Friday Heavy: September 30, 2022

Cliff: Welcome to Friday Heavy, your guide to the world of aggressive, abrasive, and loud music. Brought to you by the two modern voices behind the movement, known as the podcast, known as TuneDig. I’m Cliff.

Kyle: And I am Kyle and I. Hope that Cliff you practice those in the mirror, , before we record every time each episode. For those of you who have never joined us for this delightful little get together, we concisely cover three things. First one, brand new release in the world of heavy music, which we love and we hope you do too.

And more importantly, why we think it’ll be worth a. got a banger today. One playlist we’ve curated to help you explore a heavy sub genre or artist or scene. Often related to the new release in some way. And that’s definitely the case today. Thirdly, and most importantly, by far, one organization tackling a heavy issue by doing critical culture impacting work in their community.

Cuz we punk rockers are all we got in this crazy world. And we cover all that in 15 or 20 minutes. NPR morning commute style. So you can get up, get out and get something. Cliff, let’s get into.

Cliff: We will from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, we’re gonna talk about Aqua of Grind I believe that is Spanish for School of Grind. They have already been on the scene for only a few years, but they’ve already got two EPS and a full length out and they are all super good. I don’t know how to verbally communicate the naming convention of the eps.

But there’s one about power violence. There’s one about grind core, and there is rumor to be one already recorded about death metal. They are spelled in a way that I don’t know

Kyle: Power by once.

Cliff: your eyebrows just really sold it. Uh, I hope that we can tell some people about that. they’re one of these bands that. They’re starting to click really quickly, like you, you can see and hear and feel the progression release over release that’s coming along really fast. Like one of those crews that seem like they actually have fun and we’re sort of probably meant to do this together in some capacity,

Kyle: I’m an adventure to say there’s a strong correlation between those two things. How much fun they’re having and how much better they’re getting really quickly.

Cliff: Yep. So this looks like that. So out today, is there new full length called Memory Theater, uh, yet another release that we’ve recently covered off of Monarch Records who is crushing it at the moment? The reason we’re stoked about this release, First of all, uh, AMA Grind, Grind Fan in general. Songwriting is a loose convention in this territory there is at once. No real rule. And then also a set of very important rules, that you must know about in order to even be considered a band in this genre. But the songwriting, specifically from Aqu Grind here is getting, it’s really sharp. And they’re doing that in a way where not every song has to only be 10 seconds, although that seems to be an option if they need to.

They’ve actually got multiple songs over three minutes which is, you know, by grind court standards, a Yes album. Basically it’s, uh, Peter Gabriel Rejoins Genesis with the Symphony Orchestra level length. on top of their songwriting, getting really good. The other reason. Uh, this was recorded and produced by Klu at God City Studio,

Kyle: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before on our podcast.

Cliff: This is basically a paid podcast for like two or three producers at this point.

Kyle: Kurt Blue and and, and on tune Dick Juicy J.

Cliff: So Kurt is really, or seems at least really good at channeling extremely aggressive bands into honed album length sounds at like almost exactly this point in their career. , right? Like they are accelerating, they’re growing, they’re getting really good, They’re honing the craft. And this is, this seems to be a really cool moment to let God’s city kind of figure out how to take a really chaotic, noisy sound that you may have developed live and try to make it sound the same way, for like, Eight, 10 songs, and so there is some, like on top of all those reasons, we can already hear from the singles, there is some real depth here and that’s really refreshing in a sub genre that is so visceral and kind of like on its own sleeve all the time. So that album title. Memory theater references a spec specific historical concept of constructing a space from your own internal ideas and knowledge and perception, right?

Like memory palace and all that stuff. That’s definitely something that I think comes up in neuro divergent circles in things like that in a really interesting concept in general. But also in, uh, Kyle, I think you threw us a quote in here, but according to the site, Brave Words who gave an interview here, quote, An architect by trade vocalist, Catarina Economo explores philosophy, politics, and experiential experimentation, building a kind of structure, amids the band’s musical cacophony.

That is a sentence.

Kyle: An architect by trade. Uh, there have been like three or four instances when we decided we were. pick this record where one of us messaged the other and we were like, Yo, I’m becoming a big fan of this band all the way around musically and otherwise in real time. So the headline is, This band is punk as fuck, and we are 100% here for it.

