"AS MUCH GAY SEXY FLAIR AND JOY AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE"- A CONVERSATION WITH NEIL "CLOACA" YOUNG

                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                        

“For those that don’t know, sound freak Neil “Cloaca” Young aka Bromp Treb is a legend in the Western Massachusetts weirdo underground (AND FAR, FAR BEYOND). They were gracious enough to take five (well, in this case it took us nearly six months) and answer some questions I had in regards to their background in the arts and drop the skinny on their new full length player “Bald Eagle Over Food City”.

Note: Neil and I began this conversation in Spring of 2022 when he was still a resident of New England. Since that time, he has relocated to Los Angeles thus the heavy handed East Coast talk. I'm sure Bromp has volumes to say about their stay in California. Perhaps a part two is in order down the line!

Neil is about to head over to UK/EU for insane adventures, check out tour dates and more info on Neil here. 

New Bromp Treb material coming out in time for this tour
“Satisfaction Blowout” CS+DL Carbus Tapes 004 (usa) 2023

“Portable Elastic High-Concept and Totally Cohesive EP” DL+Lathe WHY KEITH DROPPED THE S (Belgium) 2023

Thanks to Neil for taking time out of their insane schedule! 

Interview by Mikey

Hope all is well with you. Can you tell me a bit about your upbringing in New England? What was homelife like? What were your interests? 

I’m told that I was conceived in Irvine, CA, but I know that I was born in Pittsfield/Lenox, MA... There was a period of like 5 years that we lived in a suburb of Albany, NY, then moved back to Pittsfield thru my highschool years. Before my time, my parents and my brothers moved around a lot, all over New England, Upstate, NY, Cleveland, OH and California that one time, etc. My two brothers are like 10 years older than me and I bring up my California conception because for that one year before I was born in the middle of the 70's, they all lived a perfect Brady Bunch suburban LA lifestyle. Nobody in my family is into art or is all that musical, so I wonder if such a jarring exposure to Southern California sunshine cooked my cells in gestation. Furthermore, my parents were such uncool ‘corporate’ normdogs that they thought naming me "Neil Young" just "sounded right" claiming to have no idea who that other guy was. It's meant a lifetime of tedious jokes from stoked boomers and I guess I've still yet to fully come around-to nor ever got-into his music. I love HUMAN HIGHWAY and think TRANS is a pretty good record, but all of that is mostly cos of DEVO. I believe that there's a film critic and maybe another filmmaker, all of us with this same cursed/blessed name - so while you didn't ask - thank you - i usually don't mind getting this detail out of the way and just moving on. I have a used copy of Shakey and one of these days I’ll endeavor to read it, and maybe everything with coalesce in perfect mental/spiritual union.  

My dad was a chemical engineer who went from development into marketing, slowly climbing the GE corporate ladder to become a sales manager of their plastics division. My mom has done off and on secretarial gigs but eventually was able to go full homemaker mode by the time we moved back to Pittsfield when I was like 8. I think it was like in my middle school years that both of brothers went off to college, and at that point my dad was traveling all over the place for business, so most of my teen years it was mostly just me and my mom and this crazy beagle knocking around this big house at the end of cul de sac in the woods. So yeah, I had this kinda vanilla semi-rural suburban upbringing, pop tarts, tv and mom cooking dinner, Almost like a cushier version of an only-child of a single-mother situation. My parents have always been really social people, I frequently recall there always being some boisterous hangs with their friends, work friends and extended family. A lotta my parents' friends also seemed to have kids more my brothers' age, and as I was always so much younger than everyone. It kinda meant that I was like under the table doing my own thing, while my brothers crashed around and did all the dramatic stuff. Maybe that kind of socialization was what gave me a bit of a removed-observer with a thirst for attention dichotomy. As the littlest one, i was always talked-over and picked-on, then pushed into center of attention like a cute new puppy.

I was into war toys, lasers, sci fi, building forts, slopping thru swamps, crawling around on dirt piles in suburban developments, and riding bmx/mountain bikes... I remember my brothers' teen years as tumultuous and full of them hosting rager parties while they were supposed to be baby-sitting me and my parents were going out with their friends - with all this partytime fun happening around me, i guess it's no surprise that by the time I became a teen, i was completely uninterested in drinking and drugs, so that further confused and alienated me from them. My family tried and tried to get me into organized sports, play soccer or basketball, but I had little interest and was alarmed by how upset other kids' parents would get about a fucking game. 

