TALKING TRASH WITH TRASH TALK

Trash Talk are one of the most intense live bands we've seen. And we've seen Hanson.

Photographer Alex de Mora talks tourbus movies and beat poetry with the raging post-hardcore nice guys

Trash Talk's Top Five Tourbus Flicks

1. Top gun
It’s a classic. I had the soundtrack as a kid and used to play with my toy planes as I listened to it.

2. Ferris Bueller
One of my favourite movies. I had a total crush on Sloane Peterson ...still do. She's smokin’. A movie about the coolest day ever.

3. Beverley Hills Cop
The funniest film for one-liners. I’m a huge Judge Reinhold fan.

4. Point Break
The only movie that combined surfing, bank robbing, guns ‘n’ shit. In San Francisco they're doing a live action play of it!

5. Cabin Fever
On our tour last summer in Europe we had 2 DVDs and that was one of them. We watched that one way more than the other. It’s such a gross movie. It’s a bad film but we had so much fun watching it cos we memorised the whole thing as it’s all we had to watch.

Tell us a secret?
I played Darth Vader AND Chewbacca in a stage play at high school.

KING OF K

CALVIN JOHNSON, poster boy for the DIY ethos, and founder of both K Records and original lo-fi instigators Beat Happening, is probably the reason nerdy guys in decrepit cardigans get girls. Kurt Cobain famously tattooed the K records symbol on his person and that’s not even the most impressive thing the history books have got on him.

As his latest solo incarnation, The Hive Dwellers (and with just his idiosyncratic voice and a pink guitar for company) Johnson transfixed - at his BYOB Upset the Rhythm set. Or should that be BYOM? We saw one couple drinking milk. Drinking milk at lo-fi gigs as an acceptably hip affectation is probably part of Johnson’s so-wack-it’s-cool legacy too.


Charlotte Jansen speaks to Seattle’s second most important music brat:

Your performance was meticulously executed: do you feel confident on stage?

Being on stage feels perfectly comfortable. More comfortable than anywhere else.


Do you feel you've achieved what you wanted to with your music?

Yes. Good songs have been made up and performed.


There are moments of comedy and also intense sadness in your songs - for example, Sitting Alone at the Movies. Do you feel comfortable in society?

The aim is to inject some levity even in the most serious of situations. Humour is a wonderful antidote to most of the world’s woes.


What is it about underground culture that appeals to you?

The beauty of underground culture is that people express themselves in ways that are not oriented towards mainstream appeal. This gives them the latitude to be honest in ways that would not be possible if they are chasing after a lowest common denominator approach.



Who are your favourite musicians?

Billy Childish, Tender Trap

Johnson’s band The Hive Dwellers have a 12” single, Get In, coming out on K which includes remixes of “Sitting Alone at the Movies”. You can read about their April tour here.

SK8 or FRY: CEREBRAL BALLZY

Cerebral Ballzy rule (but you knew that).

So here are frontman Honor's top 5 skate tunes and snapper turtle Alex De Mora's epic shot (see more in JUKE vol.02, out September).

Gee, takes us back to that time Dizzee Rascal smashed Diplo in the face with a skateboard in the record company's office. True story.




1. Dead Boys - Ain't it fun
"Undertone of pure gnar. Slow, melodic, but epic. If I had a skate part in a video it would be to that"

2. Violator - Destined to Die
"As thrash it gets!"

3. Any Agent Orange or JFA song
"...duh"

4. Dinosaur Jr - Forget the Swan
"For when I land stylish tailslides."

5. Slayer - Epidemic
"So fast that it ended before I landed the trick!"

We asked him to tell us a secret and he said, "I love bull dykes (but that's not really a secret)."

Oh word.

T I R E D

O F

T H E

S A M E O L D

S A M E O L D

HARMONY KORINE 4 WILL OLDHAM

Creeps.

SONISPHERE

Sonisphere. Most un-metal festival name ever? And yet, its Jagerbomb ranneth over with blast beat behemoths and other wrinkly legends - Anthrax, Slayer, Maiden, Motley, Iggy...

Running with the inconsistency, we ingested stuff designed for telling strangers you love them at house parties and subsequently failed to be remotely hardcore for hours and hours.

We tried to address the delicate balance between the trance conference moniker and embarrassingly positive vibes with some family from Norfolk's totally metal 'Thor Hammer' homebrew, but remained disconcertedly smiley and fragrant all weekend. Although the youngest daughter/great gran of the crew showed us a tattoo that's keeping us awake at night.




Our brosome snapper turtle Alex de Mora was there too. In the spirit of all the off-brand behaviour, here are a few of his sillier shots.

Aside from Method Man being off playing actors, and the unfortunate absence of Dirt McGirt (I have heard others talking about Cappadonna not being there, but taxis don't drive themselves people) - the Wu showed no signs of ageing last night at Brixton Academy. Bouncing all over the mic and tag-teaming the shit out of centre stage in front the usual sea of white middle class kids that populate every hip hop gig in the UK ever.

It was the Toys-R-Us of Hip Hop shows from start to finish, but I've got to say that even though watching Rae and the gang lunge all over the stage like tea-bagging paraplegics was a fucking spiritual experience, the warm up DJ, Mista Jam, killed it so hard that my thirst for quality hip hop was almost permanently quenched. He honestly must have played every good hip hop party tune to come out of NYC ever, seemingly.

Such was my excitement to hear all of this good shit again in public, Juke thought we would treat you all, in no particular order, to some of the biggest block-rocking jams hip hop has ever produced - ripping off Mista Jam's set entirely, but he did kinda leave us with no choice, you know? (It's not rocket science or a particularly revolutionary selection, but being reminded of better days is always good, huh?)

