Gabriel: Okay, so I just need to say something right out the gate. Pete has a vastly superior memory for detail than I do. And inevitably, throughout this conversation, Pete is going to correct me. So whatever Pete says is true, but whatever I say is also true. It's just his version of the story, if that makes sense.
Pete: I honestly don't know if that's true, but... [laughter]
Jack: See, already out the gate he remembers your memory differently. [laughter]
Pete: I mean, I think when we're talking about our shared experiences, there's got to be some difference.
Jack: See, we live for that.
Pete: Man, we did so much and it's so hard... It is absolutely impossible for me to remember even where we played.
Jack: I'll start out with Gabe. What was your early experience with music and how did you first get into music? Was it through your parents, through friends, through relatives? What was your early introduction?
Gabriel: The early introduction was for sure my parents. They were both in the Bay Area in the '60s, my mom was at Cal Berkeley, my dad hitchhiked out from New York City and ended up in the Haight during the whole hippie scene before the Summer of Love. So he was hanging out with the Diggers and going to free concerts in the park where the Diggers would bake bread in coffee tins, this gnarly, cheap-ass, tube of free bread. But he was in that scene, so as a kid growing up in San Francisco, the '60s legacy loomed pretty large. My dad and mom had a record collection, they had Santana and Hendrix and Beatles and lots of pretty wack stuff as well, Jimmy Buffett and Dire Straits. There was a handful of tapes that were just in the car all the time, Talking Heads, Dire Straits, Paul Simon Graceland. So I think a lot of my early musical information was post-hippie popular music in some ways, but also radio. Live 105 was what they called a moderate rock radio station. And I had a half brother who was about seven years older, and he turned me on to new wave. A lot of the stuff that got played on that radio station was very local and very niche in some ways, but it wasn't KFOG, which was the sort of classic rock station, it was really actually about contemporary modern pop music. So I was hearing things like the Sugarcubes and Front 242 and nerding out about that stuff because that was what was on the radio. So definitely the earliest formation of music in some ways was just what was popular, but what was also accessible very regionally.
Jack: Did you play an instrument in school or learn one on your own?
Gabriel: I tried! I really wanted to play flute when I was a little kid.
Jack: Wow! That's a rare one for a young man.
Gabriel: Man, I'll be straight-up. It was Peter and the Wolf. As a kid, I just thought that shit slapped and I was really excited to play flute. And, I kid you not, I took music lessons - my folks didn't have a ton of cash, but they bought me a flute - and I sat there really sight reading, learning how to play flute, but I could not make a sound.
Jack: You couldn't get the embouchure right.
Gabriel: I can't whistle. The only instruction anyone could ever give me was, "Well, it's just whistling." And I'm like, "Yeah, I can't whistle." [laughter]
Jack: You gotta take whistle lessons first!
Gabriel: But needless to say, I spent months and months and months, and I remember my teacher standing over my shoulder watching me play the flute without making a sound. And she leans over and she goes, "You know, you're actually doing it." I could actually sightread, because I was still trying, I just assumed at some point it would just happen and it didn't. So that was heartbreaking. I gave it up and and I would say, it really wasn't until, how to put this... I started getting into guitar music around high school or late junior high and my older brother, who had handed me all of this, like, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark and Men Without Hats and new wave music, his cassettes, then started handing me down his metal stuff because he went away to college at UC Santa Cruz and got really into metal. So all of a sudden I was getting into Anthrax and AC/DC and Megadeth and stuff like that. And I was like, "Okay, this is at least more the sound I'm really excited about." So I figured maybe I'll start playing guitar. It had to have been Nirvana that did it for me because I knew that I liked heavy music and I knew that I liked guitar music, but I really couldn't relate to AC/DC at all. At all. And then I remember coming home from high school - it probably was 1992 - turning on MTV and in the middle of the afternoon seeing, hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the world blew up for me. I was like, "Oh, there's music that is as heavy as this metal shit that my brother's into but on an emotional level, I can relate to this." And on a personal level, I was just like, "I think I'm those guys, they're kind of nerds and they're kind of queer and they're kind of taking the piss on everyone, you know? Everyone." And I felt like, "This is something else, this is my music." So in very short order I decided I was going to learn how to play guitar.
Jack: How quickly did you start playing music or start a band? I'm sure you were in punk bands from the get-go.
Gabriel: Okay, scare quotes, "punk bands." My folks were burned by buying this flute that I never learned how to play, so when I wanted to get an electric guitar, they're like, "Well, why don't you play your dad's nylon string folk guitar first." My dad, when he was a teenager in the village - he's from New York before coming out east or west - he wanted to be Bob Dylan. I've heard a cassette tape of him playing some songs he wrote when he was, like, 16. It's the worst Bob Dylan impersonation I've ever heard in my life. So he gave me the guitar and I tried learning how to play from a book. I have to say, I really struggled, I was learning chords and scales really slowly. I had a best friend who was also learning and it was like, "Okay, I kind of wanted to be Neil Young." That was, I think, what I was going for. And I would spend an hour trying to learn scales, trying to learn chords and rehearsing songs. And then once I'd done that, I would give myself permission to just fuck around. And I said, I was into Nirvana, so I was like, "Well, how do I make this nylon string guitar sound like Nirvana? Okay, well, I'll put pieces of paper in the strings or I'll put paper clips on it." I literally just wanted it to sound like it was distorted. And I was like, "How do I make that effect?"
Jack: Amazing! It's putting the screwdriver through the speaker cone moments.
