangover and announces that we should grab lunch sooner rather than later— especially considering that our large group is making short work of a Tecate 12pack.

“We’re totally unhealthy,” Duzsik says with a smile. “I was a strict vegan for five years, and now I’m more

relaxed on it. But I’ve always been a booze hound. I think I smoked a pack of cigarettes last night.”

Located in a non-descript strip mall near the trendy Sunset Junction area of Silver Lake, Alegria is the band’s fresh-fare Mexican joint of choice, and since it’s a BYOB establishment, we’ve toted along what’s left of Keyes’ beer. The band recently wrapped a video shoot for GET COLOR’s first single—the grinding, quixotic “Die Slow”—and the video editor (and his hard drive) are shanghaied somewhere on the streets of LA. “Car trouble,” says Famiglietti. Apparently this is no cause for alarm. Or maybe it is. The longer self-titled spends with the band, the more we recognize a pervasive SoCal bro-ishness that seems to squash any potential anxiety. It’s all good, even when it’s not. But know this: Every decision HEALTH makes is labored over and executed in line with a unified vision for greatness and singularity. Things like: Who will remix the single? How many “golden tickets” will we hide inside our first shipment of new CDs, and will BJ’s littleleague jacket fit whoever wins that particular prize? Will Jake puke if we go play laser tag? Should we just stick to bowling? And because Alegria doesn’t take credit cards, who is paying for self-titled’s meal?

“I feel like the mindset of reviewers now, because information is everywhere, is just to assume that nothing could be new,” says Famiglietti. “You just assume that you already know better, or you can just look it up, so you start throwing things at it.”

We’re thinking we might have to hit an ATM. “We’re just trying to find a way to marry gratifying pop sensibilities with really bizarre-sounding shit,” says Keyes, dropping beads of hot sauce onto his burrito. “All it’s really about is how something affects you emotionally. How can we take the palette we have sonically and make something that people really respond to when they hear it?”

As we finish the Tecate, the conversation splinters into the banality of indie rock, the cathartic power of the Dead Kennedys and teenage masturbation. Enlightenment through release is the endgame—whether it is HEALTH’s music or somebody else’s.

Duzsik: We want to be a rock band that makes kids go to a show and freak out, to occupy that space where people hear music they can get off on and act aggressive.

Famiglietti: We’re trying to fill a hole for kids who want something more because there’s a hole that’s not being filled.

Keyes: And we want to fill those holes.

Famiglietti: Tiny holes that need to be destroyed by grown men with skills and a lot of equipment.

Duzsik: That wasn’t just clever. We do have a lot of equipment.

Famiglietti: It takes a lot of money to sound this shitty.

“Now we don’t have to be scared of anything.”

Duzsik: Actually, it takes a lot of money to play shitty and have it sound OK. Los Angeles, the Sunset Strip specifically, in the late ’70s and early ’80s was a flashpoint for two types of artists: those who celebrated and romanticized the city’s vainglorious façade and those who wanted to set fire to it with a lighter and a spray can. HEALTH fuses those two convictions into a combustible mix of beauty, angst and raw power that is quintessentially LA. Its mechanical dirge provides an arrhythmic heartbeat to a city whose gloss and grime are oftentimes interchangeable—the only town where your $382,000 Lamborghini Murciélago can get unmercifully shit upon by a passing group of wild parrots.

“It’s rare to find a band with the ability and gift to create a masterpiece like GET COLOR,” says Crystal Castles’ Ethan Kath, who collaborated with HEALTH on 2007’s “Crimewave” split 7-inch. “Something divine has crept into their music, whether the band likes it or not.”

“It takes a lot of money to sound this shitty.”

T

here’s a track called “Girl Attorney” on HEALTH’s self-titled debut. It’s a 38-second machine-gun burst of start-stop delirium—the shortest song on the 28-minute album, but in many ways, it’s the most important. Very early in their career, before they’d played any shows, the band members came to a profound realization: Their sound did not rail against the interminable ’90s rock they had been force-fed during their formative years; their sound, for the most part, sucked. Dissatisfied with their sped-up, referential take on post-punk, they decided to sit down one afternoon and script out an assortment of chords progressions and set changes. They rehearsed it over and over, reconfiguring the signal path for their mics, instruments and pedal boards. But the song never crested the one-minute mark. It didn’t have to.

“Once that was there, we threw away the rules,” says Famiglietti of the song. “We didn’t have to care anymore.

