Interview with Sharlyn Evertsz

Pop music's ubiquity is often reliant on fitting an ultimately hollow mold. Songs filled with major key Five One chord progressions, engineered to clear that mind and tighten that smile, leave no room for a world or mind in a chaotic state. But why would John Q and Jane Doe invite disorder anyway? People want innocuity and comfort, not mental gymnastics. Life is hard enough when you're told how to feel and what to think - why exacerbate things by turning off autopilot? Well, that's certainly a way to go through life, but is it the most fulfilling one? Most likely not. But, as Judge Smails said in Caddyshack, "World needs ditch diggers too."

A significant joy in noise is breaking from tradition, which is an asymptotic misnomer of sorts - as soon as the first person recorded static, there was a form into which "noise" could be fit - even if you don't lump noise into "music," it unequivocally falls into tradition, like all other categories of music, sound art, or whatever-the-fuck you want to call it - semantics is the faux-intellectual's favorite science, after all. But noise can be conceptual and smart without firmly resting its axis on an argument over meaning and catalog.

That's not to say it isn't still fun as fuck to talk about that shit, though. I met Sharlyn Evertsz at Churchill's while Pedestrian Deposit played, after becoming familiar with her debut cassingle on Chris Donalson's Drugged Conscience label. Sharlyn makes noise, but that's a bit of a sophomoric description. As prominent as distortion and dissonance are in her music, Sharlyn will frequently feature blues vocals or danceable beats. We met up a few days after the Pedestrian Deposit show to talk about noise, what makes music compelling, and her history as a sound artist.

Jordan Reyes: So you started with more singer-songwriter stuff and then moved into more experimental territory?

Sharlyn Evertsz: Yeah, I started making noise five or six years after my singer-songwriter phase. I was living in Kendall, which is somewhat suburban, and eventually gravitated towards Churchill’s, which is where I met Rat. He approached me out of the blue and coached me on singer-songwriter music. At the time, I didn’t realize that noise existed or that Churchill’s had anything like that. I would only come out Wednesdays when it was singer-songwriter night. In 2010, I went to my first INC and was blown away. It was irresistible. I started buying small pieces of gear soon after.

JR: What was your first set up? And how has it changed?

SE: My first set up was with a Korg Monotron, the cheap $50 one, and a Kaossilator. I eventually got a DSI Tempest. I figured that I needed something more reliable. The Tempest is analog, meaning I don’t have the limitation of presets. I needed versatility and a solid platform. I wanted my music to feel genuine and get rid of the “toy-ish” feel from earlier on.

JR: Does having an open-ended instrument help you craft your music?

SE: Totally! Well…I guess it’s music. [Kenichi & I] were discussing this in the car. It lets me have a greater hand in shaping my sounds and gives me more freedom. I can also make things from scratch, which is a plus.

JR: You guys were talking about noise being music? Any definitive answers?

SE: In my opinion, it’s one of the most honest and present forms of sonic expression. It’s timeless too, because it isn’t necessarily attached to genre or preconceived notion. There’s less nostalgia too, unless an artist is trying to mimic someone else, which is rare. It’s all about the now, which makes the act of making or seeing noise fulfilling and satisfying to me. There’s no resistance in my psyche. It’s also not overly emotional, which makes it therapeutic to me. I always come off a performance feeling awesome.

JR: I forget who said this - I’ve read a bunch of books about noise - in one of them, the author was talking about photographing a noise artist’s set up, which I think is kind of fucked up because noise performance can often be a discovery process. You have gear and it can go to shit or it can go really well. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s still a meshing of time, place, and composition. How many power electronics sets have you seen where some pedal doesn’t work? I think part of the joy is seeing things fail. It reminds you that you’re human and that noise is an organic form - it’s not just machinery doing everything.

SE: Ultimately, the performer is the conductor. It’s not about some static, programmed thing. Any time I’ve felt tempted to do something like that, I’ve just said “fuck it.” Literally, as cliche as that is, double middle-finger to that shit, I’m just going to do what comes out.

