I met Ben in 2009. Ugh,God was my favorite band and Dust was theirs. I went to see him and Jimmy play in this 3rd floor college rec room in Boston and afterward I introduced myself, bought all their cds, and told them to come stay at my place. They already had like 5 albums even back then. I think Natives was the new one on that tour.
I got really deep into the self-titled first Dust album and became a megafan. I sat at the foot of my bed at night, learning “Drifting Into the Void”. I knew it was a beautiful masterpiece from the first time I heard it. Me and Mark went and recorded a cover with Dave Go at The New Hawaii, which was Florida=Death’s spot in Southington CT. The title of that sort-of-first Fat History album is “I finally understand what people mean when they say ‘drifting’” but it came from me, being 22, feeling lost, thinking “I finally understand what Ben means when he says ‘drifting’”.
I covered a bunch more Dust songs over the years. Any time I ran out of songs to write, I’d learn a Ben song and have something new to play. We became friends. They’d come play in Boston and we’d go through Bloomington just to see Dust every time we were in the midwest. In 2016 he moved to Boston and we hung for a bit but then my life got hard and I bailed on everything for a while, didn’t see anyone much and felt like kind of a shitty friend. But in mid-2021 he took over for Johnnie in the “bh1” boston band and we hung the fuck out and ended up moving to Philly together and it’s been very very good for me to live with such an inspiring dude.
His songs have always influenced me. There was often the feeling of innocence broken into bitterness by a dumb brutal world, but also so much gentleness and joy and hope and freedom and love and fun. Joy is a good title for this album. I picture happy Kid Ben, laying in the square of sunlight on his parents living room floor in Golden Era, and happy Now Ben in his room across the hall, on his way up through the through the smoke in the sunlight, writing song after song after song in a spurt.
In December 2021, in the midst of the 3rd album writing spree, when Brian was sending new songs to the group text every other day and there was already talk of it being over 30 songs long, a Philly show got cancelled, but I decided to drive down from Boston anyway to record a new song in his bedroom studio. We’d all been doing nyxy nyx as a band for 6 months and I’d found myself accidentally writing this song with a bunch of the chords I’d recently learned, so it felt appropriate.
I’d had a bad Thanksgiving, and having joined a cult of rock & roll all summer, I felt like I’d found an exit and a new way to do family. I showed up around 4 and we watched the sun go down and got down to it. He had a small combo amp with a bunch of surprisingly cool effects, a keyboard for synth bends and drums and wacky percussion, the teeny tiny tamborine I’d heard on a million nyxy nyx songs, and one microphone, on a stand when I tracked it live, but mostly just laid flat on a pillow on the floor for the overdubs. I bonked the first note and we laughed.
He uses some very old and obscure digital recording program that only allows like one “undo” before you lose what you erased forever, so it was kinda like working on tape, but even more “forward motion only” style, taking risks and trusting luck. “Do you trust me?” In fact, I actually hadn’t yet realized that we were permanently erasing things as we worked, and by the end of the night, the last couple minutes of the outro zoner had gotten chopped. Somehow I didn’t feel too worried or bad, my faith in luck was stronger than my fear of lost options.
(That whole year, recording had become so magically easy that I’d learned to trust luck to always leave me a trail of crumbs to follow. I’d sit down to sift through the stacks of improvised takes, excited and relaxed, exploring the endless incidents of un-intend-able perfection, surfing the mystic, manic momentum of a hundred sonic accidents accumulating into narrative sense of their own volition, watching the songs take their fated shapes while I clicked around, listening.)
So the next morning I woke up early and rolled off the couch, went down to their basement, and re-tracked the longer ending, just on the acoustic into my computer, so we’d have the bones of my lost original version to track over.
Then later that day we went over to Dan’s old place near 4ever Boner and the two of them put some takes of live drums on it, and I built it up with a bunch of guitars, and I went home to Boston with a bunch of fun sounds to blend into a song.
brian’s day 2 mix, before replacing the whole end w/ rock n roll chordsand here’s my album version from God Is Luck, can you hear his in mine?and here’s brian’s final w/ the endless rock n roll ending.