I think this is a thing that they wrote their PR people wrote. It’s like from their website. The music might be terrifying, but the overwhelming spirit behind Esquela Grind is a message of empowerment as they destroying musical boundaries. The quart attacks the idea of gate keeping with equal ferocity.

In fact, they already serve as a gateway drug to newcomers fighting against the snobbery. Too often inherent and extreme counterculture as they gleefully deliver their brutal death grind. I’m gonna assume, a thread one slash x. I’m gonna assume that they’re younger than us from the look of them and I’m, I maybe mis, mis generational.

but I’m gonna ascribe them to Gen Z and if so, it reinforces my theory that Gen Z. As cool as fuck. And young people are, are great and are the true greatest generation

Cliff: sorry, mis generalizing

Kyle: It’s my, I accidentally did a Charles Barkley impression.

Cliff: Are you a Gen Xer who’s been accidentally labeled an elder millennial? We’re here for you.

Kyle: Only

Cliff: Do do you not care? But not in that way. We understand.

Kyle: So reinforcing that was a, a cool bit from another interview that they did with Ka back in 2021 to three EPS ago. They said one of our goals as a band has always been to promote inclusion and acceptance. Sometimes in this modern grind scene, there can be so much gate keeping and validation and dismissal of unique members.

We just wanna help destroy that. We’ve played some of the craziest mix bills shows with OG rappers, bedroom, Pop Gore, harsh noise, Afrofuturist, electronic metal core bands, you name it. To be honest, these shows have been some of our most memorable, and we’ve made so many friends. Grand Core is surprisingly universal in our experience, so we would like to see more mixed bills.

Hell yeah. Right on. That’s sick. Friday heavy is not a podcast for gate keeping, mouth breather reviewer type dudes. Those are the, that’s the only thing we’re trying to gate keep this podcast from is gatekeepers.

Cliff: So we are very into that. So let us also then show you the music itself, because we’ve pitched you on the people behind it who seem great, although we’ve never met them in person. Maybe that’ll change one day. In fact, that’s sort of a general rule. We try to only talk about people that seem like they’d probably be all right if we met them in person.

Uh, it seemed like we are doing pretty well on that front in general, but the music. As an entry point, it’s definitely unpretentious grind core that is, like we said, kind of almost academically respectful of power, violence, and death metal. So there are lots of and especially for the older death metal fans, I think this will connect with you.

Like they write a whole lot of rifts that feel like they were written in the late nineties, but only now. Fully stood up into a song and recorded like lots of that real old stuff that you hear where you’re like, I wish this riff had bass in at all. just a ton of those for like three seconds at a time.

And then they’ll move on to something different and it’s awesome. So that’s my kind of best intro to the first one we’ll play called Cliff Hanger. Please don’t remind me that my name is included in that. I’m saying that to everyone within the sound of my voice here is that single,

Cliff: the second one will play introduces a little bit of a different way of approaching the same sort of type of thing. But again, I think you’ll keep Circling the right airport, just thinking of it as grind core, that is extremely respectful of other like adjacent sub genres and does it really intentionally, uh, and then brings it back to whatever they’re doing.

So this is forced collective introspection.

Kyle: If you dig those plenty more where that came from, check out Memory Theater out today on Monarch spelled m n r k. Go listen to it however you want, and then send the span your money through shows, merch and or direct donation. I think one of them has like a cannabis business, so feel free to explore and support that as well.

Cliff: They definitely have a cool shirt that has a monster made out of weed buds, so I highly recommend that one. I think they were doing tie dye versions there for a minute, so,

Kyle: That’s tight.

Cliff: Yes, 100%. So Kyle let’s see over and over again in the idea of this podcast, we say just because we pick a certain new release doesn’t mean that you have to build a playlist off of that.

We wouldn’t want to make things that difficult because that could really pigeonhole and I think what happens time after time, That is that we totally end up getting a playlist that’s sort of based on the original release because if I can get you rolling like two or three artists deep, if even that you need from me, then we end up with some sick, like extremely niche genre of specific playlist and I’m into all of them.

So what did you do this time?

Kyle: This one. It the direction was energy, but wound up being like very sound adjacent. There’s another quote in that same curing article where they said to us, it’s of the utmost importance to see members of the transgender and non-binary community, people of color, females queer is another, underrepresented people with a platform.

