Music and Photos: Worlds Collide
Content Warning: Shameless Self Promotion Ahead
Those of you who know me in real life might know that I play bass in ugly, grungey sounding bands with very little in the way of critial acclaim, currently manifest as a trio called Mama & His Boys with my friends André (guitar and vocals) and Mike (drums).
This particular band hasn’t been a band for long, but in August, armed with bad intentions for a good time and 11 songs — 10 originals and a cover of Iggy Pop’s “Repo Man,” which was surprisingly affordable to license — we went into the studio at Sharkbite in Jack London Square, Oakland with our friend Scott Evans. Scott is an engineer, the owner and proprietor of AntiSleep Audio, an accomplished recorder and mixer of massively loud bands, guitarist and main man in the legendary Kowloon Walled City, daily eater of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and all around excellent human being.
We tracked all the songs live in two days, André did the vocals in another day and half, Scott mixed it all over a couple of weeks, we had it mastered by Matthew Barnhart at Chicago Mastering Services, and released what we titled Twomp Twomp Vier digitally on October 25th. From the studio to the street in under 90 days. All gas no breaks. And we should have 200 vinyl LPs from Smashed Plastic in Chicago in a few weeks.
I’ve made several albums over the years with Scott at the boards, almost every one of them with André on guitar — Mike is new to the mix — and this is by far the best music thing I’ve ever done. Any agreement with that sentiment is of course relative and heavily dependent on one’s feelings for loud, fuzzed-out and down-tuned rock music about sex and drugs and the glorious lament of dystopian devolution. But it is indeed a good time, ready to be had by all.
André and I tag-teamed the LP design and layout. I shot a bunch of black and white photos during the recording session — some digital on the Leica M10 Monochrom, and a few on Kodak Tri-X 400 with the Leica MP — most of which appear in the gallery below, and on an insert in the vinyl LP jacket along side some fisheye shots that Scott took during the session.
I made the cover photo, a close-ish shot of André making a cultish hand sign, using a Rolleicord TLR camera and Lomo 800 color 120 film (nice, big square 6x6 negatives). Another photo from that session, a portrait of André wearing a menacing grin and holding a martini, ended up on the other side of the LP insert, wreathed in lyrics. The portraits of Dré and Mike here are outtakes from that session.
The band photo that appears on back of the album was snapped with a Fujifilm X-Pro3, converted to black and white and roughed up a little in Lightroom for that old “punk rock” band photo look.
You can and should stream the album from the usual places…
You can and should also pre-oder the vinyl LP on Bandcamp — which would be super helpful, the last thing I want is a box full of these in my closet forever — and it should ship next month. We just approved the test pressings, and they sound great.
End Shameless Self Promotion
See y’all next month.
BOILERPLATE STUFF
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