Brian kept working on it himself. He sent me and Dan a couple newer versions over the next few days. Then he sent this final version with a whole different ending, where the nyxy nyx “rock & roll” chords continue forever. I felt flattered that he’d gotten obsessed and made it his own. It was a special experience and I’m glad it’s documented. I’ve listened to it a lot over the last few years and I still think it’s beautiful.
I made this video on Dan’s old roof near 4ever boner in December 2023. When I looked back at the footage, I saw this crazy ufo dancing and it became the star of the show. It’s pretty unexplainable to me. But also somehow just playful and casual. I like him.
I saw someone posting about how years of song skipping through the spotify swamp had exacerbated her already intense general-anxiety-induced need for constant stimulation, and that she felt she had let her ears and attention atrophy to a point where she knew that she wanted and needed to be intentional about relearning how to listen deeper. Her plan was partly to listen to albums as albums rather than single songs, and to let them play through without skipping. I love this.
this benji lookit my knife club mix is pop af
Reading her experience, it occurred to me that listening to this set of songs straight through in one sitting could serve as sort of a fun spotify detox/brain rehab session. I realized it could work nicely as subtle ear training/music appreciation pleasure bath.
Spending a lot of time with songs is how I always listened to music for some reason, partly because I’m from cd era, but even when napster happened (“free music” year zero, 1998?), I was obsessive about collecting every single live or otherwise bootleg thing, but only from a few bands, and I listened to all of it endlessly. There was a site called indiepoplive that had bootlegs of Modest Mouse and Built To Spill and I’d get hours of pleasure out of watching the download bars grow bit by bit.
The urge to have everything was in full effect, it just didn’t hit in the same unfocused way that it seems like Spotify life has encouraged. My consumer’s ache was the same as it is for a person lost in spotify, but it was focused tight enough that I could satisfy my consumption urge but still maintain obsessive attention to the things I was consuming.
I like living with songs and albums this way. Shit is deep. 20 year 25 year relationships are important. Perhaps oddly, I haven’t used headphones outside since I was like 15. I carry the songs around with me in my memory, singing silently to myself. (I think I got into this habit when I got sent off to TN as a teen and had no music choice and not much music at all for a whole year and would recite modest mouse songs to myself under my breath while doing various activities. The only music other than that was when we’d take a van to an AA meeting offsite once a month, and I’d get to hear some new Nickelback and and Linkin Park and even that last Nirvana song they released in 2001 that sounds kinda like that one Rihanna(?) song that’s good. Oh and that last good No Doubt song about “feelin hella good” was a jam. And that was it for music. It was enough to make a man appreciate some Nickelback).
On top of the headphonelessness, I also refused to get a smartphone til like 2022 and never did spotify, so that was pretty different from a lot of other people’s experience as well.
All of which makes me wonder about how other people relate to music they love, and whether it’s different for people who “practice” music in comparison to those who “just” listen. Since I spent my life getting into learning how to make music, and then record etc, I had all the reason to obsess and listen deep and try to pick out every element of a recording and understand how music works, but i’m not sure whether that’s universal or more of a “learning music” phenomenon.
When I was 16 and first learning bass, my teacher showed me how to pick out the bass, note-by-note, by listening close and pausing and rewinding the cd really fast over and over. At the beginning, he’d teach me the bass line first, and then I’d play along, and then eventually I learned how to learn by ear on my own. First it was picking out the bass in Beatles songs and then jazz, and then picking out the rest of the instruments, and then learning how to tell the players apart by their tone and technique, and eventually having fun picking out my various friends’ individual styles from them playing on years and years of nyxy nyx recordings.
I remember the fun and focus of learning to dig through the sounds and listen to all the various layers of a recording that were revealed as I isolated my attention on each different element, and I wonder whether people who love music but don’t play it find their way into close listening that way. I think everyone can benefit from having a deep, long relationship with a song.
Thinking about an entire generation of newly free, post-spotify, atrophied-but-hungry-for-exercise refugee ears, emerging from a decade of soothing and smoothing, wondering “what next?”, it makes me start to appreciate the concept of “music appreciation”, which had always seemed like vegetables to me. But our purpose here in Artworld is to nourish each other and ourselves, so the more meaning we can squeeze into and out of our art, the better. The trick is to make it tasty. So here I will explain to you the pleasurable usefulness of a 10 song album with 6 versions of one song and 4 of another.
