1
april-
i'm finally not crying about ozzy osbourne for
maybe the first day since I heard the news.
i can finally hear a song without getting...y'know....
i think everyone is a
little bit surprised with how much that affected them
emotionally. it just got me thinking about that higher chain reaction of Sabbath and who they influenced.
it took me much longer to get into the solo stuff. i think i got into that from more of an engineering perspective.
anyone maybe into, like, punk or rock and stuff, you're
always gonna like some shitty, crappy takes. you're like, 'that sounds good', and you don't really know why. i think i just kind of grew to appreciate him. at the time, i was like "Why did they take this rock star guy and produce him like a pop star?"
But now I'm like, 'Oh, wait, they took this rock star guy
and produced him to BE a pop star.'
giles-
i was into sabbath but not his solo stuff at all. I was talking to Scott on my podcast (drummer
with Deaf Club, Glassing, Planet B) about my first love, the Ramones, and he was saying how he's tried but didn't
really get the big deal - kinda sounds like pop music -
but so many people had told him how influential they were that he was gonna take another listen....I mean, I can kinda see his point, as I really think
some of the studio
albums were a bit let down by the production
but I'll never hear a word against them! They were INCREDIBLE live. A literal relentless wall of sound.
april-
yeah, i've heard Scott say that too. maybe they don't give him
that excitement and I get that. i do love the Ramones though. i mean, for several years, I worked in digital distribution and archives for Warner Records.
We used to get live versions of stuff, or like stuff
released on CD
or other things before streaming came around. That was always a really cool thing to go through.
Like, I would get a bunch of live takes of bands like Amon Düül or The Fall.
I definitely think The Fall are cool.
I already liked these bands, but
when you hear the live take, you can really feel yourself in that live situation, you know.
2
april-
I think it's cool to have all
those versions of, like, Randy Rhoads on guitar and
stuff that you know that they've issued over time. It's the only way anyone can experience a part of it. It's just also so hard to make a record that is the same as the live performance.
There's always going to be some give and take.
giles-
I remember reading a review of Stress Positions' latest - Human Zoo - and somebody had written that the record doesn't quite capture the live show. I thought: it's never going to, or at least it's very hard to.
Personally, I like them to be different experiences.
april-
The studio record usually gets put out - or at least recorded - so much earlier in the process. It's like the songs, they might be barely written if you're a new band - and this is basically what happened to Guck -
they were all pretty new songs, and we recorded them
pretty quickly.
But now I feel like we're in the same situation: like, now, we've been playing for so long, and there's now an energy that we've learned to dial into with the audience, and sometimes we'll play the songs faster live as well. So there are just these certain shifts, some bigger than others, you know.
But then you have to ask, well, what am I going to do - hone in the live set to make it like the album, and then vice versa? Or am I going to, you know, hold back the album to make it more like the live set? And you do have to treat them like different things at different times, because that's what that stuff is - it's a performance at different times, you know. One of them gets called the album, or the recordings, and they were, like, packaged and such just as that. But, yeah, it's kinda hard.
I think the best people can do is the live album thing. And I'm not sure if I was even that into that until I started getting into archiving, or posting or releasing some of the demo
versions of the songs or, I dunno, just some other version. I'm thinking of Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory in particular. There's some major hooks and choruses that were not in some of the demos. And that kind of thing can be really interesting to see and , as an artist, that can be quite validating for your own work.
giles-
I'm quite into
the idea of releasing different versions, actually.
Remixes, demo, live, studio, tempo, longer intros, bits added, bits taken away.
I used to buy 12" version
of singles cos you'd often get an extended version of the single, plus an unreleased track. It's like the songs then become living things that don't stay the same, which is kind of what human life is about, isn't it? I dunno, maybe I'm talking shit...
april-
i quite like that idea of
ageing or like, oxidation, or anything that withstands time changes, you know. But that is the unfortunate thing. You could be a band that doesn't put music out for a long time, and you just keep grinding it out and grinding it out. And you have these two things. And some people really like that, you know. But I feel like bands can pull that off if they're like The Eagles.
During my archive work, I heard the Eagles a ton
and they do sound like the record live. They really do sound exactly the same, but they were so very coordinated.