JR: So what is a good set for you? How do you know if you’ve had a good set?

SE: A good set for me is one experienced with heightened awareness. There’s a connection, an alignment of mind, body, and emotion. You end up having the honesty and courage to take what’s inside you and improvise. Obviously, if you’re experienced, you know the sounds to avoid, which ends up creating a defined aesthetic or desire. For me, a good set is one in which no part of me feels lost. I don’t care who critiques it or what they’re going to say, but for me, the goal is to be one hundred percent present. And, of course, having it be super loud and brutal.

JR: So when you put all of yourself into music, and forgive me if this sounds cheesy, do you think you end up building a relationship with your gear? Do you begin to love it?

SE: Well, not the object itself. It’s an instrument or tool used to access sounds that can satisfy yourself or others. I understand what you mean by building a relationship with your gear, though. For me, the Tempest is the most complex piece of gear I’ve known, and certainly a relationship has been built. I still haven’t learned it completely even after a couple years. It’s beautiful to see that evolution. It’s like “A-ha! You again! Let’s see what I can do this time!”

JR: I think in regards to the trajectory of noise, there’s this false projection that noise is untutored and wild. That’s total bullshit.

SE: That is total bullshit. We were talking about that last night too. I told [Kenichi] that the beautiful thing about noise is that even the most amateur artist can perform. By the same token, there’s also a level of mastery, higher-mindedness, and experience. That’s what I admire in a performance. I’m impressed by consciousness. It’s chaotic, impulsive, and the gear might fail, but a good performer still has a handle on it. There’s a weird balance between chaos and control - it’s taming a wild beast. The best performers aren’t defeated by it - they’re conquering this unyielding force.

JR: I think you’re right. So, how many releases have you had?

SE: I remember having one through Tom Anderson productions, which was on a website. The only physical release I have is the cassingle you wrote up

. I post stuff online frequently. I guess having something on the internet makes it more informal. I have some pending releases I’m working on. It comes down to real life, which isn’t an excuse, but jobs and situations arise and get in the way, and sometimes that deters me. My music project sometimes can’t be my only focus, unfortunately.

JR: Yeah, you gotta pay bills.

SE: I know! I feel like I have to explain myself because it’s been such a long time - I think the tape I put out is from 2013. It feels like ten years ago.

JR: The cassingle was the first thing I bought at Sweat. I came in asking for some noise and Emile was like “Get this.” I was surprised because it was clearly “noise,” but it had R&B elements too.

SE: I’ve always been a fan of the blues, soul vocal. I have a deep appreciation for that display of emotion. As nerdy as this sounds, I love the blues scale. I like the notes and mood - it’s a reflection of an emotion. At the time I made that song, I was feeling that way.

JR: So what are you working on now?

SE: I hate labeling shit, but I think it’s unavoidable. It’s noise - it’s always noise for me - that’s where my heart is, but I’m a fan of incorporating that with beats. I like the gung-ho aspect of noise, but I like order too. Anything that I’m working on is a mix of noise, heavy beats, and vocals. If I’m going to put a name to it, I’d say it’s techno-noise.

JR: So what do you think makes a piece of music compelling?

SE: For me, what makes something compelling in music or performance is the artist’s intent. I’m moved by the degree of intensity in an artist’s presentation - it becomes a genuine reflection of who they are. The artist performs because he or she has to perform. The creation process is one of survival. How much does the artist mean this?

JR: Do you feel you have to create?

SE: I’ve had periods when I’ve felt creatively paralyzed, but yes, I do. That’s a driving force in my life.

JR: Well, that’s all I’ve got. Anything else you’d like to say?