So we try to make the most of what we’ve been given. We also implement crowd work elements from rap shows. We’ve played like call and response methods. It’s almost in the same way that rap shows include punk elements into their world. Now they create mosh pens and convinces, they create mosh pits and convince the audience to do walls of death.

And we’re with it even if it’s simple. People look forward to being able to participate. Unifying moments like chanting, Fuck, ice. Or grind his love with the crowd, even gets bystanders who aren’t aing to let out some pent up energy. It’d be awesome to see more bands do that. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we make extreme music as an outlet for the realities that we are all dealt with.

So this playlist is called Fucking Hostile and ostensibly it’s a grind, core and power violence playlist. But around the title are puppy rainbow and flower emoji Just. A celebration of the inherent tensions that this band has already mastered, right? If you’ve been in one of these scenes for any amount of time, there is an air of positivity or at least release, or certainly supportiveness.

And it’s something that we’ve hinted at again and again and again when we’ve had conversations about this kind of music and why we loved it enough to, to do a podcast about it in the first place. So, whereas, , one of the more recent ones, like the Holy F Dimensional Bleed. One was short in number of tracks and long and length.

This one has a ton of songs that is only like, A, a cdr and a half basically. So this one is entitled in, intended to make you feel like you’re getting out and pushing on a skateboard or doing some yard work or getting pumped to go hang out with your friends, like. The tones and the songs are gnarly and the subject matter is kind of gnarly in a lot of cases.

But the one common thread throughout is it’s energizing. It is, it is meant to get you energized and, and raise your vibrations in a way.

Cliff: As usual, I’m just gonna pick a run that pumped me up a lot. Starting around track 13, we had a vermin womb song into a null song, which is. Tennessee Grind core band. We are gonna keep bringing up and then into a gel song, which feels like they kind of like snuck in the back door a little bit to this one.

But I just got to see gel on Monday in a parking lot and everything was just, yeah. Just, Yes. Uh, everything worked about it. And to your point about, uh, you know, flower emojis and, uh, being counterintuitive with the scene in general for, I don’t know if it’s timing or intent or whatever, but like me and you have been on like, scowl, gel, qua grind, like a whole bunch of like not just female fronted.

Female driven bands. And like you you get a lot of flower emoji as you like, kind of sit in that awkwardness cuz like they confront it directly. All of them obviously

Kyle: I love the Scowl logo so much. I love all of those bands. I am so happy to see women and gender nonconforming people, like really, really representing and crushing in the scene right now. It’s fun. Like the energy in scenes like this are so fun and supportive and like I, it makes me feel like we haven’t aged out of it.

Things are going really well there, like it just, In a wor in a world with so few things to be hopeful about it, just things like this things like this are not one of them. Thank you to as Squala Grind and many of the dope bands on this playlist.

Cliff: Hell yeah. Last thing we always cover in this podcast is one organization doing heavy work in their community, doing things that matter and bringing your attention to them so that you can be aware of it, so that you can contribute and oftentimes so that you can find the equivalent in your local area to have the same type of impact and get involved.

One thing that sort of has risen up recently, but also kind of was prompted from, Kyle, you brought up the title of the record, We talked about me, Memory, theater, This kind of idea of what do we know and how do we keep that information and how do we know that we know it later? And then how do we actually know that we know the things that we know versus the things that we think that we know that we might not know.

And just like all of this, One of the more, I think like counterintuitive truths of our very weird 2022 modern times is. idea that like we have unprecedented access to information through the internet it literally unprecedented. We’ve never had this level of access to data, to information, to thoughts, to opinions and experts.

And yet this has not made us more truthful, nor more patient, nor better informed because as it turns out, people. 100% exploit the complexity that comes along with access to all that information at once. Because access to everything the fire hose is itself a complexity that has to be worked through.

And so more than ever, what we’re noticing is that people in power will look us directly in the eye and lie really clearly without reservation, and they will not apologize later, even if the thing that they’re saying to you is verifiably untrue in that exact. Using all the information that’s available using publicly agreed upon ways to dispute it.

And so what we find ourselves kind of stuck here, and one of the endless examples of this that’s popped up lately is about bail reform. In places like New York and Chicago especially city and state leaders are pretty actively trying to blame fluctuations in crime rates on bail reform. And what they’re doing is they’re exploiting the complexity of the topic of things like bail reform and other.

