YouTube has been showing me a lot of Zoomer screamo bands lately, and Party Hats is a three-piece from Texas that is a little more idiosyncratic than many similar bands. Here, they play at a rental hall in New England, which is exactly where a screamo show should be happening, no matter the decade. The video has all the hallmarks of a suburban hall show: awkward pit, confusing fashion choices, an abundance of space. It’s the light show that caught me a bit off guard.
STUDIO EARS: BRIAN BLOMERTH
Brian Blomerth is an illustrator working in the “adult dog face” genre. That means he likes to draw humans with animal faces. His psychedelic, critter-forward style is one of the most distinctive in contemporary American comics. In addition to making posters for jam bands (Phish, Goose, The Dead) and elaborate screenprinted shirts beloved by graphic designers the world over, Brian is the guy behind the bestselling books Bicycle Day and Mycelium Wassonii, which explore the histories of LSD and magic mushrooms, respectively. He also used to have a legendary rainbow rock project called Narwhalz (Of Sound), but that’s a different conversation altogether.
When you’re in the studio, what's your breakdown of music versus talk?
Brian Blomerth: Music's the shit, and music's what I wish I did more often. But at a certain point, you want to take too much control over music stuff—you're like, Oh, I want to listen to this, this, this. You're thinking about it too much. You want audio to wash over you while you're working, but to be just entertained enough to where you're like, Okay, I've got to keep sitting here. I want to finish whatever I'm drawing.
So talk is more of a motivator.
Yeah, for sure, because it's more distracting. But I have a much better time listening to music than I do talk. Audiobooks are sick, but you also feel like you're stuck until it's done. At a certain point, you get burned out by having to pay too much attention. You want it to be dumb enough where if you missed half an hour, you wouldn't care.
My girlfriend listens to these fake baseball games to go to sleep sometimes.
For a week, I did people recreating famous chess matches and talking about them. It was just interesting enough where it kept me going.
Do you know anything about chess?
No, and then I tried to play online and I sucked so bad.
Let’s go back to music for a second. What platform are you listening to music on when you’re working? A lot of it is on YouTube, right?
Yeah, it's all YouTube, all the time, with the ad blocker.
Are you intentionally searching for stuff, or do you just let the algorithm do its thing?
If I’m being real badass, I’ll let the algorithm take my dumb ass somewhere. That shit's fucked up.
It seems like there's some shit that the YouTube algorithm just throws on you. Obscure, record collector shit.
Yeah, I made a mix for NTS—it was just shit that the YouTube algorithm gave me, shit that I'd never heard of. Some of it is vocal jazz; some of it is dental office classics. Smooth and professional easy listening. I don't know if it's a cool mix or not.
When you're pulling an all-nighter, is it ever silent?
No. I got these sick-ass headphones. They're called No Calm. They're millennial mint. They block out all the sound, so [my wife] Kate will come in and yell at me and I won’t hear. It's sick as shit. When I did Bicycle Day, I started with this 808 State Bicep Remix. And I would let the algorithm go from there, and it would loop at a certain point. It would take you in all these little tech house directions or whatever. I mean, it was sick. I had a really good time with that.
I'm jealous of visual artists that can just listen to music all day.
Yeah, it's cool. And that part about it is the coolest part. Drawing is only exciting sometimes. Most of it is just getting the thing done.
So you're working on a new book right now. It's about a different kind of a drug.
It is about a different kind of drug.
Does that inform at all what you want to listen to?
No. It's got nothing to do with it. It's a totally separate part of the brain. You just occupy this hemisphere while another hemisphere focuses on the gig, you know?
I remember you telling me that you did Infinite Jest as an audiobook. How do the footnotes work with that?
I did it for free on YouTube—the footnotes were a separate YouTube. So I would collect four or five footnotes and then hit play. The footnotes were a different person. That was cool. It was a girl for the footnotes.
I’m sure you process information differently when you are drawing. The book must’ve been somewhat abstract to you.
Yeah. But it's not that crazy of a book. You see why people like it, but it's also pretty easy.
But there's certain segments that get fairly abstract, I believe?
Yeah, for sure. And there’s certain things you only get from the footnotes. There's one little detail that you're like, Oh, this is a big key, and it's just one little footnote. And then you go, Wow, for 10 seconds, and then you go back to drawing.
HARSH NOISE PICK OF THE MONTH
Ineffable Slime - “Falter (Never Abolish Chance)”
Ineffable Slime is a noise artist from New Mexico, and this track was reportedly recorded in the desert. The piece starts with an ominous hum, like the buzz of an underground meth lab. Right after that, it jumps into a classic brand of hot rod brain sizzle—the kind of sucking, degraded textures that noise freaks crave. It’s ASMR for masochists. Judging from the song title and the fact that the tape is called A Roll Of The Dice, Ineffable Slime is interested in accident and ritual. I picture an artist alone at night in a dusty desert shack, clanging metal objects against a dirt floor. Antonin Artaud is a purported influence, but for those looking to clear their head of any extraneous thoughts or anxieties, there is nothing cruel here.
BOUTIQUE INTERNET RADIO CORNER
Technopagen At XPIZZA 10/23