Trenches were special, basically.

And Trenches are no more. The band dissolved quietly earlier on this year with only a self released eponymous ep and a split 12″ with Drainland. Obviously having been a member of the latter band I am both biased and priveleged to have been involved with their history. Unbeknownst to me though, in spite of the band’s end, there was one final recording. And the band have now entrusted these two final songs to Cvltnation to stream so that you, dear readers, may have the pleasure of hearing the band’s dying breaths.
trenches house of no repair mp3
trenches rift mp3

I’ll hand you over to now to guitarist Gab for a brief note on the origin of these recordings:

“The songs were originally recorded in early 2012. And were meant to go on a split with Diet pills (then they broke up) and so we had kept them for a split with State Icons. But after all the difficulties and line up changes in 2012 the band ended, state icons also broke up at the end of 2012 so the songs remained unreleased. I still hope to one day release them in some shape or form but for now we will only be doing a download version.

The post Exclusive
CVLT Nation Streaming
TRENCHES – FINAL RECORDINGS appeared first on CVLT Nation.

The post ATTN Brooklyn!
ABSU Ticket Giveaway
for 4/11 show at St. Vitus Bar! appeared first on CVLT Nation.

Spiritualized – Brooklyn, Secret Project Robot 04/02/2013 from (((unartig))) on Vimeo.

04-04 Denver, CO – The Bluebird Theater
04-05 Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge
04-06 Boise, ID – Egyptian Theatre
04-08 Seattle, WA – Neptune Theatre
04-09 Portland, OR – Wonder Ballroom
04-11 Santa Cruz, CA – Cocoanut Grove Historic Ballroom
04-12 Las Vegas, NV – House of Blues

The post Lazer Guided Melodies…
SPIRITUALIZED Live 4-2-13
Now Showing! appeared first on CVLT Nation.

Up next, I have a preview track of the new Swamp Witch record, “Gnosis”. Pre-orders are available from Anti-Matter Recordsd if you are interested(click). This is the title track, “Gnosis”, played at 33rpm for Extra Heaviness. This is a recording of the actual first spin of the record at 33, it’s intended to be played at 45. These records are housed in a tip-on style, single sleeve jacket printed from Stoughton Printing Company, with black dust sleeves, along with a two button set that’s housed in a black zip lock bag, a poster, and a download card printed on 32 lb. metallic paper to redeem the entire recording which also includes the “Chopped & Doomed” remix version courtesy of DJ Dreemz as an added bonus. Artwork and layout was executed by Jacob R., with collaborative help from photographer Megan Brim and Steven Wilson (Black Uroborus Illustrations). 401 copies on swamp green vinyl, 99 copies on “cosmic splatter” (transparent green & white) vinyl. If you get baked, I recommend getting baked before listening.

I first heard about the next band a few years ago from an Italian Heavy Metal music journalist(Mari) who mentioned them in an early doommantia review on Swamp. I searched for their music and was pleasantly surprised with pure heaviness. Their s/t LP has been sold out for awhile but if you search yt you can find a few songs that showcase the vile tones that this band is able to conjure. Im stoked to present them to you as they don’t tour often and footage of them is almost non-existent online, here’s a look into another powerful American Doom Band.

Hell(Salem) is a Heavy Doom project from the Pacific Northwest. It started as a One Man Project that quickly morphed into something larger. Integral contributors of the Cascadian Scene helped bring this project to life by becoming session musicians and guests for their live incarnations. Some current and former members of Hell(Live) have been involved in Leech, Mania, Vault Dweller, Elu of the Nine, Ancestortooth, & Velnias. Hell has a serious online following and their records all seem to hold a great deal of value. Recently they were given the opportunity to be featured on the label Pesanta Urfolk, which is a label that specializes in attention to detail and high quality releases. Hell “II” released by P.U. is a double LP with 3 sides and an incredible etching on Side IV of a radical black/red opaque record that gleams when held up to the light. They’ve been sold out online for quite sometime but the band has a few left available to purchase while they tour, I got one and look forward to giving it a spin when I get a proper player hooked up. This live incarnation of the band was heavy as fuck. I definitely recommend checking out this band if you are in need of something heavier.

Drought from Santa Fe, New Mexico is another example of the developing and blossoming American Doom community that is playing a new breed of sonic hypnosis. This was my first Drought live experience. Their sound is powerful and bleak Doom. Definitely into this, and looking forward to getting my hands on some of their physical releases, as well as the next time I get to check these folks out live.

