Soul-Junk Interview with Glen Galaxy

Glen Galaxy @ Meow Meow, PDX (photo: Dan Cohoon)

Glen Galaxy was one of the folks behind one of the 1990's best group Trumans Water. Their spazz-out noise rock left some folks scratching there head. While others, like my self, found their joyful noise to be utterly amazing. Glen left the group to Start Soul-Junk. Soul-Junk may be the only Christian, noise, free jazz, rap, skronk rock band out there. This interview was conducted via e-mail in March 2004.

Dan Cohoon: Let's start talking about Trumans Water. What is the History of Trumans Water?
Glen Galaxy: Trumans Water started in April '91 & hooked up w/ them 3 months later when the advertised for a singer "brain optional". I learned all their songs & then started singing while drumming (along with the other drummer), then they bought me a guitar so I would quit drumming. I wrote a rash of songs & Kirk wrote some too & we ran into the studio & recorded them & released "of thick tum" on handmade-cover vinyl. next thing we knew we were touring like madmen all over u.s. & Europe. In august of 93 God whispered & told me to leave & start soul-junk, which I did.

DC: Are you still involved with them? Or do you just play with them if all you guys happen to be in the same place at the same time? I saw a show in Portland you played with them a year or two ago which was amazing.
GG: I have played with them on several tours & we did the last CD together here in San Diego. Since we lived together for 2 years & constantly improvised there's a chemistry there that's always easy to pick up wherever we left if off. They tour every year as a 3-piece, I only join in occasionally. I remember that Portland show though, that was a cozy romp.

DC: Tell me the history of Soul-Junk. How did you meet up with Slo-Ro?
GG: Soul-Junk started late 93 when I jumped TW ship & recorded the first few Soul-Junk releases (1950 LP, 1949 7", and 1950 free shrimp cassette). The first year it was just me playing everything & trying to get my newlywed wife Cathleen to sing with me. I bashed on guitar, drums & smothered everything with midrange (1948 EP, 1951 LP).

Then a band formed - Ron on guitar along with me, Brian on drums, & my brother Jon on bass. (1952 CD, 1953/54 CD) Then Chuck P came in making strange snark & Nathan the philo professor replaced Brian on drums (1955 CD). Jon and I started making lots of drum & bass-noise tracks on our own. Chuck & I did many late-late-nite sessions in a radio studio playing with massive feedback & such (also on 1955 CD). We started touring a lot & everybody except Jon couldn't tour, so we started playing with Abe (drums) & Mia (guitar). We toured with the Danielson Famile on three big tours & Jon married Rachel Smith Danielson.

Then I started recording 1956 with Rafter Roberts, who I ended up going into business with. We spent somewhere between 600 & 700 hours making that CD & the 1943 12". It had rock elements, drum & bassy elements, plus I had started consuming mountains of underground/ experimental hip-hop so that was all over 1956. We performed a lot of that as a band - I toured around with Dennis, Andy & Mizzicah from FIF backing me up, and then decided it was too crazy trying to teach all the songs to multiple rhythms sections & started the hip-hop live set.

sloRo moved out from NYC to be my noise DJ, & we had either Mizzicah or 3rd Rail as the beat/scratch DJ. sloRo & I grew up together & I was his Sunday school teacher at one point. He mostly cut out & bought donuts for everyone. Anyway, after a west-coast tour with Mizzicah & a European tour with 3rd rail, sloRo & I started doing 2-man sets. He could roll beats & make plenty of noise while I MC'd, waved my guitar & blew bari-sax blarp. (1957 CD, 1958 CD, 1940 ep, 1939 7")( viva voce split ep, 1938 ep").

DC: Why do you choose free-jazz, noise, rap, rock to praise the Lord?
GG: Soul-Junk's always been a go-where-you-feel-it operation. Breaking off from Trumans Water to praise the Lord was enough of a baptism into mid-air so I just kept going. The very first LP has a song that goes "The Lord is the Spirit, & wherever the Spirit of God is, there is freedom." So I have always been way more into the Spirit of God than any sort of concept of who I'm supposed to be or who the band's supposed to be.

