LITURGY Rey Pila ADVAETA
Vol. 2 Issue 4
VOL. 2 ISSUE 4
CONTENTS
TEAM EDITOR IN CHIEF
ASSISTANT EDITOR
DANNY KRUG
ART
JAKE SAUNDERS
2 DANIEL GREER PHOTOGRAPHY
DANNY KRUG
LOGO DESIGN
NICOLE CODY
6 VARIOUS ARTISTS: COLLAGE WORK CURATED BY DANIEL GREER
MUSIC WRITERS
JACKIE NEUDORF
10 SIC TIC
DEREK HAWKINS
12 ADVAETA
DANNY KRUG
14 REY PILA
SAM STOELTJE
18 LITURGY
EXTRAS 20 SOME PICTURES 21 SOME ALBUMS
CONTACT info@gigawattsmedia.com facebook.com/gigawattsmag instagram @gigwattsmedia
EDITOR S LETTER Something that’s been on my mind and the minds of many others lately is streaming. Fair pay for plays vs. the exposure. It can bring up further questions of pay vs. exposure, a battle that many smaller bands have to face on a daily basis. As you know we run a small label under this Gigawatts banner, one of our releases, BIG MUFF RADIO’s Life Is Easy, is on Spotify, Rdio and all those other streaming services. Recently we got the data on BMR’s Spotify streams and it came out to $0.0057 cents per play. That’s obviously not a lot of money per play, but let’s put it into perspective. We could stream it on Bandcamp and make nothing per stream, figure out how to get into Soundcloud’s new monetization program and also make next to nothing, sell it on iTunes or Amazon or a similar digital retailer and make some cash but only from the few people that are willing to throw down $4.99 for the record. In my opinion it all comes down to what the artist or their team want from the release. With the BIG MUFF RADIO release, everyone involved from us to the MUFF man are most concerned with people hearing the music, and that should be the concern of most artists at that level. Who care’s if you’re making a fraction of a penny every time a person listens to your song when the trade-off is that anyone can discover your songs for free? Music is a business and it will always be treated as such in my mind (creativity and business are not mutually exclu-
sive), but some business decisions can yield positive results in the long run even if they also yield negative cash flow in the short term. Is it ridiculous that we have people like Jay Z and Daft Punk standing on a stage complaining about not making enough money from streams? Absolutely. While all artists would obviously benefit from a fair pay system on streaming, the artists that can benefit most are not the gigantic ones or the tiny ones. The artists that can benefit most are artists in between that zone, like Liturgy, the band on our cover. They’re able to tour and play good shows that likely result in decent to good pay, they have a following that’s solid but could always benefit from a larger following. They’re not itching to be discovered and they also aren’t spending their free time floating in an infinity pool in the Hollywood Hills. If a band like Liturgy could receive even $1 every time their album is streamed in full, we would see more full time musicians in our society and as a result we would likely see even more music from the artists we love. That said, if you are a smaller artist looking to get people to hear your music, put it on Spotify, put it on Bandcamp, put it on Soundcloud. More streams will only lead to more people at your shows and in time could lead to a more sustainable living as an artist while this whole streaming thing gets sorted out. --Danny
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DANIEL
GREER
Daniel Greer returns to the pages of Gigawatts, this time with a selection of his recent collage work. Many issues ago we featured Greer’s photography which included some digital collage elements. For the past few months, Greer has been working in the medium of paper collage, slicing up images he finds in magazines with an exacto knife and reassembling them into new, eye catching imagery. His work comments quite a bit on the modern world of fashion, politics and celebrity often blending a mixture of those elements. His strength lies knowing when to use subtlety and also not being afraid to bash the viewer over the head with meaning or imagery if needed. Some images could seemingly be glossed over if they were inserted into the pages of the right magazine, mixed in with the pages and pages of advertisements that people flip through in these publications.