Thanks for checking out this edition of The Heavy Hour.

The post HEAVY HOUR ((((4)))) Featuring
GRAVES AT SEA //
SWAMP WITCH //
HELL & DROUGHT appeared first on CVLT Nation.

BURNT BOOKS Live:
4/03/2013 Tin Roof – Charleston, SC
4/04/2013 Shanty Town Pub – Jacksonville, FL
4/05/2013 Hold Tight House – Tampa, FL
4/06/2013 Churchill’s Pub – Miami, FL
4/07/2013 Will’s Pub – Orlando, FL
4/11/2013 New Brookland Tavern – Columbia, SC
4/12/2013 The Radio Room – Greenville, SC
4/19/2013 Hunter Gatherer – Columbia, SC

The post New BURNT BOOKS Video
“In A Shallow Grave”
Now Showing! appeared first on CVLT Nation.

What bore youth code? Why did you feel it was imperative to start now?

Ryan: YC wasn’t supposed to be an ongoing thing.. more of a test to see if we could actually pull it off. But that aside. I always felt this huge need to do something aggressive after Carry  On split up. But I’d never do another HC band unless it was with Todd  and he’s so busy with Nails and his family that it’ll never happen.  I mean,modern Industrial/ebm is complete garbage and all the minimal synth  shows we’ve been too are a total yawn fest. We saw there was a huge gap  to fill in synth based music and just tried to provide some sort of  alternative. Basically, like a lot of bands, we started the band we wanted to see/hear.

Sara: I had never really done music. I toured from when I got out of high school until just this past year, but only doing behind the scenes stuff ( merch, tour managing…etc.). Ryan really pushed me to excel in creativity, and would start teaching me things about synthesizers to the point where we just started writing things together. I work at Vacation Vinyl, and they were having an all employee showcase of music at Pehrspace. I noticed that I wasn’t doinganything to participate so I barked up and told my manager that Ryan and I were playing our first show, and we were called Youth Code. It seemed like it would be a fun one time deal and then it just took off.We had a second show booked as soon as we stopped playing.

 

 Where did the name come from?

 Ryan:  We were originally going to make fake bands with Greh Holger who runs one of the sickest labels around, Chondritic Sound. It was going to be a split cassette of EBM on his label. Our side was called YOUTH CODE and his side was FLAT ANDRE. We were just going to rip off Nitzer Ebb and DAF and he was going to do some early Klinik/ Clock DVA type jams. Obviously it never happened but his band “Pure Ground” and YC will be doing an Industrial collaboration in the very near future for Chondritic Sound. We just need to finish up our LP and tour that first. I cant stress how much Greh has helped us as a friend and as an influence.

Sara: Greh is the fucking best. That dude, is so influential and amazing and someone I am beyond happy to call a close friend. If we had never talked about how much we loved Death in June- but hated people who wore Death in June shirts, I would still be on tour, just selling shirts for metal bands for the rest of my days. He helped me put my feet on the ground and has helped our band in so many ways that I can’t even begin to state. If we hadn’t joked around about starting bands, we wouldn’t have even made a band.

 How does a youth code piece come in to fruition? Is there some command
 shouted around the house and then someone says “I know just the
 arpeggiation for that!” or…?

Ryan:  HAHA   Nah man. That is funny though. It’s always different. Usually it starts with a bassline or a sample that gets manipulated to the point of unrecognizable weirdness. That usually gets us going pretty quick. We honestly write songs in a couple hours. We try and keep it super fucking raw because it’s so easy to polish and rework electronic music now. But so much of it sounds stale and boring and we’re going for the opposite. We’re just a weird, fucked up version of a hardcore band.

Sara: It’s all pretty even. One of us will tinker with gear until something sounds good, and the other one just helps it build. We are constantly feeding off of each other. We’ll be at home messing with things and I’ll run in from the kitchen being like ” play that again?”or Ryan will see me learning new things and stop me and we’ll build off of that. I can’t even begin to imagine how it would be in a band where I didn’t spend every minute with who I created with. Our ideas are sporadic, so when something sounds good it goes from a spark to afire in minutes, and it has to be or one of us would probably forget what we were doing or say it sucked and move on to something else.

 The lyrics are so menacing and commanding, what are they influenced by?

