Bow + Arrow - Mathmatics Is The Study Of History

So, it took a while to record, and a long time to release in any fashion, but Bow + Arrow recorded a full-length album in 2008. It got a little bit of press, although we did little to promote it or attempt to get it released by any labels. By the time we were ready to put it out the band was already on a dramatic down-swing. One of the best things written about it was by Eric at The Stranger, ultimately seeing it as a timely and relevant return to the earnest days of DIY-spirited post-"revolution summer" emocore that prevailed in the days before corporations, eyeliner, and hair gel defined how people saw "emo" or current hardcore.

More than anything, I feel like this album represents the general undercurrent of the personal dynamics of the band in its history; the tension between half of the band wanting to write pop songs, while the other half wanting to be a hardcore band, while pretty much everyone agreed that we wanted to be playful and weird through the whole process. As far as the content and meaning behind our songs, we were equally as divided - much like the lyrical split between Ian Mackaye and Guy Piccitto in Fugazi (Ian generally not mincing words and being direct and blatant with his politics, while Guy was more abstract and less declarative), we tended to not want make grandiose political statements or wear our hearts on our sleeves, yet at the same time we didn't want to be too high-minded or aloof to the point of meaninglessness. Ultimately we ended up writing songs that reflected and spoke of the experiences of our closest friends, stylistically reflecting the records that we listened to together, and singing about the goofy art that we were surrounded by. One of my favorite moments of our songs lyrically was on "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things," where Jay laments dramatically about a friend who committed suicide, while Lucas relates a piece of graffiti that our friend Clark put up everywhere - "these are truly the years of hair", insisting that the years of hair reflect the moments of awkward growth that we seem to be completely incapable of controlling are compounded by forcing religion down kids throats ("the years of hair, bastardized by faith").

A lot of this album has a lot of significance for me, and I could go on telling long-winded stories about each song, but mostly I'm sad that we never did hardly anything to get these songs into the open for people to listen to. Instead we have CDRs packed in boxes, probably never to see the light of day again. C'est la vie!

Thanks should definitely go to Sabory, who played cello on "Sweaty Kids Cutting Loose", Jeff McNulty who recorded the whole thing at The Vera Project, Jon Manning for doing the amazing photoshoot that was supposed to be in big gate-fold album artwork, and all the friends who we got to sing gang-vocals (like yelling "GOLF!" on Harbor Stories).

Recommended songs: Nick Watter, Harbor Stories, Repatch, Sweaty Kids Cutting Loose, We Bricklayers (I guess), Accessing The Uninteresting, and The Masses.







download the full album, buddies!

Bow + Arrow EP

I'm going to post the things that Bow + Arrow (my old band, which broke up this past summer) released/recorded.

First up: our first EP!



This was just me (on drums & singing) and Lucas (guitar and singing). Give Me Back compared it to Archers of Loaf & Cap'n Jazz, other people compared us to everything from Tiny Hawks to Braid to Unwound. Basically, it sounds like 90's style "emo" or whatever.
Recorded by Matt Doctor at the Old Fire House Teen Center.

Here's a video of one of the songs from this, played at Food Fight! in Portland.




download it!

also, I have a few copies left for sale at my place, Healthy Times Fun Club, if anyone is interested.

Der Trasch - Apocalyptic, Biatch!

A few years back, I was in a band called Der Trasch. We played a lot of parties and basement shows. One time I played drums so hard I puked. A particularly memorable show we played was with Japanther at the SS Marie Antoinette, where there was crowd surfing and people jumping (and toppling into my drums) off the PA, and after we played everyone too tired to dance to Japanther.

This was probably the silliest band I've ever been in, even sillier than my high school pop-punk band that had a song about pepperoni pizza. We played synthy no-wave dance punk that would go quickly from dance beats to metal breakdowns, with singer Naomi singing/rapping/screaching about everything from slutty vampires to not wanting "that baguette going near [her] derriere', to a story about us being futuristic robots who committed the mortal sin of freak-dancing, and thus forever condemned to repeat that sin:

I am a disco robot! I dance and I can't stop!
You are a disco robot! You dance and you can't stop!
We are disco robots! We dance and we can't stop!

Recommended tunes: "I Got A Peg Leg And All That Shit," "Barry White Sings The Brown Note," and the last 7 minutes (!) of "Naomi, Origin."
Or maybe I shouldn't recommend it at all. Oh boy.

Our last show was the Capitol Hill Block Party 2006. Funny enough, my band Bow + Arrow's last show was the Capitol Hill Block Party 2009. Hmm.

Der Trasch, R.I.P. 2005-2006.


download

9-27-09

9-27-09
Originally uploaded by Asian Cajun

My new band, My Parade, is playing a show.

