Jack: Hey, what's up? Okay, do you want to talk about how you got into music in general? At an early age, were your parents musical? I mean, both you and Mark grew up in New York, so obviously that's a head start above probably most people in the world.
Esra: My family wasn't musical at all.
Jack: Except for your dad's guitar music.
Esra: Well, yeah, now he's got a little guitar music going. Actually, now they both have a little guitar music going.
Jack: So later in life, but this wasn't a part of when you were growing up.
Esra: My first show was Cracktoberfest.
Jack: Oh my God. How old were you?
Esra: 12.
Jack: Amazing. Where was that?
Esra: At C-Squat.
Jack: God damn, New Yorkers are built different.
Esra: But I didn't know about, like, big music. I never went to a show at an arena or whatever.
Jack: Which is the total opposite of probably most people, not growing up in the city where it's, like... My first "show" show, as someone who was like, "I'm into playing guitar," was Santana, which was at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Mark: I saw that tour too. [laughter]
Jack: Really?!
Mark: Supernatural, yeah.
Esra: Wasn't your first show Weird Al?
Mark: Yeah, it was Weird Al at the Beacon Theater. It was really good, Running with Scissors era. But then, yeah, I saw Santana and Rusted Root with my Dad at Jones Beach.
Jack: Damn, yeah, Rusted Root sadly wasn't on the Midwest leg of the tour.
Mark: Do you remember who opened?
Jack: I'm trying to remember. Kind of back to back I also saw Eric Clapton, and it was some other... I can't remember who but I'm sure on certain JamBase I could figure it out. [laughter]
Mark: Yeah, for sure.
Jack: Esra, how did you go to that C-Squat show? You were in middle school at this point, did a friend take you, an older friend or something?
Esra: I don't know, actually. I went with my punk friend from the neighborhood and his dad actually chaperoned us, but he didn't come inside to the show. He was just hanging out at this hookah bar next door. [laughter] By the end of the night, he had made friends with all the guys at the hookah bar. They also had a car service business and he was like, "These are my homies now, they're going to give us a ride home." In this limo. And so this limo pulled up in front of C-Squat and we were so mortified. It was, like, the worst thing that could possibly be going down.
Jack: Oh my God, that's insane. That's, like, ten times worse. That's pretty sick, though. Is C-Squat still there? C-Squat is still around, right?
Mark: Yeah, they own it now, right?
Esra: Yeah, you're right near there. I saw a bunch of the homies still posted up over there.
Jack: God, what are they, like, 60 now?
Esra: Yeah, there's this one guy that we call Father Time. [laughter]
Jack: Which indicates if you were calling him Father time 20 years ago, Lord knows what he looks like now.
Esra: And I saw him outside last summer, I think he looked exactly the same.
Jack: Mark, so your first show:
Mark: Weird Al.
Jack: Weird Al at the Beacon.
Mark: I had an older brother who really briefly was a nineties ska punk. He's four years older than I was, but when he was in middle school. So I was really young. He had like, let's see, was like Dookie was an early major CD that I bought for myself because he wouldn't give me his copy. [laughter] And the Punk-O-Rama comps and stuff like that. But then he zigged in a major way and just started getting into all this other shit that I was not interested in. So, I took the baton or whatever. I was into that stuff and I was pretty dedicated to Green Day and Rancid and stuff like that. But then simultaneously, I was just getting into the classic indie canon of that era especially, and Kid A came out when I was ten.
Jack: Which is something that you and I have bonded over, including being in a Radiohead cover band for Halloween years ago.
Mark: In the before times... [laughter] Sorry. When I started going to shows it was all very much new Millennium indie, Meet Me in the Bathroom era. All those kinds of bands. That was what I was most into. And then gradually it merged with the other parts of what I was excited about. Before I was playing music that was what I cared about.
Jack: So when did you two meet each other and under what circumstances?
Mark: Seventh grade, 2001.
Esra: It was like September... 11th? [laughter] No, but seriously.
Mark: It actually was right around there.
Esra: It actually was on the day of or a few days before.
Mark: The way our school worked was seventh grade was the start of high school, which is also...
Jack: Was this Hunter?
Esra: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah, I had gone there for elementary school and Esra came for the high school and high school started in seventh grade. So there's a big influx of new kids at the beginning of seventh grade, which was, like, September 9th, 2001 for us. We met around then sometime.
Jack: Do you remember what the actual first meeting circumstances were like? If it made an impact on you? Clearly you remember the day, so...
Esra: I honestly don't remember the day. I feel like we maybe met on the first day of school or something, but I don't think we were in any of the same classes.