Form ideas and how they impact crime data. But that’s all wrapped up right in like, how was crime data actually collected? Is this the right way to figure out whether crime itself is going up or down? Is the data itself being collected well? Is the data itself being cleaned? Is it being understood appropriately?

Like leaders are exploiting the complexity of all of this in order to deflect blame, and they’re simply. Fusing to honestly use data that their own departments are collecting. And so this came up to mind because we did talk about bail funds back in our April 1st Friday heavy episode, uh, which was really awesome.

And we spoke briefly then about the pretty obvious injustice of keeping people in jail because they can’t afford to pay a government sanction bribe to live their lives until their trial, So that was about dealing with the sort of reality of the situation. We want it to be different, but, but bail funds are designed to help people out of that reality.

Now and today though, what we wanna do is highlight an organization that’s working to change the situation itself over the long term. Cuz as we talk about really often, sometimes it’s when within one organization or sometimes it’s a coalition of organizations, but there’s always meeting the needs now.

and making the change happen long term. Both those things have to be taken care of or else we don’t take care of each other actually today. And so we wanna bring zealous to your attention. Zealous is a nonprofit criminal justice reform organization, and they support and train public defenders and advocates, and then even others with direct experience.

In order to shift the narrative around mass CRI criminalization, which bail reform is certainly wrapped up into Zeus’s team and their advisory council are made up of some truly great folks. Like I’m betting. If you pay attention in these spaces, you’ll recognize some people who are joined up with them, and that should in.

That should give you confidence when you’re looking at an organization, right? If people on the team are on the board of advisors or people that you recognize as people able to tell the truth, represent things correctly, speak up, like that’s cool. That’s a cool way to look into an organization and learn how to support it.

And I see a lot of people on that team page that I also see out in public pushing back on lies and false narratives around incarceration and bail reform and all that stuff. And speaking of that, the reason I was reminded about zealous the organization was I had recently read an op-ed by its founder in which he uses public data.

From New York to directly refute assertions from New York’s mayor about fluctuations in violent crime being caused by bail reform. And so this op-ed is just a really simple, like, this is literally. Not true. Here’s how you can know it’s not true. Here are like, here are all the links to all the ways to see that it’s not true.

Here are all the sub bullets about why it’s not true. And it’s all kind of linked up to stuff that certainly the mayor would have access to. But it’s otherwise being collected and just needs to be understood and interpreted so that folks actually understand when reforms are helping them and how they can expect to see a reform make an impact once it’s actually been.

Implemented. And so that all came back to me really quickly and thought this was a really cool opportunity to bring attention back again, not only to someone solving problems in the moment, but actually trying to change that narrative over time with data.

Kyle: I mean, as a professional communicator, it is. Wild to me to see this phenomenon play out over and over again where there’s very little accountability from the media, from the supposed fourth estate when politicians make these kinds of causal statements and do so pretty flippantly. You know, we, we see it in our home city of Atlanta.

About public transit and city jails and police facilities and, and, and, uh, we see it in San Francisco and LA around homelessness and housing. And we’re sure that you’ve seen some version of it in your city or small town as well. And a fact basis is, is the only way to continue to try to push back against the unthreading of reality.

So to create change, we must fund access to information. And the training of those who can understand and interpret that data and those who can take those facts to the public. Which, you know, a generation or two ago was just good journalism. But modern times require modern tools. So to learn more about one such institution, zealous and support their work, go to zello.us, Z A l o.us.

Clever short link. Hard to say out loud. So thank you to Zes. If you know any public defenders, friends of the podcast out there, please get them involved.

Cliff: Yep. Because those are the wow. I hate this phrase, but those are the boots on the ground. That’s the outcome of this organization that’s driving the narrative change is they understand that they must train and deploy public defenders at that level to go in and advocate for people in every instance that they can, and then use those same people to spread the word that, hey taking care of each other.

Actually helps us take care of each other. And doesn’t magically cause the crime rate to rise? Um, it turns out that’s actually negative, magical thinking.

Kyle: boots are for cops. Cliff, they’re the casual shoes on the ground.

Cliff: I know. But then, like Doc Martins, you know, are also boots and

Kyle: Cowboy Boots. Or boots. Yeah. Yeah. I feel you.

Cliff: this has been Friday heavy. We’ll be back in two weeks.

Go to tunedig.com or follow us on Instagram and Twitter for links to the new release, the playlist and the organization that we talked about today.