A Decade (plus) of Violent Change: Interview with Matt Bleyle

An in-depth conversation with a Bay Area legend

Photo: Ringo Rock Yay

It started with a spontaneous gift. I was hanging by the pool tables adorned with LPs and band merch near the entrance to San Francisco’s Eagle Tavern following a blistering set by Violent Change. Lead singer and VC mastermind Matt Bleyle woozily walked up to the table, picked up the single copy of their latest LP A Celebration of Taste sitting on the play field, handed it to me, and walked out without saying a word.

A couple days passed before it made it to my record player. Truth to be told, I was nervous it wouldn’t live up to my newfound love of the band live - an experience that, at its best, wrenched sublimity from the almost certain threat of chaos. (Bleyle didn’t seem to even want to be onstage that night at the Eagle - that night’s banter, so-to-speak, was mostly along the lines of, “We’re Violent Change, the best fucking band in the world. Fuck you.”) The band’s debut Violent Change had been a compendium of lo-fi pop gems punctuated by the occasional noise fest reminiscent of Ohio greats like Guided By Voices and Vertical Slit, and was enjoyable enough, but nothing could prepare me for this. I’m not sure at one point it hit me - was it before “Malleable Love” dissolved into the series of sound collages the occupies the middle of the LP or after? - but well before the record had hit side B’s run-out groove, I realized I was listening to something truly special.

For, Bleyle & co. had constructed an absolute monstrosity of an album. Not since Red Crayola’s debut Parable of Arable Land had the line between raw garage rock and sheer noise been so effectively blurred. Mixed mostly down to mono, every track threatened to dissolve into a strange abyss – an abyss that seemed to occupy the soul of the record’s creator, indicated aurally by waves of bass feedback, phaser wash and distant screams - and many tracks, in fact, did. Whereas Bleyle’s vocals had been a bit murky in the mix before, here they were almost entirely unintelligible. Entire songs like “Micro-Flesh” and “Someone in This House” were garbled beyond recognition. Catchy riffs popped up here and there, like the “Whip It”-like “Faster” or the angst-ridden “I Was Never Young,” but riffs and hooks were not the point here.

Years before this record’s release, I had conceded lo-fi was a spent force creatively, but here Bleyle proved me wrong by using the cassette medium not as a crutch but as a sonic pallette; the result was the equivalent of an abstract painting in sound. He took the garagey ingredients of his debut and postively inverted and/or perverted them as he saw fit, a radical re-interpretation of what rock music could do on record. It was GBV on a murder spree, Dead Moon fronted by Syd Barrett. The effect is often harrowing, but beneath the chaos, you can still hear the humanity. Check noise track “Underwater pt. 2,” where, as the feedback subsides, you begin to hear the other sonic layer for what it is: Bleyle’s breathing rhythmically into the microphone.

Celebration, as you might guess, is not an easy listen, but it’s a rewarding one if you can stick it out - and one that warrants multiple revisits. I could point to other LPs that gave me context for loving this one - Frank Zappa’s Uncle Meat, The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders, the aforementioned Crayola debut - but A Celebration of Taste sounded nothing like them, and seemed to operate on its own special logic. That logic was somewhat of a mystery, given the inscrutability of the record’s text, but perhaps some clues resided in Bleyle’s choice of cover, the unreleased Phil Ochs song “You Can’t Get Stoned Enough”:

And when you start to feelin' that no one cares
And it seems that all your good time friends have disappeared
And you reach into the night and find that nobody's there
No you can't get stoned enough

A Celebration of Taste, then, was the sound of a voice crying in the wilderness - a metaphysical, cotton-mouthed blues cast into the ether, a call for salvation to no one in particular. It remains one of my single favorite albums released in my lifetime.

Violent Change has been in operation since 2011. In that time, the band has never done a proper tour, only occasionally venturing out of their Bay Area home base. Sticking to small independent labels, including Melters and Bleyle’s own Sloth Mate Productions, their albums have received only occasional notices outside their milieu. They’ve made one single video for the magnificent “Marvelous Tones,” now no longer available on YouTube. They have never appeared on a year-end list. Months will go by with hardly any sign of life from the band. And so on.