Mark: We were in a bunch of classes together in the next year, in eighth grade.
Esra: Yeah.
Mark: Mr. Molina. I think in seventh grade, I don't know, you just kind of knew that they were… I had my friends from this smaller group that was in the elementary school. And then you were trying to figure out who was who of the new kids. I feel like you were in there somewhere.
Esra: The other thing was then I had one friend, that I went to lunch with every day. And I feel like Mark became… You know, honestly, I don't even need to talk about it that much, but… [laughter]
Mark: Oh yeah, this is what it is.
Esra: But apparently me and Mark weren't that close at the beginning of the year because she was invited to Mark's bar mitzvah and I wasn't.
Jack: Ooo…
Mark: So that's actually how we must have met, because we were both friends with the same person, but kind of separately.
Jack: Esra were you totally punked out in seventh grade?
Mark: You had purple hair.
Jack: Hell yeah.
Esra: Yeah, I had purple hair. I was definitely punked out in a 12 year old way.
Jack: Well, a 12 year old who went to Crackfest at C-Squat. Which is, again, very different from a punked out 12 year old in Minneapolis... For the most part. What about you, Mark? Were you normie? [laughter]
Mark: Yeah I was normie, but I was trying to...
Esra: You were, like, ironic.
Mark: No... Well, alright. [laughter]
Jack: Nothing ever changes.
Mark: I think I wanted to be, like, dark, you know? I got my Eraserhead shirt on and poppin' really early.
Jack: Damn!
Mark: And that was seventh grade. I was kind of like my hat was like my bid for tertiary for.
Jack: Sure, which is still it launches into the big.
Mark: Yeah, I’m still on that tip.
Jack: Never grew out of it.
Mark: I actually have a lot of thoughts about it. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, save it, buddy.
Mark: For the bonus episode.
Jack: Mark, specifically, when did you start playing music or playing guitar?
Mark: Right around sixth grade I think is when I got a guitar and took lessons. And I took lessons with this dude who was...
Jack: Dan Smith?
Mark: What's that? Dan Smith, yeah. No...
Esra: People don't know about Dan Smith anymore, by the way.
Jack: That's crazy. Really?
Mark: He has a really popular YouTube and does tutorials.
Jack: Yeah, I read the Times piece.
Esra: It's not a big New York thing anymore.
Jack: Maybe it's the death of print media. Maybe he doesn't flier as much as he used to.
Mark: I'm pretty sure it's him and there's still the psychic person and Dr. Zizmor and all that still around.
Jack: Dr. Zizmor, yeah.
Mark: But I don't know how their lives are going. [laughter] But speaking of that, the dude that was my guitar teacher was this struggling actor and he was so sick and he was in the movie Hannibal.
Jack: Oh, whoa. Like an extra?
Mark: No, he's one of the cops. It's a small role but he gets killed by somebody at the beginning and he was gnarly. I swear he was in Trans-Siberian Orchestra or something like that. He had all these weird showbiz... Like he would be in choirs. He was just a theater, music, acting, kind of, like, failing guy.
Jack: Like, "biz guy," in different entertainment fields.
Mark: So he was my original teacher. I stopped taking lessons for a long time and then got obsessive about playing tabs and playing songs that I liked and figuring it out more that way. I had taken a handful of lessons from that dude and then piano lessons and stuff like that at different stages. But always the same kind of relationship to it, where I would start taking lessons and then kind of like dip out.
Jack: I feel like that's a common thing. I kind of had that at a certain point: you reach a point where you're like, "Oh, I have the proficiency enough to kind of figure my way out of stuff," and then you’re just like, "Whatever."
Mark: Yeah, even though it would have been sick to continue. The proficiency that I thought I had was very specific and context dependent and limited. But it also resulted in how music ended up working for me, so that seems fine.
[Angels in America "Tooth Hound Sand 22"]
Jack: When did you move past just like playing guitar and more into writing your own songs? Was that later?
Esra: I do have one more important story from the early times.
Jack: Yeah. Please, please.
Esra: Our music teacher in seventh grade... You had him too, right?
Mark: Mr. Rosenberg?
Esra: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. Okay, actually, yeah. This is some shit. I think you'll get it, Jack. [laughter]
Esra: He did this thing where it was, like, seventh grade, first day of music class, you don't play instruments type of class. You just learn about music. And he makes everyone in the room get out of their desks and stand in the back of the room. Then he takes a desk and just throws it across the room against the wall. And then he's like, "Is that music?"