They're not making experimental music, you know.
giles-
Which is interesting,
because that makes me then think of what a band like The Eagles were trying to achieve? It sounds like they were trying for perfectionism, right? This is one of the things that I'm interested in - about how the notion of perfectionism has dominated our lives, and it's bullshit, really.
april-
yeah, I mean if you think
about Prince who, in my mind, and a lot of people's minds, is perfection, you know, triple, quadruple threat musician. If you think about these different versions of the songs getting played different ways, he has a ton of songs that have been played different ways and that have evolved into their own thing. He's done live shows that he then went back and said, 'This is how we're going to arrange the album'. I don't know, there are a lot of different approaches to it.
-giles
so as we're speaking now,
the album is just about three weeks away. how're you feeling?
-april
I'm feeling really
excited that it will be out. I think every band or artist might feel like this at this point. It's like, there's so many things to do on the back end. We've been close to the scene enough, I guess, to get a lot of shows and play a lot locally. And so it did add some delays to getting the record out, but ultimately, it's been really fun. I feel like now we've set ourselves up for a pretty successful release, at least on a local level.
-giles
I thought, 'all right, I'm
going to give it a final listen today' before we spoke, and there's so much going on in it, you know. It really pulls you in different directions. Aside from the experimentational vibe of it, it gives off improvised vibes too, but it feels like there's an intuitive telepathy between you all which is kinda conducting the improvisation. You are all so locked in and..... together.
-april
I think it's cool that
you mentioned the improvised part, because a lot of parts of the album came out of, you know, improvising 1,000% and and then creating some sort of structure or guidelines that we all could be on the same page about. It's a maximalist sort of album from a musical perspective, you know, like everything from the synth tones to being really like punchy, the bass being all over the fretboard, the drum rhythms and the odd meters and everything. And the vocals being, like, just incredibly, screechy at times, or loud, so there are a lot of things about it that are maximalist, and then the only thing that's really honing it in is when it's time to form it into a song, really. So there are all these things that end up being brought over, but they don't get changed much. They just get incorporated somehow. It's a bit like stained glass, or any type of art you would make based on things left around. That was the way it came together. It is weird, because there are so many different genres that the band likes and that we are all into, and maybe our attention span is just like, 'Ah, that was cool. We had a metal core moment, but now we're gonna go back to the kraut rock beat or something', you know.
giles-
there's an exciting unpredictability or volatility with it. very similar to The Fall in the way that you would never quite know what direction the song was gonna go in. That makes it a really exciting listen.
april-
yeah, for me too, as a
vocalist, there are times where I can do vocal patterns, or just double up on what our drummer, Kyle, is doing. That kind of thing. Because, when you're screaming and doing a monophonic thing, you're not really using your voice very much, so it's cool to find other things that you can play into.
there's now an energy that we've learned to dial into with the audience
3
4
5
-giles
can we have a chat about the themes you're writing about?
-april
Yeah, I think I wanted to talk about how exhausted we are as a people and as a society, you know.
And at the time I was working on those lyrics, I was feeling really exhausted myself, you know, and not just with life and my life here, but just with the political situation here and the ongoing genocide in Gaza and all these things with Trump taking over office again, you know, that type of thing.
I just wanted to make lyrics for other exhausted people, to try and resonate
with people or maybe they could hear somebody screaming for them.
I was just waking up - especially when everything first started happening in the Middle East - feeling terrible every day.
I'm not even sure that I feel better now.
I just, and I guess I don't want to say I'm desensitized to it, but I definitely expect it now, you know, which is not
good. So, a lot of the lyrics are about that.
And then also, you know, I guess I get sized up a lot: I'm five foot two,
maybe five three, and I've been in a lot of situations where I just have to go with whatever the head guy says, and then next thing, you know, everything's screwed. And if there was just a little bit more room for discussion or something, a lot of things could be avoided.
Oh, and I felt that across the board, you know - it is also happening politically within our country. So, a lot of this
is just like how I feel being an American - disgusted and exhausted - and I think all of us feel like that. So, I wrote about being the guy that gets walked all over or I play the character in some of the lyrics of the guy who walks all over everybody.