At what point did you get interested in music/sound/the arts? 

I clicked early on with creative clown types... One of those earlier-mentioned family friends who was a doctor had a giant VHS camcorder, and his kid was a little closer to my age, and so he and I would try to make Chuck Norris / Miami Vice type action movies - so many smoke bombs and fireworks and toy guns and fake blood and costumes! Incidentally it's so creepy to remember how we would be memorizing Shel Silverstein and Bill Cosby tapes. Also in my albany daze, I remember being obsessed with this cool small cassette-radio boombox I had. I'd record the radio, of course, and dumb little plays and stuff with my friends. i got this toy microphone that you tune up wirelessly to an FM channel and very distortedly, your voice and whatever you put up to it could now blast thru the boombox. I started recording all these tapes with that too - some pretty dumb and ridiculous stuff, but honestly really not too different from what i do now. 

When I moved back to pittsfield, I connected with some goofballs pretty early on via drawing cartoons, Weird Al, Dr Demento, underground comic books and heavy metal...By the time we entered middle school, The Berkshire Mall became fully operational and we would start going the record store in there weekly, looking for the creepiest and weirdest looking records and tapes. It was mostly thrash metal, Anthrax, Slayer, DBC, MOD, DRI, but my buddy Doug found The Cramps' Bad Music For Bad People LP and we couldn't believe how silly, horny and gross the art and music was. Of course, being pre-internet and Pittsfield only had a community college. So access to weirdness at that time was really Headbangers Ball on MTV and looking for weirdness at the comic book shop or trying to dig the scariest-sounding stuff at Strawberries, Record Town and Tape World. 

Of course, with all of this, we started to fool around with our looks, again, with no access to actual cool things, we just had to approximate or make it up. Around those parts in deep-Western Massachusetts (aka “The Beserkshires”), everything in the late 80's early 90's seemed like it was metal, so the mullet, wispy moustache, jean jacket with patches and writing all over it - that was the look of peak dissatisfaction. So of course, we just scrawled and painted all over everything, but we also scoured any mainstream incidental pop cultural reference that would show “punk” stuff - which, to my friends and I, punk is what looked even more crazy and weird than the metal kids. We would dig and dig to find any images of punks in music videos, tv shows, magazines and books - all of it being hilarious caricatures - like that infamous Quincy episode, reruns of CHIPS, The Day My Kid Went Punk tv afterschool special, and movies (such as that bus scene with Spock in star trek IV ), Bill the Cat from the Bloom County Billy and Boingers Bootleg book and the nuked looks from the Mad Max series... a fried/electrocuted toxic wasteland - we loved all of it! We used to hang out in the Pittsfield public library after school, running around the stacks of this brutalist civic building - come to think of it, we were ducking-in to evade getting beat up by goony jocks, anyway, I recall that we found a fountain of great punk looks in some anti-drug books, which had a lot of great detailed photos of beautiful wasteoids huffing bags of glue, shooting up and smoking weed - it was so great to see such detail in the arrangement of various hardware, spikes, safety pins and band logos we were finally beginning to recognize! 

I had a core crew of three or so friends, and we would really go hard into making comics and goofing off and searching for weird things that eventually we just landed on trying to make our own music. The first things were really primitive, putting paper and paperclips in the strings of an acoustic guitar and banging on buckets, playing casio type keyboards and recording with that aforementioned boombox... eventually we got our hands on a bass and an electric guitar, those awesome tiny shitty gorilla and peavy practice amps, etc. As we would be figuring these things out, our tastes were changing, moving from thrashmetal to punk and hardcore. 

Simultaneous with trying to figure out how to play the bass and starting punk bands with my buddies, my mom pushed me into this semi organized weekly activity of working on a youth crew at the local cable access television station. There were kids from other parts of the county involved as well as some extremely nerdy adults and oddly enough, some of those kids were into punk and metal too. So here we were freaks, radio shack employees, teen punks and computer nerds, thrown in a crew together, producing live television. The shows were truly awful, very straight community affairs and news type programming, but I was having a blast learning all of these different aspects of video production and hanging out with kids that didn't go to the same school as me. Later on, I'd get pulled into working crew on City Hall meetings, loading and unloading the mobile tv studio van, running so many cables down hallways and in and out windows, setting up mics, wearing headsets, operating cameras, and watching how they did satellite uplink out from the van back to the tv station - it was confusing and fascinating. A year or two of that and I started making my own video work, trying to make stupid shorts, skits and music videos - they would let me do my thing, borrow cameras and use editing time in exchange for time volunteering for those boring city hall meetings. Eventually in my last couple years of highschool, i was co producing a couple TV shows, one was a music video zine where we interviewed bands, tried to shoot some shows and played music videos and the other was a weird skit/variety show with one of my highschool teachers, Ernest West, who taught an elective Black History class and also worked at the station. Come to think of it, he was a big booster of our highschool band, Lampstand, but all of that is a whole other set of digressions and nerdy details. 