Gabriel: So I was doing this and finally, after committing long enough to the guitar, my folks got me a real cheap electric guitar from Sears or wherever. And you know, what I found was that I was way more interested in the sound of feedback than I was in learning how to shred. And all of my high school buddies who were musicians were into Yngwie Malmsteen. They were just weird guitar kids, they wanted to be Jimi or Frank Zappa. I wasn't hating on it, but at the end of the day, I was way more excited about learning about feedback, figuring out the weird sounds I could make putting things onto my guitar. So then I started a band with a friend that was supposed to be kind of an industrial music project, but we had a Casio keyboard for drums that we ran through a guitar amp and we both played guitar. So he just tuned his guitar really low, so it could be a bass. We had a song where I literally just played feedback the entire song. My friend saw this band play, and I thought this was a punk band because I read about punk before I ever really saw a punk band. And when I read about punk, it was like, "You do your own thing, you don't sound other people, it doesn't matter if you don't know how to play your instrument." I was like, "Okay, all the boxes are checked for me." And we play and my friends are like, "Huh, that band's weird." We're like, "Yeah?" They're like, "Yeah, it sort of reminds us of Sonic Youth." "Who's Sonic Youth?" And they're like, "Oh, they're this band," and they were sneering at this point, "They're this band that puts, like, a blender up to their guitar." And I just remember my eyes widening and thinking, "There's a band that does this?" So once I figured out also the Sonic Youth connection to Nirvana, it really just was a spiral out into everything else from Masonna to John Coltrane to everything else I got into, even Fugazi. It came out of Nirvana, that was the gateway. And I have one anecdote that I think is relevant, listening back to some of your other shows and thinking about what is different about then versus now and also just thinking about how it wasn't just about style or scenes or whatever that made me interested in certain musics. It was way more about a social world that I wanted to be a part of and my friends were into these kind of heavy metal bands and some were into some industrial music bands when we were teenagers, so we listened to whatever we could get our hands on. When Lollapalooza came to town, we went because - I don't remember exactly - I think it was probably Red Hot Chili Peppers... Jesus and the Mary Chain playing at, like, two in the afternoon in the blazing sun. There was not enough smoke machine for that show. In hindsight, that's actually the only band I wish I could go and see again. But, you know, Pearl Jam probably played. I can't remember everyone that was on. It was the second year of the festival. But what I remember is all day I was in the pit and I was having a great time. I'm this little guy jumping around the pit, but I'm doing fine. And then as the sun is setting, they start setting the stage and every single instrument, every single piece of hardware is covered with bones. When the sun is finally properly set, Ministry comes out. I never heard them or heard of them. I think I'd heard "Every Day Is Halloween" or something on the radio. But I didn't know anything about what they were doing at this point. They played "Stigmata" and the pit suddenly went from being a bunch of scrappy teenagers like me to being people Pete's height, fairly significantly taller than me, covered in leather and spikes and tattoos and piercings. And I just got tossed around a rag in the pit. I remember this moment stepping out of the pit and being kind of amazed because I realized, "Wait, I've been here all day, where have these people been?" And then I had a moment of pause and I was like, "Wait a second, where do these people go when they're not here?" Because they're all dressed so intensely, they all look so freakish. They have tattoos on their faces, they're their got fucked up haircuts. And it was the first moment that I realized there is such a thing as the underground, that is literally when I became obsessed with trying to find it. That's actually how I got into punk, I think more than anything. I was like, "There is a secret world that is not given to you through MTV or through the BMG record mail order or through the weekly newspapers. How do they find each other? Where do they meet up? What do they do when they're not at a show?" I became fucking obsessed and that is literally what drew me into punk.
Jack: Well, I think that's a good crossover point to restart then with you, Pete. What was your intro as a young person to music and how did you come to know that's what you liked?
Pete: Both of my parents are kind of crunchy earth scientist types. There weren't a lot of records, they listened to NPR Classical. That's kind of it. We had a piano in the house; I took piano lessons and saxophone lessons for a minute, but didn't go anywhere. The first record I bought myself was Run-D.M.C. Raising Hell and up until Nirvana, basically, I only listened to hip hop, so it was Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, N.W.A., Black Sheep, Das EFX, De La Soul. I only listened to hip hop and I'm growing up in small town Oregon. I grew up in Corvallis, which is where Oregon State is. It's 35, 40,000 people. It's a funny little town because it's very middle class but intellectual. There's the university and then there was a H.P. there, Hewlett-Packard, so there were a lot of engineers and a lot of the school is agriculture and engineering, basically. A lot of my friends' parents were farmers, but they were sort of more back to the land, hippie farmers. That was what I grew up in, it was a small town, it's got a little downtown, there were record stores and there was some stuff happening when I was growing up, but it was really very hippie dippy, intellectual. But I really only listened to hip hop, I only listened to rap music. Some of my friends had older brothers, you know, I had babysitters that had some funny music connections. And a lot of my exposure to underground culture was through hanging out at houses where people were watching skate videos, Bones Brigade and stuff, so I knew about hardcore. I had this idea about a counterculture very early on, but I didn't know how to access that beyond Yo! MTV Raps, which was a great gateway into anything else. The music I was getting into was definitely mainstream in terms of the routes that it was disseminating into the world through, but in both cases it's not music. [laughter] There is a lot of discourse around all this stuff that was really just like, "This is not music."
Jack: I was just going to say that that's funny, you know, I think you mentioned Public Enemy, Bomb Squad production stuff. That's an interesting path into unconsciously or consciously getting into electronic music and electronic music production, cut up, tape stuff. Have you ever thought about that being an important early exposure to that type of electronic music?