But among those in the know, VC are a gold standard of integrity and originality. Their albums, sporadically released, are revered and treasured. Their lineup has included some of the heaviest hitters from the Bay - Tony Molina (Ovens, Tony Molina Band), Ray Seraphin (Lenz, Talkies, R.E. Seraphin), Jess Sylvester (Marinero), and more recently, Andy Human (The World, Non Plus Temps, Andy Human and the Reptoids and a million other bands) and Stanley Martinez (Children Maybe Later, Cindy, RAYS, etc., etc). Rumor has it a drummer from one of the most successful bands to start in, and leave, the Bay said his sole regret from his time in San Francisco was never having played in Violent Change.

Matt Bleyle, the band’s sole constant member, lead singer, producer/engineer and chief songwriter, has been helming bands since the late 90s. His first band Abi Yoyos infused punk music with a political consciousness that went beyond the banality of typical anarcho-punk screed. With the band’s dissolving in 2007, Bleyle took a left turn, embracing pop damage with his band Sopors - a glorious, catchy mess that still retained much of the worldview of his previous efforts. The darker, lo-fi terrain of Sopors would ultimately herald the “marvelous tones” of Violent Change, which started with a series of demos Bleyle tracked in the wake of his former band’s untimely demise. 12 years, three LPs and a handful of singles later (including a standout split with Honey Radar on Henry Owings’ Chunklet imprint), VC is now on the precipice of releasing what might be their most cohesive album yet later this year.

Bleyle has given few interviews during Violent Change’s tenure; in fact, the only one I know of was a terse few lines he granted to VICE to promote 2016’s VC3, another standout LP which sounded like the demo tape of a band whose primary influences were Badfinger, Teenage Fanclub and Thorazine. With VC still very much an ongoing concern and Bleyle now having entered the record business with Sloth Mate - who have been enjoying success with Oakland group Children Maybe Later’s debut, last year’s What a Flash Kick! - I felt it was high time to probe him further. Despite the occasional awkwardness of an interview between friends, Bleyle was forthcoming and insightful, the interview going well beyond any expectations I had in revealing a new depth to his singular music.

VC live at The Knockout, San Francisco, CA, 2022. L-R: Andy Human, Bleyle, Jordan Pantalone. Photo: Ezra Gonzalez

Was your first band the Abi Yoyos?

Yeah, technically the first band I was in that played shows and stuff was Abi Yoyos.

And you formed in the late 90’s, right?

Yeah, I guess we formed a little bit before 9/11 happened. So, it was probably 2000, ’99, somewhere around there. That was the first real band I was passionate about, for sure.

Abi Yoyos were more politically motivated in an explicit way than your later work. I’m wondering where that came from.

I think being young in the Bay Area was a good place to get a pretty good understanding of the instruments of our economy and the modes of production, and the way they are used within the government to create chaos. I think the politics that informed The Abi Yoyos - everything I’ve done since then has not been much different [thematically]. (laughs) I’ve always pretty much written about the same thing, probably because I grew up in Marin amongst the Google nobility - soon to become. I grew up around these people as kids.

“Post-Industrial Flush” and “Silicon Dreams,” “Usufruct,” “Xenophobia,” all these themes that the Abi Yoyos wrote about, not to mention public relations firms and the way that they manipulate the media. I think when that was written, it was maybe a little näive, compared to the shit we’re looking at now. Compared to 2000 to now, that’s the main social shift I’d say that has informed the themes of the band. There’s a lot of shit going on, but lyrically, I think it all kind of comes out of me in a way I can’t really control. I mean, I could, but I’m not that good at writing (laughs).

What were the musical foundations of your early work? 