DC: My brother is convinced that there is no way the dude from Trumans Water could be singing about Jesus and it not be an inside joke. What would you say to people who doubt the sincerity of your beliefs?
People get so far inside their cultural modes that they can't see any kind of reality outside. Aesthetics & religion (as dead system/institution) have way too much in common. It's a drag, I have seen a lot of brilliant people get sucked into aesthetic shrine-land, just like I have seen a lot of good people get completely dead-religious. People who don't know & experience the Spirit of God spend all their time trying to figure it out. I'm just a happy piece of PVC.

DC: What was your religious up bringing like? Did you grow up going to church or did you choose your faith later on?
GG: I grew up in the church, read the bible as much as anybody, but didn't really have much. I went off to school & read a Couple hundred existential/ Russian/drunk authors & decided I was an atheist. That lasted about 3 years. Then God cornered me & asked me if I'd found anything. I hadn't. So I listened to him & started praying desperate stuff & all of a sudden I felt what I'd been missing out on. That was about a year before I joined Trumans Water.

DC: How were you introduced to avant-guard or out music?
What did you grow up listening to?
GG: I found out about the Velvet Underground in like 1987, got all their records & read all about them. That really got me into the last 30 years of noise. Before that I was a rocker. I snuck Iron Maiden/ Led Zeppelin/ Ozzy records past my parents & such. Underground rock & hip-hop was incredibly fertile soil in the late-80s. Everybody was so sick of the decade of cheese. Reading about Royal Trux, Sonic Youth, De La Soul would get you a list of about 50 records you'd never heard of & that was an easy way to blow a paycheck.

DC: What does the future hold for Soul-Junk?
Now sloRo has put together a remix CD (1937). I have been commissioned from on high to sing the entire bible word for word, whether or not sloRo will be in on that remains to be seen. 1john, 2john & 3john should be ready to release by summer of 2004..

a=1/f squared * archives * phonography * photography * links

Soul Junk Interview with Slo-Ro

Slo-ro & Glen Galaxy @ Meow Meow, PDX (photo by Dan Cohoon)


Michael Kaufmann a.k.a. Slo-Ro a.k.a. Slowly Rotating Fan dropped the beats for Soul-Junk. He is also one of the folks behind Therefore, a group that involves extended performance pieces. They use one of kind cultural artifacts (a.k.a. cassette tapes) to document their procedures. Glen Galaxy was Kaufmann's Sunday School Teacher. Glen introduced Michael to the wonderful and wild world of the avant-garde music via Glen's band Trumans Water.

Dan Cohoon: Tell me the history of Soul-Junk. How did you get involved?
SLORO: The full history of soul-junk is an epic worth unpacking (wet socks and all), but my recollection of the details are silly shoddy slop, since I was in the position of an observer until about three years ago. So the popular story goes Glen leaves trumans (which in my biased opinion deserves more recognition then they get...) starts soul-junk. Rumor has it that when soul-junk started quite a few people thought it was a put-on, a year later of gigs it was hard to dismiss assuch. What is more interesting to note is the transformation of soul-junk and its trajectory, which is not schizophrenic, but directed and highly progressional.

DC: Tell me about the conflicts you face between the avant-garde/ indy/ rap communities and the religious communities that you inhabit.
SLORO: I see very little conflict. Most of my Christian community is supportive (while they may not entirely understand) and respective of my work as an artist and musician. The integrity of both (art and the faith) has to overcome the aesthetics and politics of each. There is faith and politics in both faith and art, but if someone moves forward in humility and maturity in dealing with these things, those around will be respectful and patient, and hopefully challenged. The conflict I have seen if any is the reaction people have to the amalgamation of genres. There is a deep rooted philosophy in any genre that the thing should somehow stay pure and separate from other genres. Soul-Junk gets misrepresented as a genre-hopping/mashing scattershot, but I think Glen has always had an incredible ability to distill elements from all various types of genres, connecting to musical values and intrinsic maneuvers as opposed to fashion or gimmicks.

