March 2021 – Signals Fill The Void

Sunday Sound and Story: 2

March 28, 2021April 4, 2021 SaschaLeave a comment

Spring in Appalachia, humidity and pollen clogging the air. First ice coffee of the year coursing through my veins. Open the window over the street wet from last night’s rain. The sound of tires traversing soaked pavement fades into the background. I know I should write. This is literally the perfect environment to write, but I don’t want to. All my words feel flat and formless beneath the swollen grey sky. All my motivation slips into the void of sitting on the front steps, watching the day crawl by, waving to an occasional neighbor and fighting that ever-losing battle against picking up my phone one more time.

I fucking hate that thing.

I was sixteen, 24 years ago, in an age before cellphones and smartphones, just barely at the dawn of the age of the internet when I heard Amebix for the first time. Spring. I remember it was a gloomy Appalachian spring day, just like this one.

Sure, a lot of better writers than me have written about Amebix, their place in the history of heavy music, how their sound was a nuclear hellfire cyclone mix of Motorhead, Discharge, Crass, and Black Sabbath; bridging a gap between heavy metal and punk, largely inventing crust punk along bands like Hellbastard and Antisect.

Or I could Write about Rob “The Baron” Miller’s latter-day descent into reprehensible far-right and crypto fascist ideologies, and subsequent social media pillaging by the punk and metal communities. I could write about how dude’s YouTube history looks like a literal step by step playbook on how YouTube algorithms play an integral part in radicalizing isolated, vulnerable people into fascist movements, but uh… Better writer’s than myself can talk about that. In fact, Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards podcast did an excellent episode on just that phenomenon, and I am linking it here.

No. I’m going to do what I do best, which is tell a random ass story relating to a record and hope someone, somewhere can relate or get something from it.

So here goes.

A friend added me to some cheesy nostalgia Facebook group a few weeks ago, for kids who grew up in the Denver punk rock community roughly between the years 1990-2010. It serves mostly as a digital storage facility for old show fliers, and a way to hear what the dudes who fed your young friends’ beer to get into their pants when you were teenagers are up to now (they’re accountants).

A few days ago, someone posted a where are they now type post for a friend from the scene, they had lost touch with over twenty years ago. Someone in the know responded to their query that addiction had sadly taken the life of individual in question some time ago. I never knew this person. I relate intimately though, to having lost friends to the void of addiction, and having spent time just at the precipice of that void myself.

I was 23 years old, the first time I took opiates. I spent that fall with no place of my own to sleep, bouncing from couch to couch in various West Denver punk houses. I told myself I was living some punk rock fantasy, a life outside of the system, where I would drift and travel and exist within that very specific, good intentioned, but quasi-parasitic travel-protest culture that existed in North American punk scenes from roughly 1998-2012 (it might still exist actually. I have no way of knowing. While I may still be punk, I don’t travel like I used to). I would leave town to meet up with friends and one mass mobilization or another, and then return home to recover and leave town again. That was the misguided idea, at least. The reality was much bleaker: I feel into a pit of depression and non-function, spending my days wandering around Denver, looking for places to loiter and write in my journal, occasionally filling out job applications, and generally feeling like hell before going to crash on a couch or with my girlfriend. Undiagnosed and untreated mental illness is a motherfucker.

I have long since come to recognize the inherent folly and privilege present in this lifestyle, but that’s another conversation too.

That November, a rotting molar had me at Denver General’s emergency department. I spent all day filling out paperwork in near blinding pain declaring myself legally homeless and indigent so I could receive care for my tooth. Just at the end of the day, a tired and overworked dentist looked in my mouth and confirmed my fears. I had an abscessed molar. I needed an extraction or a root canal. My choice. “You’re still young,” he said. “No reason to get this thing pulled if you don’t have to. If you can scrounge up the money, maybe consider the dental college.”

He gave me a round of antibiotics, a bottle of Vicodin, and wished me luck.

“That’s going to hurt less once the antibiotics kick in. Stay warm out there. I think it just started to snow.”

Out in the hallway, I introduced myself to my newfound companions in pill form with a swig of water, and walked out into the chilly West Denver night. I thought I remembered something about how some friends over on 9^th and Lipan were having a party, just a small get together to celebrate another transitory friend leaving town for the winter. I ambled slowly to the house in the snow, feeling the pain in my jaw recede with the backdrop of the city streets blurring around me and the engine like noise of the city fading from a constant hum of traffic and trains and noise to a distant industrial whisper.