SE: I’m grateful for the artists unafraid to explore new territory, disregard preconceived norms, and express emotion publicly. When I stop seeing people perform, my inspiration goes into a lull or a limbo. I’ll go out and see an awesome performance and be reignited. I feed off artists. Forget me. If I get the chance to perform or do something musically, I’m thankful, but without others, I’m nothing. To me, that’s the importance.

Interview with The Ukiah Drag

What's noise and what's music? Is it simply a way to bide time until death or is there a desperate hope inexplicably tied to the act of creation? I was born with the expectation to speak and listen. Communication and communion. I'm a student of the sublime - that feeling you get when you're on a flight and the PA clicks on and the pilot says, "Well, folks, we've been notified that the next thirty minutes might be a little bumpy so you had better fasten into those seat-belts lest you float from your delicate position and concuss yourself on the cabin ceiling," and you realize that even in our most powerful machines, on a whim, the dynamics of storm and wind have the wherewithal to snap their fingers and, like a candle flickering at the mouth of a lonely cavern, turn out the lights. But I'm also a student of beauty. In Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, he pits these two ideas and feelings against each other, but if I'm going to preach for a hot minute, I'd say that music, along with other artistic media, often succeeds in being able to capture both.

Which is, of course, what The Ukiah Drag does. You might be thinking me a wee crazy now, and you'd be right, but not because of the previous claim. Beauty is created by way of a dedication to form while the sublime is an overflowing. I'll give an example. At the moment of genesis, noise music began was sublimity in effigy, but as noise became familiar it was able to fill a form dedicated to the genre, which also makes it beautiful, like how a duck fits into our form of waterfowl. To an extent, there are familiar song forms here, but there's also a tint of controlled chaos that circumnavigates those forms: guitars and other noisemakers may, out of nowhere, decide to stray from the main piece for a bit and carve their own paths.

If we're going to play the genre game, The Ukiah Drag falls into a lot of categories. Punk, Blues. Psychedelic rock. Country. Noise. And this failure to pin the band down makes it that much more exciting. Just give their newest record In The Reaper's Quarters a listen, which you really ought to, and you'll see what I mean.

Jordan Reyes: Ukiah is an interesting word to choose in a band name. I only know it as a city in California. Why did you choose it? Where does the drag come from?

Tommy Conte: Ukiah is the county seat of Mendocino County where wine flows like blood through the Russian River; it was a sordid hotbed for burnt out hippie ruralists in the sixties. Jim Jones held his first Peoples Temple congregation in Ukiah. Charles Manson was a demigod there at some point, giving his LSD sacrament to runaways and with low self esteem; he and Susan Adkins were arrested there in June 1968 for peddling drugs and fucking underage girls. At one point the locals referred to Van Damme State Park as “Dog Blood Beach” because of satanic cults sacrificing animals there. And ad nauseam...The dark side of hippie culture is one hell of an American cultural priapism, a hard cock that was useless and bulging. Hence, DRAG.

Zack Arrington: Yeah we get our name from the town, I've never actually been to but have heard stories and folklore that really builds this image of a haunted rural town, somewhere where people have a lot to tell but don't say much... and the word Drag just puts a stamp on that vibe.

Brian Hennessey: Zack named the band, it works well.

Drew: Because The Zombies was taken.

JR: There are a lot of interrelating sounds in your music. There's psychedelia, noise, punk, pop. Where do these sounds come from? Were they conscious?

ZA: We draw from an eclectic palate, and write on a conscious plane so when we're writing songs there is a well rounded pool of influences that pours out and we let it just come out as natural as we can. Never forcing anything - that's a real pet peeve of ours. Letting the song grow into its own and allowing it to align it self instead of relying a formula or assumed structure.

BH: Most of us have been playing in bands for a substantial period of time. As artists that have a continued interest in the outlet of making music, it only makes sense to keep your palette varied and fresh. Some decisions are made with a clear vision in mind, but we have a natural chemistry as a band, and this is the most important creative factor at the end of any day.

TC: I only listen to hip hop and country so personally I have no consciousness of the above mentioned music genres let alone music consciousness in general.