DC: Why do you choose free-jazz, noise, rap, rock to praise the Lord?
SLORO: I choose all and any forms of expression available to me that may bring Glory to God. It just so happens that noise flows most naturally from my pores.

DC: I stopped being a Christian when I saw the hypocrisy at my church and the church at large when I was about 11. I am interested in hearing your remarks on how you resolved conflicts between your own faith and the beliefs pushed by the religious right.
SLORO: I am not sure who you mean exactly by the religious right. This is in my opinion a fairly ambiguous term. Sure, there is the stereotype...but it is so foreign from my personal experience. But I understand your frustration with the church. I left for about 8 years and then came back. When I started looking directly at what the Gospel was teaching (what Jesus preaches), that I am both far worse of a person than I want to admit, and far more loved than I ever dared dream, and how that plays out through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, all my hang-ups and aesthetic and political differences took second priority to the realness of the Gospel. It is a Gospel of Grace and Forgiveness. That is not to say that I agree with many of the ways Christianity gets acted out via bumper stickers and political agendas (this upsets me deeply) but there is a realness that resonates deeper than humanity's ability to mess it up or miscommunication.

DC: What do you do in Soul-Junk?
SLORO: Mangle, distort, damage, sweeten, satirize, soak, trample, coerce, hood ornament, distract...live I'm part sidekick and part obstruction. On record, I’m the silly rapper and post-production sound effect guy. I have done a couple of the beats from start to finish, but mostly I rework, remix, and finesse the beats that Glen gives me.

DC: Growing up what did you listen to? How were you introduced to avant-guard music?
SLORO: I was first introduced to "avant-guard" music by Glen. Glen was my Sunday school teacher briefly during his Trumans days and my Junior year in High School. Before that I was listening to classic rock greatest hit records. Probably the biggest exposure came about when I took a semester off from college my freshman year and lived with my folks who had recently moved from suburban San Diego to New York City. I would look through the Village Voice and other papers for the most bizarre sounding things and go to them. I have always had a propensity for new experiences and the weird. I ended up attending several shows at venues like the Knitting Factory, Experimental Intermedia, and Roulette. Then my sophomore year I met Wayne Feldman (other half of therefore) and he turned me on to a lot of new stuff. Unfortunately our college radio station was AWFUL! Shortly after college Wayne and I moved to Olympia Washington (honestly unaware of the scene there) and our third roommate had a radio show on KAOS. I would go up to the station with him and go to another room and listen to all the experimental/avant stuff I could find on the shelves.

DC: Tell me about Slo-Ro. Is it an identity you use on stage or just a nickname?
SLORO: Slo-ro is short for slowly rotating fan. It has been my M.C./D.J. name for some time. It started when I was in a band called DJHappyFun. That is a whole other story. So the name stuck and when I joined soul-junk, it seemed like the obvious choice. Slo-ro as an identity didn't really start until a show in Norway when soul-junk was on tour. For the first year of soul-junk I was still very uncomfortable with my involvement in the band. I was surprised to find myself in the band. But something clicked in Norway. I had decided to put a box on my head for the performance. It was a turning point. Slo-ro the rapper emerged. I have many personalities. I have performed several times as Rush2 (solo/a cappella anthem songs) and Dutchko (awkward standup). I operate as Michael Kaufmann the visual and conceptual artist. Recently all the personalities are starting to merge. I still perform under the Slo-ro moniker and occasionally as Michael Kaufmann. But I’m starting to see this strange interaction between the characters and each of them rubbing off on one another. This stew will be fully cooked with the slo-ro solo album.

