[Discussed: Florida, California, Buddhism, world building, Alex Jones, astrology, Liberace’s lover’s limosine, sculpture, sampling, old man noise, etc.]
I may have lived with Relay for Death’s Rachal and Roxann Spikula for some time before meeting either of them. It is hard to say for sure. I was living in a punk house in North Oakland where guests were common and communication was poor. But that fall I did notice a shift. Evidence of the twins began appearing around the house: stray mirror balls salvaged from the street, sun-bleached animal bones. Cryptic jars showed up in the refrigerator. The garden came back to life.
When I did finally encounter Rachal and Roxann, they were in the kitchen, ‘practicing.’ They moved quietly around the room with a cake in the oven, surrounded by trinkets and nondescript colorful liquids. The cake, I later learned, would serve as the projector screen for their upcoming performance at The Lab, in San Francisco.
For over a decade the Spikulas have shape shifted under the vague umbrella of ‘noise.’ And, on its surface, the band’s sounds do fit nicely into that genre. But RFD’s approach is far more strange than the category suggests. The duo incorporates trash, prosthetic limbs, motors, totems, field recordings, astrology, food, musique concrete, meditation, costume, and sculpture into their live performances and records. RFD is less a ‘band’ than it is a process, a way of interacting with objects. Rachal and Roxann build structures to perform within and around, creating new environments from found materials, and performing live soundtracks to the worlds they’ve built.
At a recent show in SF, the two filled an upstairs club with a van-load of tumbleweeds, and created a algae-filled fountain from a decrepit bathtub. During the climax of their set, a drag queen emerged from a giant paper mache clam. The performance lasted about 10 minutes. The next day all of the materials were gone, disappeared, like evidence of a strange dream.
Rachal and Roxann’s process is chaotic, but tempered by a mutual trust in chance, a dedication to strange distractions and detours. While ‘noise’ is part of their palette, maybe Relay for Death would be best understood, more broadly, as ‘psychedelic music,’ if it’s to be understood as music at all.
RFD has toured in the United States and Australia, and released albums on Hanson, No Rent, and RRRRecords.
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(“No matter how short, or apparently unrecognizable a ‘sample’ might be in linear time perception, I believe it must, inevitably, contain within it (and accessible through it), the sum total of absolutely everything its original context represented, communicated or touched in any way...”
- Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, 1991
“Now, there are a great many talismans in this world which are being left lying about in a most reprehensibly careless manner. Such are the objects of popular adoration, as ikons, and idols. But, it is actually true that a great deal of real magical Force is locked up in such things....”
-Aleister Crowley, from Magick : Book 4)
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How did the band start? What was going on in your lives at the time?
Rach: It was 2004, or 2005? We were playing under a couple of different names.
Rox: It started at that house show. Because we were setting up house shows for a minute, in Raleigh. And I think we were just kind of fucking around doing black metal. It was that Suffering Bastard show. Is that right?
Rach: Was that our first show as RFD? I guess I don’t really remember.
What was the instrumentation then?
Rox: I was on drums. Rachal did bass and sampler. Maybe I did some tape stuff? We were maybe 20, or 22. We definitely didn’t pull off black metal, but that’s maybe what was guiding us.
Had you guys collaborated on things before that? Musical or otherwise?
Rox: The very first thing was an Elvis cover band, basically.
Rachal: Yeah, it was an Elvis cover band called Blue Suede Fuck. I played guitar with an ice skate, Roxann played drums, and our friend Andy Borsz did vocals. That didn’t last too long, but we did some of those shows just before moving to New York.
What about when you were kids? Did you listen to music then?
Rox: Yeah, there was music around. Mostly our dad’s record collection.
Rach: Yeah. A lot of Weird Al, Cyndi Lauper. Twisted Sister was pretty big for us as kids. Just as a backdrop I think. Alice Cooper was big, and Twisted Sister. Swimming in the pond, coming in... we’d put on Twisted Sister, or maybe we’d put on some Weird Al.
Rox: Twisted Sister, we thought the name was cool. And I think they would call us that a lot because we listened to it. Like, ‘Where’s your Twisted Sister?’
Were there things leading up to the band that that developed the creative relationship between you two?
