If you’re not familiar with Graham Lambkin, one of the great sound-gatherers of our modern time (and I suppose probably ever, since humans have only been gathering sound for so long…), whatever little intro I share with you now won’t even be a few snowflakes on the tip of the iceberg – go Google the man, find his recordings, investigate his record label Kye, treat it like you found out you were secretly adopted and just handed the names of your biological parents. His records display modern life in a way that only he can, magnifying the little moments we take for granted and ignoring the obvious, re-framing other peoples’ memories and discarded detritus into hilarious, baffling and meaningful statements. Either that or he’s just having fun. I get the impression I could have asked him about the 2016 presidential race, extreme sports or Ming vases and he’d have an equal range of well-considered ruminations on the topic at hand, but we mostly stuck to his process and the various musical formats currently available.

At what point did you realize that you could gather non-musical sounds and present them to an audience? Was there some epiphany or was it more of a gradual process?
I’ve never drawn a distinction between the ‘musical’ and ‘non-musical’ in my own work – it’s all just sound as far as I’m concerned. It’s always been my instinct to look behind the couch for ways to make sounds, and I’ve always shunned efforts to learn a conventional instrument. Whenever our paths have crossed it’s been through happenstance, and our relationship has always been tenuous and brief. Working within a spectrum of impure sound has been a major part of my process since I became interested in recording. I feel excited by sounds that are traditionally unloved, ignored or viewed with suspicion, sounds that are seen as detrimental or offensive to a greater goal. Last December I was going through some old cassettes I had recorded back in the early 90’s and had forgotten. Most of it was absolute rubbish and extremely crude: mics dragged across carpets, ashtrays bashed against tables, moaning and groaning… and it dawned on me that for the past few years I’ve really been finding my way back home to these primitive sounds.

How is it the case that you never made the ‘musical / non-musical’ distinction? I feel like the concept of appreciating sound as art is one that has to be learned or discovered, rather than just assumed, but I certainly could be wrong. Was that not the case with you? At what age did you start making recordings?
As a teenager I was a fastidious listener and collector of records, most of which came from the Spastics Society and could be brought for little money. I was quite a fan of sound effects LPs which were fairly easy to find and good fun. You could buy an LP devoted to sounds of the English countryside, military processions, horror noises – the human leg being cleaved from the torso… and many a rainy afternoon would be spent listening to them. I remember getting Atom Heart Mother for my 16th birthday and being wildly impressed by “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”, with its confusion of sound effects and conventional instrumentation. That was as close to an epiphany as I came. The same was true when I started buying bootlegs. There was always something perversely appealing about the fifth generation no-fi demo, or the wooly concert recording made from the Portaloo adjacent to the venue. The corruption of sound gave more pleasure than the song struggling beneath it. So my earliest recordings offer a coarse response to these exposures.
The question of whether or not I was making ‘real music’ existed in the shadows at that stage, but it took longer to come into sharp focus. Certainly “that’s not music” was the mantra most often heard from family or friends at the time, and that did reinforce the question of when does a sound stop being just a sound and start becoming music. If one accepts the definition of music as organized sound, does that then disqualify a field recording of the sea from having musicality? So within my own work I’ve always preferred to level the ground and call sounds for what they are, and if someone else wants to call it music I’m happy to accept that, but it has to be up to the individual.

Is there any sound you’ve wanted to work with that has eluded you? Any specific sound you’ve yet to capture but want to?
No, I already feel spoiled for choice. I think the question of finding new sounds is more applicable to someone who is devoted to a specific musical instrument. Guitar players often seem to be locked in the endless pursuit of coaxing new and exciting sounds from their instruments, through the use of effects pedals, extended techniques, or what have you. I only have the sounds that already exist to work with, and the only way I can affect them before they are immortalized on cassette is through mic placement. But something as simple as that opens up huge possibilities for variation and scope, so I’m not so much interested in finding new sounds, as I am in finding new ways to capture old ones.