The Intima - Peril and Panic

I used to pride myself at keeping my ear to the street with finding out about new music, reading MRR or HeartattaCk or other zines to see what was going on or trying to make it out to almost every show I could and watching every band. It was kind of surprising when incredible bands in my own back yard would slip past my notice. This is exactly what happened with The Intima, and almost too late, despite existing in Olympia for a few years before I finally heard them.
I found out about The Intima thanks to my friend Scott, who helped put on shows at the Capitol Hill Art Center's temporary location in what's now a repair shop for luxury cars. Scott and I had been in the process of trying to start a band with my roommate Bryan that sounded like Unwould or Shotmaker, and Scott told me that I *had* to go check out The Intima at SHAC, being that they were a political art/hardcore band in the vein of Unwound but with themes about industrial collapse and Derrick Jensen-esque eco-anarchist social critique.

Thank goodness for Scott's recommendation, because they were indeed right up my alley. Like Unwound they had dissonant melodies and circular rhythms, but faster and with the addition of a violin. The vibe of the band sometimes reaches moments of Godspeed! You Black Emperor but without bothering to patiently create the dramatic build-ups, instead feeling immediately urgent and explosive with their presentation and message.

This is a band that definitely needs to be discovered and/or revisited. This band could be seen as a good example of taking a singular political theme (eco-anarchism, in this instance) and exploring several parallel ideas and concepts within that and creating soundscapes that match the message perfectly. Personal favorites on this album: Angular Walking (which was a favorite mix-tape choice for both me and Bryan), Blue Coffins, and From Exile.




The Intima - Peril and Panic
Buy at Zum here or here
Download!

1848 - demo + self titled 7"

Ok, another post about old Seattle emo.

I started going to shows at places other than teen centers (Ground Zero, Old Fire House) and rock clubs (RCKNDY, Auburn's Best) around 1997. One of the first that I went to was the Velvet Elvis, which was a collectively-run performance space in Pioneer Square. There was also Framework Productions, which put on shows at various art galleries and community centers. And of course, there was also shows at houses. Around 1997 and 98 is when I started to get really into hardcore, which thrived in Seattle at these non-traditional spaces, and it was in these environments that I started to get exposed to artists that approached their music from different paradigms and pushed the boundaries and limits of what was acceptable in art.
I became less and less interested in punk and rock music, and I became enraptured by two different paths - harsh noise, grind, and powerviolence on one side, and emo on the other. The former of these felt like an expression of cynicism and cathartic destruction - negative and brutal music that wholly rejected any appeals to mainstream standards and decency. The latter often expressed an outlook that engaged the audience like an academic lecture (for better or worse), either by confronting a specific issue, or by turning a critical eye to how we engage in the world as individuals or a community. This kind of approach is more akin to the (admittedly cliche) feminist credo of "the personal is political," which challenges us to demonstrate in our personal lives a microcosm of our hopes and desires for what we want to see in the broader world.

1848 is my friend and old roommate Matt's band, and it squarely fits into the aforementioned definition of "emo", with the band consisting of principled activists and anarchists who both worked on large-scale causes like the efforts to shutdown the WTO in 99' as well as bringing radical theories into their daily lives (veganism, polyamory, communal living, etc). They handed out photocopied lyric/song explanation sheets to their shows to help ensure that their music wasn't just passive entertainment, which kids like me would take home, read, and put up on their wall. It was bands like this that politically challenged me far more than bands like the Dead Kennedys - I was encouraged to not just have opinions about the world, but to actively and intentionally live out my beliefs and ideals with how I interact with myself, others, and the world at large.
I'm crossing my fingers that I might start seeing bands approach music in a similar way again. We're due for another Revolution Summer, for sure.



download!

New Bloods - Demo

Way back when, I used to live at this house called The Punkin House (old website, photos on flickr!). It was a somewhat venerable punk house that had a long history of notable basement shows, and I really really loved living there. Anyway, while I was living there, I also worked at Wayward Cafe, making homemade soymilk and washing dishes and doing food prep, and eating a bunch of amazing vegan food. I had a nice thing going back then, hosting a few shows every week and always bringing bands who stayed over to come and hang out at the restaurant, or sometimes I'd meet people at Wayward and they'd play at the PH.
However, all good things have endings, and we got notification that Ye Olde Punkin House was to be sold and we'd be kicked out. It was during these last few sad months that I was working at Wayward and one of my coworkers told me to introduce myself to two nice women hanging out in the restaurant who were looking for a show in the near future. These women were Adee and Osa, who had just moved up from New Orleans to Portland and started a band called The New Bloods. We chilled for a bit, but I couldn't immediately help them with a show because of the PH closing. However, I just started organizing a house-show festival with some friends in the newly collectivized SeattleDIY group, and told them that they could play Carousel Festival. Months later they played, along with another band we booked called The Vonneguts, and it was an incredible show, good times had by all, and shortly after the New Bloods toured with their new friends in The Vonneguts, and my new band (at the time) Bow + Arrow played with New Bloods a few times too, then they got all sorts of hype and ended up on the cover of Maximum Rock & Roll and got signed to Kill Rock Stars.
Sadly, they're broken up now... but it was sweet while it lasted. They were one of my favorite band, and more than just a little bit of an inspiration for my new band My Parade. I haven't talked to any of them since they played in Seattle last, but hopefully they're all doing well.