DC: What is up with the costumes?
SLORO: Live hip-hop is incredibly boring most of the time. I have seen some good live hip-hop...MF Doom, Antipop. But for the most part it is the mic and the dat player. It is horrible. And the worst thingabout it is that there is a potential for so much more. Since your hands are free from instruments there is a whole new level of entertainment you can engage. The masks are a way to bring in a newelement. The masks are also great obstructions. I am interested performing (via all my personas) with self-placed obstacles. It creates an uncontrollable variable. It makes it experimental, because you don't know what is going to happen with a large box on your head when you try to play an altered trombone. The concept of self-placed obstacles is perhaps most fully realized in "therefore". And masks are the extreme statement of artist as performer. All artists take on a stage presence. You hear a lot of hip-hop about keeping it real...I’m interested in keeping it totally off-the-wall and with a degree of fiction. But fiction that somehow transcends reality. Metaphor? Like Sun-Ra. Also, the masks remind me of some of the goofiness and strangeness of early hip-hop.

DC: Why do you use numbers as album titles? What are some of the ways these numbers can be interpreted?
SLORO: That is Glen's doing. Basically, EPs and Singles go down from 1950, full-lengths go up. I think that Glen wanted an easier way to keep track of releases and name releases.

DC: Your other project is Therefore. Tell me about that project.
SLORO: I think that is a separate interview. Of all the projects with which I have been involved, Therefore is the most conceptually thought out. Therefore can perhaps best be understood by our actions; long shows, guerilla sound installations, progressive economics, new contexts for non-antagonistic "avant-guard" performance and music. We have had some wonderful opportunities as Therefore. We have had the chance to show our work along side of Robert Rauschenberg. We performed an 8 hour gig at a public high school for about 700 students coming and going through he course of their school day (probably one of my fondest therefore moments). Most importantly, I really enjoy making music with the other half of therefore, Wayne Feldman.

DC: You do one of a kind of cassette tapes. I love the format. A one of a kind CDR just doesn't have the same power as a cassette. Do you think that format is on its way out? What are your reasons for choosing the format?
SLORO: Cassettes on their way out? Well, hard to say. One thought that keeps coming to my mind in regards to cassettes is this idea of recycle culture. Cassettes seem safeguarded from apocalyptic times. You can't copy cds over and over again. Sure, cds are incredibly disposable and inconsequential, but there is something about the consumer power imbedded in a cassette. You can destroy a cd, but you can tape over a cassette.We choose cassette more out of a matter of convenience I think. A regular Therefore activity was dumpster-diving behind a Value Village in Olympia WA. We would find all of these cassette tapes. We decided we should make unique one-of-a-kind tapes to hand out to folks. Cassettes are great for this because they are easy to put in your pocket. Cdrs are not easy to carry around in your pocket.

DC: Soul-Junk seems to change drastically in sound and genre from album to album. What does the future hold for Soul-Junk?
SLORO: Well, it is funny you should ask. Slo-ro has semi-officially left soul-junk. I will probably assist occasionally on record and live, but I am going to focus on doing a solo lp or ep (possibly dvd) as slo-ro and then quitting this whole rap game all together. Jay-Z is inspiring. Glen is still cranking out massive amounts of beats and has a few things up his sleeve, but it is still all in the developmental stages.

Some urls of importance:
http://www.sppr.net/therefore
http://www.sloro.info
http://www.souljunk.com

a=1/f squared * archives * phonography * photography * links

Jackie-o Motherfucker Interview

Jackie-o Motherfucker @ the Fez Ballroom, 2001

This interview was conducted in 2001
@ the Michigan Avenue Social Club
with Tom Greenwood & Jef Brown.
Interview & photo by: Dan Cohoon

Dan Cohoon: Tell me about the chronology of the albums of when they were recorded versus when they were released.
Tom Greenwood: The first three records were recorded and released as you'd expect. Where it starts to get a little screwy is that we recorded Magic Fire Music (the Ecstatic Peace double LP) the fall of 1998. We finished that a year later. The sequences of when we recorded the records are Magic Fire Music, Wow (Fisheye) and then Fig. 5 (road cone). The way they came out was Fig. 5 was recorded last but came out before any of the others. Then Wow came out after that & then Magic Fire Music came out just this summer.That was the first one to be recorded and the last one to be released. (ed. note: Magic Fire Music & Wow have been re-issued on ATP )

DC: That was recorded in Baltimore mostly?
TG: All of it.

