A Not Normal World; or, The Kinda Place I'd Like To Be

A quick and calm one before the storm coming next week, True Believers. Next week will be a deep one, I poured my heart and soul into ruminating on our landmark first vinyl outings, and so don't have much else to add to what I already prepped for you mugs on this'n. Before we get to it:

1) Any order placed for Roy Kinsey's modern masterpiece Blackie (vinyl edish) within the next week will receive a free copy of More Roy. For free! Zero fucking bones, so do the thing.

2) You can still get American Hate, Cherry Death, and Deodorant for $5, but only until midnight tonight!

3) Das Drip's debut LP has been added to the distro and it is not an exaggeration when I say that this is the best Hardcore Punk record I've heard this year. You absolutely have to get this fucker.

4) I'm going to record my "auxiliary percussion" parts on the new Tums tape in T-minus one hour. It's gonna be, let's say, inspired.

5) I'll most likely be migrating the entirety of the blog so far to a new host. Been hearing people have a lot of problems accessing blogger and I just wanna make it easy for the 16 of you keeping up.

See you in seven!

NNT#008 These Are The Voices In The Back of Your Head CS Compilation

Even in those early, humbler days, we wanted it all; to piece together these disparate entities into a unified whole, a Not Normal World flying a banner to which all freaks could flock. It was possible. The mythology existed alongside the history, it was possible. Punk exploded in London, New York, LA, in an era predating portable technology, near simultaneously. A harmonic resonance disseminating sonic smut through psychic back channels and reaching near total proliferation. We assumed it possible to replicate the Network of Friends, those bandana and flannel clad miscreants spread across Europe and found contemporaries throughout the Americas, in a contemporary timeline. We had seen, too, the potential of a tightly curated collection of music, tied together not by adherence to a specific sub sub sub sub sub genre but to the Vision. Pushead had done it with Cleanse the Bacteria, just one lone bleached-out Boisean who found a pulse beating clean through the Earth. And we’d later discover more proof, comps from Germany and San Francisco and South America, that gave us a solid foundation.

Did we accomplish that same thing here? I dunno. Did we add to the canon? Who’s to say, maaaannnn. We did it as we saw and heard it at the time, twenty-ish minutes of semi-international noise, that hopefully made a couple fools sprinkled out over this big distant world feel a little less dumb and empty and alone. It was Chicago/NWI heavy as always, our perspective skewed through proximity to regional brilliance (see also: blatant localism), but even so, I’d like to think it showcased a view of punk beyond hype and beyond style and taught us sometimes the voices you hear maybe you wanna listen to.

Trivialities: Mat Williams contributed no small portion of his time and energy to the layout of this bad boy, and, like most things in this early era, so did R. Lowry. 500 pro-dubbed cassettes, red shells with black imprints, housed in screen printed cardboard cassette mailers with 8.5 x 14, double sided, black and white insert. Early on in the process, Ultratumbados were wary of being included on the comp due to what I characterize as a completely baseless fear of the tape being just them and a bunch of power violence bands, a devastating accusation that I may or may not have ever forgiven them for.

NNT#009 The Outs - We’re On The Outs

 

Look, it’s not a good way to live, but I feel as though a good quarter to one-third of my life decisions have been made in reaction to some uncomfortable truth I’ve brushed up against. We can never be sure that the Outs would have began had Nick not rejected the first riff I ever brought to Poison Planet’s vegan straight edge table, but being so spurned was at least A catalyst here. Maybe he was right, I don’t think I ever quite found that knack for songwriting that other members of this band have, the legacy Spooky, Mark, and TJ have left behind is far and beyond anything I could hope for, but I’m glad I squeaked in a couple during the time I spent with these three, especially at such an early stage of my bass playing “career.” The Outs were short lived and sorta volatile like nearly everything happening in Chicago at that time, but we played our asses off every show, hurling ourselves around and just generally carrying on like a bunch of silly little goofs.

We recorded this demo like every other demo in NWI at the time, at Niko’s house while his grandma took mental notes on every perceived transgression and every piece of property we were no doubt thieving, but the idiocy surrounding the session surpassed even peak NWI levels. In the span of six hours, here’s what went down: we tracked all six songs live and nasty-like, with Spooky one-taking every song on her first ever recording while standing in the downstairs pantry, Niko mixed the demo in the half hour it took to get back to my house, Spooky cut my hair in my bath tub, we dubbed 25 copies, then shot back to Schererville to play our first show. 

Trivialities: first run of 100 split between green and orange shells with hand written sticker labels, in white norelcos, with xeroxed j-cards designed by a pictures pages playing pud. Second run of 100 distinguishable only by the considerably better sound quality.