It was more Alternative Tentacles-centric, like MDC and Crass. Political bands that sounded violent. One thing I think informed me, too, during that Y2K punk era was…domesticating those recordings from the late 70’s to the 80’s that did not exactly fit into the production molds of the time, nor the time that I was listening to them. You kind of had to prepare yourself. It was kind of like joining a cult - understanding fidelity was part of it too. The sublime quality that a shitty recording from a bygone Reagan era sounds versus the nostalgia of a My Bloody Valentine recording. You had to figure out how to ease yourself into a certain context as a listener - at least I did - to really get a grasp of what was going on, rather than just being “noise and chaos.” I’m sure most people have gone into something starting listening to the Beatles, or, let’s say, Green Day, and the production quality of that is what you consider to be the acceptable audio form. Just to really understand, coming from an archival point of view, is what happened with me with the Abi Yoyos for sure. Just trying to make music that wasn’t acceptable, initially, to your ears. The goal is not to make something that you to appreciate already, but to experience.

Was there maybe a frustration that the Abi Yoyos stuff is so clean sounding? You did Mill Valley [Big Racoon Records, 2006] with Bart Thurber.

That was not my favorite recording we did, but it was probably the most produced one. But the 7” [“This World is Not My Home,” RIISK, 2005] was recorded with Craigums [Billmeier] in the Dutch Oven. Mill Valley is more going for a drum-centric, 90’s quality, where [drummer] Blaine [Patrick] has kind of taken over the important artistic aspects of the album a little bit. Listening to that album, the drums are amazing. (laughs) But it’s not my favorite recording I’ve ever made. Since that recording - I was young when I did it - my idea of going into studios would be different now than when I did it. You kind of have to think about a lot of shit if you want to get it to sound the way you want it to. 

Abi Yoyos toured pretty extensively for that record, right?

Yeah, we did one-and-a half US tours. For the 7”, we might have just did a West Coast thing. That was pretty much done through [singer] Shawn Mehrens.

I think I might have seen one of the last Abi Yoyos gigs at Gilman in ’07.

It was probably the last one. 

What ended the group?

I kind of don’t remember. We started to play with another drummer, and I think things just kind of got stuck at a certain point. People didn’t want to practice. I wrote most of the stuff but it was a difficult band to get to do stuff, as far as practicing goes. It was a natural break-up, I feel.

Did Blaine play at the last gig?

I think we might have had two different drummers. Maybe Will [Webber Knietel] and Blaine played. If we’re talking about the last Abi Yoyos shows, we played one at Thrillhouse and one at Gilman. At the Thrillhouse show, I was starting to get sick and I took a bunch of Tylenol to get through it. I remember waking up the day after maybe more sick than I’ve ever been in my whole life, just like I pushed myself a little too much for those shows, and I felt like I was dying. It was good though. Good to move on.

In between Abi Yoyos and Sopors you got a band together with Tony [Molina], right?

I don’t think Tony was going to be a part of it, but Shawn and I did have a band after Abi Yoyos, and it was called Yankee Kamikaze. We only played maybe a handful of shows. We did tour up to Portland, Seattle, but we never got a good recording. We have a demo that was on MySpace, and that’s about it. It wasn’t that serious, I guess, but we took it pretty seriously. There’s a lot of lyrics that I re-used in Violent Change from that time period. “Wal-Mart Parking Lot” was Yankee Kamikaze song, but it was structured differently. The lyrics were a bit different. 

Spoors was a pretty big stylistic departure, and it gets into some heavier sonic regions. What was the impetus for that change?

A lot of it was just being not being able to communicate the way you want to through traditional [means] - you know, write a song, show it to your band, go to the studio after you’ve practiced it, recording live. Me and [bassist] Keith [Reilly] started it together with Brian [Reise] on drums, and Spencer [O’Karma], at the time was going to Evergreen, the art school up north. I think he was unhappy with it and he ended up coming back to the Bay Area and joined as a very important member. We were all into recording lo-fi stuff, GBV [Guided by Voices] and the KBD [Killed by Death] stuff. Me and Keith used to jam a lot of it together, like The Eat, The Tensions, The Normals. Spencer was really into REM, so all of those things kind of blended together pretty well. They were already good at recording shit, if you consider the first Sopors recording “good,” which I do. Other people might have recorded an album better and put it out…(laughs). That was the vibe we were going for. 

What was behind the use of the pitch wheel on the Sopors record?

You mean the patched-together, irrational rhythm? 