 Ryan: Lyrically- life’s hardships, lessons learned, love and loss. Basic  teenage diary stuff… but with some heavy real life experience behind it. I’m a pretty chill person but I hold a lot of rage and pain inside. I’m not the best at talking about my problems so I use music as an outlet. It keeps me balanced. Musically- We draw from hardcore and metal just as much as we do from all the early Industrial bands. There is also a huge power electronics and noise influence with what we do although it a little more subliminal and structured once we get the finished song.

Sara: I tend to write about experiences that I build in my head. Like really fucked up scenarios that could happen, that are completely possible and may have sort of happened in my life, but are excessive in written song. I like that I can completely throw every feeling of hatred, rage, pain and sadness into a 3 minute format and just cleanse my brain of those feelings.

Electronic equipment can be a wonderful thing and absolutely

  crippling, you can do and make whatever you want so long as it wants
  you to make it. You have a pretty massive set up; electribes,
 samplers, controllers. What’s your favorite piece to create with?

Ryan: We use the electribe to sequence  but our sampler is the soul of our
band. We always have our iphones out recording sounds on the streets
and pulling movie clips etc. Then we just dump them in the sampler to
make kicks, snares synth sounds. Whatever really. We’re pretty budget
wave. Can’t really afford a bunch of crazy analog gear and I’m not
sure if I’d even be that into it. With a sampler we can apply the old
Burrows “cut up method” and use every day sounds in a new way (which
is what we think Industrial music should be about). That’s very
attractive to us. Other favorite is the Yamaha DX7. It uses FM which
is a different form of synthesis. It’s such a pain to program but you
can get the HARSHEST sounds out that thing. We sample that a lot as
well, but live it gets used as a controller for Sara’s rack synths.

And yes. It can be crippling. We’ve yet to play a show where
everything works right. YC has only been a band since September and
it’s been full throttle since. A LOT of trial and error.
We’ve recently been using/playing tape loops through a series of
pedals between songs. It’s helping kill the dead space while we
re-patch and set up the next song. But it’s also a very cool homage to
the early Industrial Records catalog.
I seriously hate 1/4″ cables now because of
this band. But it’s worth the trouble to use actual hardware. Fuck
laptops .

Sara: I really really like the EMX ( Blue Electribe) I feel super
drawn to it because it’s so all inclusive. When Ryan first started
showing me how to mess around with that stuff, the Electribe was
really what was left in our house. It is the base of a lot of our
stuff and it just clicks with me. Sure I’d love to get a Tempest or
something crazy like that in the future, but that thing will always be
my baby. I also really love pulling samples. The power in words
resonates super hard… so when I see a line in a movie that I like,
and process how it affects me, I like to take that and place it in our
songs, as an inspiration for what I’m trying to convey in Lyrics. And
exactly what Ryan said- I want to murder every 1/4″ cable in the
universe, but Fuck a laptop. It’s like the Mario Bros. 3 cheat whistle
of electronic music.

There’s a very cinematic feel to Youth Code, a definite tech noir
 vibe, what films inspire you?

 Ryan: I totally get the tech noir feeling but neither of us are huge sci-fi
nerds, surprisingly. I think the futuristic vibe comes more from
growing up in a very small town, out in the countryside. I was
completely enamored with the city as a kid. . specifically, night in
the city. The glow of neon lights, skyscrapers busy, freeways, were
worlds away from my surroundings and I cherished every trip my family
would take into Los Angeles.  I was obsessed and I still am. Once I
was able to move here I started going to clubs and was exposed to so
much dance music. It was never really something I would go home and
listen to (aside from 80′s synth pop) but it was the perfect
soundtrack to accompany my lust for the city. I guess paring that
feeling, with our Wax Trax fetish, is where the tech noir feeling
comes from?

Sara: I can see where someone would put it as tech-noir, but for me
the movies that are super inspirational are movies where I feel like I
can truly see the inside of how humanity operates. I love John Waters.
His movies push so many boundaries and envelopes, and I feel like he
took a bunch of people who society would cast away as being disgusting
and turned them into superstars… and superstars who have no
boundaries about what they do. It is similar to what we’re doing in a
way… we don’t give a fuck and we’re just doing our thing and making
it work.

 The live videos are absolutely animalistic, how important is playing
live and what are the moods that transition between you two during a
live outing?