Should I take it that you don’t do much post-recording processing? Do you stay away from adding effects and distortion to the sounds you initially record?
If I’m interested in affecting or distorting a particular sound in my solo work I’ll try to do it in the recording stage, either through unorthodox mic application, or by recording onto treated cassettes and “damaging” sounds as they are captured to tape. But by and large I try to and keep my material as unprocessed as possible. That approach suits my work better than relying on lots of artificial application after the fact. These considerations don’t necessarily apply when working in collaboration with other artists though. The trilogy of discs produced with Jason Lescalleet leans quite heavily on distortion and recontextualization of sound, particularly Air Supply and Photographs. Those techniques are far more prevalent in Jason’s work than mine, so it was interesting to take my methodology and surrender it to such a radical process.

Do you approach your creative process differently when collaborating than when working entirely on your own? What I’m wondering is, do you leave your work a bit more open-ended or unfinished, knowing someone like Jason is going to transform and alter it? I’m curious as to how possessive you feel over the sounds you create, and if you’ve ever had a moment of ‘that’s my baby you’re messing with!’ when you hear what your collaborator has done with them.
The process is completely different, and it varies with each collaborator. Fortunately, I’ve been lucky enough to work with people who have shared certain core sensibilities, but are not so similar that the collaboration is pointless. A good collab needs to start with mutual respect and a shared trust, but also a willingness to lower boundaries and allow the second party to influence the shape and flow of the work in ways that may not have seemed obvious to you. That has to continue on through the recording, the editing, mixing, mastering, sequencing… and then into titles, packaging, the whole shebang. It’s rare that this kind of total collaboration happens and is successful, but I found it in my work with Jason, I found it with Keith Rowe, and most recently with Michael Pisaro. If you’re defensive toward the idea of change, or it’s taken as a personal insult, then you probably shouldn’t be in a collaborative position to begin with.

Have any of your friends or contemporaries ever come up with a specific sonic moment or audio trick that you wished you came up with first?
It’s funny, but I don’t really pay much attention to contemporary goings-on. Of all the things I listen to I would say about 10% of it was current, and I don’t feel in competition with any of it. I stopped trying to keep up with the latest happenings about 10-12 years ago. There’s just such a continuous glut, and my tastes were drifting further away from anything I was hearing, so it wasn’t a tough decision to make. I do still buy a lot of new releases but they’re usually historic/archival in content.

How much effort do you want the listener to put into your music? Does it make a difference to you if your fans are listening intently on repeat, or if they just throw it on in the background while cleaning or eating dinner?
It’s really none of my business, and wouldn’t expect my audience to be sat in constant rapture anyway. They’ll be times when it’s convenient and appropriate for the listener to lend a more concentrated ear, and they’ll be times when my stuff will take a backseat to a more urgent activity. I would like to think my work could survive in both those situations. A lot of the material I produce comes from thinking about, and observing music in that type of supporting role: music heard in the car, music playing in the home, a half-remembered tune whistled in the street. This has kind of become my hunting ground, so I am perfectly happy to imagine a person in their kitchen, making a delicious bolognese, with Millows rattling away on the kitchen counter boombox. Quite a lot of my listening is done in that exact environment anyway, so if it’s good enough for Jimi Hendrix then it’s good enough for me.