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the fighters: a trip through 4 versions:
Spending time with 4 versions of my recording of “the fighters”, you can hear the various major differences that result as I distort or remove elements of the original mix.
Listening to 4 mixes of one song might sound tedious, but getting to hear the layers of a recording be peeled away or distorted or rearranged around the same skeleton of a live take and improvisations, really is pretty fascinating.
We can consider “the fighters (dust cover)’ to be patient zero. I love these guitar leads. Just put distortion and chorus on anything and it will sound beautiful and iconic. The sustain makes it very easy and fun to play with. I let the 2 leads dominate on this version.
From there we go to the “(stripped version)”, I muted the loud leads, so you can hear the dreamy drums a lot better; and with some of the more distorted organs muted, you can hear the bass moving more clearly. I like how it feels with the leads stripped. It lets the mix swell and bounce in a much dreamier way than the original version. I can hear more depth. Like it actually feels like I’m seeing the layers of distorted sound down in the murk, blurred shadows on the bottom of the lake, cast by the school of cymbals swimming by. Feels very “deep dark serious mysterious”.
Also I can feel the way the rhythm hesitates and leans backward a bit into the beat, the tension/release feeling of which I like. It adds to the wobbly “walking underwater” feeling.
the fighters (nude version)
Then we have the “(nude version)” which is just the live acoustic/voice take, plus 2 overdub acoustics and 3 overdub voices. I like the chorusy effect that the out-of-phase acoustics produce, and also how loud you can hear the birds in the tree outside the open window. I can feel the space, the lack of confinement. When I put this one through the compressor to master it, those birds really jumped to the front, I love it.
(I’m realizing a lot of what I’m talking about is the perceived 3d space presented by any recording. And that’s part of what we play with when making obsessable sound worlds. It really is a physical place it puts you into if you listen close enough.)
Finally, the “(burnt version)”. I love heavy. I turned the distortion way too hot on one of the acoustic overdubs, put one of the leads back in with the bends and bumped up the distorted drums as well. Can you hear the missing lead? Ok class, we’re done sorting through the murk. What do you hear?
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Table of Contents/explanation:
Listening straight through feels pretty fun, and I’ve heard these tracks A LOT. It’s “The Fighters” in 2 senses, as in, like, the versions are all duking it out and also, these “look at my knife” remixes were the submissions to the “knives of the people” remix “contest” I did during turkey season. And also, we are The Fighters, surviving pigworld.
The album starts with the original version of my “the fighters”. Then there are the 2 alternate versions Ben did in 2010 for the Marble Memo extras, there’s the folky strum version that I copied from, and then the other one is like this sick dark jungle jam w a bell. Feels kinda Beck somehow. The original album version on Marble Memo is just him walking around outside, singing the words into a tape recorder, it’s kinda a deep flex he went with that utterly stripped version for dust’s bigtime corpo album, when you consider how good both these versions are. I love it.
the fighters (alt 2) by dust from 1000 yrs. this is the arrangement I bogarted from.the fighters (alt 1) by dust from 1000 yrs jungle jam w a bell style
Then I threw Benji and Curt’s Knifes in the middle there to palette cleanse, before hitting you with 3 back to back versions I made by muting or blowing up the original elements of “the fighters” mix, nu blus style.
Then it’s two more reimaginings of “look at my knife”, dust alumnus Michael S w/ the far-out melancholy technosexual disintegration and Darren in Wales taking us out on psychedelic waves of wah and endlessly echoing mel and me.
In conclusion:
It’s an interesting artifact. I am in my “versions” era, enjoying toying with scraps like a cat in a fabric factory. And the “knife” remixes everyone did are incredible. Trust me, it doesn’t feel like work. Just let the different versions wash over you and you’ll notice more and more tasty morsels. Have fun.
My first contact w/ Faux Fetus crew was when we met Ugh,God in May 2008 on the third day of the first Fat History Month tour. We played the Sex Dungeon with Florida=Death. The first thing Sean ever said to me when he opened the door was “I’m gonna fuck you on the carpet with my dog dick!” with a gleam in his eye and a shit eating grin and I knew we were among friends. There on the wall next to him was the immortal drawing of a dick sucking a dick’s dick.