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VARIOUS ARTISTS:
COLLAGE WORK CURATED BY DANIEL GREER
KIERAN MADDEN ERI KING
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ZOE¨ LIGON
MIKE DESUTTER
RICHARD VERGEZ
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SAJJAD WORKS
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LINZI SILVERMAN
MICHAEL TUNK
JAY RIGGIO
THE HUMAN WRECKAGE
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SIC TIC
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When I saw Sic Tic live for the reinvention for Rathbone. He’d "Finally I got really antsy," he first time earlier this year, the spent about three years playing said. "And I was like, shit, I need with Swanson in an upbeat garage trio called Photon Dynamo And The Shiny Pieces, which was based in Brooklyn. After an amicable breakup, Swanson moved to Texas and Rathbone turned inward, taking some time off to focus on new material. He casted a wide net, testing out different sonic textures and combinations of instruments. "I started, like, six different bands over the course of three years," he recalled. "I was experimenting with Sic Tic is subtle like that. Even all these sounds. I had for a while when the trio is going full-bore, a guitar, sax and drums trio. And there’s a precision and intricacy I had a bigger group with a bunch in their music that makes them of horns and stuff." utterly satisfying to listen to. On the surface, they play a moody, During that time, Rathbone met rhythm-driven indie pop that Nelson at a cafe across the street calls up some of the Dismember- from his apartment, and the two ment Plan’s more contained mo- developed a relationship. She latments. But there’s always some- er joined him in some recording thing deeper going on in their sessions he’d booked at The Fort, songs that defies expectations where he wrote and recorded the — an unusual male-female vocal dancey, wistful track "Colors," harmony, a surprisingly com- one of two singles Sic Tic has up plex guitar line sitting low in the on SoundCloud. mix, an explosion of drums that They had something good, but it catches you off guard. didn’t immediately click for RathGuitarist Frank Rathbone, bass- bone. "I’ll go through periods of ist Jenna Nelson, and drummer saying, fuck this, I give up, I quit," John Swanson got together last he said. "When originally working summer and started performing on this material, the plan was to as Sic Tic in the early fall. Rath- never show it to anybody. It was bone takes on most of the vocal very selfish." singer was using this odd delay on his guitar that didn’t sound like your typical effects pedal. It was changing within one of the songs, sometimes up front, sometimes just barely noticeable above the rhythm. I’d never heard anything quite like it. Toward the end of their set, I moved up to see what is was creating those tones. Turned out there were no effects pedals at all — it was just the way he was playing.
duties, but everyone gets a microphone when they’re on stage. The three of them share a second floor apartment across from the elevated M train tracks in Bushwick, and I talked with them in their living room over some coffee on a recent sunny afternoon.
a band."
He called up John in Texas and told him about his new project. The idea, he said, was to create an outfit that was tighter and more single-minded than what they’d done in the past — and hopefully put it all under one roof. "He called and he was like, ‘I got this thing going, and my roommate’s moving out,’" John said. "And then I called the next day and I was like, ‘I got a plane ticket.’ The stars just aligned." Despite the time apart, Rathbone and Swanson say they had no trouble revisiting that things that had made them great musical partners in the past. And Nelson, a trained viola player, has an ear for punchy, clever basslines. Overall, the members of Sic Tic approach their music with a type of maturity that’s earned through a lot of trial and error. They seem far more interested in carefully crafting their songs and fine-tuning their live performance than churning out new material just for the sake of it. If anything, patience is the band’s guiding force.