I don’t know if I got a warped copy or what but the tape seems to speed up and slow down. It was on a few of the tracks.

I don’t think we did any pitch shifting on that one at all. It might be a warped copy. It got bounced a lot. That may be what you’re hearing. The drums are very crunchy. You can’t really hear ‘em. You can’t really hear the snare. That’s cool. You kind of have to accept it was there. It helps with what we’re doing when we’re playing different parts at the same time. Like “Brand New Faces,” there’s two different elements going on at the same time with the drums just kind of crunching around. It sounds beautiful to my ears. 

You were a lot more satisfied with that sound than the drums-forward sound you were getting in a recording studio?

Yeah, and also at that time I was really into the PSF Tokyo Flashback comps that are kind of archival, the way that Sublime Frequencies does their shit, but it’s more an actual comp. A lot of it is live recordings, Japanese psych from the 80s and 90s, I feel is pretty inspiring throughout all this madness. Even from Abi Yoyos, I was into Ghost, these weird time signature things going on. But also, the difference between a live recording and a studio recording. I was really into live stuff, it just seemed like a better thing to listen to as someone in their early 20s. Listening to the Stooges, the MC5 and Japanese psych stuff went along with that for me. 

You brought up Robert Wyatt to me before.

Yeah, I love Robert Wyatt. The Canterbury scene, they’re one of the best. They were definitely inspiring for all this stuff too.

Sopors was a one or two-year long project?

Yeah, it would have been around 2008 ’til maybe around 2011. Or ’09 through ’11. There’s one way for me to remember. When it was recorded was the day Michael Jackson died. 

What ended Sopors? 

Sopors, I think we stopped playing because Spencer was traveling. He wanted to do a backpacking, hiking thing across the country by himself. I remember being annoyed by it at the time, ‘cause that was a thing to do, but that was lame of me. There’s no hard feelings about it, but I wish I was more adult….I liked that band, I thought it could have kept going into something pretty unique. It is already, but it’s all good now, for everyone.

So Violent Change, would you say that was started to be your vehicle as a songwriter and purely your vision? At this point, you take over most of the songwriting and the vocals, as well as playing most of the instruments on the record.

Yeah. After Sopors it became more of an egocentric mission. I’d just kind of record drums, the songs were in my head, I would have a metronome and I would track everything. With Sopors, I was barely involved in the recording process at all for that band. It just kind of became a very singular…if you will, but I won’t. It was trying to communicate ideas about going through the process, basically demo-ing for people, but the songs that I demoed, people liked them. They were like, we should just put it out that way. So that stuff, the production quality suffers (laughs). I liked the way it sounded too, but I think the impetus at that point of my life [was]…’cause it wasn’t the highest point in my human experience, as far as depression and shit goes - it kind of brought me out of it. 

Violent Change brought you out of it? 

Yeah. I don’t think I had experienced the psychological problems that go along with living in a convenient, post-industrial society as an artist. I think that between Sopors and Violent Change is when that really started to affect me, like on a personal level, rather than just someone trying to enlighten other people about structural problems in our government, et cetera. Violent Change is a bit more like, the way it feels to be broke in San Francisco in that time period. That’s what I was doing. That’s what I did. A lot of people did it. It was a fun few years.

You assumed a pseudonym for a while, “Gladys Bleyle.” I was wondering what was behind that. 

It was my grandma’s name. I went with Gladys sometimes, it was an old name that needed to come back. I went with it as a moniker. It had some familial elements to it that I won’t go into. I won’t talk about my grandma, if that’s okay. 

The first record [Violent Change, Catholic Guilt, 2013], you had Tony [Molina] in the group, and he contributed a couple songs. Most of that record is purely your work, but I was wondering if that was like the George Harrison/Tobin Sprout idea, someone throwing a couple songs in for contrast? What was his role in the band at that time?