Jack: Wow. [laughter]
Mark: Mindblower.
Jack: It's a real School of Rock moment.
Esra: Yeah, it was pretty great.
Mark: Also, I had this fourth grade teacher to bring it even further back, who in the elementary school had this fucking reputation for being super tough, but, like, "You'll learn like who you are." There was all this mythos around his class, like how he didn't play by the rules or whatever and all that stuff. He had a very specific curriculum that he kind of invented and a big part of it was listening to Einstein on the Beach. It was like Baby Einstein, play something for your baby and they'll get smarter. He was just assuming that exposing... It's a net positive thing obviously, but at the time it just felt like such a self-consciously, like, mentor, mind expanding thing or something. But obviously, it worked in a lot of ways.
Jack: Now you're on playing the Glass Etudes right?
Mark: I'm a Glass boy. Yeah, I'm a major Glass boy since I got the piano.
Jack: So sick. Well, Esra, what about you? When did you start making your own music? Did you study an instrument first or did you play in a band before Angels?
Esra: Not really, but I would play in random cover bands with my punk friends. And then I also had this one person band that was also kind of a Leftöver Crack-adjacent situation that I wrote songs for that I'd sing a cappella that I thought were fun. But, Stza from Leftöver Crack was my number one fan and would always wear my patch.
Jack: Wow, that's amazing. [laughter]
Esra: No, I didn't study music or anything.
Jack: Okay. Yeah. So then Mark, when did you move beyond just playing music or just playing tabs, to being, "I can write my own song."
Mark: In high school. I didn't do anything too official. I remember I had a fake band that never did anything. But we practiced a couple of times with this one friend of mine. I got a Tascam digital recorder, but it was 4-track style.
Jack: Right, like four faders.
Mark: Yeah, exactly. You didn't have to bounce it down over and over again because it wasn't tape. But, there was still some limit on how many tracks you could do. I started to record that way and try to figure out stuff with guitar and actually the same fucked up keyboard that I just used at that show the other month.
Jack: Oh yeah.
Mark: The Yamaha. I had a bunch of little garbage-y instruments and started to put them together. Yeah, it was all around the middle of high school to like the second half of high school. One time I recorded something; Esra you probably won't remember this, but I recorded this thing for my June project, this English paper kind of thing that we had to do that was a creative component. It was my most ambitious thing with all this Tascam, multi-track recording. And I played it for Esra, I remember. And you kind of "faint praised" the fuck out of it. But, it was cool. [laughter] It kind of sucked. It was fine. I didn't really have it yet, but I was working it out.
Esra: I said it was really good?
Mark: No, you were like, "This one's cool, this part's cool." You know that language that we've all come to know so well, where it's like, "Fuck, I gotta find something to complement."
Jack: Yeah, like "It looks like you're having a lot of fun up there."
Mark: Yeah, exactly. I wasn't bummed, but yeah, I was trying to crack the code on a bunch of stuff around that time and not really recording with a computer, which is actually what happened with Angels eventually, but prior to that.
Jack: So, then from there I guess maybe we're in high school now. The big question is, how did you first get exposed to weirder music / how did you go to your first noise show?
Mark: I think the stuff I started to get excited about was getting a little bit weirder, from paper trails of stuff I was already into and just kinda talking to people. At a certain point, Esra told me about Royal Trux, for sure.
Jack: Oh yeah, big one.
Mark: Oh, actually, WFMU is a big one. I got really into WFMU when I was 15, around 2004.
Jack: I got into WFMU also in high school, but you were actually in a place that you could listen to it on terrestrial radio.
Mark: Yeah, me and this one friend would always listen to it obsessively. And it was also a period where the noise rock type stuff was ascendant, in a way, so I remember being really, really psyched about Boris, Comets on Fire, Magik Markers, and all that kind of stuff. And Load records, like USA Is A Monster. I remember getting that CD in high school and realizing that the stuff that I cared about that was theoretically... in the way of having this Eraserhead t-shirt, I could figure out what could be perceived as weirder, off the beaten path stuff that was still pretty much dominant mainstream culture versions of it. Not that that's good or bad, but that's kind of where it lived. And then bit by bit actually figuring out the stuff that felt like it was deeper off the beaten path. And then finding the Hanson mail order, getting into the Culturcide CD because the write up was like, "This is why this whole genre exists." Just finding my way to things.
Jack: The one where he just sings over the songs?
Mark: Yeah, Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America. It's also Weird Al-esque, so honestly I had it from the jump. That's how it felt. Like, "Oh, this is kind of the path that has been laid out." But also it feels like I'm actually getting into darker, weirder areas that I wouldn't necessarily have known to do. That was what started feeling really fulfilling and really like something new was happening for me.