Was there a moment when you realized that your interests were different than what was going on in other music/art circles at the time? 

This is a funny interview so far - I feel like I havent talked about my childhood and youth in so long, so it feels strange to be going back there! I was typing these responses in tiny 30min-1 hour bursts in between very hectic activities of my old life back on the east coast, and now, six or eight months later, after moving across the country to southern california…. Whew! It is confoozling! Let’s see if I can chop these old blasts of thought down to something coherent. 

I don't think I could distill it to a particular moment, but maybe once I started dressing weird and trying to hang out with the 'bad/tough' metal kids, I realized that all of these normdog adults and my conforming peers were a bunch of hypocritical and superficial babies, who seemed so easily triggered by how someone presents themselves and who they hang with. A lot of the metal kids I was knew were actually really smart but just so clearly had it with authority that they were refusing to behave-correctly. In retrospect, I really think that the teen punk-ification process for me was so much about the slow illumination of the dominant structures of oppression - classism, racism, the patriarchy, homophobia, colonialism etc - and that I was trying to figure out how quickly i could shed any identification with this toxic bullshit and the expectation to become as a straight cis white dude who projects power accordingly. I never would've said it that way back then, and definitely didn't have even a fraction of that kind of analysis, but it was where I began to identify how fucked-up things are and what were actions I could take. Clearly my actions were all feeble, choosing a path of "fuck your dumb system!" rather than doing something more productive, but still, identifying as a freak, my friends and I got fucked with A LOT at that time in the beserkshires and I think those agitations and confrontations were fruitful to being a more compassionate human. 

It's funny your interview with Shannon started off about altercations, because, pretty much from late elementary school right up thru early college, I've been harrassed, bullied and have been jumped a few times. Nothing ever super serious injury-wise, but I did have my head smashed into a storefront window of the bagel store by a bunch of metalhead tuffs after leaving a show on the eve of my first day of highschool. Luckily it didn't go all the way through, but it did do that wild spider-webbing thing and my friends and I were so freaked out, running away down alleys, thinking that we were gonna get in trouble by the cops for being beat up and ruining a downtown window! Mostly, I was worried my parents would find out! There's a million other stories but I can spare you. 

But to actually get back to the core of your question about when did I realize that the art/music I was doing was different than that in other circles - I'd probably have to say when we started our band that became Lampstand. There were a few primitive punk band configurations before that, but this band had keyboards and no guitar. Less The Screamers (had we even known about them!), think Madness / Devo / Dead Milkmen. We threw together our first tape in 1991 and put it out ourselves in one weekend, sold it around town and our school. There was another crew of kids on the other side of town going down a similar punk path, but they went more for the heavy macho hardcore thing, while we ran towards the more hyper sissy thing. Our second tape as Lampstand is better, and relatively out of step from anything cool that was happening in 1992. The year punk broke just meant that jocks and bullies smoked more pot and were only slightly less interested in beating us up. 

Did you have any projects before Fat Worm of Error? Does Fat Worm of Error still exist in some form? Did you do much travelling in Fat Worm? 

There were a few false-start type bands that I played one or two shows in, but mostly between my highschool bands up to Fat Worm of Error, I did solo home-recording type shit - lotsa multilayered soundscapes, crappy tape collages and dumb acoustic guitar stuff a la Sebadoh, Eugene Chadbourne or god, I don't know what... I found jazz at some point in highschool, with my friends, checking out LPs from the Pittsfield public library, blasting thru bop and into free jazz, but didn't really get to see anything like it performed live until I was in college, but by then I was starting to fumble around with improvisation, trying to realign how I play music and listen with others. Halfway thru college, I was moving outta the singer-songwriter mode and more into just improvising, recording and making beats. Bromp Treb wasn't a thing until the early 2000's, with my first self-produced release in 2002. The Connecticut River Valley at that time in the late 90's and early 2000's was really humming with a variety of crazed musics and the old Flywheel space was this perfect sized room for playing / organizing / attending a show with a terrible turnout. It was also a time where all of these european improvisers and electroacoustic musicians were touring everywhere on their cushy travel grants, so we had this killer pipeline of really fucked up music and noise pumping thru on top of all of the homegrown outsider stuff, psych, improv, etc Coinciding with all of that, is the emergence of Fat Worm of Error, which is one of the most important collaborations in my life. Those four bozoes are family to me. The five of us coagulated around making bombastic high energy music constructed from noises; basically a no-wave band but almost every member had, at some point, some experience with the Smith College Community Javanese Gamelan orchestra, so these other ideas were melting in as well as all of the visual sense of our cheap pageantry, junk sculpture, totemic objects. 