No….I think [with] all the records, it’s me, but it’s also who I’m close with at the time, creatively. Tony’s kind of a big influence as a songwriter. I started hanging out with him a little bit more. I’ve known him forever, but I would say I started seeing him pretty regularly during Sopors. He was kind of an inspiring guitar player and songwriter. I wouldn’t say he was a side part of that record. I’m trying to think of what his equivalent, his precedent in rock form would be. [laughs] It was pretty much [drummer] Rohit [Rao] and [bassist] Sterling [McKinnon] and Tony, just drinking and playing together. 

At the time, I didn’t know the two of you that well, but going back through that record and listening to “Christmas at Tony’s,” I realized that sounds like a lot of the pop music Tony loves, the big bass line and the baroque melody. Was that coming from listening to records with him?

Yeah, “I Don’t Know Why” also on the first record. I wrote that song, but he kind of helped finish the bridge. I think it was his idea to start off with a minor [key] introduction thing. He helped us with writing that song, I would say. So there are all these songs he didn’t necessarily play on, but he’s sitting with me like, “you should do this.” Like constructing the solo on that song in particular, I remember him showing me how to start the solo. Just friends doing shit. I don’t know how much we were thinking about that, while we were doing it. 

You recorded all that stuff on the Tascam 688, right?

Yeah, the 688. It was just recorded by me, but some of it’s recorded like, we went into the practice space that night and recorded the practice that night, and also did some tracking.

You felt more comfortable taking over all the production at that point rather than just watching in Sopors?

Yeah. I had bought a couple of 8-tracks, like the [Tascam] 238 and the 688, and I’d been messing with them a little bit while we were doing the Sopors. Probably thinking about how to record the next Sopors record, is why I bought the stuff. Eventually, I just started getting better at it, and then David West (Rank/Xerox, Rat Columns) showed me how to bounce stuff to computer. He helped me with a lot of my early recording problems, like how to bounce a 4-track to an 8-track, and how to mix.

He mixed a lot of that first EP [Suck on the Gun, Melters, 2012] and the first LP, right?

Yeah, he mixed the Sopors’ stuff too, if I remember correctly. 

Was that mixed on computer or from the 8-track into the computer? I feel like the stuff he worked on, your voice has a different compressed quality than the other material. 

I don’t think that had anything to do with him. That was probably in the recording process. You mean like mixing the pitch difference between tracks?

I’m thinking about how the voice almost sounds like a police bullhorn on some of the tracks.

That was probably from, a lot of the vocals I did were recorded through a tube guitar amp mic’d with effects, recorded straight in from an amp. I would play the recording back through the PA speakers and I’d record an amp for my vocals, because that was the only way I could do it without feeling stupid. (Laughs)

At some point, I heard a rumor about what “Wal-Mart Parking Lot” was about, but I’d like to hear the story from you.

That one was one of the ones that came from a Yankee Kamikazee song. There’s a lot going on, I would say, not really about one thing, but the end of regionalism, and all that kind of fun stuff. It’s a very Pere Ubu, David Thomas vibe. I think that Pere Ubu were a band that was definitely going after some high concept criticism, but without being too obviously preachy about it. 

It was also inspired by the general vibe of the media in Southern California at that time. Compared to the news in the Bay Area. Los Angeles had a slightly more sensationalist TV media in the early 2000s that was constantly reporting about people being murdered and babies dying in cars from being left at the supermarket. I traveled to LA a lot - my first girlfriend lived in Reseda - and I remember hearing a story about a young boy who had been shot and left for dead in a Walmart parking lot. I was listening to a lot of Phil Ochs and the song was “Power and the Glory” for me at the time. It has a morality to it that measures the value of society by the way that it values the lives of its most historically oppressed… those left out of the democratic representation module via mathematics and marketing.

I heard there was a big brawl in a Whole Foods parking lot in Mill Valley, so I’m thinking about writing a sequel. I guess a bunch of teenagers were fighting and then the cops came, and they were throwing 40’s bottles at the cops and stuff. There was that documentary around for a while, what was it, Black Sabbath parking lot? Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Anyway, hopefully that Whole Foods parking lot experience is like that for them.

There was kind of a storm in a teacup over the insert of that record, as I recall.

Oh yeah. (Laughs) We won’t go into that.