-april
And it's in real time, and it's not just started now. Before that, it was happening with
the BLM Movement. It's like, as soon as a marginalized person gets harassed, abused or killed by a police officer, we all know about it moments later. That's traumatic for people in the community. It's traumatic for parents. I was a camp counselor at the time, and I was teaching kids how to 3D print, and every day, I changed the two machines and put different colors in there so they could print with different colored plastic. And I put silver in one day, and I had to, like, be a jerk, because they wanted to print, like, toy guns and stuff. And I'm in Texas doing this camp, and I'm horrified of them leaving with this, where a cop could use this as a reason to, you know........ It just adds so much stress when you think that you could just get brutalized by the police state at any given moment, really. And there's not just that, but now that Trump's back in office, you know, things like sending the national guard over to Los Angeles are just going to happen for no reason, without us asking for it. If it's not one thing, it's another, like living in Southern California during all of these ICE raids
-april
there's this area downtown called Santee Alley. A lot of people basically say it's
like a little slice of Mexico Downtown. There's a lot of shops and food and restaurants and bootleg rock and roll merch and all kinds of, honestly, awesome stuff. I love going there, but things have been shut down and gated up. I haven't checked in a while, but I try to go because it's near Little Tokyo and I do some grocery shopping there. Just seeing a place that used to be full of street vendors and children and families, all locked up, it's like Covid again, or it's like The Purge or something, you know what I mean? It was really dystopian and weird. I'd seen certain stories too, about certain people who work at certain busy Taco stands who are getting pulled away. And this affects the community on so many level levels. A lot of people rely on these places to get affordable food, they pay in cash and so on. I just really hate that stuff. It's exhausting, you know. Most of us don't want this. Yet it keeps happening. I feel like we're just all being gas lit. We know that inflation is a humanitarian crisis at this point, you know.
We fundamentally know that wages aren't high enough, that housing is too expensive, that this is putting people out on the streets, you know, and we're still pouring money into other sectors of violence that have nothing to do with enriching us. So between that and a few friends having legal trouble - Green Card trouble - I'm pissed, you know?
6
-giles
do you think music still has a role to play in protest and resistance?
-april
Yeah, I feel like people forget what it's all about. especially if you think of early American music, which was enslaved people gathering together after a day's worth of hard work to sing and stuff.
they had their own ways of telling their stories. So, when we think of music, I think we forget that we're supposed to be telling a story.
also, I guess covid might have messed it up for some people, like being out of touch with a local music community.
I could see that really being weird and affecting people. But, yeah, I think we're forgetting what to write songs about.
I think musicians are forgetting why they play music, what they have to say and what they need to fundamentally say so they can sleep at night, you know?
-giles
it feels to me like
the gulf between mainstream artists and the rest is so large now, not just in financial terms, but in terms of who's prepared to use their voice for protest. Bands that call themselves "political" and are doing very little outside of "safe" causes kinda make me nauseous. This is the time to speak out - when the injustice has never been greater.For me, Gaza has spoken spotlighted those who care and those don't
-april
I think some
people don't feel like they need to be a part of the progress.
I think a lot of
people were born into a world, at least here in the United States, where it was like, oh, you know, Obama and Clinton were presidents, neither in any way perfect, but it was definitely more left leaning, and things like gay rights and stuff to some people, just like, exist, you know?
And there was
never an uphill battle to the extent we have now that was witnessed back then.
So, sometimes I
wonder if that has a lot to do with it, and a lot to do with why Trump's the President of the United States again. Are people just not realizing that they need to take that step forward and participate, whether it's going to a fundraiser or supporting a touring band, whatever?
-april
There's many ways
you can meet your people, get together and be like, how are we going to make this better for our people? And music used to be like that, and I do think that it is still like that, it's just in different ways, you know.
I think what
Justin does with ThreeOneG is very much like a family.
Brian, the
guitar player for Deaf Club, has a record store as well
which is a great place for people in a community that's south of LA and a lot of those kids still grow up going to shows in LA and doing all of that. So it's cool that they have a spot, you know, that's all ages closer to their home.
7
-giles
you've had a space, Non-Plus Ultra - another example of a community space that's supporting musicians - so
important for growing and nurturing.
-april
i don't think we'd be a band if it wasn't for Non-Plus
Ultra. places like them are absolutely fundamental.
you don't have a show if there's no community and then you just make records and play them in
your room. This works because of community. Otherwise, capitalism would have taken it out a long time ago, you know. Community is one of the few things keeping it alive.
Places like Non-Plus Ultra - so important.
Chappy also books for a similar space in Nashville - DRKMTTR. it's
also important for people to have places to play that are all ages, not just 21 and up.
it's supposed to be for the kids and all the community, you know.
8
9
-april
when I studied at Cal Arts, I took Gamelan
classes and did some performances, but I had learned a lot about Gamelan culture and music culture there.
Their perspective on it is that you come
to, I think it's a pendopo, like an open sided room with a roof - kinda like a veranda - and everyone practices and plays under under it and they perform for the community.