Jack: Did you feel a connection in way… Versus you being into bigger bands like Radiohead, then getting into something... Maybe not Royal Trux because that's a little older, but did you start to have a sense that it was an actual music scene or something that you could actually be in contact with?
Mark: Yeah, definitely.
Jack: When did you start to get the sense of that community or "the scene?"
Mark: I think for me it was mostly around the WFMU stuff because I started volunteering there also, and bands would come in and do live performances.
Jack: Times New Viking! I remember that you did a show for them.
Mark: Yeah, I helped set up shows because I was a volunteer and bit by bit you're coming into contact with this thing. On the one hand it's very small scale networks and non-dominant, noncommercial means of networking and touring and all that kind of stuff. But on the other hand, there's some infrastructure that you start to see the shape of. It's super exciting. But I think I was weirdly kind of late to that because I was a little removed. I was just trying to listen to stuff and getting obsessed with it in an isolated way. And then way later it was being in Montreal and in Providence and seeing it more there than I did in New York. But that was just me.
Jack: Totally. Yeah, Esra what was your initial "in" into getting into the sort of scene we all know each other from?
Esra: I think it was through our friend Griffin [Pyn]? He lived in Kansas City but he came to New York this one time. We had been friends for a long time and he was just into punk and crust, and then suddenly he was obsessed with Wolf Eyes. He came to New York and we went to No Fun Fest. It was like right near my parents house... I think I was like a junior in high school?
Jack: Wait, which year was that? Like 2006?
Esra: Yeah, it was 2006 because it was the year that Tarantula Hill had the fire.
Jack: Oh, yeah. Thurston [Moore] did the fundraiser CD or whatever.
Esra: Yeah, twig did this performance that was after the fire and that really had an impact on me. I think Jessica Rylan was there that year too. But yeah, that was this festival that happened and everyone came to town. It was such a crazy two or three days and it was right by my parent's house so I could stay out for the whole thing without getting in trouble. I feel like this thing happens with punk stuff in the era of our age group or maybe even a little younger, where at some point people grow up a little bit. They grow out of being the "bratty punks" of their pre-teen years and want to be something else. My friends got into this really corny folk-punk thing. I really didn't like it and I stopped being interested in it. I was like, "I'm into metal" or something. Then there was this period where No Fun Fest happened and Griffin went back to Kansas City and I didn't really have any friends that were into that. But I would be on the message boards. Like the I Heart Noise message board.
Jack: Yeah, totally.
Esra: And find out about some random show in Williamsburg and go by myself.
Jack: This is senior year of high school, like 2007, 2006?
Esra: Yeah, but I didn't really know anyone in that scene.
Jack: Can you remember any shows that you went to in high school?
Esra: One show that was so good was this Sword Heaven show.
Jack: Oh amazing. The best noise band.
Esra: It was at this diner in Bushwick that closed at 3 p.m. or something. It was daytime and Aaron Hibbs had all this shit tied to his leg and was dragging it all around the diner and out onto the street. I was like, "This is so crazy." And then for some reason this other show sticks in my mind, which is mostly because I was thinking, "It's so weird that I'm here by myself." What was that band called? Vegas? It was Dom's band that was noise rock. There was a guitar player...
Mark: Oh, what about Hospital Records and Jammyland?
Esra: Oh yeah, that's true.
Jack: In the basement.
Esra: That was the other thing. Like, that was my other, like, way after the first No Fun Fest, that was the year the Hospital Records opened, that week of No Fun Fest. So then I was like, "Okay, now this is this thing that I'm into." And I went there the next week or something and it was in the basement of this reggae store and you had to go in a hatch in the floor down this ladder into the tiny room.
Jack: I never went there, I only went to the one near Anthology but I always heard about the ladder.
Esra: It was there but he took over.
Mark: It was the same place.
Jack: Oh! So Jammyland moved out and he took over the whole place, I see. That's so funny. Oh Vegas Martyrs!
Esra: Yes.
Jack: That's with FFH.
Esra: Yeah! [laughter] That was kind of a sick band honestly.
Jack: Damn, yeah, I never heard them. That's insane. All right, So you guys then went to McGill. Did you guys both coordinate that or did you independently go to McGill without knowing?
Esra: We semi coordinated it.
Mark: Yeah, we were both talking about it and kind of getting excited about Montreal, I feel like.
Esra: Yeah, then we were like, "What if we like what if we did this?"