We were always worried about what ‘good music’ had to be like, but now we didn’t have to be scared of anything.”

He points his fork toward Duzsik and Keyes and smiles.

“These guys were good guitar players before we started the band, but they’re not using very much of their ability.”

This is how the guys talk: grand statements of purpose followed by rapid-fire witticisms and self-effacing comments that moot pretention. They don’t hide the fact that the sound you hear on HEALTH and GET COLOR is not the sound the band set out to create, though they easily could have. Until they played their first string of DIY shows in 2006 in a handful of unremarkable locations throughout the southwest, HEALTH had been holed up in a downtown LA practice space performing gapless sets of freshly concocted, face-melting noise rock for no one but themselves. They went through, as Famiglietti says, periods of extreme self-doubt about their new direction, but sooner or later they needed to start gigging. If this new sound sucked, they were going to have to find out on the road. Specifically, surrounded by dozens of fickle teens in an Arizona apartment complex.

“Our first shows were ten-minute blasts of music,” Keyes remembers. “We’d probably run through about seven songs in that time. But because it was so intense and heavy, it validated the music as we were playing it live. That’s how we came to define ourselves as a band.”

Without looking up from his plate, Famiglietti flatly recounts his own memory of the set: “We thought it was gonna bomb.”

With Miller pushing them forward like a freight train, Duzsik, Keyes and Famiglietti attacked their guitars as if they were trying to rip through the pick guard to the guts inside. They convulsed like their bodies were being riddled with small-arms fire. They dropped to the floor and pounced on their stomp boxes. They twisted knobs and honed levels until the hum of their machines groaned, distorted and folded in on itself. It was half performance art, half exorcism.

“They’re a fireball of energy and a fucking steamroller of a band,” says Bret Berg of Anavan, an LA synth-pop group that came up in the same downtown DIY scene that broke bands such as HEALTH, Abe Vigoda, No Age and Mika Miko, and made venues like Il Corral and the Smell ground zero for LA noise rock. “BJ hits his kit physically harder than any single drummer I’ve ever witnessed.

But what’s more, they completely buck the trend of all this virtual instrument/Auto-Tuning/Ableton Live jive.

It’s primal, from the gut. It’s enlightening and terrifying.

Hopefully it’ll inspire more kids to put down the laptop and pick up a drum or a guitar and beat the fuck out of it on a purpose.”

“They stood out from the very beginning,” says Jim

Smith, owner of the Smell. “On one hand, they’re very intense musicians in the sense that they’re very dedicated to their art and are always trying to come up with new and interesting ways of approaching it—almost like an avantgarde band. But on the other hand, there’s a pop element to their music—something very accessible but with an interesting and artistic burst to it.”

HEALTH don’t claim affiliation with any particular artistic movement, but they don’t so much cringe as genially brush off their live shows as choreographed art pieces. Shades of Sonic Youth and Black Sabbath occasionally poke out from behind the caustic, circuitgrinding walls of sound, and when self-titled references the Zombies as a vocal parallel, the band is in full agreement, especially Duzsik. When they’re not matching the music’s intensity, Duzsik’s atonal vocals coat the songs with a texture that softens the edges like a Gaussian blur.

When the singer goes for broke, his screams are nearly indistinguishable from the band’s bludgeoning sonic uppercuts.

“There were a lot of bands that were making really spazzy music, and we were really into it,” he says. “But they typically had a vocal recipe that sounded like Devo on helium. I’m not sassy and down with singing all crazy and wacky. It’s not part of my personality at all.”

As everyone with us at Alegria finishes eating, Famiglietti and Keyes brandish two crisp hundreddollar bills—the benefits, Famiglietti explains, of having consistently healthy merch sales. Our waitress lays down the check.

“I have to ask,” she says, curiously. “What band are you, and who is this interview for?”

“The magazine is self-titled,” says Famiglietti, “and we’re HEALTH. Just a regular word.”

T

he drive from Alegria to Shatto 39 Lanes dips under the Hollywood Freeway and winds through Los Angeles City College, Temple Community Hospital, various carnicerías and panaderías, and what seems like a never-ending number of micro-malls that contain the holy trinity of urban LA business ventures: a launderette, a donut shop and a nail salon. Aside from a few more potholes and a few less Sam Goodys, not much of this commute has changed in the past 15 years. If you jump down to Wilshire and snake toward downtown, you eventually hit the Wholesale District, smack in the middle of Skid Row. This is where HEALTH wrote both of its albums—in a lock-out just a few blocks from the dregs

of the LA River. “Industrial shithole LA,” says Duzsik, who self-titled has tapped as our co-pilot for the drive.