Pete: Absolutely. I did a collaboration with Beans not too long ago, I think that was in 2013. It's like, "Man, this is something that's part of my musical DNA from childhood that I never really thought I would tap into in a more serious way." But it was really cool chatting, we were just talking about Mantronix production and the Bomb Squad, we were sending each other videos of live Public Enemy. As a live band they had this energy to them that was so intense.
Jack: Did you see them live ever?
Pete: No, I never saw them live. But like I said, I saw footage of them and it reminds me, it gives me the energy of being at a punk show, where it's really out of control. [laughter] All that music was super intense. And then, I did not listen to any rock music until grunge hit and then there was also Nine Inch Nails and all these other things that were lumped in with that that were also sort of industrial, and I started catching on to some of that stuff through watching 120 Minutes. But I also found out about this TV show - I'm probably watching this when I'm 12, 13 - that's on Sunday nights on this channel that had been a local network that was kind of transitioning being into Fox. So I would watch the Simpsons, the Ben Stiller Show, and then after that it would be this show called Bohemia Afterdark that was music videos, video art, things like that, that I figured out later was done by Mike Lastra from Smegma.
Jack: Wow! That's some local Oregon weirdness.
Pete: It was this network from Portland that had this Mike Lastra-curated music show basically and they would have interviews with Russ Meyers and John Waters and stuff like that. There was footage of Butthole Surfers playing live in the '80s that Mike filmed. It also introduced me to some more local acts. And then the thing that really pushed me over the edge was seeing footage of Boredoms and Harry Pussy and Masonna on 120 Minutes.
Gabriel: Oh man, 100%.
Pete: I was like, "Oh, I need to check more out by this band the Boredoms." So Boredoms was the thing that kind of pushed me to not go to the chain record store and go to this more local used record store called Happy Trails in my hometown. I was so intimidated going in there, but they had Boredoms CDs and I just started going there with my buddies and we'd poke around and see what was cheap, what was local. And just in a matter of maybe a year, I went from being like, "Oh, I'm kind of feeling this alternative thing" to just being like, "Oh, there's Kill Rock Stars." I blind-bought a copy of Unwound New Plastic Ideas. There's this stuff that was happening close to me where I could access it pretty easily through this record store. And it just started opening up these doors for me. I had a few high school buddies that I ended up playing music with, started my first band with some of these guys. I got more into Gravity records and Kill Rock Stars than they did, but we all got into the whole Slap A Ham grindcore scene very intensely. I only went to high school halftime because I was kind of ahead of a lot of folks, creditwise, so I worked part time most of high school, working in the Oregon State Library. I bought a car and would go up to Portland and check out shows a lot on the weekends. I had my first job I think when I was 13 and went out and got a bass with all the money I earned. I just wanted to play in punk bands. I guess I must've been 14 or 15. But I got the bass and I wanted to sound like godheadSilo. [laughter]
[Yellow Swans "Police Eternity"]
When I first moved to Portland, there was this new venue, 17 Nautical Miles, that was run by Todd P. My hardcore band that I was in was called Murder. [laughter] We played at 17 Nautical Miles every week, a five minute set, just in and out. Done.
Jack: Are there recordings of Murder?
Pete: Yeah, we did a split 7" with his band called the Nervous System.
Gabriel: You should also describe Murder, because I feel Murder is really important. It's a transition, right?
Pete: Yeah, I did Murder and then I met a bunch of people for doing that and ended up in this band that was probably my first really serious band that got anything done. But yeah, Murder was definitely in the tradition of Gravity Records, you know, very chaotic hardcore. But through that band I ended up meeting this guy Evan Burden who is probably the best technical musician I've ever worked with. So basically I'm in this band and everyone is older than me, I wasn't even 21. So we'd practice 3 or 4 days a week and it was music that was very inspired by loops. Evan was obsessed with Ligeti, so it was very inspired by minimalist classical, but it was really epic rock songs. Everything would be, like, 12 minutes long. So I guess that gets, at least in my life, to where Gabe and I start meeting, basically.
Jack: So you guys met there. Were you both living there? What's the story with that?
Pete: We were in the orbit of each other for a long time. So a friend of mine from Portland that I met going to shows at Oh Hell, went to Stanford and had a radio show at Stanford, introduced me to this lady Deborah, who I'm still buddies with, who was doing a radio show and was involved in the hardcore scene down there and was also involved in riot grrl, stuff like that. And she was friends with this lady Cici who I met, and she ended up being in a band with Gabe and George Chen. But before that, I guess Gabe saw this band that I was in with one of my roommates at the time, this dude Joel and Paul Dickow from Strategy, called the Cold War. There was a long time where I was just constantly having weird one off bands. I did this band with Joel and Paul that was about this one specific news event. We wrote, you know, four punk songs about this thing. We tracked it through the news cycle and then one night when it was out of the news cycle, the band was over and we got asked to play a reunion show with the Red Scare. And because of the band everything was super like, "Let's just throw it together, whatever." And Gabe was at that show. [laughter]
Gabriel: Yeah, I was just on a road trip to see what Portland was about and we found out there was a venue, a DIY space, called 17 Nautical Miles run by Todd P. I think we knew the Red Scare, so that's why we went to the show, I'm pretty sure. But I saw Pete's band play and, like I said earlier, I read about punk before I ever actually went to punk shows and really understood what punk was. So I had this impression about what it was supposed to do, not necessarily what it was supposed to sound like, and what it was supposed to do is make you want to start a band. It was supposed to tell you "Oh, you could do this." And I remember seeing Pete's band and being like, "This band is fucked up. It's fast, it's noisy, it's sloppy. I could be in a band like that." And it was basically like, "If they could do this, I could do this." And George and I were both into similar music and we've been talking about starting a noise band. We started this band called Boxleitner, named after Bruce Boxleitner, and it would start off just being him and me. It was just microphone and drums and lots of looping and pedals and noise. It was terrible. We kept on saying we want to be in a band that is kind of like the Boredoms but also we both love all of this Gravity records stuff, maybe we could combine it somehow and - in a kind of weird call back to the last episode I heard on your on this podcast - we were really into Andy Kaufman, so we really wanted to somehow figure out how we could we make a band that was the emo hardcore version of an Andy Kaufman bit. And after I saw Pete's band, after I saw the Cold War, I came back and I was like, "George, we gotta do this. I saw this band, it was great, let's do this thing." And it ended up being this weird mix of no wave. In this particular moment in the Bay Area a kind of neo no wave scene was emerging, somewhat influenced by what was happening in Providence and Chicago, but really its own thing. So you would see Kid606 or Blectum from Blechdom playing with Numbers or Total Shutdown or one of these bands.