Jack: What about Montreal were you guys into?
Mark: Just, like, not America or something? It just seemed like it was an exciting, new option. Yeah, not New York. I really wanted to leave, for me at least. But something that we didn't have a bunch of context for, maybe, or that I thought I knew what the deal was with certain other places, but I didn't really know that much about Montreal. It's just easy to get all gassed up about it because it was, like, unclaimed space.
Esra: Yeah, and it was like a city that seemed like it had some kind of New York vibe in the same way but was really foreign to us.
Jack: Do you guys still stay in touch with the friends out there, like those people you lived with, Mark?
Mark: I'm in touch with a bunch of people, yeah. Most people have left from our little era cohort. Not most, but a lot, so it's a really different place now.
Esra: I think most.
Jack: Did you guys start Angels in New York or did you start it up in Montreal officially?
Mark: In Montreal.
Esra: Yeah.
Jack: Do you remember the genesis of that? Just one of you guys just being like, "Let's start a band"?
Esra: I mean, the degree of isolation that we had once we got to Montreal, especially once the winter hit, was kind of insane. [laughter]
Jack: So it was out of desperation.
Esra: We were just like, "We're in this apartment all the time." Then there's a video store across the street that we go rent movies at. We had a few friends that would come over to our apartment. I don't remember what the first conversation about it was, but...
Mark: Yeah, there was always some notion. I think it was mostly an idea that we would just make a record or make a tape or something or do something. And it wasn't a band; we were treating it like a band with a name and iconography and all this kind of stuff, but it was...
Jack: It was a recording project.
Mark: Definitely. Mostly because we couldn't imagine possibly playing a show. [laughter] But it was always an idea that we would do a band. And then it was figuring out how it would work. I kind of remember the one conversation that was, like... Actually I remember the band that it was and I'm going to say it: Yomul Yuk. [laughter] We were at this show, this band Yomul Yuk's playing, and it was noise rock or whatever, it was the kind of stuff that was happening a lot at that time, which is to say real instruments but super noisy. I knew that I had the guitar and we had a loop pedal, that was kind of it. And then random shit that we could make noises with or whatever. So it was like, "Okay, wouldn't it be sick if it was kind of like this?" Then at some point at the show, we had some conversation where it was like, "Imagine if it was this but then there was a song for a half second or for a brief moment there was a song."
Jack: Like, real music. [laughter]
Mark: Yeah, just as counterpoint, a more constructed, traditional type song or something like that. But that's part of it. Or something. I can't remember.
Jack: From you guys starting the band, you guys both made the decision to leave McGill after your first year.
Esra: No, I didn't.
Jack: You didn't? But you didn't graduate from there?
Esra: I stayed for another year, though.
Jack: Oh, okay, right. Mark, then you transferred to Hampshire, where we met. You were an incoming second year, and I was a first year. And I distinctly remember meeting you on the first day when Swift and Cameron and I were going up to my room to jam, quote unquote, after meeting in the quad and being like, "You're into weird music somehow," wearing a band shirt and being like, "Oh, I know them or whatever." Then you were on the floor below me and you saw us and came up to us because we looked like mid thousands noise 18 year olds.
Mark: It was Old Time Relijun. We got Old Time Relijun to thank for this.
Jack: Yes!
Mark: Swift had an Arrington [De Dionyso] shirt. "You're into that? I'm into that." Like, "I'm into weird stuff!" Yeah, I really pitched hard.
Jack: That's right. In the stairwell, I remember. And then you came up to my room.
Mark: Yeah, we were going to the open mic. Me and my hall mates were on the way to the open mic, like, the general college open mic, which probably would have been so sick. [laughter]
Jack: So dope.
Mark: But I was not wanting to go.
Esra: This was the first day of school?
Jack: This was the first day before classes even started. Literally the first day. And we went up to my room and we jammed and it sounded like Wet Hair or something like that. [laughter]
Mark: Like it was '07 noise rock era, '08.
Jack: Exactly, yeah. Then I remember that you guys had recorded that first tape that you had independently put out, but you had sent it to Thurston. And Thurston wrote you back. I even remember, I think, when he wrote you back.
Mark: Yeah, you got me champagne. [laughter] But there were a couple of steps to it... That was really nice, Jack.
Jack: Hey man.
Mark: It's actually another Arthur magazine thing, which is funny. We had recorded the tape during spring in Montreal, and then send it out to places or given it to people. I gave it to people like Scott Williams at WFMU. Oh yeah, and we had a listening party with Malcolm. Just one person.
