In high school the only thing in the world I wanted to do was play in a band, and I kept doing that in some capacity until 2016 when I fell into a spiral of existential doubt. In 2020 under the psychological pressures of that year I picked up music making again with synthesizers and drum machines instead of with a guitar and other people. This is my basic account of all of that.

Trooper

I was in a few other bands in high school, but I start here because it was the first band I was in that felt like it cohered into an aesthetic. Jacob picked the name, it was from the Iron Maiden song. Daniel, Jacob, Mike, and I pursued the most out there punk we were capable of. The big touchstones (for me anyway) were Flipper, the Ex, Karp, Sonic Youth, and Black Sabbath. We also were obsessed with guitar feedback. Not just any high pitched frequency, but the super expressive stuff like Unwound, Black Dice, and Tim Green’s guitar playing in Nation of Ulysses and Young Ginns. Guitar feedback was like unleashing the chaotic forces of the universe, if you could control and shape it, there isn’t anything you couldn’t do. During our 3rd show I broke the high E string of my guitar and never replaced it. I discovered that the B string of my guitar could be lifted around the bridge and moved back and forth to create a sitar-esque drone sound which I used in the intro for “Flyin’ High”. I strongly believed in the idea of discovering the idiosyncracies of your music instruments and pushing them as far as they would go. The one thing I’m a little embarassed about is my vocals. I was pretty undisciplined about it, and trying out a variety of different styles instead of trying to discover my own voice. Instead of putting in that work I would instead stick to mostly instrumental bands for the rest of my life. We played a bunch of shows in DC throughout the year, then went on a weeklong tour over the summer. When we got back to DC we had (d)evovled into a total improv band. We opened for Dismemeberment Plan at Ft. Reno. I remember seeing some online review complaining about how awful we were because we were just making stuff up as we went along, which we all got a real kick out of. Guy Piccoto came up to me after the show to talk about how much he liked what we were doing. I had started playing guitar after I saw Fugazi play at Ft. Reno when I was in jr high school, so it felt like an important milestone for me. Then I went to college, and the rest of the guys went on do Black Eyes.

Scalpels

I spent the first year of college in the dorms, hating that. I rectified that by moveing into a 3 bedroom apartment with a basement in Logan Square with some friends, and we started a band. They hadn’t played before, but I believe in playing music with people you like, and just trying to meet people at whatever skill level they are at rather than arbitrary gatekeeping. It started out as kind of a nowave thing, but keep evolving in unexpected directions. I went back to DC during the summer and practiced in a band called Hot War (more on that in a minute) and Al Schatz spent the summer in the apartment by himself just practicing drums as much as possible, and was a beast by the time I got back. After a year or so of doing noisy punk stuff a couple of significant changes occured. James Shaver joined us filling out the rhythm section. The Black Dice album Beaches & Canyons came out and expanded the possibility space I considered when making music. I picked up a delay pedal, and in combo with a volume pedal transformed not just how my guitar sounded, but how I actually played the thing. We kept going further and further in a more cosmic/psychedelic direction. Then I think the apex of what we were going for happened when Keelin joined us on saxophone/vocals, and we arrived at a wonderful synthesis of krautrock, free jazz, and postpunk. We did about 3 tours, and released a ton of cassettes and CD-Rs of varying quality. We also played with some incredible bands and musicians, by the end of it I became spoiled for choices in terms of who we could play shows with. And then everyone just kind of scattered to the winds. We opened up for Mi Ami under a barebones lineup, and I decided at that point I wanted to move to San Francisco.

Hot War

Okay, so Hot War was a band I played with the members of Early Humans that were still around DC at that point in 2002. We practiced constantly in a tiny overheated basement in Mt. Pleasant during a super hot DC summer. Kevin O’Meara had switched from bass to drums for that band and was already incredible, and it was kind of intimidating for me to play with these guys. We played two shows, one in NYC, and one in DC, and recorded like 3 and a half songs. I miss Kevin a lot, and am really grateful I got to have this experience with him.

The Pain

Okay, so also when I was back home in DC during college breaks I briefly played with all the guys in Trooper as a noise band called the Pain, and we lived up to our name I think.

Body Swap

In San Francisco it took me like 2 years to find some people I wanted to play with, and we played shows at all the usual places in SF: the Knockout, Bottom of the Hill, Hemlock Tavern, etc. as well as like house shows in Oakland and Davis, CA. Then our bass player left because he was stretched thin playing in like 4 different bands. Jacob was done playing in Mi Ami, and he decided to step in, and it all felt pretty seamless. If Mi Ami was the more stripped down, focused postpunk version of Black Eyes (reductionist I know, but hopefully you get me), then I felt like a similar thing happened with Scalpels to Body Swap. We did a West Coast tour with Insect Factory, and kept playing the occasional Bay Area show. I don’t think we every really found an audience, but I did find kindred spirits in Three Leafs. Nearly all our recordings ended up on bandcamp (and all of that is free/pay-what-you-want now) or soundcloud, and some of it is the best stuff I have recorded. But at a certain point we did sort of creatively stagnate. By the time Jacob left for New York there was a part of me that was relieved it was over, but I also wasn’t sure what to do at this point so I just stopped playing music for awhile.

0x12f

Pandemic product. The name is hexidecimal code for ‘303’. I bought a couple of those Roland botique and Korg volca synths, basically stuff that could easily fit in my tiny SF apartment, and I worked on music to keep myself sane. Although I’ve loved all kinds of electronic dance music since forever (as a child I had trouble sleeping, and it was Kraftwerk albums that I listened to to lull myself to sleep) it really required a kind of brain rewrite to actually start making it. I want music I play to surprise me, and that’s difficult when things are just getting sequenced, but there are still tricks available to make some things unexpected. I have very rarely played shows because my setup isn’t very condusive to playing sets, but I hope to change that one of these days.