Cooper (gtr, etc) and Goddard (voice, synths etc) moved away to the west coast in 2013, so we've been effectively dormant/dead, but we fairly regularly check in and are periodically fantasizing. We have an ongoing group Signal chat, which has most recently been about trail running footwear, which is hilarious. It's crazy to think that it has been so long. We still have an unfinished body of work, something we recorded over a week at Donny's house with Chris Cohen engineering, but I think maybe it was a combination of factors that had us stuck in a state of overdetermined creative paralysis. The performances of the songs are mostly good, but I can't really further speculate or articulate why the thing was never completed. 

So much of what that band is came from a weekly sometimes bi and tri weekly practice sessions, with the five of us playing, hanging out, jamming, snacking, goofing off and working on some really fucked up music and art. Our process was always vaguely consensus but everyone's individual filters are pretty strong, so striking the right balance of collective perfection can be difficult. FWOE did a fair amount of touring, but maybe not as much as we would've liked. Five people is not easy/cheap to move around and I felt like we were always chasing elusive leads and never quite getting the offers and opportunities to do stuff in ways that it always seemed that our peers always seemed to land. We did two full US tours, a bunch of mid atlantic and midwest tours, two tours in Western Europe and the UK and one week long residency with DePlayer in Rotterdam. I think we were denied entry to Canada twice because of strict and ridiculous canadian border policy, but eventually we played Montreal a couple times. I guess that's not bad for a 11 or 12 year run, but I regret that we didn't/couldn't go harder. 

A few years into playing in the band, I started bringing the crappiest/cheapest videocameras I had at work with me on our tours,  constantly shooting the incidental stuff of our adventures. I think I had that camera glued to my face mostly to ease my discomfort and anxiety around travel,  I'd periodically edit the material down to these densely packed collages of sights, sounds and fucking around - mostly environments and domestic spaces but also other performances and stuff. It's more like funny home movies or autoethnography or something - there's not a whole lot of FWOE playing but maybe in's more playing around. I think I've made something like 10 pieces and there's still a couple that are yet to be edited. I made some DVD and VHS releases of these as tour merch. Tim also made some great DVDs from video work he did around the band in the early days, which is where I believe I found the footage of you and some Lexington crew going apeshit at that video store gig we did in like 02 or 03... Is that when/where we first met? 

Yes, I believe it was. Then my band Warmer Milks played with you guys and Angela Sawyer in Boston a few years later. 

I’ve screened Vandura Capsule Logbook (2012) a couple times at some microcinemas and special screenings and stuff, but other than the DVD-Rs alot of that stuff just remains on harddrives and private links awaiting the right time and place to show em. 

I still collaborate regularly with Donny, we have a speaker-frying noise duo called Carbus and we also have an improvising quintet called Gloyd with Andy Allen (reeds, flute), Wendy Eisenberg (guitar), and Ruth Garbus (voice) - I'm playing drums and trumpet and Donny's playing bass and sax. gloyd.bandcamp.com

What is your role at Hampshire College? Did you attend school there? Did you receive any formal visual/sound education? Does your experience there influence what you do as an artist?

I work in the Library at Hampshire College, running the Media Services office, loaning media production and A/V gear to students, faculty and staff. The job is a million different jobs: I do class tutorials, A/V, some classroom and events support, video production, media archival stuff, film library stuff, general troubleshooting and a fair amount of constructive goofing off. 