Here's their demo, released just in time for that Carousel Festival show they played (Summer 06 I think).

New Bloods - Demo 06!
Buy their record and 7" at Kill Rock Stars

Christopher Robin 7"

A long time ago a friend told me about a mix-tape competition he was having with a buddy of his. It wasn't just any mix-tape competition... it was an EMO mixtape competition. They had an point-scoring system, with points going towards cool old-school emo cliches like dueling male/female vocals, silk-screened record covers, poorly recorded, bands that could barely play their instruments, being able to list if people are ex-members of ____ band (usually from a straight edge hardcore band), or lyric inserts with over-explanation of song meanings. My friend told me that his A-card was when he pulled out his Christopher Robin 7". It's truly a good one - emo in the vein of Indian Summer or In/Humanity, not poppy stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate or Cap'n Jazz - chaotic but not formless, clearly full of passion but not saccharine or overdramatic (if you like that kind of emo, check out Bob Tilton), and yep it's poorly recorded.
I gotta say, I love this record. Christopher Robin was a Seattle band that played a bunch of house shows, and released only this 7" and one song on a compilation (Universal Choking Sign comp on Excursion Records).


enjoy, buddies.
download: http://www.mediafire.com/?izw0wn2yjid

J Church - Camels, Spilled Corona, and the Sound Of Mariachi Bands

So I decided to blog about some of my favorite albums, and put them up for download (or at least, the ones that are ridiculously hard to find, or are out of print)

The first album I want to write about is one of the first records I ever bought, and one of my favorites to this day.
In 1994 or 1995, I saw a east-side pop punk band whose bass player had a couple stickers on his bass, and one of those stickers was J Church. A little while later I went to Cellophane Square in Bellevue (way back when it was in the mall) and found a J Church record - a picture-disk version of Camels, Spilled Corona, and the Sound of Mariachi Bands. I also bought a Husker Du record (Candy Apple Gray), but I hardly ever listened to it because I couldn't bear to take the J Church record of the record player that I inherited from my grandma.

This record is a compilation of their early 7"s, though it feels as cohesive as any other album I own. All the songs could definitely be considered "pop punk" but stands apart from most others in that genre - there's no whiny vocals, the songs aren't lamentation about girls, it's not something that blathers on about pogo-ing, or getting drunk, or silly shit like bananas... rather the songs are as political as you might expect from any hardcore band of that era. In fact, singer/guitarist Lance Hahn had been a long time anarchist and vegan, and wrote incredibly catchy and thought-provoking songs for the entire 15 years of J Church's existence.

This is one of the few albums that I've memorized most of the lyrics to, and they periodically pop up in my head to this day. Just a few months ago I was hanging out in San Francisco, walking in the rain with soggy feet in the Mission district, and I start singing the song November: "As the rain falls hard it fills the cracks on Mission Street, There's a hole in my shoe and it’s letting water soak my feet."

The song Kathi especially influenced me over the years - a song about having a conversation with a friend about vegetarianism, specifically about hearing meat-eating friends' opinions and trying to listen and be respectful, but at the same time not compromising deeply held values and not being passive with your most important beliefs. And as a bonus, it has Blake Schwartzenbach from Jawbreaker singing backup vocals.

Kathi tells me that she doesn't care and its not as if she's dumb or unaware,
Kathi tells me there's no reason why but she doesn't feel that eating meat applies,
Kathi says she doesn't understand why I do not want to eat at Burger King

And I try (I try), I can see that it makes no sense,
'Cause I try (I try), I can see the difference,
And it's something that I felt in side that will remain there,
Something that I can't hide

Kathi tells me everything must die but I don't get what she implies,
I think about the things she has to say all the time, I don't see how she can close her eyes,
'Cause it makes me sick to think of every cage and it makes me sick to think of life wasting away

And I try (I try), I can see that it makes no sense,
'Cause I try (I try), I can see her innocence,
And it's something that I felt inside that will remain there,
Something that I can't hide

Kathi says a lot of things but it all has that familiar ring,
Kathi says a lot of things and it all has that familiar ring

Lance Hahn passed away in late 2007 of complications with kidney disease. Even though I've been such a big fan of J Church for all these years, I only got to see them once, when they played at Second Ave Pizza with Storm the Tower in 2003. They played some of my favorite songs from this album, and it was one of my top-10 shows of all time. When I talked to Lance, he was incredibly nice and had awesome and encouraging things to say. He'll be missed.





These mp3s are all ripped straight from my record. There might be a skip or two - but hey, it's an old copy that got a lot of wear. Adds character.
J Church - Camels, Spilled Corona, and the Sound of Mariachi Bands <- download! http://www.interpunk.com/item.cfm?Item=999& <- buy!

new tattoo!

new tattoo!
Originally uploaded by heartmurmur

I got a new tattoo today. It's my first in like 2 years or something. I think this is the most impulsive tattoo I have. It's in reference to the old HXC slogan, "flex your head," which is a sentiment that I've always liked, but I think it falls a little short. We shouldn't just be smart, we should be compassionate.