Me and Sean in like 2011 or 12?
That was my introduction to the the loose group of tortured genius goofs called Faux Fetus. We ended up being friends for life, though I didn’t meet some of them until years later.
me havin funHere’s me and a squeaky chair on the roof at the show covering the first Sean song I learned “accept this one”.
From my understanding, they all met when they were like 18, some had been friends since 4th grade, they all had bands together and then started playing in each others bands in various combinations. Curt put up the Faux Fetus site to host all the music they were making, I assume because myspace only let you put up 4 songs at the time. The Pregnancy, Chamomile, some vast number of silly named Brian bands, The Beautiful Traps, Caw, a bunch of others, the website’s still up, you can check it out: fauxfetus.net
When I met Dan and Curt and Sean and James and Mike, they were already doing Ugh,God, which was sort of a supergroup of a bunch of them, coming out of the initial few years of Faux Fetus, built around Sean songs. Maximal to the max. Dualing drummers, double neck guitar, chain-smoking bassist with no strap, balanced relaxed on top of the full stack in the back, Sean and Mike, Mick-and-Keithing it back-to-back, wailing the harmony guitar solos in Chocolate and Peanuts, Curt burning and Dan slamming, hair and sweat slinging everywhere and Sean’s lunatic silliness singing loud into the mic. They were my favorite band.
adric rocked the flyerhe’s who painted this portait of the future from Dead and Loving It too (adric)
The initial Faux Fetus era was all before my time so for me it was already sort of a mythic thing, but casual. It was still a loose idea, just semi dormant, and we were riding in the wake of it. I’d hear stories about people I hadn’t met yet, “our friend Brian Reichart”, former members of Ugh,God etc, it took me a while to get the full scope.
I could tell they were like me, kids with huge ambition in the wrong direction, towards art and originality and fucking with the expected. Kinda bent. I imagine even just the loose concept of themselves as a “collective” probably gave them the narrative thrust and feeling of combined power to believe in themselves as real artists and go for it together. I’m sure they knew they had something special.
Ben hangs his screen
I got to experience that feeling of intense combined collective power when we did the Nyxy Nyx big band iteration in 2021.
Shit was fun and easy and felt like destiny. I imagine that’s how it felt for them in the early years too. I’m glad I got a dose. It saved my life. It rejuvenated me and made me remember the real heavy power and magic of music and friends and playing together, and collaborating in the studio, sending files backs and forth, recording all the time. Art life.
I walked inside during nyxy nyx’s set and there was Meg in her multitudes.
Anyway, someone will write a history someday. Since the ones of us still alive are all lifers still livin’ it, we had a big fuckin’ party for Curt’s birthday.
even good ol marky fartface made it down from maine.
It happened July 28th 2024. We’d done a few big art shows at Cambria House in 2021-3 and it is always awesome. All the old buddies came through, the Florida=Death dudes, even ol marky fartface made it down from Maine.
Old head brothers from CT, former Florida=Death and New Hawaiians(ct oasis show living room in the early years, initial home base of florida/neon leather drip, pre meriden exodus).the order of operations
Here’s a nyxy nyx bootleg from the show, it’s spent a couple years as a file on my phone, on repeat in the van for the last hour of driving for the workday. it’s ok 2 cry. The heaviest. Hard to hear his voice, but if you sing along in your own Brian voice, it works nicely:
I met Eli in the summer of 2021, when he was 21 and I was 35 and we both still had flip phones. He’d done a solo set at the first nyxy nyx show we did at Baby Gap, but I didn’t meet him til we talked outside the Broadway show we did in NYC a few weeks later. He’s one of those “I know we’re already friends” type friends. The temporary global shutdown of capitalism in 2020 had cracked me out of my biz-reactive jadedness and 2021 had blown my mind open with the actual power and magic and purpose of music, so I was happy to meet a younghead who confirmed my feelings of hope for myself and culture in the new world, post apocalypse-lite.
We did a show with them a couple years ago where Mel played flute, and it was so beautiful I asked her to come play on Pigworld, and then she ended up frosting the cake on like every song. Very easy magic. That’s how it felt watching them play this set in our living room. Casually magical, up on the tightrope dancing together with a touch of looseness and a laugh and landing it perfect every time.