I got my bachelors there doing film/video and poetry, but before that, I was getting rides with my older friends from the Beserkshires to see punk rock shows there. Shit like Nation of Ulysses, Unsane, Samiam, Spitboy, Scissor Girls, Citizen Fish, Bikini Kill... I slowly got to know some of the students there and when some found out that I was interested in video, I was sneaked-into some class screenings. When I finally went to college there, I was going to as many shows all over the surrounding valley as possible. I was psyched about school, an experimental school with no grades and very few requirements but with that total freedom one needed to figure out how to have enough motivation and discipline to complete the work - that is not easy and I would definitely say that I really did not come to understand this until I completed my thesis films (which were like 30 short experimental films; half on video and half on 16mm). So yes, without a doubt, going there and continuing to work there has been completely challenging and stimulating to my artistic practice. For 21 years I've had this day job where I can be as weird as I want, truly be myself in a mostly supportive and inspiring community of freaky students and colleagues. The only drawback has been that it's a year round, "9-5" job, so that has also meant some truncated or stifled opportunities and oftentimes grinding myself down with my other fulltime job of making art.
 
You are pretty busy in the Turners Falls/Greenfield area. You have the Phantom Erratic series, the yearly Peskeomskut Noisecapades as well as live appearances at TenForward and other places. Do you feel it's not enough? Too much? 

I'll say that I've always been busy with projects outside of my dayjob/work life. I go through periods of attending, playing and organizing - sometimes these things all happen at once and other times I'm trying to avoid doing anything. 16 years ago, my partner Fafnir and I bought a house up in TF. We were tired of being pushed along from apartment to apartment because of rising rents. We busted out of Northampton to Easthampton, this was maybe a year or two after Flywheel started up - we were both part of the initial collective and sat thru hours upon hours of consensus meetings. Fafnir was part of the early gallery committee and my buddy Dan Millman and I ran an experimental film series there. Anyway, I guess it's just a given that if you're gonna make fucked up art and music you gotta organize and hustle with your friends to create spaces to share/exhibit and promote the work. Flywheel was beautiful and infuriating but also the most transparent in terms of labor and social protocols - step up and do the work, find volunteers to help you and the show happens. So, when it came time around 2006 or so to look for a place to really dig in, we found a zone we could afford like 20 miles or so north to TF/GF (Turners Falls / Greenfield) area... For us, finding a copy of the Montague Reporter, this strangely-DIY yet very normal/functional area newspaper and stumbling upon the Brick House Community Resource Center, an old firehouse with a teen center hangout/practice space and hosted some events, sealed the deal. To our wide-eyes, it seemed like the perfect place to plug in and organize shows a la Flywheel. TF is far enough out of the reach of the Five Colleges (Hampshire, Amherst, Smith, Mt Holyoke and UMASS) that the rents and property values weren't as inflated and the presence of youthful hipsters was more muted. So once we moved up here, immediately Fat Worm of Error played one of many Brick House-sponsored skatepark benefit shows with a handful a local young goofy punks. My partner Fafnir and I started getting to know this particular place's insular world of freaks... bands and artists like Moscow Mule, Jeremy Latch, Fashion People, OFC, David Detmold, Patricia Pruitt and Chris Sawyer-Laucanno, Jack and Eileen Nelson, John Landino, etc. A couple years after living there, a few friends started a new bar called the Rendezvous and they kept asking if i'd be interested in organizing events there. Fat Worm had just returned from our second tour in Europe and I was so inspired by a show that we played in Rotterdam organized by the DePlayer gang, that I decided to take my Rendezvous friends up on their offer. Montague Phantom Brain Exchange was a monthly cabaret style variety show, usually 2 - 3 acts (performance art, noise, psych or improvised music), maybe a short film, and always a 15 minute or so lecture on any topic of the presenter's choice and a DJ between all of the acts. At peak perfection, I'd say we were pulling together a crowd of like 80 folks in this awkward hallway of a bar, with like a third from TF/Greenfield, a third from Northampton/Holyoke/Amherst and a third from coming down from Brattleboro, VT. The bar regulars were definitely confused having their last Wednesday of the month all fucked up with noise and crazy performance art and people desperately trying to explain something like complicated math research to a bunch of rowdy drunks, but after a few months, the regulars were psyched for the monthly disruption and would excitedly ask me what's next. Flywheel was having space troubles and there were less and less shows happening in public spaces around the Valley. There were plenty of houseparty type things happening in private spaces, but I always felt like it's too easy to retreat into privacy and friend-scenes. The rise in social media seemed to coincide with this privatization of public DIY life. I've always felt like anyone should be able to stumble into what's happening and widen a conversation, no matter how esoteric and noncommercial the art in that happening can be. I also feel really strongly that nobody should be made to feel like an idiot for "not getting it." So I worked really hard to create a ritually disarming space where all reactions / questions are valid and those who vibe with the least assumptions get more out of the experience. Anyway, I went hard at that for the first two years, wound it down to quarterly in the third year, and then shifted the name, venue and format to what is now the Phantom Erratic - something I do whenever I'm moved to do it. It was super fun, but completely exhausting and kinda stupid. 