Jack: Yeah, there's a bit of an overlap in the scenes around that time, but they were distinctive scenes: the more leftfield dance music, if you would consider it that, and then the more DIY punk stuff. But they were overlapping. That's the Men's Recovery Project era also.
Pete: Yeah, they were sort of separate and then they weren't.
Gabriel: Exactly! And this was what was confusing. This is true I think of a lot of music scenes: if you base it on genre, it seems they're worlds apart. But if you base it on who's drinking together, there's a lot of overlap, or who's dating. But honestly, I really felt this frustration because I wanted my music to be free and radical and experimental, which I felt was in in line with my goals for music, but also for life, and as I felt like the music was around me in this electronic music scene that was happening, turn of the century San Francisco. But I wanted to be pummeled with bodies and sweat the way I felt at a Burmese show. And I couldn't find those two things together, so I was like, "Well, I don't know what I'm going to do." I think this was part of my motivation for leaving the Bay. Also the first .com disaster was happening, so rent was absurd. I was living in a living room with four other people in an apartment with six or seven people and I was working full time and it's just like, "This isn't the life I want. This isn't what I want to be doing."
Jack: So from there...
Gabriel: From there, Owen from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone walks over to me at a show is like, "Gabriel. I'm moving to Portland. You should come." And I'm like, "When are you going?" And he's like, "We're leaving in two months." I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to Portland again." Just right in that moment.
Pete: Well, Gabe and I had met when Boxleitner was on tour, they played at Todd P's house, which was a half a block away from 17 Nautical Miles. [laughter] I don't remember why, but he was having a tough time.
Gabriel: I'll tell you why I was having a tough time. We thought it would be hilarious - again, Andy Kaufman - to book a tour for the first week after Y2K. [laughter] So we were in the Bay Area and everyone was obsessed with Y2K and everyone was like, "The world's going to end, planes are falling from the sky, the computers aren't going to work." And we're like, "We should book a tour for January 1st." [laughter] And I think our second show was in Portland. It was January 2nd. So I think Todd was just like, "No one's going to come to the show." It was snowing or rainy or miserable weather, like, "Whatever, I'll book a show as a favor to George because George ran Zum and and put on tons of shows for bands. George was a mensch and deserved a show, right? We were on tour with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and Jim Yoshi Pile-Up, which is a shoegaze post-rock band. I don't even know if we played with a local band. Pete, do you remember?
Pete: I don't think so.
Gabriel: I don't think so. We were silkscreening t-shirts in the kitchen. It was fucking freezing. But Pete was there and we just hit it off. We just shot the shit, enjoyed each other's company.
Pete: So I had met George and CiCi before and I was like, "Oh, Gabe, yeah, I've heard about you." [laughter]
Gabriel: Rumor got up to Pete that I was moving up to Portland and this would have been spring 2001 or something. And Pete sends me an email and he says, "Hey, I heard you're coming to Portland. Do you think we could get a band together in time to play this show in a month?" I wish I still had this email, but Yahoo trashed it, I don't know where it is. And I was just like, "No, absolutely not, but we can definitely start a band together." [laughter] I moved up there and I think within a week we were working out what our band was going to be.
Pete: Gabe was living in this pink house with Owen Ashworth and Cass McCombs.
Jack: What the hell? That's crazy overlap.
Gabriel: I know, I know. Like I said, who you end up living with, hanging out with, who you're friends with, doesn't always show up in the Spotify playlist.
Jack: In the written history. That's why we do these things.
Pete: So we started rehearsing and we actually rehearsed for a long time because we got a whole bunch of new gear.
Gabriel: We took at least six months before going public with it. I mean, part of it is that we were trying to figure out what it was that we were doing not just technically, but also conceptually. Both of us really wanted to make this music that was visceral and physical, but also really weird and fucked up. And we were starting to listen to things like the more electro influenced Wolf Eyes and Metalux records. Some of it was just that we were really pushing ourselves to try something risky and different. And I think also Pete was a pretty well-known and established person in the music scene and in the community, so it felt like a little bit of pressure; if we're going to do this, we want to try and be ready. We don't want to just show a work in progress, we want to show something that immediately pushes people's buttons.
Pete: But then our first show was terrible.
Gabriel: It was the worst. We were playing with all these great bands, I think it was Get Hustle, Monitr Bats, which was Brace Paine's band. Who else was on that, do you remember?
Pete: Chromatics!