I ran into a friend outside one of the neighborhood’s many liquor stores.

“You going to the party?”

“Yeah. Slowly. I just got done at the dentist. They gave me painkillers. I think I might be fucked up.”

“Shit. Be careful getting there. I’m just going in to buy a beer. Wanna wait for me and we’ll walk together?”

“Nah. I just want to keep walking. It’s only a few blocks.”

“Cool. See you there.”

I kept walking, relaxing into the relatively new sensation of not feeling well, anything. When I was younger, I was chronically insecure, hyper-sensitive, always on edge. My best friend once described me as someone who walked through the world missing a layer of skin. She wasn’t wrong. Everything just hurt, and depressed and deprived of creativity, I had little outlet for that pain other than wearing a lot of black and hating everything. I desperately wanted to have community, but I didn’t know how to calm down enough to relate to anyone. I can’t know for sure, but based on my hazy recollections, I am pretty sure I was a consummate bummer to hang out at parties with. After all, nobody really wants to drink with the person who is just going to start crying about nuclear annihilation, vivisection, economic inequality or any myriad of other social ills at the drop of a hat.

In the house, a small but lively party was in full swing. A dance party in the kitchen. Friends passing bottles around in the living room. Someone passed me a bottle of brown liquor, and I took a swig. I told myself just one shot. One swig of sweet rotgut liquor to tuck me in just a little snugger, beneath a blanket of numbness. The liquor burned all the way down, settling somewhere in my guts before diffusing through my bloodstream, adding to the narcotic haze. I made my way to the kitchen, leaned against the counter for support and watched the dancing punks through pinpoint pupils. Someone pulled me into the crowd and I tried not to panic, my legs moving slow motion in feeble attempt to catch the rhythm. I felt like I was trying to dance to a record played at 33 RPM when everyone around me heard it at 45 RPM.

My friend from the liquor store grabbed me and settled me back at my spot at the counter.

“Woah! They are way too fucked up to try and dance!”

I ended up leaving the party, walking to a different punk house to crash. The Ghost Ship (not to be confused with the Oakland warehouse space, and site of a deadly fire in 2016) house on 7^th and Santa Fe had a guest bed in their mudroom where I often slept. A tiny mattress on the floor, with a boombox at the head of the bed. Walking the few blocks to the house, I could practically feel that velvet-seeming softness calling me.

Nobody was home at the ghost ship. I stripped out of my dirty pants and got into bed. I dug around in my bag and found a tape. Amebix – The Power Remains. I had bought the record at Double Entendre records when I was 17, six years before. All my records were stored in the basement of another punk house until I got back on my feet, but I kept a collection of tapes with me for quiet solitary moments just like this one.

I put the tape in the tape player, hit play, took another pill to send me drifting, and opened my journal to write document what I was feeling.

10/24/04

I just ate some more Vicodin and everything feels fuzzy. I like it and I don’t like it and I get why people get hooked on this shit. I am having a hard time focusing on anything, but in particular anything related to my wretched heart. I see it. I almost feel it, but I fall short in grasping. I know I am going to save these for those occasions where the desire to be numb is overwhelming. I don’t know if I want that now, but I have it, so I put on an old Amebix tape to keep me company before I fall asleep.

I guess I uh, fell asleep. The entry trails off after that.

I saw someone refer to Amebix as the “Ultimate music of annihilation” in a zine somewhere in the 90’s, and I don’t disagree. The music is ugly, hopeless, and tragically beautiful, all at once. It was music made by people living on the edge and on the fringes of society, often homeless and struggling with addiction. In the liner notes of The Power Remains, The Baron informed the listener that none of the band were able to get off state welfare during their original run (Oh, I wonder how he feels about such liberal institutions now?). It was music created by individuals living through the dying days of the Cold War when nuclear annihilation was at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts.

Down on my little mattress in a West Denver punk house, I don’t know what I dreamt about. By 2004, apocalyptic climate change had begun to supplant nuclear war in the nightmares of young people. Perhaps I dreamt of a world burning to death, choked on carbon dioxide with mercury filled oceans rising to swallow cities whole. I related to the music as a depressed young person grappling with mortality and impending doom. I relate to it less now as a maladjusted middle-aged adult (who still grapples with morality and a sense of impending doom, just differently, I guess). I’m thousands of miles away (both literally and figuratively) from the sad skinny kid with a backpack full of tapes and a notebook that I once was, and I’m thankful for that.