I was organizing MPBE for every month, working fulltime, still practicing and playing shows with FWOE and doing solo stuff? it was psycho! and somehow I still felt like I was always missing out on things, it was totally dumb. I put an inordinate amount of care into putting these shows together and creating a good flow of communication and hospitality for the artists and the audience. The process of organizing these taught me so much about building a crowd of regulars and also getting folks pumped about being surprised. I also became more concerned with programming for variety and balance, trying to make bills with majority women or women-identifying artists and totally pushing to prevent the typical sausage pileups that always seemed to be happening everywhere that I was playing or going to shows then. I didn't make a stink about it, but I definitely noticed how putting work into making more balanced bills created a less bro-y social scene. I also tried really hard not to repeat the same artists, or if someone came back, it was in a new configuration/project. 

I took a break from doing the Peskoemskut Noisecapades for a few years, partly being out of town at the right time or just not in the mood, but this year the ice was too perfect and with like four days' notice, i put out the call and a great crew showed up and we had a blast. It also coincided with my birthday, so that was a selfish bonus. 

The big thing this year for me has been doing a bunch of very little, low stakes but very regular practices that I invite folks to join me and participate in. Hampshire has a great collection of 16mm films and small scale cinema seems like the perfect in person antidote to all of this disembodied pandemic remoteness, so I've been doing a weekly film screening series all year called Bonus Rectangle. Also, since this summer, I've been going outside and playing trumpet twice a week. I call the thing Tooty and there's an open invitation for anyone to join me out there, but with a few caveats.
 
Tell us about your mix tapes!

A couple years ago I realized that I have these huge piles of recorded music (records, CDs tapes and files) and if I'm not actively combing through it, I'm just sort of hoarding a dead collection. I really don't like spotify and streaming services but I was really enjoying some of the mixtapes Dennis Tyfus was putting out, and had some 60 minute tapes kicking around, so I started using that as the constraint: record two 30 min mixes, digitize em and post em somewhere. Hampshire has a very intermittent student internet radio station, so i can put all these files on the server there and link to em accordingly. Folks can stream or download and I just now have an excuse to listen and rediscover stuff that I'm constantly burying. I don't have any organizing principles and I just follow my bliss, which can be pretty smooth or just really psycho. The most freeing thing has been learning to not give a shit about whether I'm 
https://churnersmonthly.blogspot.com/
 
How did you get involved with the Milford Graves film? Did this experience influence your own work as a sound/visual maker/life overall?

Jake Meginsky and I have been friends in the weirdo music scene, sharing various bills in the valley for years and he had been up in Bennington studying with Milford Graves and slowly accumulating footage for a film for quite some time. 

After some initial meetings and conversations looking at the archive of material for the project, we quickly jumped into a collaboration, with Jake pulling me further into the Professor's world. We went to performances, visited him at his home spending hours in the garden, sleeping on the floor of his garage-turned-dojo and hanging out in his lab in the basement of his house. Jake would speak with him on the phone daily, staying ever attuned to whatever the Prof's thoughts went. So much of this thing of making this film was about listening and looking, being attentive and receptive to whatever the Prof would throw at us. It would be like Jake would get a request or an assignment to check this or that out and we'd try to jump into action to be there to capture it. The editing process had a similar vibe with us both constantly improvising, trading scenes and trying to listen to what the emerging film was telling us that it wanted. Over like three years we knocked something into a form that honored his music art way of life and teachings. Prof embodies the  learning-as-doing ethos I feel so connected-to and I feel so lucky to have spent all those hours with him and Jake, learning so much from both of them and through the process of our collaboration. 

The project was as musical as it was visual for me, but yeah, it's really hard for me to encapsulate or articulate the whole experience, it totally scrambled my whole being! When I think back to the years of making and then promoting the film, I feel something like a little car was just picked up in a massive tornado and then gently and miraculously plopped down in a completely different state. As quickly as I was pulled into the project, my work in it seemed to be done and it didn't make much sense for me to be doing the promotional touring of the film. Especially when so much promotion focused on Graves' teachings and Jake's unique and beautiful relationship with his mentor. We made the thing, but I didn't need to awkwardly stand next to it every step of the way. I'm just really happy to have helped ensure this brilliant human's legacy. 

