TB03 ::: Soft Gates

A short feature I wrote on Istanbul’s Soft Gates is up over at Impose Magazine.

TB02 ::: Ex Wife

The story of Ex Wife is the story of two, possibly three, bands. Although the duo has already played in numerous water-worn New Brunswick basements, has released a self-titled EP to a positive tri-state area response, and is on the brink of releasing their first full length entitled “Everything Was Beautiful,” due out this October – the band is still a newborn, ambitious and untired having only been around a little over a year. But the bond between members Nick Bolton and Matt Harvey is calloused and drafted from what could be called years of prologue. And the music of Ex Wife embodies this bond; whether as the relationship between two friends, between a predicted future and projected nostalgia, between the people we dream we are and the sharpest, most shapely reality.

The history of Ex Wife can be traced back years prior to the band’s actually inception. Bolton and Harvey had met in art class at Ramapo High School in Bergen County, New Jersey – as Bolton explained, “he was my only friend who smoked up.” When I met the two, it was the summer of 2007 and they were playing in a band called Snake Vision. Both Bolton and Harvey were students at Rutgers University. Harvey was a friendly and clean-cut guy with short black hair that matched a well-kept beard. Bolton was slightly more disheveled. He was a lanky guy and he had been wearing a pair of Chuck Taylors that a friend had tagged “Lightning Bolt sucks” on the sole. He had long dirty-blonde hair and was slightly less assertive and more soft-spoken than his band-mate. At the time, Harvey had been booking shows at The Southwest Burrito, an amicable Mexican restaurant only a few blocks away from the New Brunswick train station. The restaurant was open-minded enough to have kids play loud music – perhaps somewhat aware of the area’s long lineage of hardcore and basement shows, or perhaps they just benefited from the extra traffic. But they always kept their fluorescent lights on. I never inquired as to why; it seemed obvious the space was not designed to have shows. There were large glass windows at the front, a couple of refrigerators filled with cold drinks across from a small countertop lined with paper menus, a large dry erase menu overhead the kitchen and tables in the back. There wasn’t a stage, just an outlet and when bands played, you could hardly pick the faces of those wielding instruments from those watching. Everyone was under lights. Snake Vision blended into a room filled with friends and other bands, aside stacked tables and the bright lime painted walls. As if a continuation of the blurred roles of The Southwest Burrito, Harvey and Bolton had nearly identical screams. As Bolton beat drum skins and Harvey pounded riffs, the two hovered around their microphones with the same guttural static, the same pristine clarity of their shouts, the two nearly played as one.

But Snake Vision would come to a common end, the age-old adage of too many hands in the pot. Bolton, who had been a self-taught drummer, took up playing keyboard and the group ascertained a more conventionally sound drummer, Dan Pelic. But the original mix was now off; Harvey explained, “we weren’t playing stuff that was anything like what influenced us for the most part.” The more polished they became, the less original they sounded – the vision of two friends lost to the vision of three comprised without the warm glow of nostalgia. After a short tour at the beginning of 2008 with fellow New Brunswick-based group Tin Kitchen, Snake Vision called it quits. Harvey would go along with Pelic and play more referential rock songs that choose to expand on what he saw as the lost “90s” sound. Harvey explained to me that part of his musical goal was bringing back “the cool sounds that shouldn’t have died out so quickly.” While Harvey got back to the pop that was central to his musical vision, Bolton kept busy with projects that choose to reject convention. From improvisational noise bands – a collective known as T.G.I.F. and as the backing band of Richmond-based Picayune – and as Slam Dunk – a solo project where Bolton made collages out of field recordings and found sounds. But the two knew that to let their musical connection fade away was to kill a part of their past. By the summer of 2008, Bolton would approach Harvey with his own songs, and the two high school friends would start a new band, a new two-piece, now with Harvey on drums and Bolton playing a Baritone guitar. The two would start the band as ‘You Without Teeth’ but would eventual settle on the name ‘Ex Wife’, Bolton explained to me:

“The name You Without Teeth really had no meaning, it was a misreading of the movie ‘Youth Without Youth’ (2007), but to us became something about growing old and dying. But most people thought it was about fighting, [which was] not at all what we wanted… Ex Wife doesn’t really mean all that much either, except that it’s someone that you love intensely and then can’t stand the sight of.”