JR: Tell me a little bit about your new album. How did you write these songs?

ZA: For me, this record has been in the works for several years, a slowly focusing vision, very squinty-eyed, and trying to craft the pieces, some of these songs were written before the band really existed and it has been a process of first finding the band to write them with, allowing the band to form and come into itself and then having the perfect facility to record them in. It has taken a couple years, written between a couple of towns and cities but now it's finished. A period is marked and now it's time to move on.

BH: We recorded it in a church-turned-studio in Hudson NY. It was wacky. The band solidified this batch of songs over the last 18 months or so, and were able to embellish them nicely in the studio.

TC: We wrote them with our ass in the air catching a breeze, Ben Greenberg holding a very sensitive, expensive microphone between his teeth and Sultan’s carpet absorbing the large pool of jissom. As for writing, what happens when four Floridians lock themselves in a basement? We don’t have those in Florida so you go a little stir crazy.

JR: Are lyrics important to your music? What themes or topics do you find importance in?

ZA: I mean to me they are. Its like the accompanying narration to the music - it gives it a little personality. Not just filling in blanks with some sort of vapid karaoke routine but giving it a little bit of a soul. The lyrics are typically pretty personal for me but vague enough to assimilate to the listeners imagination and they can do what they want to do with it from there

BH: Sure, I care that they sound good to me. Anyone's interpretation though is up to them, and in earnest they are usually the last thing I hear when I am listening to music. I've heard it said that any song is about love, war, death or sex. While I don't think that's EXACTLY right, I'll say that all of those themes do resonate strongly with me.

TC: I like karaoke and sex and you’ll have to believe my word.

JR: Do you guys read a lot? Any favorite authors or poets?

ZA: When my attention span allows it, I love reading. It's a very fundamental stimulus for me but I usually need something that just hooks into my brain and doesn't let go until I've read the whole book or whatever or I'm liable to just shelf it and will come back to it like 6 months later... Been on a heavy WS Burroughs and Harry Crews thing the last year or so. We also pass a lot of books around among ourselves.

BH: Same here, my attention is a hard thing to wrangle. A biography on Tom of Finland by F. Hoover Valentine reeled me in real hard last year. Michael Chabon writes some entertaining fiction that I enjoy.

TC: I very much have to read, and there is a fine line between indulgence and compulsion. That’s why I can read the Holy Bible and a Haynes automobile manual and react on a visceral wavelength to both. A few slabs I've read recently that have resonated deeply into my cold, brackish heart: The Family by Ed Sanders (beat poet turned hard-boiled gonzo journalist), A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor; The Process by Brion Gysin (Nothing is true, everything is permitted); You Can’t Win by Jack Black; The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (The Exploited ain’t the only idiots who like sex and violence); Ted Morgan’s revised biography of William S. Burroughs; Freedom is a Two Edged Sword by Jack Parsons; Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger; any and all Antonin Artaud, whether it be an absurdist manifesto or a dinosaur-like cat (cat-like dinosaur?) drawn on a napkin; Paul Krassner’s The Realist; Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby by Takashi Nemoto. I have no life so I must indulge vicariously through literature.

JR: What differences were there between this record and the cassette releases that came before from labels like Ascetic House and Night People?

ZA: Well "Jazz Mama" and "Variations of Candy" were recorded in the basement of the apartment me, Tommy and Brian lived in in Boston. We were more of a recording project at the time wide open with a lot of ideas but still coming together as a band.  

ZA: When Drew join in, he kinda served as a backbone for us and since then we have really grown and matured and really started to articulate what we are doing with our music, so after a couple of tours and recording a single it was time to do the LP in a studio, we really wanted to give justice to these songs and were more than adequately facilitated to do so    

BH: Home recording vs. a studio environment was definitely the biggest difference.

TC: Mood, drug choice, tape hiss.