Circle back up Alameda two miles toward City Hall and you’ll hit the Smell, the windowless brick building where HEALTH—along with an undisclosed number of large rats—spent eight months recording its debut.

A not-for-profit, all-ages, volunteer-run venue with a vegan kitchen and a strict no-alcohol policy, the Smell has served as a rejection of anything commercialized and Hollywood about the LA scene since the venue opened its doors in 1998, even though many of its regulars have since gone on to become hipster favorites. It is to punk rock what the Good Life Café was to LA hip-hop in the early ’90s—a DIY safe haven that allows young artists to flourish creatively, providing they respect the forum. It’s a place free from the boozed-up, meat-market vibe offered by so many of LA’s trendy live-music spots, and Smell regulars praise its unassuming, no-frills business approach.

HEALTH thrived within the venue’s sweaty walls, and the crowds helped validate the band’s direction at a time when they needed it most. Every time they performed, any nervous energy that leaked out was quickly transformed into thrust. The same effect holds true for Anavan’s Berg, who attributes the success and momentum of bands that repeatedly plan the Smell to the venue’s capacity to let those acts “simply be themselves, on their own terms.”

HEALTH could not have existed without the Smell, and the guys will be the first to tell you that. They frequented the spot so many times, both as players and patrons, that the back-alley bouquet of urine, garbage and sulfur signifies a sort of homecoming.

“Noise is the new punk rock for kids,” says Duzsik.

“We’d go to these shows at the Smell, and it would just be pure noise. It’s music that’s typically associated with people taking themselves super seriously, especially on the East Coast, where you’re associated with a gallery and it’s some dour, ‘I’m an artist’ thing. In LA the attitude is like, ‘Hey, let’s get drunk and do some crazy noise music.

Everybody’s gonna mosh, freak out and have fun!’ ” We’re first to arrive at the bowling alley. A small group of older afternoon patrons occupy a few lanes, while teenagers pump quarters into Altered Beast, Killer Instinct and a few other dusty throwback arcade games. Like his bandmates, Duzsik has a healthy taste for sarcasm, but even though we’ve taken the piss out of youth culture on more than one occasion this afternoon, he’s very much aware of the band’s role in defining it.

“We don’t want to be a band that plays music that sounds like it’s from another time that was cool back then,” he says, taking a pull off a bottle of Bud. “How depressing is it that you can be a kid and the music you have to get really psyched on is music that’s trying to

sound like another time when kids actually got to have that music for themselves? We talk a lot about wanting to rock for the kids and shit like that, but that’s really important for me.” (In fact, the band members even prefer that their ages not appear in print—presumably, in an effort to remain close to their core audience.)

As such, it’s impossible to listen to GET COLOR’s nine songs and not get the sense that HEALTH is a band fighting for its life at a time when the gap between today’s blogosphere star-child and tomorrow’s peer-topeer detritus has never been smaller. On “Die Slow”—an experiment, says Duzsik, in more “traditional songwriting structure”—pulsating, metallic shards give way to throbbing, guttural guitars that contort beneath Duzsik’s wistful breaths. For “In Heat,” HEALTH abandons complete sentences for fragmented discharges of snare rolls and futuristic, transmogrified bass. (Though Famiglietti swears they’ll never record analog again, the tape saturation adds a depth of field that was absent from the group’s first album.) The first 45 seconds of “Severin” drip with paranoia and agitation before exploding into a driving, double-time barrage of toms and snare hits, and whenever the slightest semblance of vocal harmony reveals itself, it’s quickly shattered by the crash of cymbals.

“Eat Flesh” couldn’t be more appropriately named, and “Death+” is a mad merry-go-round of dissonant patterns and rim shots that bore into your brain like a rusty drill. In HEALTH’s spastic hands, bass riffs sound like guitars that sound like synths that disappear into the deepest corners of the stereo field. By the time the album’s closer, “In Violet,” comes around, the skittering, gated guitar rhythm and shimmering leads wash over you like water, and the vocals, sparse and ambiguous as they are, are nothing short of sublime.