Ex Wife would bear some resemblances to the predeceasing Snake Vision but in many ways would be the inverse band. Citing Sunny Day Real Estate as one of his biggest influences, Bolton is the major composer and writes what he terms “minimal emo/punk”. For many reasons this is an apt description, as Ex Wife’s music uses repetitive lyrics over a gradually changing song structure, that is both routed in the minimalism of bands like Spaceman 3 while also keeping with the punk sensibilities of a band like Hot Water Music. But the music could hardly be seen as self-loathing or “emo” in the deprecating connotation that usually comes with the genre. Bolton had explained to me that one of his biggest pet peeves was the “misrepresentation of emo”. Bolton’s lyrics were hardly words of resignation, he explained some of his ideas to me:

“The demo was mainly about nightmares, but the new album’s lyrics are more about ideas of my future and death, nostalgia and [love]. They’re all autobiographical, or are in a vague fantastical way. I write about something that happened or I imagine things I think will happen to me.”

And while Bolton recounts or predicts his life, he is looking for positive change, to be strong even in the nightmare. In “This Is Not A Dream, This Is Real Happening”, Bolton’s speaker furiously reasons with the subject, “your blood’s not on our hands” – calling the subject to be accountable for his own actions, that circumstance can only push you so far, that as much of a story as the subject believes and reasons his life to be, that this is not a dream you are supposed to float away in, these are not dead symbols, that this life is all we have. The difference between Ex Wife and Snake Vision seems to exist somewhere within this motif, Ex Wife would focus on the personal because in their isolated landscape, that was all they had and all that could be there for them.

With their first full-length on the way, the two are making sure to keep their dreams separated from reality. When I asked him how “Everything Was Beautiful” would differ from their past release, Bolton told me that they had spent more time on the record, but quickly strayed away from album production to more personal issues, “I went broke, that’s my only life change…[and] last night was the first sleep I got in six days.” But hearing the title track from the album, I was immediately transported to a time seeing the two at the Glass Door in Brooklyn this past July. They took the stage after The Sleepies to a small, crowded, sweltering room that was completely dark save for a spotlight centered behind the bands. Bolton lugged his Fender cabinet to a corner and the room slowly started to fill with people, the sounds of hit chords and crash cymbals. The spotlight silhouetting Bolton’s thin frame and Harvey’s drum kit, you couldn’t see their faces but could only see the spots where the light escaped, you could only parse how the shadow on the microphone screamed. “Empty eyes, long dark hair, black cries in the freezing night air,” their voices as one as the spotlight eclipsed shapes moving in the dark.

Download Ex Wife’s Self-Titled EP

Catch Ex Wife’s upcoming shows:
October 29th at The Charleston with Rapid Cities
October 30th at Le Poisson Rouge with Pissed Jeans & Awesome Color
November 12th at the Lit Lounge

TB01 ::: Colour Buk

Tucked away on the beachside strip of Surf Avenue stands Peggy O’Neill’s. It’s a pretty average South Brooklyn bar, its main traffic coming from those needing a break from the Coney Island boardwalk or grabbing a beer after a Cyclone’s game but it has a certain local flare; with outdoor seating, cheap well drinks, 20 ounce pints of locally brewed Coney Island Lager, and a stage that seems to inevitably invite bad tribute bands and buzzed patrons to let their freak flags fly taking part in karaoke. So after setting up his amp and plugging in his guitar, Adam Kastin was surprised to see a close friend running toward the stage, his face covered in blood. Adam couldn’t have exactly known what was happening at the time or why the people crowded around the octagonal bar would feel the immediate urge to fight once his band took stage, but he must have had some sort of clue.