"There’s no rush," Rathbone said. "We’ve done that before, rushed through things, and I’d rather "But everybody loved it," Nelson not. I’d rather let it incubate." chimed in. "Everybody hoped you’d show people. Frank’s music was my favorite music that I was hearing at the time." words by derek hawkins
It took a few months of stewing, but eventually something Sic Tic’s music is largely the changed that gave Rathbone a product of a period of musical new lease on the songs and he experimentation and general rented a studio to rehearse in.
photography by alex norelli
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ADVAETA
I meet with ADVAETA—a "dia- shows there. We’re nestled in a moment when you first met and mondkrust" outfit comprised far-off corner, the three of them it all fell into place. But in realiof guitarists Amanda Salane and Sara Fantry, and Lani Combier-Kapel on drums—in midMarch, on the eve of an upcoming tour in the South, and a month away from the release of their debut album, Death and the Internet. "We recorded the album in that room right over there." Lani’s pointing to a space behind me in a back room of Silent Barn, the Bushwick cooperative and "alt-arts mecca" that’s virtually a second home to the girls of ADVAETA, who have both played and booked countless 12
perched on a futon mattress on the ground. There’s detritus everywhere—the mangled remains of incomplete drum kits, stacks of old show posters, piles of discarded furniture, and recording equipment. The trio coalesced in 2008, though Amanda and Sara were friends prior to the band forming, and Sara and Lani went to the same high school.
ty our relationships are defined along the way. The magic of us all coming together was cool, but the magic of us all staying together–" Amanda interjects: "The thing is, we just decided to stay together. So many bands break up. When we first started, we were a completely different band. We started as novice musicians, had another member... It was a totally different sound."
When I probe further into ADVAETA’s origin story, Sara is quick to retort that when constructing any relationship narrative, it’s Yet if ADVAETA has seen various easy to romanticize "that kismet incarnations, one thing has re-
mained constant—their unrelenting commitment to playing live shows. Over the course of their seven years together, the trio has proven themselves stalwarts of the Brooklyn DIY scene, performing at spaces that run the gamut from metal hub Saint Vitus and indie venue Shea Stadium, to now-defunct Death by Audio and 285 Kent. While the band shows no sign of stopping any time soon, their forthcoming album deals squarely with endings—that of loves gone and past (and for one member, the recent deaths of loved ones). "It’s a breakup album," Amanda tells me. "‘Your New Life In Pictures’—use your imagination." That song touches on the other theme referenced by the album’s title: love in the age of the Internet. The epigram "forgive and forget" is harder to actualize when an old flame’s goings-on are incessantly chronicled, just a click or a scroll away, in hi-res. But, the girls defy dejection. Sara avows, "None of the breakup songs are depressive. I think we wrote them because we needed a way to reflect on the lessons we’d taken away from those relationships." For Amanda, for whom "the true beauty of making art [lies in] its ability to serve as a conduit for self-expression," music is ultimately a form of catharsis: "The album incorporates a whole spectrum of emotion, anger in-
cluded. We’re allowed to express anger. We don’t have to be repressed—too many people are repressed." Though anger is certainly one of the presiding moods of Death and the Internet, the range of feeling expressed on the album is as complex as the multi-layered harmonies and heavy reverb that define ADVAETA’s sound—heartfelt and at times aching with vulnerability, at others quaking with defiance. Nowhere is this range better exemplified than on the track "Hazel Blue Eyes," in which all three members of the band ooh and ahh amongst a tangle of lyrics, thundering drums, and fuzzy guitar licks. At the song’s height, the rebuke "Now you’ll know with all your right places" reverberates in the chorus, as the driving lines "See with your eyes out, see with your mind out" emerge from the murk, and yet another distant voice consoles, "You’ll move on." There is rarely a song on the album where all three members aren’t singing, a deliberate arrangement that reflects a crucial part of ADVAETA’s ethos, which, as Sara explains, is staunchly egalitarian: "We’re all three totally equal, collaborative parts of this project. This band is like a womb for us, we’re like family. It’s very important to us that we’re each appreciated for our own unique voices." Unfortunately, the system of mutual support ADVAETA has cultivated over the years is in part necessitated by a music scene that is far from accommodating.
