"Steel Palm Tree"

I make music. Here's a song I made recently.

For the past two years, I've written and recorded songs. I pull inspiration from a lot of different places, though the most glaringly obvious are industrial, noise and math genres. Some of the bands I've been pulling a lot from recently include Craw, Dazzling Killmen, Zeni Geva, Suicide and Xaddax.

The first year of production was categorized mainly be experimentation and minimal skill whatsoever. I'd yet to pick up a guitar and threw myself directly into composition without any basis. It was still lots of fun, however, even despite the lack of meaningful output.

The summer of 2023 was when I actually started to make "songs." That's in quotation marks due to how primitive the process and results were, fundamentally being a fuzzed out Big Black knockoff with ideas from Revolting Cocks and the first Swans record. I'd played the guitar for like, six months, and had the rhythm of a dead fish. Even still, I wanted to record, so that's exactly what I did. Here's the results of that little experiment.

"En-Dash"

This song's called "En-Dash". It's named after the punctuation mark, sorta a play on words since there's one in the title. I made around six or seven songs like these between June and July. This one's the second. Revco was the main inspiration here.

Still on the topic of that summer, the process became slightly better and faster every time I made something new, though this right here was pretty much the extent of it, even still. In hindsight, most of the songs sounded pretty much the same: way too much distortion, untuned guitars, and me shout-rapping.

Funny story about that guitar part, my guitar (a Squier Stratocaster) wasn't set up at the time and I really just beat the shit out of it. I played with these really heavy copper picks and had no idea how to play with my wrist. So I put my whole arm into it and tried to play at ridiculous tempos. Strings would break all the time, and if one broke while I was recording, I would just power through without it. Never mind actually tuning my guitar, either. I might've tuned it once a week and didn't give a shit afterwards.

Assuming I had all six strings and everything was in tune, what I was trying to play was bizarre considering the style I was reaching for. The guitar was still this mystical thing to me. I had no idea how the fretboard was layed out or even how to play power chords. So what'd I do?

I learned a bunch of obtuse blues chords. Mainly inspired by Larissa Strickland of Laughing Hyenas, I just read up on a bunch of blues and jazz voicings. I only remember a handful of these, mainly because I could hardly play them. Even still, I tried, and it translated in the form of a fizzy, piercing slab of guitar.

About the guitar tone, I played through a Vox Pioneer 10 at the time, this screeching little practice amp that would feed back really hard if you turned the gain all the way up. So that's exactly what I did. I went through a pretty heavy Sonic Youth phase a few months before all this, which--along with Big Black--created a lot of my guitar sound; except for the fact that everything I did was way worse.

I think this'll be the last thing I mention on this specific subject. All the lyrics I wrote over that summer were very inspired by Big Black. I wrote mainly about real violence, the media, and life in the middle of nowhere, often very sensationalistically and without much of substance to actually say. I really wanted to be the next Steve Albini.

I should preface all of this by saying I turned seventeen that July. I think that says a handful of different things, though I don't feel at liberty to put too much judgment on myself. It made sense; I played the cards I was given to the best of my ability. The results are questionable to who I am now, but they weren't made for that person.

"Erotic Grotesque Nonsense"

Here's another. For reference, mixing was very abstract to me at the time (I've gotten a lot better, but still not incredible), and mastering was a total unknown. I think one of the funniest things about this song are the drums. I had no idea how a drum set worked. I didn't know a snare from a hole in the ground, hence why I used a snare sample for the entire percussion section. I'd fed it through the same amp I used for my guitar, with about as much distortion as my guitar.

The voice sample is from the movie Pinocchio 964, this cyberpunk, Japanese art film from the 90s. Think Rubber's Lover, Tetsuo: the Iron Man, Burst City, etc. Funnily enough, this style of sampling was actually most informed by Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest, my pilgrimage into the world of hip-hop happening alongside all of this.