A fairly democratic brawl had broken out, a pissed off audience was riled to beat the shit out of the performers for making music they didn’t understand, and Adam and band-mate Brandon Wulle would spend most of their night waiting at Coney Island Hospital, the worst injury another band had gotten being a shattered skull. Naturally, the sore crew recouped by getting liquored up all night before attending Sunday morning mass at a local Bay Ridge Catholic church. “It felt good,” Brandon and Adam agreed.

For the past two years, Adam and Brandon have been making music under the moniker Colour Buk, creating a sort of music the two could only define as “classic,” or “raunchy”. Natives of Levittown, Long Island they feel disconnected from the area’s music scene filled with “Pay to Play” venues and what they described as “overprivileged kids playing…regressive forms of emo”, “mostly trying to cash in on the success of [L.I.’s] Brand New.” Between the two twenty-somethings, they use a shortwave radio, multi-presence delay, signal generators, tapes, vibrators and guitars – among other things – to create what feels like a wall of hell. Seeing them in the basement of Silent Barn this past August, the few bodies that occupied the small basement seemed to stretch as the music pervaded obnoxiously, yet the two parties making the noise seemed calm and composed. Colour Buk is a dirty wave, a gaseous combination of dionysian energy and fart jokes that leaves you deaf and drained. And for most “noise” enthusiasts, this is quite exciting. It isn’t designed to piss people off, “I’m neighborly,” Brandon admits.

Yet out of the few times the band has performed live, they have amassed blind hatred out of those persons probably expecting a tribute band to perform. At a gig at the Delancey in Manhattan, the two were heckled throughout their performance by a girl fronted rock’n roll band until their equipment was unplugged. On his way to the bathroom after their set, an older Irish man approached Adam and told him that if he ever “did that to a guitar again” that the old man would kill him. But in their short existence, Colour Buk has already tapped into the periphery of noise big shots such as Pete Nolan of the Magik Markers & Spectre Folk (just to name a few), Megan Remy of US Girls and even avant-garde luminaries The Residents. It seems some people are getting it, and Colour Buk has to realize this. After a recent show, they were asked by a member of the audience if they like Red Crayola, to which the two could only reply, “No, we like Carol King.” Subversion of their audience’s expectations – whether intentionally or not – seems to be a common thread for Colour Buk, who scream “DIY sucks”, “The Fall Sucks” in their infrequent use of vocals. But whether genius or just plain fucking with people’s heads, the two plan to play out more, to release new material – including a 7” tentatively titled “Once a Woman, Never Again”, and mostly just to do as they please – as Brandon says, “shitting the shoot”. It hardly seems that Colour Buk is even remotely vying for mainstream acceptance, perhaps a symptom of growing up in Jesse Lacey soaked cultural entropy, yet Adam couldn’t help but smile as told me of an attractive Russian woman who approached him at the end of their set at the Delancey. “She told me that our music cured her of sadness,” Adam grinned, “we had a moment.”

Download Colour Buk’s Live In The Well

the sleeping pig awoke

This is not my first blog. Nor is this my first attempt at keeping an online collection of my more – let’s call it – “professional” writing. But this seemed like the thing to do. So before WordPress becomes as obsolete as – I don’t know – Livejournal, I am going to post some of my ‘deepest insights’ and ‘staggeringly human’ narratives. Some will be fiction – because God knows in this economic climate no one is giving money to put out an unpublished writer’s fiction, some will be more along the lines of arts editorials and profiles – because whether the internet community agrees with me or not I have lots of opinions and semi-coherent ramblings on the arts and music scene in New York City, and some will simply be blogging – whether on important things I feel I should talk about or the most mundane of things that I will comment on out of sheer animosity. But for the most part, this is just an experiment to see how productive I can force myself to be. A sleeping pig at the end of my rope, it’s time to start shitting where I eat.