Esra: There was five people. [laughter]
Mark: Someone sent it to the Byron [Coley]/Thurston column at Arthur that was reviewing tapes full time and then Esra, you called me over the summer. Do you remember how you found that?
Esra: No, you found that. I don't know if you told me about it, but there was something on that message board, where it was like, "Does anyone know who Angels in America are? - T." But we didn't know who that was and didn't respond to it. The only contact information on that tape was my email address, but it was like, "@hellokitty.com." I checked out, I didn't check my email for a long time. [laughter].
Jack: T Was looking.
Esra: I was on a road trip in Asheville, North Carolina and I checked my email and there was an email that was from Thurston, being like, "Do you guys want me to put out a record?"
Jack: The man.
Mark: And that was pretty much it. One and done.
Jack: One and done. [laughter] Yeah, really promoted that one.
Mark: It was a peak.
Jack: It wasn't even on the site. I was looking and it was not even on the site at all.
Mark: It's been memory-holed. [laughter] Other people put out tapes and records, that's not true either. It was really crazy. We were just starting and we were mad young and it felt like a very crazy, precipitous thing to have happen. And then just kind of been chilling ever since. But anyway. [laughter]
Jack: And that's it! That's it, folks. That's all.
[Angels in America "Free Galaxy"]
Jack: That summer I went back to St. Louis after our first year at Hampshire. But then you guys played your first live show in New York. Is that true?
Mark: During the school year, I went back up to Montreal for a second. Esra, you guys had booked an Angel show and we were like, "All right, we're going to try to figure out how to play as a band."
Jack: Was that with the drummer?
Esra: Yeah, and another guitar player.
Jack: Yeah, right. I remember that was up on FMA. I remember listening to that.
Mark True.
Jack: True. Shouts out.
Mark: Yeah, oh my God. Then for the summer I went back up to Montreal and we got more serious about playing shows and we played a bunch up there. We recorded a ton of the second tape and we ended by touring from Montreal to Baltimore, right?
Esra: Yeah. And that's when we met Taterbug.
Jack: Oh my God! Wait, tell that story.
Esra: We were doing some shows with Sewn Leather and he was like, "I'm going to play some shows with these friends of mine from Iowa." And all I remember was that it was Taterbug and Sci-Fi Sam and they had just gotten arrested for stealing milk from the supermarket the day before. [laughter] I had no idea what was going on. They were just super crusty looking punk kids. And then Taterbug played at the Bank, the first show that we played. He went up to the piano and just sang a bunch of songs and it was so good.
Jack: Was this summer 2009?
Mark and Esra Yeah.
Jack: So after the first year at Hampshire. How did you guys book that tour? You knew Griffin already, but were you just like, "Let's do some shows." Did Griffin book the shows?
Esra: He booked some shows and then we booked some shows. And [Ben] Kudler kind of booked some shows.
Mark: That's also when we played at Monster Island. It was a Todd P show.
Esra: Oh god!
Jack: Who was the show with? Do you remember?
Mark: Teengirl Fantasy.
Jack: Oh! With Logan [Takahashi]. That's so funny.
Mark: It was a bit of a funny mismatch, mostly because we had never played a show remotely large-scale.
Esra: I don't know why we were on the show.
Mark: Yeah, it was a Todd P show. But wasn't it Griffin? It must have been Griffin.
Esra: I guess so.
Mark: That was the show where after we played we were outside and someone was arriving late and saw their friends and was like, "Ah shit! What did I miss?" And the person was like, "Uh, nothing, just the worst band ever." [laughter] Right in front of all of us. Truly some weird overlaps that weren't quite right yet, but it was fun to do all those shows. That was proof of concept for playing shows even though it didn't actually prove that we could play shows.
Jack: So from that, what was the transition to going full-on duo with electronics?
Esra: I feel like there was some point where we started to realize that we could play the songs that we were making. We got more gear and we started making new songs that we knew we could play live, instead of trying to figure out how to play these songs live that had never been intended to be like that.
Jack: I personally remember in 2011, I was gone for half the year abroad and then I came back and it was full-on drum machine and synth. And it was like, "Damn," [laughter] seeing you guys play when you guys toured with Daren Ho, who I think I've mentioned on almost every single interview I've done - there will be a Daren focus episode - but you guys did the tour with Daren and Steve [Hauschild].
Mark: That was fall 2011.
Esra: Was that after you did a tour with Christopher [Forgues]?
Mark: Yeah, and with Weyes Blood.
Esra: Oh yeah.