Gabriel: Chromatics, that's right. When they were over in Seattle. So it was a big show for our little scene. What I remember is that after playing, I put away our gear, I left the building and I walked for two miles by myself, and I was pretty sure I was going to give up music for the rest of my life. I was like, "This is the most humiliating thing I've ever experienced. I will never play music again."
Pete: Yeah, it was bad. [laughter]
Jack: Okay, so first of all, I know you guys have clearly evolved over the course of your almost ten years as a band, but I'm curious: how would you describe the early version and then going into what was that first show, how did it fail in relation to that?
Gabriel: I think we just had really big ambitions and we were working it out in a basement. There's some things that you really don't know until it's in public, until someone else is experiencing it. And even if they don't say anything, just the feeling of like, "Oh, that thing that we never actually worked out in rehearsal, that problem that we kept on coming up that we never nailed down, it just came up. And now I really see why it's a problem." We just weren't ready. But you're never ready, you have to be willing to fail in public if you're going to try something hard.
Jack: Absolutely. For this very first iteration of the band, did you guys have songs that you would play?
Pete: It started out more like songs. If you hear our first split with John Wiese, it's more song-based, but we ended up meeting this group of people who were all very dedicated improvisers working in this space of very minimal music, and they lived in our neighborhood. After about a year of the band, we ended up living in the same house together. They were just a couple of blocks away from us and we would go play with these people who were really excellent improvisers.
Gabriel: Bryan Eubanks, JP Jenkins, who's still in Portland, was in L.A., Mark Kaylor, Joe Foster.
Jack: Oh I know Bryan! I know Bryan very well, he's a good friend.
Pete: We were literally neighbors and we would all get together and play together.
Gabriel: They were really generous and open to people trying things. And the fact that we wanted to hang out and try to experiment with them, they were down. I think that really changed how we listened, how we thought about composing.
Pete: They were people who really opened up our ears towards a different kind of listening. And because of that, I think that really transformed how we played with each other.
Jack: How early into the band was that? Was that 2001, 2002?
Pete: That's more 2002, 2003.
Jack: Had you guys started a Collective Jyrk by that point?
Pete: I think we started pretty much right as we were starting the band with Eric Mast and we were just mostly putting out CDrs by people around us, you know? And one of those projects that we put out a lot of stuff for was this project GOD, that was Bryan Eubanks and this dude, Leif, who I think is totally out of music now, but they were absolute legends. Bryan and Lief went from being a sax player and a drummer to Bryan basically playing a bunch of exposed circuit boards and doing live circuit bending and Leif mostly playing turntables and records, but with a parametric EQ and no belt. [laughter]
Gabriel: Sorry, I'm just remembering Leif biting the record.
Pete: Yeah, so Gabe and I were at this show that GOD was playing and Leif was playing his turntable and he leans over and starts biting this record and this dude in the who is watching the show just stands up, throws up his hands like, "That's it. This is too much," and just leaves.
Gabriel: But this is why we kicked it with these people, because they were extreme. I mean, I think at this point we've established that Pete and I listen pretty broadly, that we're not super concerned with just being narrowly focused on a genre or a scene. But what it came down to over and over again, and this is really the main story of Collective Jyrk, is we were interested in people who were pushing an outer limit and it didn't entirely matter if it was more melodic and poppy, if it was harsh noise, if it was metal. It just needed to be something that was on the outer limit of what people are doing and it needed to come from, I think the term is sui generis. Is that right? I had to be born out of that person's own deep weirdness and if it came out of their own individual or collective deep weirdness, I think we were pretty excited to do things with those people.
Pete: And there are a lot of weird people in Portland. [laughter]
Pete: We were only on the West Coast until 2004 and Collective Jyrk was around for a couple of years, we were mostly just repping Portland stuff and then Gabe and I both did these local music events around Portland that were like,"Here's 12 bands in a day that are all from around here that all could play more shows with each other, but don't." So we would have these little mini festivals that would just be a bunch of cool bands that do all sorts of different stuff. And Narnack came out to one of them and ended up offering record deals to a handful of bands. They offered us to do something which led to our first record, which is one where we're still in Portland, but then kind of in the middle of all this I'm moving to the Bay for the first time, Gabe's moving back to the Bay, and it was kind of so I could pursue this relationship with Liz Harris. We end up recording the record and having it come out right after we get to the Bay. It was supposed to come out in time for our tour, but we end up doing this full U.S. tour to basically move us.
Gabriel: I don't know how much it is still true for bands that do tour in the ways that we did back in the day. I know that bands do still to some extent, but there was a pretty big gap between the East and West Coast. What it comes down to is there were two main obstacles for a band in Portland: one was the huge distances, even just to get to San Francisco, you had to go 12 hours, if you were lucky, right? And to get to anywhere on the East Coast or even the Midwest, there was scenes in Ohio and Michigan, there was lots of great places to play, but to get there took so much effort. And it also meant that to get from that side of the country to us took a lot of effort, so on the one hand that meant that things could kind of percolate in Portland without that constant pressure of what is happening in New York or what's happening in L.A. That's part of why I think Portland itself had an amazing scene, but also why bands that were pretty different than each other were willing to play and form a scene around just being in relationships together. It was almost a really big small town in that way. The other issue is that we didn't really have a label that represented us in the same way that Troubleman or Dischord, or pick your label, represented a particular region or particular scene. So on some level we really built those relationships or that scene from the ground up because we didn't have immediate access to the Ann Arbor, Detroit scene. We didn't have immediate access to the Fort Thunder scene. And oftentimes when we'd show up in a place that already had a pretty established scene, it wasn't a great show. It took a long time...