Amanda lays it bare: "Women are not encouraged to play music." "Before female bands were prevalent," Sara adds, "sound guys treated us really badly. People would try to adjust our amps for us, or—," "Sound guys still treat us badly," Amanda counters. Even before the three joined forces, she continues, "We were always told to be front women...When I was young and wanted to learn guitar, people expected me to play acoustic—I wanted to play electric guitar, but everybody just told me to be a front woman. ‘Oh no, I’ll play guitar for your band, you just sing, just sing and look hot.’" The refrain is all too familiar for Lani, who was informed growing up that "playing drums was a ‘man thing.’" "The fact that female musicians right now have to push through so many boundaries tells me there’s a lot more work to be done." And ADVAETA is poised for revolt. In a post to the band’s Facebook page in early March, the declaration—part affirmation, all conviction—rang clear: "One day the title ‘all female band’ will be redundant. Pretty sure this generation’s gonna make that happen." Death and the Internet comes out April 28 via Fire Talk. The release show is scheduled for May 2 at Palisades. words by jackie neudorf photography by danny krug
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REY PILA 14
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When the typical American Rey Pila was born as the solo proj- So often modern bands rely on thinks of Mexico they might ect of Solórzano and has since the sounds of past decades too think of beaches, tacos, margaritas or even spring break. Most people wouldn’t associate Mexico with the types of music that we often enjoy here in Brooklyn. You wouldn’t expect to venture down to Mexico City and discover an 80s influenced synth rock band like Rey Pila. "The "scene" is of course smaller than the Brooklyn one, but it’s definitely been growing a lot in the last few years. We have been playing in bands for several years, and have seen it grow. Mexico City is now possibly the top destination for bands in all of Latin America, with new venues, festivals and fans blooming every year," says Diego Solórzano. In the Brooklyn scene, trying to gain exposure can sometimes feel like banging your head against a wall, it’s easy to look at places like Boston or Philly and think people have an easier time of it there, same could be said for Mexico City. However, Rey Pila’s first hand experience in Mexico City says it might just be hard everywhere,"I Think it’s hard to get attention in general... there’s an enormous amount of new music coming out every single day, everyone is screaming for attention all the time! We’ve been active in Mexico for a longer time than internationally, so we have a larger fanbase, right now, in Mexico, but it’s great to get new ears from all over the world, our international audience has been growing a lot in the last few months," says Solórzano.
evolved into a fully collaborative four piece band. "It was a seamless evolution from solo project to band...we had been playing together live since it was a solo project, so it was very natural to become a band, where we all collaborate in not only the songwriting, but all other aspects of the band," he says. Their sophomore record, The Future Sugar, out on May 5th through Cult Records. The new album builds upon the band’s first, self-titled album released in 2009 by taking their already catchy dance-punk type sound and going even harder. The band brought in producer Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear) to work on their new album. The result is a gigantic anthemic feel to the new tracks that utilizes 80s style synth sounds, modern electro sounds and booming rock elements to create something both familiar and fresh. "We definitely wanted a bigger sound for these new songs. That’s one of the reasons we contacted Chris, besides he is amazing with synths. We knew we had a good batch of songs and hooks, we really worked at them since the demos. We had the demos very well developed before we went into the studio, it’s one of the reasons Chris got interested in the project, and the studio process was mainly trying to get a bigger and better sound in general," says Solórzano.
heavily resulting in music that feels too derivative or recycled. That’s not to say a band can’t use vintage sounds while making it their own. Rey Pila’s combination of vintage sound with modern thinking keeps them from falling down the rabbit hole and just sounding like 2015’s New Order or Tears For Fears. " We definitely have influences from 70s and 80s bands, but also listen to a lot of new music. We don’t set out to sound like anything in particular. When we write the songs we always want to add that contemporary/futuristic touch, if we only wanted to sound like a tribute band it’d be boring for us," says Solórzano. Their blending of sounds has resulted in Rey Pila touring with a variety of acts as well including Albert Hammond Jr. and Interpol. Starting May 5th, Rey Pila heads out on tour with The Rentals. Listening to the new album, it’s easy to see how the band can fit in with the darker sounds of Interpol while also appealing to The Rentals’ crowd. Rey Pila’s new album The Future Sugar is out May 5th on Cult Records and you can catch them live on May 22 at Music Hall of Williamsburg.