MP3, cassette, vinyl record, CD… do you hear a difference? I’m curious if the format matters to you, from a sonic perspective, and if so, if there is a specific preferred medium for your own work.
There’s room for all the formats, and each comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, depending on what the consumer demands of it. On a personal level I prefer CDs. I believe they have the best potential to accurately reproduce sound when mastered knowledgeably, although of course they are as vulnerable to abuse as any of the formats, and a poorly mastered, or “brickwalled” CD will invariably sound awful. There’s something aesthetically pleasing about the possibilities of the digipak/booklet combo, and I like the potential for creative CD box setting (Magma’s Studio Zünd would be a good example of that done right). CD is also a very practical format, which again, makes it appealing. I like that I can play them in the kitchen, or car, which is perhaps my favorite listening environment of all, or when I’m working on art – I don’t have to worry about handling expensive vinyl with ink-stained fingers… these are all factors to consider. Moreover, the majority of things I am interested in listening to are really only available/affordable on CD, so from an economic perspective they also make sense.
LPs are more fetishistic, have scope for nicer packaging, and will probably always be the most romanticized format, but I’m not sure they all sound that great anymore. Purists talk about the superiority of the all-analog format but overlook the fact that there’s almost always a digital link in the production chain, and in worst case scenarios LPs are pressed using masters intended for CD, rather than a specifically produced independent master of their own. This leads to all sorts of ugly issues, and a pretty ropy sounding record at the end of it. This isn’t always the case of course, but it’s a practice that’s on the rise.
Kye puts out the majority of its titles on LP because it’s the preferred format right now, and if I didn’t recognize that fact sales would suffer. But I am dubious about the long-term viability of this vinyl resurgence if things don’t change. There needs to be more money invested in the production of new presses, as well as maintenance of the existing ones, and there needs to be proper training available for the manufacturers who work at the plants. The craft and artistry involved in making a quality end product seems to be on the wain, and the time investment needed to properly skill employees has been trampled down in the mad rush to fill orders for Record Store Day – all so some silly sod can buy a warped “limited edition” 7″ picture disc of Brown Sugar for $15.00. The vinyl manufacturing industry is under enormous stress and has become steadily more unreliable over the past few years. In 2014 Kye produced six LPs, each in an intended edition of between 400-500. Out of those six, four had to be returned, and the complete run repressed due to flaws (despite signing off on faultless test pressings for each), then out of those four repressed runs, two of them had to be returned and repressed a second time, due to flaws that were even worse than before. This all added months of time to forecast release dates, was tremendously frustrating, and in the latter two cases remains unresolved. These kinds of situations are becoming more commonplace, and if this industry hopes to avoid self-asphyxiation then it needs to address the concerns of supply and demand, and quality vs. quantity.
Another reason I don’t take this resurgence all that seriously is like everything else, vinyl has become the target of nostalgia. A generation of music consumers who are tired of spending money on faceless download files are currently reveling in the novelty of a handsomely adorned physical object. But novelty passes, and it’s no great stretch to imagine the next generation pining for the archaic delights of the jewelcase, the bonus track, the glorious prism of rainbow light, the halcyon days of 1989… Everything comes around again, and CDs will enjoy their resurrection.
The cassette is another example of a format that lived to read its own obituary. I love working with cassettes and use them exclusively, having no digital recording means. There’s something magical to me about the flaws inherent in the medium, and I’ve used them in much of my work over the years. MP3 is the most disposable format, and the best thing you can say about it is it’s quick and easy. I don’t value MP3, and I don’t purchase music on it. My kids will rip CDs to MP3 and make mixes for their iPods, and that’s about all the format’s good for as far as I can tell.

I’ve certainly noticed that the Kye titles that remain available for purchase the longest are CDs. Do you truly think CDs will return to prominence at some point? To me, they lack the romantic nature of LPs, or the personalized warmth of cassettes, and if you are looking for ease of use, an iPod can play the entire recorded works of John Coltrane with the push of a button, not just an album or two on a CD. Then again, I don’t think anyone in 1994 would’ve predicted the collectible vinyl boom of the past couple years…
Right now CDs are the whipping boy of the new vinyl generation. They’re uncool, they’re ugly, they’re characterless, and no one who truly loves music should want them. Vinyl is back. My mother phoned me up today and told me she’d just bought a turntable with built-in speakers that plays LPs, 78s “and those other little ones.” – and it was only thirty quid…

You talk about the sound quality, and poor mastering running rampant… do you think this is only going to get worse? I feel like artists are expected to release so much music these days if they want to stay relevant, sort of a side-effect of the 24-hour news cycle, and this pushes less sexy aspects of record-making like mastering and production to the background.
The productivity of the artist and the caliber of their product (in terms of its actual construction) should be mutually exclusive. I think what you’re seeing is just a general decline in standards right across the board. Take a moment to browse the threads in any given audiophile chat-room on the topic: ‘Just brought the new 180gm deluxe edition of Nevermind and it sounds like shit’; ‘This new Lana Del Rey LP’s warped and has all these fingerprints on side 1’; ‘My beat up old 50¢ yard sale copy of Mahogany Brain sounds better than this new one’ – it’s endless. People are bound to get cheesed off eventually, because these things aren’t cheap, and when you’re spending $25-$30 on an deluxe LP that sounds like it was mastered by an intern and pressed on asphalt that’s going to start to burn.