In between that and the next record, and the drummer Rohit left as well, and I heard there was actually a full version of A Celebration of Taste (Melters, 2014) that got lost. Is that true?

No, that’s not true. Tony was still in the band for a good portion of the recording of that one and played guitar on “Malleable Love,” and I played drums, if I remember correctly. Me and Tony and Sterling recorded that one together, so it was kind of like a first album recording session. We tried to get Kirk [Podell] to come, but I don’t know what happened - ‘cause Kirk was playing drums at the time too. We had a lot of drummers that didn’t end up necessarily recording with us. But he’s great live. Great drummer, and an inspiration for that recording too, like the way he plays drums, I was most likely emulating the way that song was sounding the first time we played it together. I was going for the Kirk vibes. (laughs)

Is the beginning of “Malleable Love” supposed to be the drum intro to “Anarchy in the UK”?

Yes. “Detention Camp” [is] also consciously “ripping it off.” But only half of that one made it onto VC1.

That recording goes way more into an experimental realm, and I was wondering what the impetus behind some of that was. Violent Change has a couple super brief soundscapes, but Celebration of Taste is almost half soundscapes. 

Yeah, that was the vibe we were going for, kind of a Vertical Slit kind of thing, the sound collage, the second album has that kind of shit going on. We were trying to take it to that psychedelic level. A lot of it was recorded when I was like, every time, really wasted, a lot of those recordings. (Laughs) Drugs and various creative vices on ourselves.

I was curious about the Phil Ochs cover, an unreleased song called “You Can’t Get Stoned Enough,” where that fit in thematically for you with that record.

I liked that I had recorded a version of that. My first exposure to that song, I had no idea what the music was, because I read [the lyrics] on a Phil Ochs fan site. This was in high school or something, I guess. I was like, that’s cool. I had some lyrics, so I tried to write in the vein he wrote in, and just tried to piece together the melody in a way that I thought he might, which was completely wrong after I heard the recording years later on YouTube. Somebody uploaded it. (Laughs) And then, I’m glad that I recorded the version that I first heard before I heard the actual song, I thought that was kind of unique in the history of music. I guess Wilco kind of did that with a lot of Woody Guthrie stuff. I don’t know, maybe I was doing a similar thing as Wilco. 

Right, Mermaid Avenue. (Both laugh)

Respect to Wilco for doing that with Woody Guthrie. Might be easier to figure out what he might have done. 

The sound on Celebration of Taste is a lot rougher than the first record. Was that an aesthetic decision? 

It’s weird. There’s aspects of the first record that I think you could say make it a better quality recording, and there’s aspects of Celebration that sound like improvements on the first record, like “Malleable Love” sounds a bit more produced than “Straight to My Head” or something like that. But yeah, I do think that that record, we were using people’s criticism of the first record and magnifying it a bit to our advantage. I’d say that’s the best - my favorite Violent Change at the moment. 

I’d like to hear more about the criticisms of the first record. I remember [Catholic Guilt record label head Michael] Harkin telling me about them at the time. Ultimately, I think that album was well-received, and you play a number of the songs from it in concert to this day, but I’m curious about what was said to you that influenced that next piece of work.

I think it was a probably playful, jovial journey of [mine]. Just wanted to make the best case scenario of production quality that we are striving for. I wouldn’t say it was a super-conscious reaction. There was a slight backlash that we were able to play with. I wouldn’t say it galvanized the band, but it made it another aspect for us to use.

But what was the backlash?

I think some people just wanted it to be a punk band, a punk record. Some people maybe wanted it to be an Ovens record. And some people just liked it because it had different stuff going on, it wasn’t just one-subgenre-focused. It’s an album that does a few things instead of just one thing. So that was the backlash. There was also, yeah, the insert, which depicted Hitler with headphones on. I guess I thought that we were beyond being triggered by an image to that [extent], but it offended some people. 

Sometime between Celebration and VC3, I heard you attempted to make a record with Greg Ashley.

Oh yeah. We tried recording at The Creamery [Ashley’s Oakland studio]. I felt like it was a good recording, I just didn’t feel like it was the band. It didn’t really fit in with the timeline. I don’t know, it wasn’t a Violent Change recording in my opinion.