Without a doubt I listen to my breath and heart more, I observe my senses more-deeply. Of course, my drumming has shifted, my gardening skills have expanded, and my filmmaking has evolved. I've become more patient, open and I feel forever changed. It’s really hard now not to think about the Prof and his influence in everything I do. 

What brought about the inspiration for Bald Eagle Over Food City? 

Oddly the inspiration came from that initial blurry photo of the eagle over the grocery store parking lot, I laughed about how bad the picture was and then blurted out to myself those five words. Bald Eagle Over Food City: it's equal parts poetry and sad comedy. 

I'm always inspired by landscapes and places - what combination of factors gives everyplace its own unique character, how does that form the people and culture there and vice versa? Come to think of it, pretty much all of my filmmaking has been concerned with these ideas in some way. Being in western mass most of my life and realizing that this (Turners Falls) is the longest that I've lived in one place, I just wanted to go in deeper. I've made plenty of references to being here in my music, but nothing as substantive and loving. 

I'm still in a dreadful process of trying to figure out what to say about this record. Technically, it's just a bunch of instrumentals that really could be "about" anything, but while working on it I was ruminating hard on the particular spaces and relationships in this little village. Less about specific human relationships, but more about the natural and built environments. It's funny, when I finished the thing, I was like, "damn, there's nothing about human people in this!" It's like all the residues / garbage from people and a few critters! 

This village, still currently called Turners Falls, has been a place of human activity for thousands of years, but it's also the place with an unpleasantly fraught history that continues to play out today, in so many systemic dysfunctions social, economic and environmental. 

In spite of these ongoing dysfunctions there's so much evidence of continuance resurgence and resilience, percolating and regrowing. I'm still trying to figure out how to be in my own privilege and settler-disquiet, really trying to educate myself and be in better relations with people, nonpeople and land. So the record, to me, is not about self-flagellation nor is it an uncritical love letter, it's about my process of continual learning and trying to figure it out. 

I made a short film (music video) for Mineral Hill Runway - I recorded the music nearly a couple years ago at the outset of this project, just thinking about this particular zone at the top of the bluff over the river where the airport now is. At some point this last fall, riding my bike past there on a particularly dramatic foggy day, I spotted that someone had plowed a really nasty hole into the chain link fence around the runway - maybe a drunk driver or someone swerving out of the way of a deer or something. This partially collapsed fence struck me as the perfect metaphor for this puncture in colonial reality. A reality for far too many white folks that everything built here is 'progress' and will always remain. A reality built on the complete erasure or 'disappearance myth' of the Pocumtuck and Abenaki people that are here. 

During the time that I've been recording the record, I've also been making a few other short video pieces. I've made a few shorts (music videos) for my buddy Jessica Pavone, both have factored heavily in this place and what it teaches me. Hurtle and Hurdle is entirely about the flow of the Connecticut River here. I did a Bromp Treb performance short around the Montague sand plains called Leather Interior, sonically it's based on the SHNTH instrument and visually it's about the idle interaction with these places around Montague. 

When No One Around You Is There But Nowhere To Be Found is the most recent piece I did for Pavone. I've been considering reconfiguring it into something that more directly addresses what the black backside of this massive caution sign (warning boaters not to go over the dam) means for me. Just across the river from TF is a small boulder with a plaque commemorating the colonial captain who led a raid on a fishing village on May 19, 1676, which resulted in the massacre of a couple hundred Algonquian people - mostly elderly, women and children - refugees from war erupting all over the northeast finding sanctuary with relations there. This commemorative boulder is periodically splashed with red paint, but the overall effect of the memorial seems underwhelming. The back of this stupid black sign, with its power to block what would be a beautiful view of the river and landscape, really strikes me as a more fitting (albeit accidental / unintentional) counter-monument to this traumatic event. Again, I'm still processing, but I hang out by this place all of the time and keep wondering what more can be done to repair these fucked up truths and improve relations. 

I bring all of this up because while much of it may not be explicitly in the record, all of this has in some form been implicitly woven in over these past three years. 

Would you mind telling us about the making of BEOFC in terms of daily routine, instrumentation and studio/home recording situation?