DC: Is there a core of people that allows Jackie-o to exist?
TG: I would say that the core would be myself, Jeff, Barry, Brook, Geves & Jillian.
Jef Brown: John Fleming would be in there to.
TG: Oh yeah he has been in this thing longer than anyone except me.

DC: Your music seems to be very American. You incorporate everything from Folk, Blues, Jazz, Rock and Electronic music. Did you set out to do that or did that just evolve from people's histories?
JB: We kind of can't help it. We are Americans. We live in a society that gets so hung up on doing the new thing and forgetting about the old thing entirely. You listen to a lot of modern music that is being made today, it is so removed from tradition it almost sounds contrived. We never really set out to do it. It is something in our subconscious. We didn't really even know it until the reviews started coming in . . . at least I didn't.
TG: Musically, we never really set out to reflect anything influence wise. I read ads in the paper where people are looking for band members. They have these huge lists of their favorite bands. I can understand wanting to some common ground with people you are playing with. Like if you are really into Burt Bacharach & Liberace you are not going to want to play with some one who is really into Cradle of Filth. For instance with Jef we didn't sit down and say I want this to sound like John Lee Hooker crossed with Pink Floyd. It was just coincidental that when we started touring & bringing out our tapes that we were both into the Dog Faced Hermans & John Coltrane. We really want to document what we all sound like playing together. I would never try and start a band based around what my musical influences is. Just because I like something doesn't mean that I want to copy it.
JB: Sometimes the best music you make is after weeks of not listening to anything. Sometimes you have to do that. Turn your stereo & radio off. Just get away from it.
TG: I think that really freaks out some people. I think some people fall in love with a certain type of music and they want their own music to sound like that. It is really common.
JB: Sometimes you go to someone's house and look at their record collection and they have twenty albums that all sound like themselves.There is nothing wrong with that, it is just not what we are doing.
TG: I think that is the one of the factors that keeps every one interested because we never really know what the next thing is going to sound like. Honestly, I have no idea what our next out put will be.

DC: So the record for Road Cone--is that completed?
TG: Yes.

DC: Is there a general theme?
JB: No, it started being recorded last summer. It was a different band then. There would almost be two records worth of stuff on that thing. There were a couple of pieces that were written out. There were a bunch of short pieces we wanted to do just because we wanted to do some short pieces. I guess that is how it is different is that there is a little more thought put into it than the last one (FIG. 5).

DC: Speaking of that; how did the interpretations of “Old Hannah” & “Amazing Grace” come about?
JB: “Old Hannah” was collaboration with the Amalgamated Ever Lasting Union Choir ...
TG: We just looked through their repertoire of tunes that they do. We chose that piece to work on, an arrangement--Jeff worked out the arrangement.
JB: It was fairly chaotic. I ran home from work. They were all sitting around the house anxiously waiting to go home. I had to set up the mics, grab guitar chords. They had no idea they were playing with us (laughs). They were a little freaked out that we had a band in the other room. They thought we were doing a recording just for them. They way it happened was total chaos but a lot of fun. "Amazing Grace" was another accident. There was nothing planned about that. Moe was playing violin on that track and just started to play Amazing Grace. It sort of developed into that. That whole record (fig.5) is sound checks really.
TG: Except for "Old Hannah," "Beautiful September," & "Cells are in Motion." The way that thing takes its shape is through the editing. We have piles of material. We listen to it all and determine what shape the whole thing was. Through editing we found the way to most efficiently make that statement.

DC: Do you normally record that way?
TG: Editing is incredibly important to what we do in terms of the out put. It is basically a constant process. We are recording in the basement and when we are playing we have the tape machine on. We may do that for weeks or months. Just pile stuff up. Then eventually, we get around to listening to it.We'll find bits the we like and that is how we create a song. Making a record is just a more refined step of that. Find out what we have and through editing make it take the shape that we want.