It's not for any other purpose, other than
for everyone to come together and eat and dance and celebrate.
-giles
there's a traditional Palestinian
folk dance called Dabke and it has long been used by Palestinians as a form of resistance and liberation.
Dance troupes bringing it into
communities, and getting the community to dance with them and think about what it means to them.
I think dance is a
pretty sort of powerful and spontaneous art form. I think whatever kind of art form you enjoy, just use your creativity powerfully for good.
-giles
what were your formative influences as a kid growing up?
-april
I really liked rollerblading and stuff, and then I got into skateboarding, and this is when I was really young. Skateboarding as an art form just got me into so many different things, like fashion, because then I would buy the skate apparel, and then I would notice, hey, these seams are actually really good. This pocket is really durable, and I noticed that sort of thing. And then same for when I was watching skate videos and stuff, just learning about music that way. And so I feel like skateboarding really had a big influence on my life, even though I don't really skateboard anymore. I had back surgery from an unrelated thing. So it's not like the first thing I'm thinking to go to but I have skated a few times since getting back surgery. It's no big deal. I just need to make sure my arms and legs work. If I was a professional and at this age, I'd probably keep going, but I have to professionally do other things with my arms and legs.
10
-giles
i did it once when i was a kid and went down a big hill, fell off and cut myself up. my mum was like "ok, you're not doing that again"
-april
that's an interesting thing about the hill. It's what we call bomb the hill, and then you get the speed wobbles. I had that happen to me. And then a friend showed me, well, if you carve left and right and you make these bigger waves, it's easier. And I was like, okay, cool. And then, many years later, when I'm studying synthesizers and audio engineering and wave forms, I'm like, Ah, if they were talking about this in algebra or something and instead of being like "solve for x", and they had given me a scenario, I would have been like "Aaaah, I get it".
I learned quickly that they create those tiny lines because it's impossible to go perfectly straight, you know. So, yeah, break by doing those turns and snaking through it.
giles-
i'm just not sure that Chorley had the expertise that you guys have had, haha!
11
-april
haha, it's true. I think skateboarding in the United States was so popular, it was ridiculous. When I first started skateboarding, I was in Germany, okay? And my dad had us live on the US military camp where he was based. This is just part of my existential lore. But, we were there, and there was no one to teach me how to skate, either. And then when I got to the United States, everyone knew how to skate, and so everyone could show me certain things,but for a while I just kept falling.
-giles
so what was it like moving from Europe back to the US?
april-
That was weird. It was like, day and night. I lived in Germany for about six years. So for most of what I could remember, by the time I was moving to back to Texas, in the United States where I was born, I was basically like in eighth grade, about to start high school, so from second grade, my whole schooling had been in Germany on the base. And it was actually okay. I actually didn't mind living on on the base. I did kind of become an internet kid, and that's when I started really learning a lot about music, because I was online a lot. There weren't many people to hang out with. But when I moved to the States, there were definitely a few things that culture shocked me - like the amount of advertisements I saw everywhere.
they were everywhere. i found the food weird to start with. Macdonalds tasted gross or it wasn't what i expected. But honestly, I think
I was born in 1990 so I really liked music like them and The Distillers. I don't know, I was just really happy to be able to make friends and stuff. If
And then I did eventually end up, I really don't know why in retrospect, but I ended up hanging out with a group of skateboarders and I think it was just
on a military base in particular, I had a hard time like finding friends or people into stuff that I was into. And when I went to the States, it kind of was like, it was like, too chaotic for me, but it was kind of awesome. So I
anything, I might have been a little bit too eager to make friends. I didn't realize I was making some bad friends, and by bad, I mean, they were assholes. But I had a clean slate and it was really hard to tell where I was going to go. I had
because they really pushed each other to get really good at skateboarding and I think I just liked being a part of that momentum. I was 12, so it was cool but I did learn a lot about all the stupid things that 12 year old guys are doing
actually, like, just got to hang out with people who also played music, or also liked whatever I was listening to at the time, probably like the Vandals or Alkaline Trio, or, whatever.
hung out with some of what you would call Cholas, I guess, here in the south. And then there was also the goth girls that I hung out with first stint of time. And so I bounced around.