Rach: As kids we were always kind of building worlds. All of the zones had names. It was maybe a Russian doll thing, of world building, because our mom is a landscape designer and is really good at transforming environments with rocks and trees and waterfalls in a pretty magical way.
Rox: And Florida itself is a big land project.
Rach: Yeah. We’d carve worlds out of worlds that had been carved, but it was still very wild. There was a kind of falling-apart shack in the yard we’d hide under. We called it Lipstick Land, because there was a sign that said ‘lipstick’ under there, in the dirt.
Rox: We’d hide under there when people came over.
Rach: I think having someone to retreat into weird worlds with, physically, probably helped us do that conceptually or artistically later.
Rox: Rachal always sort of wrote. I got a drum set when I was 17 or so, with the idea to start a band and have Rachal sort of front it, and to turn these writings I would find of hers into songs. So when we first started doing music it was more lyric-heavy. A lot of, like, feminist rants. Basically, it was screaming vocals that drove it, along with the drums. We kind of fell off of that pretty hard though.
The vocal aspect?
Rox: Yeah, or even it being centered around verbalized ideas. It just became more abstract.
Rach: A lot of our friends were in bands early on, but they were more straight ahead. It never felt right to be just a spectator. And I think maybe what we wanted was a little weirder.
When did you begin to incorporate more electronics and hand-made instruments?
Rach: Pretty early on. A couple shows were more drum-oriented. But I feel like pretty early on you [to Roxann] were making reel-to-reel tape loops and using that Califone. And I was doing feedback through an old bass amp head.
Rox: Yeah. I think a lot of it had to do with moving and maybe losing instruments. It went to just scrap metal stuff for percussion pretty quickly. It seemed more circumstantial, a lot of it. Using what was available. Then we had access to some weird old equipment that our grandpa had hoarded in some buildings.
Rach: You made that record player out of a box fan to play those massive old radio station LPs we found.
A big part of what’s interesting about the band is this specific kind of intuition, or psychic communication, you two share. I wonder when that started being something you would present to other people?
Rach: In Florida we didn’t have any outlet or formal creative direction. It wasn’t really a possibility in our younger years to do something performative. But we did a lot of acid. I think that definitely influenced us.
How old were you when you started taking acid?
Rach: 13. And there was a horse pasture next to the yard, so we were also able to take mushrooms pretty frequently. That definitely had a huge impact, shaped how we thought about things. We were pretty anti-everything. And developing these ideas that were based on walking around dirt roads...
Rox: Yeah, anti-everything, I think that’s the common thing. That’s what developed that helped shape our connection with each other, and, along with mushrooms or acid, that fleshed out that interior world. And maybe it didn’t exteriorize until we figured out doing sound. But I think that sound was always a big part of our
Rach: Yeah. A lot of it will happen where there’s a particular sound we haven’t used yet, or that keeps coming up. It’s not that conscious.
You talked about swamps. I know you also made an early record during an impatient medical study. How much does the environment you’re composing in influence the content? Is that something you pursue at all?
Rox: No. Even when making the record in the med study, I’m not even sure how much inspiration we pulled from that environment. It’s just all we had to do. We’re in a small room for a couple of months.
Rach: Some of that record, for me anyway, was influenced by first seeing the Big Sur coast.
Rox: Yeah. Mostly it’s just snapshots of where we were at a certain time. And, being in an isolated place, you have nothing but those things to draw on. And sense memories. There aren’t really any smells. It’s a really sterile environment.
Rach: We’re definitely really sensitive to our environment, so it seeps in. But we’re not like, ‘I want to record here, because I want this to seep in.’ Some of the shit we will record and be like, ‘This sounds like Black Sink Prairie,’ this particular swamp, because it has the same feel. Even though the source material and recording location is different. And it becomes that for us, so the sounds can also influence our experience of a place.
How about the environment the sounds are presented in? Do you aim to transform it or overcome it?
Rox: All of it is pretty much taking over the environment. Creating or emitting, rather than the detectable arc of a composition. It’s like, ‘I’m trapping you in this thing right now. You’re feeling what’s being emitted.’ That’s kind of a goal. And you can feel it when it hits, you know? And sometimes it just doesn’t.
Even though you use harsh sounds in your music, it doesn’t have an obvious aggression to it. Some of the records feel more like minimalist music even. One can really get lost in it. Is there an intended audience effect for the recordings? Do you imagine how your music is received?