DC: Do you have any formal musical training?
TG: (coughs and mutters under his breath jokingly) Jef went to Berklee.
JB: Don't print that!

DC: Ok ...So why are you ashamed of Berklee?
TG: It just wasn't that much of an important experience for him.
JB: It made me feel bad about myself. There were a few teachers that were up lifting and cool, and the ones that were deserve all the props. They are truly wonderful human beings. The problem with that school, with any school . . . I guess you can print that. It is an important subject. There was a big change in art and music in the 1980s.
TG: So true.
JB: It used to be about doing the best at what you want to do and it became about . . .
TG: Commercialism . . .
JB: . . . making money. So you've got 900 hundred guitar players @ Berklee College of Music. John Scofield had a hit record in the jazz field. So 500 of them are learning to play just like him. They have that gleam in their eyes. The whole curriculum is geared towards that. It just the way the world works. It is not like you can blame the staff there or anything. The Maryland Institute of Art was the same way for that matter. It went from a bunch of freaks wanting to make art to a bunch of people wanting to graphic design. It is just the way the world is. I think a lot of it had to do with Reaganomics. That whole attitude is what we're still suffering from.
TG: I had a really similar experience--I went to the Minneapolis College of Art & Design as a film media arts student. I was there from 1986-90. A couple of years prior to me going there Husker Du would play in the student music area. There was a huge independent press scene there. People were doing crazy old home made books, films, and really outrageous performance art, punk influenced happenings of all kinds. Basically a lot of the kids I went to school with ended up working @ MTV. There was an experimental film professor there. She was my advisor. That's where I learned about Harry Smith and Stan Brakhage. They made homemade films, hand painted animation, and all that really cool stuff. There was another whole side that was really into computer animation and real slick style MTV style film making. That side totally took over. After I left, they turned out tons of graphic designers & computer graphics people.
JB: It was really heartbreaking when I went to Berklee. It had all ready changed before I went to Berklee. Before it was a smaller and more laid back program. When I started going there in 1986, it was what was popular in the 80s, Metal. There was this huge Metal thing going on at the school. If you want to learn about rock & roll music get your self a guitar and rock out. Learn some good music. Do it with some soul. The whole entire country then was about playing as fast as possible and as technically as possible. Still the guy from the Stooges and Keith Richards are still the best rock-n-roll players on the planet. They made great music… They had soul.
TG: Where is Randy Rhodes now? Is his music going to stand up in the pantheon of American musical history?
JB: Going to art school in Baltimore 1992 was the year it all changed.There was this incredible art and music scene that was tied together very much hand in hand. It was a huge amount of fun. Everyone dressed in the cheapest and fucked up outfits that they could find. In 1992, you had everyone wearing the raver look; the Adidas. They were all there to study some graphic thing. It was about economy. It wasn't about creativity. That was just really heart breaking. So it just means that we have to work a little harder . . .

DC: At my school (Montserrat College of Art) there was a constant battle between the fine arts majors and the graphic designers or worse the illustration majors. It was something really disappointing to find out. Now that I am out of art school and have been working in a warehouse for the last two months, yeah I guess I would have liked to have been a graphic designer. On the other hand, I am happy making my photographs.
TG: There is no naivety left. It all became really calculated. It became impossible to follow a dream. I grew up in North Dakota. That isolation lead to a certain naivety in deciding what to do. It is so hard to live now that when you go to college you have to be concerned with what you're going to do afterwards. I was just like fuck it. I don't care--I like what I am doing. Economically, that was really stupid of me. It's difficult to live, but I get by. I am glad to be doing what I am doing, even though it is difficult. I probably wouldn't be doing what I am doing if I were more thoughtful about my career.
JB: Some where in school I had the realization that I would be doing the same thing ten years down the road that I am doing now.

Links:
Road Cone
Unity Sound Archive
All Tomorrow’s Parties
Ecstatic Peace
Fisheye

a=1/f squared * archives * phonography * photography * links