I had been recording this thing for a while before pandemic, but by the time it hit, the project evolved and made even more sense as a thing that I was working on and researching. My partner was living and teaching in Indiana, so I was alone and  developed a routine of recording anytime that I was not working. 
I usually do all of my tracking on tape machines, trying to get a good solid live take and making a few digital edits once it's all digitized. I started working with a few four tracks and a couple stereo machines. A really nice young fella in Greenfield named Simon heard I was working with tape machines and offered to fix/service some for me, so after a while, with machines now better-functioning, I started really getting into recording tracks and tracks of the same instruments. I played a lot of violin, brass, casio keyboards, cheap synths and percussion - getting away from generating textures from synthesis, feedback and noise, I wanted to make simple sounds with instruments, even if I didn't know how to play them all that well. Without any or much effects, these ping-ponged layers would get re-recorded onto or just mixed alongside with other machines doing the same. Layers of any instrument, no matter how badly played, is just such a satisfying sound!

It got to this insane point where to do a final mix of given song, I was juggling like 3 different four-track machines (two cassette and one 1/4" open reel) with another 1/4" open reel two track - tuning them up with the pitch controls and pressing play at different coordinated movements and blending all of these different elements together together in real-time. Some of the songs on the record have like 70 different takes and hundreds of false-starts - if one thing didn't play at the right time, coming in too late or too early or if the constantly shifting levels weren't right, I'd be rewinding everything and doing it all over again. There is no automation anywhere in these mixes, just pure old school and janky mixing by hand. 
I was getting into the idea of working without any computer for as long in the process as it was possible for me to do so. Everything would be mixed to a nice digital audio recorder and the files would just be trimmed. There's still a few of the tracks in there that are relatively simple cassette four track stuff, but there's also a fair amount of these crazy tape collage gymnastics described above. Further along in the recording I got a compressor and eq, and started trying different mics... I futzed with a lot of delays and reverbs while mixing it all down. 

When not recording and working, I was (and still am) reading and learning about native history in this region. I threw a few names in the record liner notes of folks whose writing really helped guide my thinking. Lisa Brooks' Our Beloved Kin and Christine DeLucia's Memory Lands were two books in particular that really shook me. I mentioned a few other area native scholars as well as our town's newspaper, that I mentioned earlier, because I've learned so much from them. All this year at Hampshire there have been events run by students and faculty, both native and white, hosting visiting artists and activists, sharing scholarship, working on land acknowledgements and improving reciprocity. Again, all super important mind expanding stuff for me and I feel so lucky to be in the right place at the right time to soak it in. 

Why the record label choices for BEOFC? Have you worked with them before? 

Every label that I mentioned this project to basically turned me down and as I was about to give up, and just put it out myself on bandcramp or whatever, I happened to be chatting with an old Finnish freak Arttu Partinen aka Amon Dude from Avarus / Hetero Skeleton crew. He mentioned that he was doing a label called Artsy, and offhandedly invited me to propose a release to him. Haha, Why yes, I did have something, in fact!  I told him about the project and sent him some early mixes and he quickly came back to me with an offer to co-release the record with Ikuisuus Label run by Timo Puustinen.  Smooth as silk! 

Do you have a spiritual practice of any sort? 

Nothing coherent and organized. I was raised a lazy Catholic, following my dad's path of faith out of the Lithuanian Village of Brockton, MA where he was raised, but I think my mom's more lowkey protestant upbringing meant some kind of pushback from all of the pageantry of shame and guilt-mongering and after a bout with some after school hyper-dogmatic Catholic youth indoctrination attempts, they pulled me and I was just dragged to mass every sunday with my dad until highschool. 

Mostly, I'm generally confused and just try to lean into some regular outdoor physical interaction with nature. 

What are your thoughts on USA 2022? 

Ugh. I'm curious about your expat experience, being outside, looking back in! 

England is another shade of Western shit but there is goodness here like anywhere else I suppose.

I think I'm too far in it, I just oscillate in my thinking of complete-disavowal of the fascist USA behemoth and wanting to say I'm from (and of) this totally fuckedup place and its ideals. I realize that my position in this society completely affords me that idiotic privilege, so I participate as gently as I can, and try to elevate others' power. Electoral politics is such a joke and the two parties are so completely appalling, yet, I don't have the bandwidth or knowledge or energy to put in a lifetime of total direct democracy - or at least that I think that I do. I'm just a goofy artist, so my lIfe goals are the selfish pursuits of pleasure and beauty, while mustering as much solidarity as I can with the struggle for a total obliteration of colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism. Ideally doing so with as much gay sexy flair and joy as humanly possible. 

(photo of Neil by Tim Huys)