Ryan: Our main goal is to just fuck shit up when we play. If you watch old
TG, Klinik etc. videos, they are absolutely terrifying and
confrontational. I don’t understand why that went away. Plus. We’re
both very aggressive people and we’re not EVEN going for the pretty
sing songy thing. I just want to wake people up. Synth shows are
boring and guitars (as much as I love them) are fucking ancient now.
There needs to be an exciting, challenging alternative.

Sara: I couldn’t come off as dainty or soft spoken if my life depended
on it. When we play- it’s my opportunity to be as pissed as I want and
fucking go for it. Like I said, everything We do musically I want to
be as hard as Pantera or Earth Crisis. As a girl I don’t want to fight
or scream or get confrontational in everyday life….  it’s not very
attractive, but when we get on stage I get the chance to let that
inner animal out and come out swinging.

 How do you feel about the fact that this new EBM/Industrial wave that has
 really began to breach? With bands like Believer/Law, By Any Means Necessary, White Car, //Tense// and you guys?

  Ryan:  All the newer bands that fall under the genre all sound very
different and it seemed to come out of nowhere which is pretty
exciting. I don’t think any of us where even aware of each other until
very recently. I can’t speak for anyone but myself here… but being
someone that comes from a hardcore background, I really wanted to hear
and see some more aggressive bands working with electronics. Honestly
though. I really don’t care if a new scene of Industrial/EBM bands pop
up. I just want to hear good music that comes from the heart.

Sara: I don’t even think that this newer scene of EBM has really even
cracked the surface really- much less crescendoed. I started hearing
word of EBM revivalism when Tense and White Car came around and that
shit is so good, but everyone else was doing minimal synth….
especially in LA- it was all either Witch house or Minimal Synth. So
for me it’s exciting to see that aggressive Synth based music is
starting to pick up. I feel the same way that Ryan does- we’re from
hardcore and metal, and it’s good to see people being able to do
things with a tough feel to it.

What are some influences you think people would be surprised to know?

Ryan:  I listen to Tim Buckley, Sibylle Baier and Nico almost more than
anything else. I have some weird obsession with really sad people and
music. Then I guess… some really embarrassing bands like Braid and
The Jazz June.. haha

Sara: I want everything that I’m a part of musically to be as
devastating as the Breakdown in “Strength Beyond Strength” by Pantera.
or “Firestorm” by Earth Crisis. I hear songs like that and want to
break everything around me. I have so many different influences
though- in fact I’m sure there’s a lot of embarrassing stuff that I
just love. Fuck, I mean I like Paramore a lot. Who cares. I’m drawn to
so many different elements of song structure, that I take parts that I
like and apply them to what we’re doing.

 Personally i want to know what are questions you want to answer,
 what’s something that you’ve wanted to talk about but no one ever
 seems to ask about?

Ryan: When we started we made a pact that we wouldn’t work with any
labels. The exception being Dais (the 7″ on Angry Love was already in
the works) but we never thought they would ask. I have such high
regard for Gibby so when he asked I felt like Sara and I really
accomplished something. The back catalog is fucking flawless and I
wouldn’t be into half the bands I listen to if it weren’t for Gibby.
From covering Joy Division when he was in The Trouble to wearing PTV
and TG shirts when he was in Panic. We played shows together in the
Bridge9 days and I just want to give Dais the best record we can
make… to say “Thank You” and return the favor in a way.

I’d like to talk a little about the labels we’ve chose to be
on.   I met Eddie (psychic TV)
about 3 years ago while on tour working for Kylesa. Our friendship was
instantaneous and I really connected with him. I stayed with him for a
little bit and got to see the production behind Psychic TV’s label ”
Angry Love” . I was so enamored with how they did everything. The
Label is so perfect from aesthetic to how it’s run- that I couldn’t
help but to ask. I for sure thought it was a long shot because they’re
only put out their own recordings, but when Eddie and Gen gave the
blessing for us to do a Youth Code 7″ on the label I was thrilled. It
is an absolute honor to be able to release something with them, and a
total dream come true. I still can’t believe that we’re getting to do
this.

 You can catch Youth Code at the second anniversary CVLTNATION show with Gehenna, Seven Sisters of Sleep and many more April 26th. Head over to their bandcamp to hear their first demonstration cassette.

The post “Destroy!” Said We!:Interview With The Almighty YOUTH CODE! appeared first on CVLT Nation.