Jack: To break into that scene. There's always a kind of provincialism.
Gabriel: Yeah, "We've got our thing, we don't need you." What we found, though, was places that often got overlooked ended up being some of the most exciting towns to play in. Sacramento, St. Louis, Iowa City. Just to kind of give us some long term perspective, we showed up in St. Louis the first time and it was a house show and Ghost Ice was putting on the show. We discovered it was his parents' house in this bizarre housing project, gated community, every house looks the same. We were late because we had trouble finding it, it was an early in the day show. There's a barbecue, his mom or his dad are barbecuing. His mom is serving cocktails. And there's a guy in a full tuxedo with a saxophone looking really anxious. As soon as we show up, they're like, "You guys, we gotta start the show. We've been waiting for you and the first opener has to go play a wedding." So without even unloading our stuff, we just go down into the basement and this guy does a blistering, fire music sax solo for 20 minutes.
Jack: Probably Dave Stone.
Pete: It was totally Dave Stone.
Gabriel: So yeah, he plays and blows us away and is gone. I think he literally stops playing, runs up, shakes our hands. He's like, "I'm so sorry, I have to leave before your set, I've got to go play a wedding." The next band is, I don't remember what they were called, but they were I think two guys, maybe three, they're covered in mud or body paint. They're mostly naked. They're playing logs. But at some point, Mom comes into the basement to see if we need snacks or drinks and Jeremy is like, "Mom! I told you not to come in here!" [laughter] So she embarrassedly closes the door. I don't know if she noticed that there were three naked men in the room playing logs. Ghost Ice plays and Ghost Ice was, I don't know if anyone ever remembers, but Jeremy was so good, so good.
Pete: He never put anything out! I've talked to so many people about Jeremy and his music, and everyone was like, "Oh man, he was really good."
Gabriel: And I'll just say, that was our first show in St. Louis. We had a great time, we played to 20 people in the basement, it was no big deal. But we kept on coming back to St. Louis and it seemed to matter to people that we kept on coming back. And honestly we eventually got good shows in New York City and in Chicago, we worked our way up to that point where we could play a decent show in those towns. But that show in St. Louis was as good as any show we played anywhere else in the country.
Pete: You know, on our second U.S. tour, we were opening up for Xiu Xiu. We initially met because Xiu Xiu was on their first West Coast tour and George Chen was traveling with them because George's sister was in the band. So they roll up to Portland and they're like, "Oh, George knows Pete." They hit me up and they end up crashing at my apartment because they were sleepy. [laughter] We were all buddies, Jamie lived in Seattle for a little bit and we did some tracking on Fabulous Muscles. Then he asked us to tour with them and we were stoked. We were a little bit of a stretch for a lot of the people coming out to the shows. One of the shows that we played was in Fargo and it was at this brewery, but was an all ages show. At this point it was just us and Xiu Xiu, I think. For some reason there was a great P.A. and we just rolled in and played. It sounded good and kids were just confused. They were like, "What was that? What were you doing? I don't understand it." So for the show in Fargo, we're playing to 20 kids and none of them knew what they were getting into, but five of them, their world totally changed that night. So the next time we come back, we play and nobody comes out. But there's an opening band that's from Fargo. It's a bunch of people playing noise. So it was just that thing where you see that influence. And our first tour we booked entirely ourselves. So it was like, "Okay, we need to get from point A to point B, where do we stop? Can we stop in Missoula, Montana?" We played a bunch of little small towns.
Gabriel: Even even once we had kind of established our circuit, as a kind of principle or rule we always made sure we played somewhere we hadn't played before. So even on our last tour with Mouthus we still ended up probably playing some places in the Southeast that we've never played before, just because we needed to reach out to other people. Also it was for our own benefit, we just didn't want to get stuck or bored or calcified. We agreed to do things that a lot of people wouldn't agree to, we were curious. I think we were just willing to take a chance, like, "We don't know if this is actually going to work, but why not?" One of my favorite examples of that is we had a show booked at, I forget the name of it, if it's the Bug Jar in Rochester, New York. Pengo had booked the show. We were on the bill with Pengo and then they get in touch with us and they're like, "Look, you got this show first. We are going to honor that, but we have to be honest., D.O.A. and the Dickies are playing and this would be a really good show for us." And Pete and I were like, "Well, can we just open?" We rarely set up on stage back then and and we didn't set up on stage. I feel like we set up in the cafe or on the floor in front of the stage. Maybe ten people actually watched us. It was a lot of older punks and no one was there for us except for Pengo. But this one guy - I wish I could remember the shirt he was wearing, the Clash or Subhumans, I forget - he was an older punk who probably had seen D.O.A.'s first tour and he comes running up to us and he's like, "What... what... what... what do you call that? I mean, what do you call that?" I'm like, "Well, we call it noise." He's like, "Really? You're not joking? You call it noise?" I was like, "Well, I mean, I think of it as punk" and he's like, "You do?! Because it seemed punk to me, but it wasn't punk." He was so fucking excited and I was just like, "That's worth it."
Jack: Amazing.
Pete: So yeah, I don't know if we went to Europe while we were working on Psychic Secession, because we mostly were playing pieces from that for the first time. But basically we got an invitation to go play this festival in Belgium called Dramarama.
Gabriel: This is, I think, one of the most important moments in our trajectory.
Pete: It was a festival that was curated by this Belgian artist Jelle Crama put together this whole multiple day festival that was Kites...
Gabriel: There was Glamorous Pat from Portland.
Pete: Extreme Animals.
Gabriel: There was some other European bands, I'm struggling to remember who else was on that bill.