The band members admit they’re still learning how to translate their live energy to the recorded medium in a way that isn’t a complete engineering and mastering nightmare, but that unhinged virility is perhaps the biggest reason why someone like Trent Reznor tapped HEALTH to jump aboard a string of East Coast tour dates this past fall—and why he invited them back as openers on Nine Inch Nails’ two purportedly final live shows here in LA. When the rest of the crew arrives at the bowling alley, we order another round of drinks and split into two teams, setting up shop directly opposite a huge banner that reads, ironically enough, bowl for fun and health.

Keyes switches to Jägermeister and Coke, while Famiglietti and the girls stick with beer. In a move that would prove slowly but efficiently to compromise our bowling aptitude, self-titled convinces Duzsik to join us in sampling the bar’s signature drink: the Shatto Sandbagger, a brutal mix of Rémy Martin, Southern Comfort, Bacardi 151, Grand Marnier, sweet and sour mix, and fruit juice. Between frames Famiglietti—he of hurried and lanky delivery—explains the 66 handmade tickets that will be inserted into random copies of GET COLOR. Each ticket will feature a color code that corresponds with a specific set of prizes, which includes (but is not limited to) the following: a painting by Famiglietti’s mom, a bag of hair from Keyes’ cat, an uplifting call from the band’s manager, an album from the band’s collection (signed in blood), an intoxicated video chat, HEALTH T-shirts, a framed photo of Miller’s mom and, of course, a grand prize.

“We fly you to LA. You can crash on my couch or Jupe’s couch, stay there for three days, and we’re gonna take you to Magic Mountain and party with you all day,” says Famiglietti, who proceeds to roll a pair of gutter balls, much to Duzsik amusement.

Given this afternoon’s course of events, it’s easy to see how they could dream up a Wonka-esque coup of this magnitude, and even easier to imagine the voracity with which they’ll manage to pull it off.

HEALTH is, in effect, a regular group of guys with a regular-sounding band name that is calmly and coolly attempting to pull off the impossible: forge a completely non-referential palette of sound that is as beautiful as it is abrasive, then use those colors to author a soundtrack for the world’s more flighty demographic. They are doomed to a lifetime of scrutiny by detractors who will undoubtedly write off their antics as nothing more than hollow, misguided Weltschmerz. Meanwhile, teenagers will still show up to HEALTH gigs looking to purge their souls of all that is average by, say, sucking down multiple hits of acid, beating the living shit out of one another and, finally, hugging it out in a bloody display of brotherly love. Although maybe that’s the kind of thing you only hope happens once.

“We want kids to own this time period,” says Famiglietti. “There’s a new art being created that’s fucking crazy, and the kids get it because they’re fucking nuts. We want to be a band that reflects these new opportunities, and this cool new world of too much information. All these kids got for their rebellion is some pre-packaged old shit that’s not doing anything crazy. But at the same time, are we being idiots for going out of our way to achieve that?”

He gets up, strides to the line and unceremoniously rolls another ball down the lane. It straddles the edge for what seems like an eternity before connecting with the four-pin and producing a single dejected and hollow knock. He is not pleased, but he is not altogether agitated. It is what it is—which is to say, it is all good. //

ISLANDS THE self-titled INTERVIEW

by cassie marketos / photography by aaron richter

E

ven as he’s speaking, Nicholas Thorburn edits his own words. “That’s underlined, italicized, bold and in quotes,” he says, noting the personal bent of his third and latest album as Islands, Vapours (Anti-). “And it’s a hyperlink!” Coming from somebody else the advice might seem unwarranted, but the former Unicorn and current creative mastermind behind Islands is so familiar, by now, with being rendered into journalistic blather that his suggestions are more akin to humorous commiseration than condescension. In fact, he seems comfortable.

Languishing against the wood-paneled wall of a Brooklyn coffee shop, Thorburn is downright serene and optimistic about his future: touring in support of Vapours, prepping round two of Human Highway (his collaboration with Jim Guthrie) and fielding rumors about a possible Unicorns reunion (fingers crossed). After all, Thorburn has reunited with fellow former ’Corn Jaime Thompson, who’s returned to play drums in Islands after a brief departure from the group. Cracking wise with self-titled, Thorburn chats about his potential for immortality and tries his best to resist slinging verbal sludge at all those crummy glockenspiel-wielding bands out there (you know who you are). self-titled: So you only recently moved to New York. How are you liking it so far?