Still, I feel love for the scared and vulnerable person I was when this music first spoke to me. I feel love for the music, even though I was relieved to be done revisiting this LP, listening to it straight through for the first time in many years, as I wrote this. I feel love for the community of like minded often hypersensitive and hurting kids I was lucky enough to surround myself with at just the right time. I feel love for the ways we all grew up and grew apart and grew into different people. I feel lucky for the ways that addiction never quite managed to hem its way into the empty spaces in my heart. Maybe I was just lucky. I really don’t know. So many of the hallmarks for someone who should struggle with addiction are there for me. I guess I just managed to stop just before the point of no return, avoiding the sad ending of an overdose, or drinking my way to yellowed skin and a ruined liver.

Because fuck romanticized self-destruction.

For the curious, I’m sure Amebix’s discography is available somewhere. I’m not sure who handles their reissues nowadays given how The Baron has tarnished their legacy with his sad old man flirtations with nationalism and right-wing extremism and subsequent falling out with the former members. Maybe check reliable crust or anarcho-punk distros if you feel the need to have physical copies of this stuff.

More on The Baron’s latter day politics here, here, and here.

Sound & Story

March 22, 2021 Sascha1 Comment

Hey there. It’s been a long while. I hope the deep and dark Covid winter has been as gentle with you as possible. I hope wherever you are, you are hale and whole and that the spring season brings you continued good health and tidings, and that returning sun lifts your spirits. I hope the fear of creeping authoritarianism doesn’t have too strong of a hold on your heart.

Things have been busy around here. Or the days have been blank voids of depression and quarantine isolation and crushing anxiety. Not a lot of middle ground. I graduated from college, something I never thought I would do. I turned 40, something else I never imagined myself doing, celebrating by a ride to my hometown with my sweetheart and the dogs to visit my childhood best friend, then coming home to punk bleach a pair of jeans in the basement while my birthday cake baked in the oven. I wrote a book. I did a few readings. I finished a zine. I have two other zines just so close to done. In the coming weeks, I will be significantly overhauling this website with the hopes of selling some of those zines in mind. Somehow this all feels monumental and insignificant at the same time.

Tonight though, we’re just taking baby steps in getting back into the swing of things. In the past year I have found myself feeling too rigid in my writing practice when I am able to engage with anything creative at all. I agonize over blank pages and prose that feels too plain and flat to my self-critical ears. It has been difficult to write for enjoyment for much of the last year. So I’m trying to get back to the heart of what I loved about writing when I first got serious about it – Music and stories associated with it. Some of this was inspired by recently finding an old piece of writing centered around an EP from a largely forgotten Philly crust punk band, and the aforementioned childhood bestie’s and my attempts to see them on a school night when we were sixteen. I shared that story with said friend, and he simply said, “You should write more stories like this.” I endeavored to get a new turntable and listen to some of my old wax and see what happens.

This is my first attempt. I will be writing about Neurosis’ The Eye Of Every Storm.

I hope you enjoy this, or take something from it. As always, thank you for your time.

At this point in my life, I have seen Neurosis more times than I can count. I own most of their records and have worn multiple shirts into rags. I consider them one of my favorite bands of all time. I am scarcely alone in this sonic reverence, given the sheer number of records they have sold in their 35(!) years together. They have a devoted fanbase all over the world. Whenever they play in a city, the shows usually sell out within a matter of days (I’m still pissed at the meathead in a Cannibal Corpse shirt who undercut me on an extra ticket in front of Neumos in Seattle back in 2010, by the way). Their so-fucking-loud-you-can-hear-it-from-goddamn-space shows are almost a religious experience. All that spirit and sound shot into the stratosphere scattered to the winds, and Neurosis inspired countless musicians who took those sounds and disfigured and distilled them down into something all their own.

I first heard Neurosis sometime in the 90’s when a friend put a song off Souls at Zeroon a mixtape for me. I was transfixed by the heaviness and raw emotion of the song. I spent the remainder of the decade kicking myself for not being brave enough to “borrow” my mother’s car to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Denver to Colorado Springs to see Neurosis play with Bongzilla one night during the summer after I graduated from high school. Something about traveling in secret down desert highways to see the band seemed so romantic, but I wimped out at the last minute, probably opting instead to drive around aimlessly through Denver’s weird suburbs with my first serious sweetheart listening to tapes and trying to figure out which diner had the worst coffee.