Pete: Fat Worm of Error!
Jack: I was literally about to say. Fat Worm is, like, the pinnacle of that. One of my favorite bands ever.
Gabriel: So for us, we went out there and we were like, "All these people are cool." We have a lot of connections already there, we were aware of some of these groups, having either played together or just having bought their stuff or we just had heard about them. But I don't think we saw ourselves as doing the same thing and this festival put us in this contrast to everything else that was happening in music in this weird way that it made us, I think, really recognize, "Oh, there is something happening." You know? But I think I think that this was really that moment where someone outside of the scene was able to look across and see that there was something happening. And then to get that affirmation from people who... Again, as Americans, we were just not used to being treated as artists. If we were lucky, we were treated as a real band. You know what I mean? I think it was a really huge leap for us to have the opportunity even just to go to Europe but then it also solidified friendships that were forming through tape trading, CDr trading, and we ended up going back to Europe a lot.
Pete: We had some very weird tours in Europe and a lot of them would be a bunch of really, really good shows and then a lot of weird shows. But there was this dude who is a really big fan of Yellow Swans in this little corner of western Germany near the French border. It was our drive between, I think, Brussels and Torino. So this dude is stoked, he sets up a show for us. I don't think he promoted it. There were no opening bands and it was at a rec center. It was the only show in Germany that we were playing. So we roll up, we get dinner with him, we set up, soundcheck sounds great and it's just him and then one other kid who's involved in the show. We're kind of hanging out, we're like, "No opening bands?" "No, nothing." "Okay, cool." And we're just hanging out, waiting to start, whenever it's time. [laughter] And this car, totally full, rolls up, and it's all these kids who drove hours from Hamburg or somewhere and they get out of the car and are like, "We just drove 3 hours to come see you guys." It's the two kids involved in the show who are big fans and then these people who just drove a long way to see us. And it sounded really good in there. So we just started playing and the vibe was really good and we finished what would be a normal set. We're kind of like, "Should we keep playing?" They're like, "Yeah!" We were just like, "We'll just keep playing until you think you got your money's worth." [laughter] They put all this effort in and we ended up playing for almost 2 hours.
Gabriel: What it comes down to is, I think, we grew up understanding that what a band does is they kind of have this working class mentality, get in the van and you tour and you're not entitled to shit. You earn it through playing and building relationships and you do it through reciprocating, right? So we were putting on shows for bands when they came through and we were putting out our own music, but we also were putting out music for other people. To its credit, I think the noise scene in America, building off of the years of tape trading and the kind of tape exchange that happened with Europe and Japan as well, really understood that we're not in this for fame and money. We're in this to be obsessed with other people who are obsessed. So it really was very horizontal. For all of its problems, also generally was willing to accept people doing something weird and fucked up and and value people just trying things. And so I think the noise scene was super supportive, but also not a lot of bands that sounded like us or did what we did toured the way that we toured.
Pete: So in 2007, we basically were like, "Mmm... Time to call it."
Gabriel: Yeah. The way I remember it is that he and I were not getting along. At the end of the day, well, tour itself, we weren't enjoying each other's company. It was hard work. We were tired. We just knew each other really fucking well. I think I slept next to Pete more than any other person in my entire life prior to my current partner. I just was like, "We have no space from each other." The way I remember is I put it to Pete, I was like, "You know, I don't think this is fun any more. I don't think this is working. I don't want to do this if we're not friends. And so I would rather we make a decision to end this, but do it on our terms." And Pete seemed to be in a similar space.
Pete: Yeah, also a big part of it was if Gabe was moving, it wasn't really clear how the band was going to continue working. So basically we had a practice space and we agreed to record a final album ourselves, and we also had a few remaining obligations. We had this West Coast tour that we were going to do with Sissy Spacek and a handful of shows that we were going to play in the Midwest. And then after we had basically been like, "Okay, the Midwest is it." We got contacted by Sonar Festival and they were like, "We want to have you this year." And we're like, "Oh, we're broken up. But what is it?" They're like, "Oh..." It ended up being one week after the last show that we had scheduled that was going to be in Chicago. And I was like, "Well, we can do this, but it's just going to be one show. You gotta pay for both of us to fly out." They're like, "No problem, of course." But for us, we'd never had a fly-out show. Really good way to go out. It was probably the biggest show we played, period.
Gabriel: I think we ended it with this idea of if we're going to do this on our terms, what are the things that we need to do to feel good, to not feel like there's unfinished business? And we made a list. Making one last album was very clearly important to both of us, and doing a few shows. These these kind of mini tours felt important to us. We had a couple other releases that were on the list, most of them made it out. But at the end of the day, I think we set ourselves up for about a year of work, maybe, or was it less?
Pete: We recorded everything at the beginning of 2008 and it didn't come out until the end of 2010.
Gabriel: Yeah, that's right.
Pete: So Gabe moved to Canada, got married, did the whole immigration thing, started art school without a bachelor's degree, which I'm endlessly impressed by. Me, I basically decided to continue the path that I had been on working in mental health. It was time to finally go to college. So, I leave my job, I start doing prerequisites, go to nursing school, I decided to go the medical route. I ended up getting my first bachelor's degree in two years, going to Portland Community College and Portland State. I did all the prerequisites for nursing school, the only program I got into was at Columbia. The program at Columbia started in June and all the classes that I was taking to finish up my first bachelor's degree ended almost at the beginning of July, so I had to finish all my classes three weeks early and move across the country. Also during my winter break, the last year that I was at Portland State, I went out to a friend's cabin and I'm like, "I'm going to make an album." So I record all this stuff. I had ideas for three different albums. I'm out there for a couple of weeks and I recorded Man with Potential and I Don't Rock at All at same time.