What makes a Violent Change recording for you?

I’m not sure. (Laughs) I don’t know how to answer that one. Maybe that was the wrong way to put it. It was a Violent Change recording, but I couldn’t get the vocals right. For me, that’s important, to get the same quality in the vocals. You have to put a lot of effort into it in the studio, and with a large diaphragm mic with beautiful sounds projected through…(laughs)…you know? But I felt like the way you do when you hear your voice recorded on an answering machine [for] the first time, that same kind of disconnect you have…is why I don’t like that recording!

Were those same songs on VC3?

“Television” was recorded, an early version of it that was restructured. The other songs, I did nothing with. That era of the band fizzled out in a way that I still don’t fully wrap my head around. 

I was wondering if we could talk about the varying lineups over the years. That one was stable for about a year or so with Ray [Seraphin], Jess [Sylvester] and Sam [Weiss].

Yeah, that was the band that was playing for the most part when Celebration of Taste had come out, I believe. It was me, Jess, Ray Seraphin and Sam Weiss. That was a good lineup. It sounded great live. The only problem with the recording was that we did it too fast. We could have done it better.

For VC3 [It Takes Two/Melters, 2016], I feel like it was almost in between the aesthetics of the first two records. They’re primarily songs but with some of the experimental elements in those tracks. I know that was kind of recorded in a bunch of different places?

That one was, for the most part, in LA by Sterling, the basic tracks. There’s some that are recorded at my parents’ house in Novato. All of them were processed up in Novato. I recorded that slowly but surely.

You dubbed it all back to your 8-track at home?

Yeah. I remember that. The drum tracks were bounced and I bounced things on top of that. Some of the full songs were already recorded, like “Unit A,” I think I might have added an extra guitar track behind it to add some lo-fi fuzz. There’s other stuff recorded from it, but it didn’t quite make the cut. I guess we were trying to make it more of a song [based] album. There are a few songs where the basic tracks were recorded by Stanley [Martinez] too, like “Marvelous Tones” and “KGEN (instrumental)” Those were bounced to my 8-track, I believe, then I did the vocals.

There’s almost a more melancholic thing going on on that record, and has a couple things approaching love ballads like “Marvelous Tones” and “In the Way.”

Yeah, I can hear that for sure. Also the feeling is kind of fantastical, folk ballad-sy on a few of the songs, “In The Way,” that kind of stuff, just kind of minimalist, weirding you out as minimally as possible. Man with a guitar, freaking you out. Yeah, there’s a sublime element to that one, I would say.

Can you tell me what “Potemkin” is about?

“Potemkin” is about living in [the] pre-1968 ideal world they painted for our generation like some Santa Claus story marketed by Macy’s, but it’s actually the threshold of human development that is being “thrifted” away from us via ultra-centrist PACs that exist like an alien marketing SAC. VICE Magazine and critical consumerist marketing of the hipster ideal has faded and now we have a post-industrial automaton version of the trying artist - AKA, folk music of the unadulterated post-industrial world has become a thing. 

At that time you started working with Stanley, who you’re still working with today.

Yeah. Since VC3, Stanley’s been a part of the recording process, and even the part of the bouncing of VC3, Jordan [Pantalone] and Stanley were hanging out with me the whole time…’twas a communal experience. They were putting it out too, Stanley and Jordan and Thomas [Rubenstein] and Eli [Wald]. But yeah, the 7” that I put out [“Violent Change”, Sloth Mate, 2020] was probably the first recording that me and Stanley worked on a lot together, passing back and forth. 

Is there a connection between “Detention Camp” and Celebration’s “Abductors” and VC3 - from what lyrics I can hear - being focused on confinement? “Unit A,” “Never Felt The Air Up There,” etc.?

Definitely a lot of my songs are influenced by my time locked up in the ward. (Laughs)

Is it fair to say some of your time with Violent Change has been punctuated with periods of institutionalization? And does that directly affect the work?

Between the release of the Sopors LP and the Sopors 7”, yes. VC for me has been influenced by that experience but also by examples of the way this institutionalization has worked its way into “free and domestic society.”