words by danny krug photography by sergio granados
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A Sort of Communion
with Liturgy’s
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix Giambattista Vico’s The New Science (1725) describes a cyclical history of civilization in which human society passes through three ages: the divine, the heroic and the human. Engaging with Liturgy’s latest record, The Ark Work, I find that its greatest strength is its unique collage of images and forms drawn from (as Vico would have it) such disparate ages. In the opening passage of "Vitriol," Hunter Hunt-Hendrix chants,
cept album": "I was working on a mythopoeia during the time I was writing [it] [...] but we’ve never really figured out how they are connected – though the song titles come from the mythopoeia." For those who aren’t familiar, "mythopoeia" signifies the fabrication of a new or invented mythology. Within Vico’s paradigm, the mythopoetic urge hearkens to the "divine age"; think the pre-classical past, in which polytheistic belief systems were cooked up through millennia of Because soon the flowers will close oral storytelling traditions. Usup and sleep peacefully ing figures of metaphor, ancient Because soon the ADHD kids will qui- societies explained their worlds et down respectfully and realities through elaborate Because soon the tractors will drive narratives of gods and spirits. themselves on orderly hills Because soon the pineal eye the pi- It is, of course, an incredible act neal eye a penny a lie selah selah (1) of hubris for a modern person to invent a mythology, but we He brings together here the accept such blasphemy in the markedly liturgical figure of the context of artistic production anaphora ("Because soon...Be- (everything from Tolkien to Marcause soon") with contemporary vel Comics) because we know images of "ADHD kids" and robot- the mythopoeia is "merely for ic tractors, like a schizophrenic entertainment." The subtext, or street preacher with a degree in perhaps, counter-text of The Ark media studies. (2) Work is a revelation of the fundamentally apocalyptic nature of In an email conversation with the drive to be entertained by new H-H, I asked him if The Ark Work myths. Even as H-H imagines Kel could be described as a "con- Valhaal as a reclusive deity living
"in a constellation of gears divided / partitioned eternally by horizons," the incongruous spasm of "card-carrying Laundromat Auto Zone" punctures this mythological veneer, forcing recognition of the mundaneness of human life. The distraction of the myth is fractured, our attention divided between entertainment and reality. †††
"It would be impossible to put enough underscores under the sentence, ‘We are not a metal band,’" H-H insists, and while Liturgy’s first two LPs at least sounded pretty consistently something like black metal, it is clear with The Ark Work that any generic affiliations have been unequivocally dropped. This means that yes, there is glitching, and yes, there are bagpipes. The textural effect is one of constant disorientation, of the digital and analog at war à la Death Grips, and of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk-level totality. Following on the inherent grandiosity of the mythopoeia, The Ark Work produces a (fictive) world of itself, while at the same time re-producing our own contra17
dictory (real) world; it is a representational ouroboros, a kind of autophagic narrative, like Goya’s Cronus devouring his children. What do we make of the vocals? Here H-H appropriates the syncopations of the hip-hop emcee (3), together (remarkably, inexplicably) with those of Judeo-Christian "psalm tone singing." Although perhaps the integration is not as radical as it first appears; after all, the functions of the emcee and the cantor are not so different in their relationship to a responsive audience. These are, originally, oral traditions predating the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (i.e., the recording studio), and H-H deploys them together to assert the vitality and omnipresence of the pre-modern, however much we might, as contemporary Americans, insist on seeing ourselves as without history and territory. In our dialogue, I attempted to theorize this persistent diachronic recombination using the fashionable critical terms of post-colonial discourse ("hybridize," "appropriate"), but H-H characteristically directed my attention to more unexpected places. "These days I think of it more as alchemy, because I’m less into Deleuze and more into hermeticism: arriving at a new synthetic unity by finding points of resonance between disparate styles. [emphasis mine]" In one word, "alchemy" handily indexes the many 18