Field Day Aftermath

Another festival down, and plenty more on the way. Juke's day in the field turned out to be another congealed mess of partying and pestilence, and all the oddities in between. Definite highlight of the day was being reminded of this song by a woman in sequinned pants eating a flaming candelabra. Rad.

After the volume was turned down and we were escorted off the premises by a squint eyed security guard with a lisp, we went to a pub to hang out with old favourites No Age after they killed it in the park to chat about the day, record stores and their new album.



Hey guys, how was your Field Day? Do you find the interaction with you music is different over here to in LA?

Dean: The UK is fucking great usually. We can usually get people going wild.

Randy: Yeah, people told us that the UK audience is pretty reserved...

Dean: ...but we find them to be wild beasts. Wilder beasts.

How was your experience of the weekend?

Dean: It’s a great festival. I’m really into the artwork and the whole atmosphere of the day. We’ve been in London for a week just hanging out, so it was great to play the show.

Oh yeah? Where were you hanging out?

Dean: Umm all over. We went to visit the Crass house, you know, where the band Crass started. We’ve been hanging out in Bethnal Green, Shoreditch and on Brick Lane too.

Have you bought any good records since you’ve been over here?

Dean: I’ve only bought one record, the new Wolfgang Voigt record. Other than that I haven’t bought anything. I’ll be back in October, so I’ll try and get some more then. We really wanted to go to this record shop in...where was it, Holloway?

Randy: Was it DOC Records? Our friend lives above that store.

Dean: Yeah, DOC Records. There’s all these old EPs and LPs. It looks really cool, and all the records were like dollars.

It’s a real shame because it feels like all the old style record store have totally died out or are in the process of doing so in the UK

Dean: Everywhere, man. We did find a record store, I can’t remember where it was, but we were driving to London with Silk Flowers and we found this store

Randy: The one in the basement? Oh yeah.

Dean: Yeah, and it had like such rad records. Young Marble Giants 45s for like a dollar, loads of Madness and Two Tone stuff, The Specials…like really cool records, you know.

When you played your set on Saturday it sounded like you yelled “Fuck Depeche Mode!” – did you actually say that?

Dean: I probably said that. I said a bunch of stuff.

Randy: I thought you said “Fuck the police!”?

Dean: I said a lot of things. I said “Fuck the law”, “fuck Depeche Mode” just cos. I was just talking shit. I just felt like talking shit.

Do you like Depeche Mode?

Dean: Yeah, I do. I do a lot. I like bands that rip off Depeche Mode. Those guys are awesome.

What other bands did you catch at the weekend?

Randy: Atlas Sound.

Dean: Pantha Du Prince…We saw Phoenix. Thought they were awesome. That’s about all we saw, we were just running about the whole time.

What do you think of the music here or what you’ve experienced of it in comparison to what you’ve got back home?

Dean: Well, you’ve got things like Upset The Rhythm, which throws it down and puts out really good music. That’s the kind of world we know from London, I guess, and it seems amazing.

It was a shame that your set got stopped at the weekend as you didn’t really get to play much off the new record…is the guy playing synths at the side a really recent addition because he wasn’t around when you played London before?

Randy: He’s playing samples. A lot of the songs that we were writing were written out of the range of the samplers, so it just made a lot of sense to have another pair of hands to turn all of those. It just got to the point where we another guy being there really helped.

Yeah, cos in the past you’ve been like moving all over the stage hitting stuff with your feet…

Randy: We still got a lot of stuff going on, but it’s just a bit easier having someone else there.

Dean: I mean, it’s challenging and it’s fun, but sometimes you just want to relax.

Dude, you didn’t look all that relaxed

Randy: Haha, it’s a lot of work.

Dean: But like before I’ve been like “Arrr!”, and it’s fun to, you know, like push yourself, but…and plus if you’ve got another person you’ve got more amps, so it’s just more full sounding.



Listening to the new album through, the sound seems to have taken like a lot more of pop direction with more focus on structure, is that something you were conscious of?

Randy: Not really. I think we just wanted to make something that we liked, and that’s just what came out, and what we were interested in. I was listening to a lot of power pop and stuff like that, so I was listening to that sort of style of song writing from a guitar perspective…Elvis Costello inspired ideas…

Dean: I was listening to more like ambient kind of stuff…

It’s strange because you can hear that influence more on like Weirdo Rippers than you can on this record…

Dean: Well, now I think we tried to put them together. Like, we tried to add that layer of ambient stuff like with the songs. Thing is, with Weirdo Rippers, there’s like two brains like fighting with each other and with this record we kinda tried to put them together a little.

Randy: We just experimented by combining sound for musical pieces, versus me like having a schizophrenic live set up…I think that we were able to get a lot of form by doing long atmospheric pieces like with the soundtrack to The Bear etc, and I think there was a conversation at one point about this being a lot of compulsive songs and then at some later date doing something that’s a lot more free form.

Dean: Yeah, we could have almost just made an ambient record.

Do think that’s the direction you’re eventually going to go?

Dean: Well, no, we did the Losing Feeling EP and it felt like we were going to go on to make something like that, but then at the same time that we were writing for this record, we did the score for The Bear and we did the Rodarte film, and we did this collaboration with our friend Brian Roettinger, that’s like samples live and stuff. And I kinda feel like we got a lot of it out of our system, but at the same time we were writing for this record. It kinda felt like we had the ball and we were running with it and we did a little juke…I don’t fucking know man. It’s just nice to be able to make the record we want. It’s cool to just do whatever you know.

Oh, what Star Wars could have been...