How do you see that last part playing out? And are there certain songs that speak to it?

“Potemkin,” “Open Space,” “Micro Flesh,” “What Have They Done.” It’s being played, and it was happening before I started being placed on the gears and the levers.

Do you view yourself as someone with an illness or as someone with a different perspective and sensitivity to the world at large? 

I think that what is being tried out on our society has been played out already by similar folks in the Pentagon in Japan. As we enter this “recolonization,” certain perspectives are remunerated, some are criminalized. Juxtapose the life of Daniel Ellsberg with that of Julian Assange. The culture has changed. The society has lost its “mind” in the Jungian sense. 

There’s been a seven year gap between VC3 and there being a full-length, although you did the 7” [Violent Change, Sloth Mate, 2020] and the Honey Radar split [Chunklet, 2021]. This new record has a different feel than those, and it feels like there’s almost a conscious return to doing things that are very pop and sound-forward, but there’s a clear delineation between those and the soundscapes, to enhance the contrast.

I think that’s a pretty good way to summarize what’s going on. Yeah, just really focusing in on the recording quality. Stanley’s always been an audiophile, but he’s been getting more practice in. He bought some mics that build a little more character and are easier to compress in that way, basically just trying to get the sound better without compromising what we like in a recording. But yeah, contrasting that with the soundscapes….I like the way that it’s tracked because it kind of makes you think about each track a little bit more, the way that they’re spaced together. 

What’s the album going to be called? Do you have a title for it?

Red Panda Preservation Consortium. (Laughs) I don’t know! We’re still figuring it out. I’m proud of it. I think it’s good. (Laughs)

Is it mostly you on this recording as well, or did you have Andy, Stanley and Jordan contribute?

Yeah, on this one, Andy plays bass on “Whipping Boy,” but that’s the only track he plays on, I’m pretty sure. He’s a busy man. We have a new drummer, Ollie Lipton, who’s on a couple tracks, “Whipping Boy” and “Driving.” For the most part, I would say, this record is a Stanley-centric album. He’s written a lot of the material. The “Pendercke” was a noise track me and Stanley recorded together during the “Squandered” recording sessions, so that’s on there from that. “Mr. Leigh,” Stanley wrote that one, and he wrote “Conduction Wire.” “Whipping Boy” was, we all went into the practice space and recorded, [that] kind of thing. Stanley’s playing guitar more than me on a lot of the leads and stuff. So it’s more of a vocal album for me. So, not to be another band talking about being communal, that was definitely a vibe for this one, which makes a difference [from] the first couple Violent Change records. It feels like more of a band.

In addition to the Violent Change stuff, you’ve started a record label the last couple years, Sloth Mate Productions. You initially put out the Violent Change 7’, but you’ve since put out the Children Maybe Later record (What a Flash Kick!). I was curious why you’ve gone fully into the record making business. 

Well, I really liked the recordings Stanley was making with Anastasia [Rodrigues]. And I really liked the concept of the band that wasn’t a band having a record come out. I’m putting out a record for this band called Now that’s getting mastered and it has kind of an Orange Juice, 80’s thing going. It’s good. I’ll send it to you. But yeah, Children Maybe Later was a special record for me because it kind of got me to get my shit out a little bit more. I’m getting my life structured with these Children!

What are your plans for Violent Change in the future? Is this a life-long project? 

I definitely will keep doing it as long as someone wants to do it. I don’t know if I would put out another self-recorded punk album, but, you know, I probably will. (Laughs) It’s definitely a life-long project of mine.

I’m curious what motivates you as an artist, because the work seems to come from a particular place - you have a real drive towards a special kind of project and work. I’m wondering what motivates you to keep going. 

I don’t know. I’ve never not thought about making music. It’s something I think about every hour, every five minutes. It’s just what I am, so there’s no way for me to really stop doing it - I won’t feel fulfilled. I’m a musician, “artiste,” forever. Everyone has their own style and I guess I’m representing one, an aesthetic. 

Special thanks to Ezra Gonzalez, Michael Harkin and Scott Karoly for their help with this piece.