JR: Where did the art for the record come from? Seems somewhat similar to the recent zine you put out.

ZA: That's because I did the art for both.

JR: There seem to be some mystic or spiritual tropes in the artwork, maybe more archetypal. Do these themes have any impact on your music?

ZA: Not necessarily an impact as much as they're parallel. Two outlets from the same source. Sisters  

JR: You recently toured with Merchandise. How was that tour?

ZA: The tour was a blast, those guys are kin. It's nice touring as a roving herd because even if a city or show is a pit you still got 8 friends to get in trouble with, and when it's a good time it's even better because you have the crew, which is a mobile sense of the familiar.

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BH: It was cool. I saw some places that I hadn't seen before, and got to hang out with a lot of old friends. I'll be hard pressed to go on a tour that is any more like a vacation than that one was.

TC: A highlight was eating Prince’s Hot Chicken in Nashville. Chris Horn from Merch is a fried chicken guru and that’s why he plays saxophone so well - the valves are lubricated with gristle. It was our first time in Canada as a band and I wandered alone in both Montreal and Toronto for hours, trying to get into sex shops and being denied. They knew I was not a Quebecois fuckboy, just a plain American one.

JR: What is the musical climate in Tampa like?

ZA: I would not be the guy to ask, I haven't lived there for over 2 years now

TC: Hip hop and country music

JR: Are you guys going to tour behind the new record?

ZA: It's looking like early next year were going to tear up the whole US

TC: Lock up your unibrowed sons and sweaty lawn boys! The Sultan is in heat...

JR: What all is in the future for Ukiah Drag?

TC: I want to play the David Letterman show

ZA: Sex? Drugs? Maybe some cash? Been thinking about getting a pet Tarantula but will probably settle for a ficus tree... hard to say.

BH: We'll write more songs and probably eat each others food on the sly until we leave for tour. A 12" EP coming is out sometime in 2015 too, so there's that.

Release of the Day: Ultimate Spinach - Ultimate Spinach

Hands down the most important book I read all year has been the Acid Archives Second Edition. It's an expensive investment, but worth its weight in gold. This book compiles thousands of reviews in addition to boasting short introductions to lesser-listened-to genres like New Age, Exotica, and obscure Soul. It focuses on private press, rare records generally of a psychedelic bent from about 1965 to 1985. The book is quick to admit that not all of the records that are reviewed are great, but many are and have been passed over, only to become collector rarities to the few who spent time digging through crates at record fairs.

Another thing that I've discovered this year is just how many excellent full albums are available to be streamed on YouTube. I mean, you can find anything there (though most is definitely not good). Anyway, Bill Roe from Trouble in Mind more or less hipped me to the "YouTube Album K-hole," which is when you just keep clicking albums on the right side of the screen to see if you hear something cool. It's basically fool-proof and I've discovered some pretty great jams. Maybe it's that I'm easy to please, but I'd say that most of the albums are worth at least a little attention: it's how I have discovered some pretty incredible records like The Bachs.

Today, I'm discovering and listening to Ultimate Spinach's lone long-player album from 1967 Ultimate Spinach. This band came out of Boston and wasn't happy with three-minute nuggets, so they instead decided to really psych out for extended periods of time, which can be heard in the the first song on the album "Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess." I mean, how badass is that title? I'll answer the question for you - pretty friggin' badass. And it's a great song to boot, starting with a uncanny vocal intro.

The album has familiar vocals, somewhat similar to early Kinks, which is a fairly good reference point to this record. "Funny Freak Parade," is a bouncing nug of psych pop like you'd hear on Kinda Kinks, but it also utilizes non-human vocals and exotic sounds to create a more untamed ambiance to the composition. The following song "Pamela," begins with a baroque organ trill before getting into more folk rock area. The use of classical or baroque-rooted instrumentation is consistent throughout the album, though the band never commits fully to either old-world or new-world music, resulting in something far out that could just as equally played in bars as in cathedrals.