Jack: Man with Potential has one of the greatest album covers that is still talked about among our friends today. If people in radioland don't know, Pete was known for wearing... What is that hat called?
Gabriel: I think you just call it the Castro cap.
Jack: It's like the grindcore guy hat, that's what I also think of it as. [laughter] The album cover, for those who don't know, for Man with Potential is a mop with that hat on it, which actually just looks Pete with the hair that he had. [laughter] It's one of the most classic album covers.
Gabriel: 100%.
Pete: I wore a peacoat a lot, so I put my peacoat on a coat hanger hanging off the mop and put my hat on top of the mop.
Jack: Yeah, that's right, it has the coat too. So it literally just looks like you, but you can see the pole going up the middle. It's an amazing cover.
Pete: I still really like both of those records, but the live show got a little tiring and I just kind of hit a point where I was just like, "Oh, I don't really love it." 2014 rolls around, I finish up my master's degree and I'm basically ready to start my career prescribing meds. [laughter] I was basically doing a job and people are like, "I want to book you for a show" and I'm like, "It's not happening." And then around when Gabe and I started working on our archive, we had been talking about playing music here and there. Basically right before the pandemic hit, Gabe came down to L.A. and we were like, "Let's just plug it and see how it feels." And we got together and we played and we're like, "This sounds like us." It fully just sounds like no time has passed, you know? And we both were like, "Oh, we should play some shows." But we kept batting this idea around and then I guess it was earlier this year, we got an offer and the window was just too tight. And I was like, "Yeah there's no way we can do that, there's no way we can get together in rehearsal with our lives being what they are." But so we ended up getting another offer pretty quickly after that that was on a more workable time scale for us. This was Oblivion Access and they've done a lot of things to accommodate our needs, they're booking rehearsal time for us in Austin and things like that. Since then we've been able to get together and rehearse and that's been really fun. The rehearsals have been good and basically throughout the sessions we keep playing better and better with each other. I think it is progressing in a direction, which is pretty awesome.
Jack: That's exciting that it's not just a reunion greatest hits kind of thing, but it's a new chapter for the project, is what it seems, which is pretty exciting.
Gabriel: Yeah, it'll sound exactly like us. And also, I think anyone who cares enough to notice the difference will immediately hear that it's something new, that it really is new sounds.
Pete: It sounds like us. It's a progression from where we were, but it really sounds like us.
Gabriel: Which, fair warning, anyone who just wants to hear Going Places live, there'll be moments where some of that comes through, but you're going to be disappointed if that's what you expect.
Jack: Prepared for disappointment for the Yellow Swans reunion! [laughter].
Pete: Come on!!!
Gabriel: So what do you think, Jack? Any last questions or any lacunae?
Jack: I think we're done, but I have one last question: can you tell me the origin of the "D" in D. Yellow Swans?
Pete: It's entirely a reference to DYS, the straight edge hardcore band.
Jack: The Boston straight edge hardcore band, Department of Youth Services. Wow.
Gabriel: I have a slightly less cool answer. Both Pete and I, I think, were low key fans of no logo, both of us. I think we're interested in fucking with the normative ways in which records get cataloged. We thought, "Yeah, if we change the D word every single time, people don't know where we go in the record store." I was always okay into Will Oldham and Palace, but I loved the fact that every album, the record clerk didn't know where to put it. I thought that was smart. And then I think it also just took on a life of its own. Most of the music is improvised, most of the recordings felt like a different version of the band, so it was kind of fun to just use the D as a way of saying, like, "This is a different version of Yellow Swans." And one of the things that it also allowed was for a bit of taking the piss out of us, letting other people have fun. When we would play a gig, we would let the person making the flier choose the D word. If someone was releasing a CDr or a cassette, we usually let them choose the D word. Often people really were passionate, like, "I really want to call you this." And so sometimes we had really dumb D words, but that was part of not taking ourselves so seriously.
Pete: And this kind of gets back to when we started the band, it was a thing we took seriously that we didn't want to be outwardly serious, but it became more serious over time.
Jack: Have you ever used "dumb" as one of the D-words?
Gabriel: Oh yeah.
Jack: Okay, I assumed so, but I can't think of them.
Gabriel: Dumb, Do Your Dishes. Dude, Where's My Car? Yellow Swans. [laughter]
Jack: Some of these are just on the flyers, right? You must have some sort of archive somewhere of some of these, because these would be great to archive.
Gabriel: Actually that would probably be a really good t-shirt, nothing but the D words. I have an archive of almost all the printed matter that exists, but I have no doubt that I would not be able to account for every D word that was used for sure.
Jack: Well, then there could be a crowdsourcing thing, so maybe on this we could say, "Hey, you know, if you booked D. Yellow Swans at some point in their eight years as a band and you have a D word that you used just for that show on the flier, please come forward and send it to..."
Gabriel: Yes, maybe send it to the Instagram.
Jack: Yes, send it to the new Yellow Swans Instagram that is up, DM them. What's the handle?
Pete: It's yellow swans sound with underscores.
Jack: There you go, you'll be able to find it.
Gabriel: Slide into the DMs, if you've got photos of the flyers, send it our way.
Jack: Yes, please. Well, this has been really great. Thank you guys so much for doing this. I will see you guys in June at LPR. Alright, have a good weekend. Enjoy, relax and talk soon.
Gabriel: Thanks, guys.
Pete: Sounds good. Thanks so much.