I probably didn't need to be exposed to their internet search history. That was the most traumatizing thing! I was like "this is what you talk about all the time?" I was so pure at the time
12
april-
At the time, I didn't understand it, but I still appreciate those guys, because they got me into a lot of music, and they showed me a lot of skate videos, and that's how I heard about The Locust, but they definitely normalized me to a lot of weird, weird stuff.
I mean, one of them messaged me a few years ago and was like,
'you know, April, I'm sorry we were such an asshole to you.
We could have just helped you skate better instead of making fun of your shoes and whatever'.
They used to make fun of me for being flat chested and, you know, whatever, just like boy stuff. But he actually felt really bad.
I was reading this interview about this professional girl skateboarder.
I don't remember which one, but she said that all her friends were just like, so cool and supportive and nice,
and he was like, we could have just been that. I think now they've maybe all reflected on it, but I'm not trying to make them all sound like bad guys.
giles-
has all of that stuff helped you to use your gut instinct more?
april-
my instincts are so trashed right now.
Before, especially doing scene stuff like booking shows and stuff, I think I always assumed people had the best intentions.
Now that I've really been through a lot of stuff, I do feel like my instincts are a little bit more "Shoop" - my guard is up a little bit quicker, and, yeah, I'm working on it.
I would much rather give everyone the benefit of the doubt but, with instinct, I observe patterns, and I do think I'm intuitive, and these days, if I have a bad feeling about somebody, I'm right.
The only thing now that I'm navigating is when I have a bad feeling about somebody making sure that it's like because of their behavior and not because of my experiences.
That's kind of where I'm at.
giles-
I'd have one side of my brain trying to
analyse things and the other would be my instinct.
And some situations would drive me nuts
when I couldn't decide.
Since I stopped drinking, I definitely trust my own decision making better than I used to
and I use
my instinct much more now.
april-
that's actually interesting as I feel like I do have a lot of doubt in my decision making and choices.
I'm trying.
There could be a bunch of reasons why, but, yeah, that's where I'm at right now.
I wonder if that makes added vulnerability for me to doubt myself because of that.
I can relate to what you've felt.
giles-
How do you all adapt to each other's ways of working, or how do you get the best out of each other? It's quite complex when a bunch of people come together - like introverts and extroverts, you might have such different sparks and triggers, right? Also, you're possibly gonna have a producer and engineer who might have their own ideas and ways of working...
april-
It can be hard, for sure. I was actually visiting family for Christmas, and the band just like, grinded out so many things towards the end of 2023 for days straight, basically treating it like the recording session, you know what I mean? So all the shit that you hate about whatever or about your part, or that you didn't figure out about your part, or that you were unsure about, I'd done it to where you think you can just figure it out in the studio - and I think they had too - so their approach was just like, let's figure this out now.
And so I think, yes, I must have missed out on that, but from what I remember, the songs didn't really change, and it was just making things a little bit tighter.
I think it's important for everyone in Guck to have all the space that they need.
And I think we've embraced that as part of the sound of the band, whereas before, I had been in a slowcore band and everyone
needs to dial it back, do a lot less. And Chappy had played in a slowcore band for a while too. So I
think this is kind of an opportunity for us to create a, I don't know, like a hippie commune of rips and then when you look from far away, it looks like one house, in one place with one family. But when you zoom in, it is several different houses or sheds.
someone talked about these different relationships in college. I wish I could give credit to the correct person, but basically there's this like - and I know we're not really using these terms these days - master and slave relationship in a consensual way, right? Between, like, a musician who's been practicing for years and years and years on a certain piece, and the composer who just composes the most pain in the ass piece of music, and then me or you, we're just going to hear like extended technique or clickety clocks on an instrument, and some notes sound that sound like jazz or improv. And we're like, what the heck - you've been practicing this piece for 10 years? You know.
But there is some type of relationship that some people have with music where they like that challenge, and they like being pushed that far, similar to, like, a dominatrix vibe, you know.
So again, I wish I could credit who got me thinking about this, but I think about that a lot nowadays, because, you know, it's not easy to do this, even if you're not playing those really annoying new music pieces that sound like improv that actually took you 15 years to learn how to play the first two minutes. Even if it's not that, it's a lot of work, with all the different hats you have to wear.
And, like you said, there's the production side of things. For this record, I would say we produced it as a band, you know. We all sat behind Sam and bossed him around and made him set everything up, and we all produced it. If anything, Scott, the mastering engineer, was like, "Okay, there's a little bit too much of this" or "not enough bass here".
But other than that,
we produced the record
and it sounds the way we
would want a
record like
this to sound.