I like it. I don’t want to live here forever, though. I’m a West Coast person. I’m from out west in Canada, so I feel like I need to be by mountains and ocean and maybe a little quieter lifestyle. For now, it works.

Did you decide to get rid of your band before or after you figured out what you were going to do with this album?

Hmm...

Sorry, sore subject?

No, but it’s a weird subject because it

was an unorthodox move, but Islands has never been a consistent band. It’s always been a project. It’s more nebulous than a “brotherhood” or a “fraternal” sort of thing that bands traditionally are—or a sisterhood, but I mean, it’s a pretty maledominated sport—but, yeah, the band that made the last record was the touring band, more or less, with a couple of key changes over the years, but they didn’t play on the first record. I just really wanted to take a step in a different direction. As somebody who is making records and making music, I have a deep yearning to try new things always.

Did you enjoy doing it this way? Is it something you see yourself doing again in the future?

Yeah! I’d love to keep switching it up and have different modes of output. For now, this is the focus on this record. So I don’t know what’s going to come next, but I do have another set of songs I’d like to record, possibly with the last iteration of the band.

They’re a great rock ’n’ roll band. I mean, it might be naive to think that I can be so fluid with line-ups, but I like to have not just one. I’m polyamorous in that sense.

Even though you have other people around you, do you feel like Islands is a solo endeavor?

Yeah, it ostensibly is that. It comes right down to the name “Islands” and what it represents, what it signifies. That isolation and that solitude. In a very real sense, it is a solo project. But of course, it wouldn’t be anything without the people who play on the records and play on the shows.

I’m curious about your songwriting process. You’re a self-taught musician, and I feel like your songs come together in an interesting way because of it.

It’s almost like they get in arguments with themselves—which I mean as a compliment. There’s less of that on this record than in the past. Are your songwriting skills improving?

I don’t know what it is. I don’t over-think it. I do think in the beginning, I didn’t have compositional training—where there is a

“My new thing now is not to shit-talk other bands...but...”

structure inherent and subject matter and a little yellow legal pad for themes and rhyming schemes to explore. It’s always been a really natural process for me, songwriting.

It will take on whatever form it will in the instant, I guess.

It just does. That doesn’t really make sense [laughs]. I get really excited about parts, and when it comes to arranging a structure of a song, I will lose focus with one thing and get really excited about another section, so there will end up being—in some songs—a ton of bridges and choruses that don’t really repeat, but yeah, this album more than ever is a little more cohesive.

Two of your new songs—“Devout” and “Disarming the Car Bomb”—have a lot of violent imagery, which has always been an element of Islands. But those were the only two on Vapours. I even think I heard some love songs in there.

It’s true! Those were themes I kept going back to. If not death, then using death as a metaphor for whatever feeling: abandonment, doubt, self-doubt, guilt, but couched in a hyperbolic sort of blood-bath metaphor.

Those two songs are a little older; they were maybe written around the time of Arm’s Way—so still in that headspace. But I’m trying to broaden my metaphor usages.

But I love those metaphors!

I do, too! But it gets a little overbearing for people. Arm’s Way can wear you down because it’s a pretty gloomy record.

Did it wear you down to make it?

No. Well, yes, it did. There was a lot of label trouble. We had an old label in Canada [Equator Records, which released Islands’ debut, Return to the Sea] we were trying to free ourselves from. There was a long period of feeling we were in a bit of a holding pattern. That was the real stressful part. As far as recording it, though, that was a pretty enjoyable process. You know, I always try and have one romantic or love song on a record, and even the love song on Arm’s Way is a total gloomy, depressing, pessimistic version of a love song. This one’s got a little more optimism.

Does that reflect where you are in your life?

I don’t know! “Tender Torture” is actually an old song, written and performed even before Return to the Sea. I wanted to record it for the follow-up record, but I shifted gears with how I wanted the record to sound and what kind of songs I was getting into, and it just seemed a little more disposable—too fluffy and light for where my head was at. I think it was good I had that time, with the new line-up, to arrange it; it adds a lot more. It sounded a little...

Let’s just say it had xylophone on it. The new version: no xylophones. That’s a big thing. No xylophones! That can be the pull quote. That’s a guarantee. There are no xylophones on this record. Or glockenspiel! I can’t handle that instrument in rock music. I think it’s a sign of bad things.

So many musicians I want to mention right now.

I shouldn’t get specific. My new thing now is not to shittalk other bands because it never looks good.

It’s my job to draw that out of you.