The Eye of Every Storm came out in 2004. The record wasn’t much on my radar until someone played a copy for me in the squat I lived in during the fall of 2005. Something about the immense, apocalyptic heaviness of it, even through shitty boombox speakers just hit me. I suppose I ascribed some sort of meaning to the record, considering Hurricane Katrina had just decimated much of the Gulf Coast and storms and the decline and pitfalls of the industrial age were at the forefront of so many of our minds. We listened to the album late at night, with the windows open towards the Oakland Hills where some of the members of Neurosis had no doubt spent their childhoods and I felt a connection to a place born in sound and subculture.

I moved to Richmond, Virginia, that winter, on a whim. Mostly to find a spot where I could be around ritualized substance abuse less, and maybe dig myself out of a rut dug by too many aimless nights and filled with cheap liquor. I knew one person when I got to the city on New Year’s Day, 2006. My friend Teal. We got the keys to our house in Churchill and moved our sparse belongings into the house in the cold. The walls of our new place were mostly blank. There were a few pieces of furniture left by the old tenants and a rodent infestation too boot. My bedroom window overlooked downtown and the train tracks and I liked it just fine. Teal and I spent most of the winter in quasi hibernation, watching bad movies under blankets and reading back issues of Cometbus to one another at night.

Just as the city awakened to spring, some pathologically sketchy oogle gifted Teal and I a car when they decided to move up to upstate New York. “I don’t need a car where I’m going. I don’t care what you do with this thing. Never bother me about it again,” they said. Against all better judgment, Tal and I accepted the vehicle. Because, hey… Two irresponsible young people. With a quasi-legal, uninsured vehicle of questionable ownership given to us by someone with a name like “Hacksaw” or some shit like that… What was the worst that could happen, right?

The oogle split for New York, and Teal and I decided impulsively one day to drive our new car down to the outskirts of Raleigh, North Carolina for an all-day punk fest we had heard about through word of mouth, where a few bands we liked were playing. I think the fest was called “DIY Fest” or something. It was one of those gigs set up in a rented hall by impossibly optimistic young people, not for profit, but for the love of music and community. The kind of gig so earnest and endearing, that so many of us age out of attending as cynicism and “the real world” set in.

I don’t remember much of the day, aside from the gray sky outside the hall pissing rain almost all day. The rain and the weather leant the air that damp, not quite spring chill that sets in your bones and won’t leave. Teal and I kinda stood around all day, catching up with friends and acquaintances and watching mediocre teenage hardcore bands shamble through their sets. I draw a blank when I try and remember what bands played, other than Kakistocracy and The Crimson Spectre. Requiem too. For some reason, it stands out that that gig was the both the best, and last time I ever saw Requiem play. I don’t remember any of Brian D’s between song pontifications. I’m sure I clapped politely with the rest of the largely white and middle-class crowd. If I had thoughts or feelings about the failures of punk and broader leftism and their failures to reach out to working people outside of our comfortable subcultural bubbles, I kept them to myself.

The show let out, and teal and I decided to drive straight home. We said around of goodbyes and got back in our sketchy car and headed towards I-95 towards Virginia. It was around midnight, with roughly two and a half hours of driving ahead of us. Like young fools who can kind of function on little food and sleep, Teal and I had scarcely eaten or even drank water all day. Somewhere in the first hour of the drive the exhaustion hit us and our bodies went into revolt. We pulled off at a truck stop somewhere for coffee and whatever vegan junk food we could find. I slid back behind the wheel, sipping my bitter coffee while teal pulled open a bag of chips and offered me some.

I said, “I am so tired. We might have to keep talking to keep me awake and on the road on the way home.”

“Fine by me,” Teal said. “What should we listen to?”

“Neurosis?”

“Perfect.”

Teal pushed in a dubbed cassette of The Eye Of Every Storm into the tape player and the thundering opening of Burn hit the speakers. We drove the rest of the way home, taking animatedly, letting the tape flip over to the beginning when it ended. The songs receded into the background, providing the backdrop for our conversations while remaining a commanding presence in the car all the same. I didn’t know it at the time, but in that tiny car, speeding through the blackness of a chilly southern AM, one of the best friendships I have ever had was being born. Our hearts beat at an caffeine-accelerated beat, in the spirit of sound and friendships forged in finding one another at exactly the right moment in time.