Do you like retrospective boxsets, generally speaking? They seem to be more and more prevalent these days.
I do, but I have to be really strict with myself because they can be quite an undertaking, and a real commitment of time/money. I had that King Crimson Starless box in a shopping cart a couple weeks ago, and I kept going back and forth. It’s a lot of money, do I really need to hear umpteen different mixes of the same LP? (One I already own three versions of) and 20-odd discs of the group running through essentially the same set every night in varying degrees of completeness, half of which I already have on bootleg or traded tapes? Some of it’s on Blu-Ray so I can’t play those… I don’t have 5.1 Surround, so that’s no good either. Do I really want to spend $200 on a 12″ X 12″ print of Bill Bruford? I probably will get it.

Does your family understand your passion for sound? Is it something you’ve had to explain? It seems like being in a punk band is hard enough for an elderly uncle to understand, let alone a sound collagist…
My parents were baffled and thought the whole thing was ludicrous at first: “What the bloody hell’s The Shadow Ring? Why would Graham and his dodgy mates suddenly be making this racket every week? They can’t even play, yet alone release records”… But they never tried to stop it happening, and as time went on I think they realized it was just something beyond their comprehension. Certainly, the occasional foreign fan letter and a few American tours lent more ballast to our cause. Seen from the other side of the fence, I don’t think my kids really bat an eyelid – it’s just what Dad does.

I’m not sure I ever equated “raging politically-charged hardcore-punk” with Providence, RI, at least that is until I saw all six of the Downtown Boys simultaneously seizuring and levitating during a live performance (that includes the drummer). Musically, they’re like an X-Ray Spex album played on 45, or The Contortions covering Los Crudos, a whirlwind of too-fast punk riffs and blaring saxophones, led by the powerful presence of vocalist Victoria Ruiz. They’ve got a lot to say for themselves, which is more than I can say for most current punk bands, and they manage to say it without compromising any of the joyous and chaotic release that comes from a live punk show. A debut album and full US tour are planned for 2015, don’t miss it!

Let’s cut to the chase: were you punk in high school?
Victoria (vocals): I was a super nerd with highwater bell-bottoms, lunches made by my grandma, constantly studying with the few other people of color in my Catholic private high school, never been kissed, Rage Against The Machine CD from Target, tour shows, dying to live to find the punk scene I am apart of now. I knew it was out there. I knew the truth was out there, as my high school self. Yeah, I went to Hot Topic, but none of the clothes fit me and I didn’t know what to buy anyways. And, I didn’t know who Sleater-Kinney was, but I wanted to know. I was an angel ready to be an alien.
Joey (guitar): I hated everything and was depressed and did weird stuff, so in that sense it was kind of punk. Didn’t have a spiked jacket or any of that, if that’s what you mean. There were a few of us in high school who would get a car and drive really far to get to shows cause there wasn’t anything in our town. Because of that I still really like playing smaller cities because even if there isn’t a huge crowd there’s going to be a few weird young kids there who are having a truly important experience.
Emmett (tenor sax): I was the furthest thing from punk: baggy jeans, sports, jazz-band shit for real. I’m still not that punk, but I believe in this band!
Dan (bass): I was weird. I was starting to flirt with radical politics, and I listened to some classic punk bands, but I wasn’t punk.

Do you think the mystery and difficulty entering into punk and underground music helped you form such a bond with it? Like, if you were a 13 year-old kid now and just Googled and Spotified every band you heard about, would it end up meaning less to you?
Joey: I don’t really know if it’s any more or less mysterious now than when I was a teenager. I grew up when most bands were online already on Myspace or Purevolume or whatever, so that’s intensified, but hasn’t changed that much. I didn’t live near a big city or know any hip people, so the internet was useful to me to be able to find out that people were making exciting work. The more we can reach those kids who are more isolated or don’t have access to cultural capital the better. Making the music and message accessible is far more important than creating mysterious romance for a select few. That underground aspect will always be there anyway because the legit world doesn’t want our stuff out there.
Dan: In my work life, I interact with a lot of young people, and I’m so lucky to get to watch them discover underground music and sometimes, to recommend music to them, and I think that this process can still be mind-blowing. A lot of my youth don’t have home internet access, and if they do, it’s on a shared computer that they can’t spend a lot of time on, so it’s important to remember that a lot of thirteen year-olds still don’t have easy access to Google and Spotify.
I am more worried about young people’s sense of cultural access and empowerment than how meaningful they might find the process of discovering new music. Consistent with national trends, Providence has very limited music and art education in its public schools, especially at the high school level. I fear that a lot of young people who feel inspired by punk or other underground music don’t know how to take this inspiration and use it to make the art or music that they want to make.