I know it is! But, you know, I think it’s important to be critical. I think it’s good to be critical of an instrument like the glockenspiel—the way it’s used in contemporary rock music. I don’t want to get specific, but I’m sure we’re thinking the same thing!

Do you think people will call this your “personal” record?

Yeah! It is.

How would you explain the dynamic between Nicholas Thorburn and “Nick Diamonds”? You went by Thorburn, your real name, on Arm’s Way, but now you’ve gone back?

Well, even though [Vapours] is probably is the most personal record I’ve ever done, I did recently take back the name Diamonds. I’m back to Diamonds. I guess I’m a very

manic and moody person, and for Arm’s Way I wanted it to be no bullshit or anything. This is my name, and this is very serious. There was not a lot of joy or pleasure. I feel like I want to have fun now, and I want to create. I want to distance myself from me, even though this record is the most personal thing that I’ve done. I still need that kind of veneer that I can get into character. That’s an important part of music—the character of it.

A lot of your music is pretty playful. Even in the song titles there’s creativity and obvious character. How much do you draw from real-life experience?

It’s all real. It’s all what I’m feeling. It’s all about my life and whatever I’m feeling or going through. I try not to be too self-centered and have perspective on things, but it’s all directly a result of my “feelings”—and that’s underlined, italicized, bold and in quotes. Just...for the record. And it’s a hyperlink!

Every word in this article is going to be a hyperlink: glockenspiel, character...

Exactly.

How do you think people are going to take it? Do you even think about that?

I do! I obsess over it. I’m in that period, the period right before the record comes out—it hasn’t leaked yet. [Ed. note: The record leaked a few weeks later.] And I’m just super nervous, I guess. I want people to like it, obviously. That’s what the song “Vapours” is about, the vulnerability of being a musician and making records for the public and that role of entertainer and the pleasure of entertainment and entertaining, and obviously there’s not much pleasure when nobody is entertained. I really hope it’s enjoyed, but it’s hard to say. I thought people would enjoy Arm’s Way, and it was a little more lukewarm than I anticipated.

Did that affect the direction you took on Vapours?

Not explicitly. It’s not like, “Oh, I tried prog rock and people didn’t’ like that, so I’m going to make a pop record.” I think by default I’ve always felt a real allegiance to pop compositions, and I wanted to get back to that. And it didn’t hurt that my brand of...whatever the last record was...wasn’t as immediate for people as I hoped. I feel like we were making it challenging for listeners. We weren’t tossing off something; we were asking you to listen; and you will be rewarded if you really give it time. It’s reflective of the amount of work that went into it. But this record is a lot more casual. It’s a lot less anxious about anything like that. It’s just more...not as hung up.

What are your favorite pop songs?

I have so many. God, I always draw blanks. I think the

“It’s gonna be a new genre: doom-wop.

It’s like doo-wop but at half speed.”

“I have a 98 percent chance of Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” is one of the perfect pop songs. Shit, I get so emotional about really good pop songs, but I’m drawing a blank. I’ll come back to it.

You’ve cited Paul Simon’s Graceland as a reference point before. What were you listening to while making this record?

There are certain little things in my music that I always reference. “Switched On” references Wendy Carlos. Ratatat’s music— the guitar work and rhythms—is a bit of an inspiration.

Do you see yourself collaborating more in the future?

Yeah. I love collaborating with people. I’m probably going to make another Human Highway record with Jim. We have a great backing band, and the next record, I hope we get those guys in. Th’ Corn Gangg is always in the distant future. It served well as a crossover between the Unicorns and Islands. It was when we were in between and kind of figuring things out. I’m talking with Ryan Kattner of Man Man; we’ve been flirting with the idea of a group.

Islands is you. So it really is.

Well, I’m finite. Hopefully, I’ll live forever; I’m not so sure. I think I have a 98 percent chance of immortality. But there’s a 2 percent chance that I could die.

If you live to the end of this interview...

If you don’t kill me...

Has the fervor over comparing Islands to Unicorns died down?

Still get it. What’s died down is my being uppity about it. I’m way more calm, I think, than when Islands was first starting. It was naive of me to think that people wouldn’t reference the Unicorns, but I got cranky about it, which I think was a little childish.

Obviously, the reason Islands had a leg up is because of the Unicorns. But I don’t at all mind anymore. I’ve got no reservations.

Do you ever miss playing with them?