valences of The Ark Work’s craft and cosmology. The alchemist plays with the materials at hand (instruments, drum machines, the human voice) and, through arcane/magical processes, a transcendent substance comes into being. H-H is interested in the alchemist or magician as archetype, and I think The Ark Work could perhaps be considered as fundamentally a meditation upon the same. (For wasn’t Moses in many respects a kind of allegorical alchemist, inspired by divine knowledge to manufacture that-which-couldn’t-exist?) ††† I’m reading now, on Rolling Stone’s website, the "Coachella Tour Diary" of Steely Dan singer Donald Fagen; in his era, like H-H, a polarizing provocateur in the discourse of "taste." Dismayed by the lack of originality exhibited by his Coachella cohort, Fagen writes, Maybe something awesome will turn up. Or not. As the Empire declines, so does culture, literacy, and almost everything else. Ironically, high technology, once thought to be the savior of civilization, has become our Alaric the First, our barbarian invasion. Increasingly, it looks like life in the future will be nasty, brutish and long. [emphasis his] Is the world getting better or worse? Are the "barbarians" at our borders? Are they in our heads? If
Fagen is correct that our human epoch (in which popular democracy reigns and irony is the chief mode of representation) is on the verge of collapse, then we should prepare for collapse into the divine. (4) The Ark Work gestures to a world in which the divine coincides or cohabitates with the human, which may then mean a dissolution of humanity itself, or at the least a reconceiving of the "human" as identifier. The "barbarian invasion," then, signified by an emerging multiplicity of (virtual) worlds, might not really herald a "decline" at all, but rather an ascension. I asked H-H about "the role of religion in Liturgy’s concept or aesthetic," and his reply was anomalously terse: "The short answer is that I am interested in the power of music to activate a transcendental state of consciousness." To revisit the passage, cited earlier, from "Vitriol": "Because soon the pineal eye the pineal eye a penny a lie selah selah." The sentiment is fragmented, but evokes the notion of a simultaneous, or somehow causally related, spiritual awakening on the one hand, and on the other, the end of capitalism. (5) If we take H-H at his word, the time has come to imagine new worlds, and realize old prophecies.
words by sam stoeltje photography by danny krug
(1) From Wikipedia, "Selah": "The Psalms were sung accompanied by musical instruments and there are references to this in many chapters. Thirty-one of the thirty-nine psalms with the caption ‘To the choir-master’ include the word selah. Selah notes a break in the song and as such is similar in purpose to Amen in that it stresses the importance of the preceding passage. Alternatively, selah may mean ‘forever,’ as it does in some places in the liturgy (notably the second to last blessing of the Amidah)." (2) If you are struck by the degree to which this article thus far has resembled academic writing in tone (footnotes and whatnot), rather than the typical knowing/ironic affect we expect of music journalism (characteristic of what Vico would call our human epoch), it is no accident. The projects of Liturgy, and particularly The Ark Work, invite and encourage sustained critical attention by virtue of their meta-textual, even palimpsestic density, and so I’ll oblige with the, I believe, requisite care and sincerity. (3) Specifically, as he has emphasized before, the "triplet flow" of Three 6 Mafia, and we may recall the much-noted inheritance of Afro-Cuban folk style suffusing the American hip-hop idiom. How right Q-Tip was in telling his father, "Don’t you know that things go in cycles?" (4) Free association on "collapse": Apocalypse, TEOTWAWKI, the singularity, depersonalization, ego death. (5) The anarcho-vibe is recapitulated later in the song, in case you think I’m reaching: "Soon money will be paper and success will be a crime." 19
some photos shows, parties, and other weird experiences
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STUFF WE’RE LISTENING TO AND THINK YOU’LL DIG
Wand - Golem
Ava Luna - Infinite House
JULY 24-26
FESTIVAL 2015