How difficult is it to go crazy while playing a brass instrument versus a guitar? Do you ever worry about your teeth?
Emmett: It’s definitely a challenge to play the saxophone while your face in careening around, and I’m constantly weighing whether to prioritize playing the notes right or going as wild as possible. I hope I err on the side of chaos, but I haven’t broken any teeth yet.
Joey: This band has somehow run over not one but two of our own saxophones and totally destroyed them. It’s never happened with any of our other gear, just saxophones. Those were probably the most extreme sax disasters.

Are you interested in trying to reach well-meaning but otherwise clueless middle-class white dudes with feminist and “Bros Fall Back” philosophies? Or is whether or not they “get it” not something you’re concerned with?
Victoria: This is a super interesting question. The answer is yes, we are very interested in reaching people who are well-meaning with feminist and “Bros Fall Back” philosophies. It’s not our responsibility to make sure they understand hegemony; that’s on them. It’s pretty awesome actually that they even wanna listen to me, and if it is genuine they are probably more than “otherwise clueless.” Our band is a mess of race / class / critiques and analysis! At some point in time our analysis was not so formed.
I was pretty clueless before being really radicalized in high school by my grandma and mom, then in college and after through a lot of relationships with femme punks. But, I am probably also clueless in some ways! It is not about a white man, it is about white supremacy; this is structural and outside of guerrilla critiques of individuals. Also, I am from a fairly big suburb of San Francisco called San Jose, where the populous wants us to be otherwise clueless. It is riddled with average and brainwashing US pop culture and techies. It also has mad Chicana families like mine who are hustling and scraping away imperialism from our beauty daily. It’s really annoying and not okay when white people reject other white people, or men reject other men, or women reject other women, or people of color reject other people of color right off the bat! This is not actually helping us take power from white supremacy or white masculinity. We are a school of fish, dawgs! We gotta find a way to swim together like one big fish to get away from the shark! It’s like we need to actually find a point of contact, a point of the possibility of trusting each other or a legit reason why trust is not in the cards, and that will truly break our cluelessness! The amount of times we will fail will undoubtedly outnumber how many times this works. But the more we fail, then the more we will “get it” at times. It’s very discreet and important math. It’s that whole Audre Lorde idea, “if I speak to you in anger at least I have spoken to you. I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, ‘What did she do to deserve it?'” And yes, I have a lot of anger and while I am more than happy to speak to the well-meaning but otherwise clueless middle-class white dude, it’s not my job to explain why their race and class hold a violent history, and yes they should probably go speak to other white and middle-class dudes and with other Latina upper-lower-class women, and so on and so forth after (and before) they speak with me or they see a Downtown Boys set. We are never at our 100% best and we are never at our 100% worst… which is kinda scary, but really really real.

Does it make you feel good to make a generic audience of hardcore dudes uncomfortable? It totally must, right?
Dan: I think about the people who love punk, but don’t often feel at home at a punk show; it feels good to make them comfortable.
Victoria: Haha, I like Dan’s Answer. Making people feel uncomfortable is a really complex one. I feel really uncomfortable a lot actually. It seems like I must have like all this energy and that should lead to confidence. But, as long as the status quo looks the way it does, where we are still taking the streets to fight white supremacy, I will feel pretty uncomfortable. So when we make others feel uncomfortable, in a way I am like, “Well, someone had to do it.” But also, that is not the end goal. What is inspiration without a next or new step? Nothing. So what is discomfort without transforming that feeling as part of a greater analysis… kinda nothing. I think that when we can use our shows to push through that discomfort and get to that moment of asking, “What do we do about it?” Why are we feeling uncomfortable, what does it mean to our relationship to race, gender, capital, sexuality, structures of the state? If that discomfort becomes questioning, then it feels good. Otherwise, it is just kind of awkward because people look at you in a like, “man, why you gotta be a downer?” way after the show and they like don’t ask you to play shows and they don’t come to the shows you book, and their discomfort becomes fear. We run this risk every time we play a show. We are at great risk, but so are a lot of people and that doesn’t mean we resort to anything less.