Jack: Talk about that tour with Christopher. How did you guys first meet Christopher? An important person for you guys and probably for a lot of people.
Esra: I was living in Baltimore and he came and played a show at America. I think that's when I first met him?
Mark: I met him at Feeding Tube Records because he was in Western Mass for a show and someone was like, "You guys would get along."
Jack: He did a full US tour as, what was his moniker then?
Mark: Mark Lord.
Jack: That was Mark Lord era. I remember one notorious story, obviously, from that tour in the Northern Territory.
Esra: That was actually so crazy because we went on two tours that summer.
Jack: Were they connected, or did you come back and then go on another one?
Mark: Little break in between, yeah. We took a half country-wide tour and then a little break and then a full country tour.
Esra: Yeah, we did Midwest with Weyes Blood and then we came out and had this record release show that was so crazy.
Mark: A lot of stuff happened. [laughter]
Jack: Wait, why? What was busted about it?
Esra: A lot of shit went down.
Mark: It was bussin'. [laughter]
Jack: Well, okay. Give me one. Give me one story.
Esra: It was like...
Jack: Or just tell me who is involved. You don't have to say anything.
Esra: It was like a Murphy's Law show.
Mark: There was a lot of pent up energy from...
Esra: Every aspect of it was going totally off in the wrong way.
Jack: Woah. Where was it?
Esra: It was at the Bank
Mark: It was a little mini-fest. Mad people played: Humanbeast, Mark Lord, Weyes Blood, Phemale.
Jack: Oh, damn! Shouts out.
Esra: Christopher played and his MPC broke and it deleted everything on it and then he just poured his whiskey all over it and threw it on the ground, smashed it to pieces. That was the first person who played and then it just...
Jack: Devolves from there.
Esra: Yeah, it was really crazy.
Mark: And then the next morning, I had to take my car back to New York to get it registered or inspected before we went on tour. And I fucking crashed on the Jersey Turnpike with Esra's little brother and Ben Kudler.
Jack: Yeah, I remember that.
Esra: We literally got the car that week.
Jack: Oh god.
Mark: We had gotten the car that week and I crashed it so then we had to do this crazy rental car shuffle, which ended up totally working. We were able to go on tour and catch up to our itinerary.
Jack: Oh, crazy. So you had to miss the first couple of gigs? Classic.
Esra: The first leg was mostly Florida shows. We canceled most of them, but not all. So our first show was in Tampa, so we had to drive.
Jack: Just drive, like, 20 hours to Tampa. You guys are notorious, you guys are cancel-happy in the first place.
Esra: That's true. That's in the past though.
Jack: Oh! Damn. [laughter].
Esra: We also got the date wrong of our Nashville show. So we had to straight up cancel, we then were driving back and people hit us up like, "Yeah, you fucking didn't show up." In St. Louis...
Mark: That's where we met Josh [Levi].
Jack: Oh yeah, that's right!
Mark: It was all on accident. It was really bad. [laughter] We were just kind of figuring it out.
Jack: Just kids! Just kids having fun.
Mark: Just a couple kids.
Esra: That's how the rumor started that we were 15 and didn't know how to drive. [laughter]
Mark: Yeah. It's, like, our grandma's car.
Jack: So kind of after that era, or maybe concurrently, you guys started doing these radio plays, which honestly, in retrospect, even though we were sort of in different corners of the scene for a while earlier on, I feel like the radio plays were actually very inspirational to me now, specifically with the stuff that like Jeff [Witscher] and I are doing now.
Mark: I know you see me as a father figure.
Jack: Definitely, for sure. That's another episode. But how did you guys get more into that? Because already you guys kind of created a sort of internal world or language with your work. Obviously, Mark, you're a writer and that's a big part of your life and writing and language is very important to you. But how did you get fully past, or out of, music, going so far to where you're just making a straight radio play? How did that first come about?
Mark: We did one in Montreal too at the same exact time that we were making the first tape.
Jack: See, I didn't know that.
Mark: Yeah, I kind of forgot too.
Jack: That was from the beginning a part of... That's funny. See, I had no idea.
Esra: We actually wrote the script and everything. That one actually had a script!
Jack: Do you have a recording of that?
Mark: I can send you the script. It's on Chris's podcast.
Esra: Oh yeah.
Mark: It's on Bin Series, the first episode. If you recall, he had a podcast a long time ago. It was a Christmas play, a traditional Christmas play called Enter Sandman, a Series of Misundersandings. [laughter] And it was, like, you know, all kinds of sand shit. [laughter]
Jack: Damn, I have to hear that. I'm going to need a file.
