"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 various places, though the most 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.

My first year of production was categorized by experimentation and minimal skill. I'd yet to pick up an instrument and began writing songs without any musical knowledge.

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

"En-Dash"

This song's called "En-Dash". It's named after the punctuation mark, there being one in the title. I made around six or seven songs like this between June and July, this being 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 about the extent of it. In hindsight, most of the songs sounded very similar: too much distortion, untuned guitars, and angsty shouting.

Funny story about the guitars, my guitar (a Squier Stratocaster) wasn't set up at the time and I just beat the shit out of it. I played with heavy copper picks and didn't know how to use my wrist, instead putting my entire arm into it and trying to play at really fast speeds. Strings broke constantly, and if one broke while recording, I didn't stop to replace it. Never mind actually tuning my guitar, either. I might've tuned it once a week and didn't care afterwards.

Assuming I had all six strings and everything was in tune, what I was trying to play was strange 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. But for some reason, I decided to learn a bunch of complicated blues chords rather than take any conventional route.

Mainly inspired by Larissa Strickland of Laughing Hyenas, I 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. I don't even listen to much blues, either.

About the guitar tone, I played through a Vox Pioneer 10 at the time, this little practice amp that would feed back really hard if you turned the gain all the way up; and that's exactly what I did all the time. 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.

Also, 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 sensationalistically and without much of substance to say. I was trying to be my childhood hero Steve Albini.

I should preface this by saying I turned seventeen that July. As a consequence, I don't feel at liberty to put too much judgment on myself. This music makes sense for that moment. The results are questionable in hindsight, but I believe they also informed the direction I went.

Don't forget your roots, I suppose.

"Erotic Grotesque Nonsense"

Here's another. For reference, I knew little about mixing and nothing about mastering. I think one of the funniest things about this song is the drums. I also knew little about how a drum set worked, and therefore didn't question using one snare sample for the entire percussion section. I'd also fed it through the same amp I used for my guitar, with about as much distortion as my guitar. Now, it kinda reminds me of something like HYPER GAL or Boris but also nothing like either of these bands.

The voice sample is from the movie Pinocchio 964, this 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 inspired by Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest, my pilgrimage into the world of hip-hop happening alongside all of this.