How do you summon your live show energy? Does it simply come from the sound of the music, or are you thinking about your lyrics and the specific songs you’re singing, or is it something else entirely?
Victoria:Oh my god, recently live show energy is coming from tears and anger of what is happening with the terror by the U.S. Criminal Justice System, racism, and trying to figure out my participation and necessity to fight. I read this quote by Frantz Fanon very recently before a show: “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.” I relate to this so much because I have the rot on me, I don’t just get to see it from outside. I’m really pissed that more Latinos aren’t making the Black and Brown connection right now, it’s related to this disease of imperialism and therefore policing. This anger and desperation to scratch this rot away from our minds is what gives me energy. It really doesn’t matter what kind of day I have had, what mood me or the band is in, it is like my subconscious meets my conscious for twenty minutes. And it is messed up. The music and the lyrics completely hold hands. Our lyrics are a mix of wails and protest chants and the music is like something from so deep in the brain and sometimes during songs I hear certain parts of songs and I literally don’t know what the earth even looks like, only what it feels like. The energy comes from the fact that we have to be expressive or we will only be silenced, we have to be deep or we will only be dead.

Where did the concept come for your “Slumlord Sal” video come from?
Victoria: The nuances of the police like totally racially profiling teens, using local policing tactics as a way to criminalize migrants that were forced to come here because of racist economic policies in their home countries, and just realizing that policing is also used to keep expressive political spaces like punk shows down, really inspired a lot of this video. Joey really helped us connect the importance of the “sexy cop” as this deeper identity in it all. And it was really awesome to think of slapping cops into a state where they can unblind their eyes and minds.
Joey: We know we need to be entertaining in order to get people to listen, though I do think if we made that video right now we would do it a little less silly and more direct. I mean, the issues it addresses are still very serious and the fantasy in the video comes out of the intense fear and desperation around these issues. We had joked for a while about this idea of a superhero who would show up and destroy cops by slapping them. Then when making the video we thought it would be tight if instead of destroying them the slap just totally transformed their ideology, made them an inverse cop. We worked on this with our friend Casey Coleman who has done a lot of amazing video work for Big Freedia and others and we were like, “Casey, you think you could make an effect where a person dressed up as a cop gets slapped and transforms into a sexy cop?” and he said “yes, I have some ideas” and then we got to it.

Your 7″ was mentioned in Rolling Stone‘s 2014 wrap-up. How does that make you feel?
Victoria: The Rolling Stone thing was cool because it is such an iconic symbol of like, “Oh wow, they must be doing something right.” It also relates to your earlier questions about making incisions in the thoughts of bros. It’s like, “You can’t hide from media about racism and classism, we are gonna find you!”
Joey: It’s wonderful when we’re able to get the message out there through slightly larger media channels. As a kid you seek out the most exciting culture within the outlets you have access to. So for me seeing radical Rage Against the Machine videos on MTV was super influential. Those videos wouldn’t be allowed on TV anymore. It’s exciting when we’re able to make even a small incision into that broader world. That kind of mainstream validation isn’t everything but I’m not gonna pretend like it’s not nice.

What’s next for Downtown Boys, record-wise? Has anything changed in your songwriting since the debut?
Joey: We’ve got a new LP coming out in the later Spring with Don Giovanni Records and will be touring a bunch once that’s out. We’ll have a solid release date soon. We recorded this past November at Electrical Audio in Chicago and I think it sounds really powerful. I don’t know if our songwriting has fundamentally changed. It’s gotten better, but we haven’t moved linearly toward being more expansive or mature or anything. There’s a bit of that, but we also have some very simple songs on there because we’ll always appreciate that energy. We’re adding to our language but we’re erasing what’s already there.
Victoria: I have noticed our lyrics getting crazier and crazier – more stuff about straight-up socialism, freedom, necessity in the struggle. Fewer typical curse words. These days we use words like “skin, bank, inheritance, and freedom,” to speak more directly to white supremacy.