Mark: I'll get you a thumb drive.
Esra: One thing that's cool about the radio plays is that we get other random people to be involved.
Jack: Yeah, for sure. It's a huge community thing. Everybody in the scene that we're in are kind of their own little hub for various people within the scene. But you guys definitely are central to a lot of my friends, obviously, a lot of the Baltimore and Providence people. It was definitely a cool way to carve out what your idea of the scene is. It's great. I remember on the last one you had Brian [Blomerth] and Kudler. Who did you have on that second one?
Esra: We had our friend Michael Crow, but he became our friend because of the first radio play. So it was kind of a Thurston situation. He heard the Christopher podcast and heard our Christmas play and was like, "Who are these people?" But didn't care at all about the music that we played and was just obsessed with the play. So then when we made the next one, we had him do a part in it.
Mark: It just became like a useful way to get through... It wasn't planned to be part of the...
Jack: Oeuvre.
Mark: It wasn't planned to be part of "the band" artistic project, I don't think. Then we had this residency in Berlin.
Jack: Oh yeah. And that tape came out of that, right? I have that.
Mark: Yeah, it was a week. We had this ridiculous, very painstaking process of how we recorded stuff, especially then, but still, kind of. We were like, "We can't record a new record during this recording residency but we obviously have to do something." So we did this radio play that Simone Trabucchi from Hundebiss co-released with those people. After that we did another one. That became an alternate version of how the band could function. Now I will also say that on this new record there is stuff that is sort of a melding of that side of things, a little bit more with the musical side. I get that it does feel hard for the few people who cared to reconcile these really fucking stupid radio plays with these slightly overwrought, sentimental musical excursions. So we're just gonna put them more together.
Jack: I also remember one of the festivals at Far Rockaway... For people who don't know, there's a house in Far Rockaway that's very important to all of us and the people who do that were a big part of our community and people as we got to know them. I remember you guys maybe premiered a radio play at one of them? At the last one.
Mark: XILF: Stikklemuzick.
Jack: Yeah, XILF: Stikklemuzick. That was playing out in the shed in the back, I think. Is that true?
Esra: Do you know how you actually say it, Jack?
Jack: No.
Esra: [whispered] Stikklemuzick. [laughter]
Mark: That's the language.
Jack: I vaguely recall the proper dialect. [laughter]
Mark: Yeah, we had a brackish water
Jack: Oh yeah, right.
Mark: We had a "Snitches Get Pickles" promotion, where if you snitched on somebody doing something bad, we would give you a pickle. Some people didn't really get it, I will say. I don't think they were snitching correctly. But then one person did. I'll just say it. It was [Alex] Tominsky. He came up to me and he was like, "Mark, look!" He pointed out some people. He was like, "They're doing drugs." [laughter]
Jack: That's proper snitching.
Mark: So I gave him a pickle. Because he snitched.
Jack: Damn, respect. Respect to Alex Tominsky. It's a cool way to showcase your idea of what the community is, all the while positing some sort of new idea that's beyond just playing a show. I, for one, thought that the installation was very sick and I liked it a lot.
Mark: We should do more stuff like that.
Jack: Yeah, you definitely should.
Esra: We didn't even get to talk about our smock.
Mark: Oh, the smocks. "Don't be fooled by the smocks that I got." You would go to a birthday party or a bar mitzvah, honestly. Some kind of turnt up, lit kids party. Sometimes they'd have a decal machine where you could put a decal on a t-shirt.
Jack: Oh yeah, for sure.
Mark: One time my mom had a party at her work, which is a hospital, and she was like, "Hey, I've had these things made, you may not like it." They were these clear smocks that had players from the New York Rangers decaled on them with really heavy, thick, papery, laminated decals. So we were really into it and definitely wore it at least once or twice for a show and it was met with some thousand-yards stares in a big way. [laughter] People were like, "A-haha... Yeah..." It just didn't connect but I still have them. They honestly looked weirdly good, though, which is maybe why people didn't even blink.
Esra: Yeah, I'm kind of bummed I can't get a smock reveal right now.
Mark: I should unbox my smocks. [laughter]
Jack: Well, on that note, I think we could wrap it up. I want to thank you guys for doing this. I learned a lot. I learned some facts about my friends that I didn't know. I thought I knew everything about you guys.
Mark: That's what it's all about. Facts and friends
Jack: That's what it's all about, baby. Yeah. All right. I'll talk to you guys soon.
Mark Bye.
Esra: Bye.
Jack: Bye.
Esra: Love you.
Jack: Love you.