Yeah, I do. I see all them. I saw [former Unicorn Alden Penner] when he played in New York with his new band, Clues, who are great. And yeah, I do. And you know, you never know. We’re buddies.

I can’t even fathom.

It’s gonna be a new genre. It’s called doom-wop. It’s like doo-wop, but at half speed—really low-frequency stuff. So were working on that. What else? I’m just game to play music with people. But I don’t want to dilute Islands for sure.

Think you’re going to play together again as the Unicorns?

All I’ll say is...ya never know [shrugs].

Islands is forever?

Yeah.

I’ll say “coyly.”

Exactly. Coyly is the term. //

[Laughs] I can’t record a [imitates shrug].

You can’t record a [shrugs] shrug? You could use brackets! All I can say is [shrug].

“ ...But there’s a 2 p

immortality...�

percent chance that I could die.�

THE B&W PORTRAITS PROJECT Photography by Shawn Brackbill

P

hotographer Shawn Brackbill has long been a self-titled favorite (he shot Black Dice for our debut issue). His music images are essential, the vision of a shooter always looking for an intimate connection with his subject—even if it’s just for a second. Throughout the past five years, Brackbill has been maturing a collection of black-andwhite photographs of musicians, presented here in part. self-titled: How did this project start?

I was heading to Coachella with Q and Not U in May 2004 with a backstage and photo pass. I really dislike shooting festivals, so I thought I’d try some portraiture. I decided to photograph individual musicians because I figured it would be easier to coordinate. After a few months I realized that there were added benefits of photographing everyone individually.

What emotions can we see in the images?

My intention is to make my subjects comfortable, and whatever they give me is

Annie Clark

Cale Parks

what I get. I pick locations, mostly for the lighting they offer, and let the subjects give what they feel with little direction as far as how to look, how to stand. It helps that the shoots are mostly under five minutes and I usually shoot less than ten frames. No one even has time to get uncomfortable.

Why photograph musicians?

I started because that was the world that I was in. I already had been going to tons of shows since high school and photographed many once I got a camera in college. I had grown bored of shooting shows as the bands that I knew were playing bigger venues.

This was a good way to stay connected. The project brings the musicians down to the level of them as a person. Separating them from the other band members puts a different focus on the individual.

Normally they are just part of a band and only photographed as a group. I hope this helps to bring out the individual personalities.

Of the images shown here, which is your favorite?

Cale Parks. He is a good friend, and we have worked together a lot. I like his

Kyp Malone

expression, a little intense, and the black clothes work well with the white wall.

Any interesting stories about these shots?

The shot of Wayne Coyne was an interesting one. It was one of the first portraits for the project. I didn’t really know what I was doing yet, but I excused myself and asked him if we could do a quick portrait.

He said, “Sure! Where?” I hesitated for a second, and he said, “Right here!” and put his hands up to shade his face. That is one of three frames I shot. A few months ago, he actually wrote me an e-mail saying that he liked the portrait. He found it on my Web site. It’s always nice to get that kind of feedback.

I’ve heard a few times that the portraits are people’s favorite photographs of themselves, which is the best compliment I could think of.

These are all shot on film.

Why? I shoot both digital and film but have been using only black-and-white film for the project. I had started the project at a time when I was only shooting film, so I wanted to continue on with that. Because there was

Mike Watt

really no project on the first trip, I actually shot a few portraits on color film, but the black and white really was the standout.

Why black and white?

I love the grain and contrast. It’s a classic look.

I started shooting black and white when I took my first photo class and fell in love. I almost shot it exclusively for the first few years. I was a custom blackand-white printer for a few years as well, so I have a lot of background with it.

Because I’ve been shooting most of these portraits very quickly and under varying conditions, the black and white brings it together. It also helps bring the focus to the subject, and I’m less concerned with distracting backgrounds.

What musicians would you still like to photograph?

Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, Björk. // This November, Shawn Brackbill will show a selection of prints from the project in Utrecht, Holland. The exhibition is in conjunction with the Le Guess Who? music festival and will also feature work by Nick Helderman and Annie Hoogendoorn.

Wayne Coyne

This sketch was drawn by Canadian turntable wiz Kid Koala. It was inspired by—and inked while he listened to—Central Market (Warp) by Battles’ Tyondai Braxton.

Says Kid Koala of the record, “The way things skip and repeat, I just kept thinking ‘factory’—scenes of robots moving down assembly lines.”

End