Rox: I think I’d say that it applies the same to the recording process [as it does live]. As far as the type of atmosphere you’d want to create, or drag them into. For me that’s intentional. In the same way, the same place [as a show].
I don’t even really see it that much as a mood thing. It’s almost like an audio-spacial thing. You kind of want them to feel a little bit dislocated, but inserted into this thing that you want to be fully immersive.
I’m wondering if it’s more feminine in that way. There isn’t this ascending action, climax/release, this phallic arc to it. Is any of that intentional, or am I reading that right at all?
Rox: Yeah, it’s more to locate you...
Rach: It works a little more like geology..
How do you mean? The pace of it?
Rach: More like no detectable telos.. It’s like there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to do; trajectory is an invention... I have an aversion to gendering concepts, but I don’t think of intentionally trying to be non-aggressive or non-’masculine’ or anything.
Rox: I feel like there’s a bit of intention in that.
Rach: I mean, noise has always seemed more innately ‘feminine.’
What’s the longest you’ve ever played? The longest you’ve sat with one idea?
Rox: We could sort of collapse, sitting with one loop for hours.
Rach: In the van we had one CD that got stuck in the player. One song was on repeat for like a year. Always playing. It was maniacal.. It wasn’t our song though.
Do you ever think of doing longer performances?
Rach: Yeah, I guess that’s funny. Our shows, if they’re past seven minutes they feel too long. We don’t generally play long shows. I know I don’t have the attention span for it at a show. But if I’m listening to something at home, I can listen to a single loop endlessly.
Rox: We did do Atrophy Motor, installations we set up with some performance that would go on during shows at Terminal [Oakland noise venue]. Those would go for hours.
Could you talk about things you work on outside of music or art? Things that might inform your approach?
Rox: We’re always building things.
Rach: We’re always building things. We’re very hous-y. A lot of it can be circumstantial, like with eviction or having to move for various reasons. Like when you don’t want to live with a bunch of people you find yourself piping in water and building walls in weird spaces. Collecting fake plants.
Rox: We had plans for a Pagan infoshop in Margaritaville- our place we had in Richmond [CA]. That got cut short because of the fallout post-Ghost Ship, and having to deal with housing inspectors.
Rach: We’re informed by paganism, the moon, architecture. I wrote a book called Architecture of Blaugh that’s about the onslaught of bullshit architecture popping up in the Bay, and everywhere, really.
Rox: We’re informed by buildings. And bodies.
Didn’t you tour with a full body cast at some point?
Rach: Well, we didn’t begin with it, but we gradually made it. We made it in Tulsa, and we finished it somewhere. Missouri?
Rox: We did it half in a hotel, and some in a parking lot, a gravel lot or something.
Rach: And a little in a park?
Rox: It was a couple of different settings.
So you would do the torso or something, then come back to it?
Rach: Yeah, and pull it off, then rewrap it. I think we did the arms and legs separately or something.
What happened with the finished product?
Rox: One is in Liberace’s lover’s limousine.
Is that something literal that you’re saying?
Rach: Yeah. Jack London George, the guy who owned the Bordello in Oakland. He died recently
Rox: ‘Rest in Pizazz,’ as Micheal Whittiker would say..
Rach: He bought Liberace’s lover’s limousine at an auction. We left the body cast there [at the Bordello], and he put it in the limousine.
Rox: It was parked in his house.
Rach: Yeah, it was parked in the house, by his weird indoor tennis court thing. I think that must’ve been the first one [cast]. We used it for a show we played at Hellarity [long running North Oakland squat]. Then we left it there at the Bordello, and then we made another one as we moved across the US. And that one is in the pit, in the back building at our Grandpa’s house. I don’t remember putting it down there.
Was it used as part of a performance on that tour?
Rach: I guess so?
Rox: That was the tour that [our cousin] Fey did with us.
Rach: Oh yeah. We were essentially moving across country with a few shows set up along the drive, but ended up joining Cock ESP and Rat Bastard on the Phi Phenomena tour for some shows after Chicago. Fey came and performed, too.
Rox: Fey is our cousin. She did slow, imperceptible performative movements that looked like an opening and closing rib cage.
Rach: I think at that time she was conjuring flickering thresholds and pulsating wombs.
Rox: Yeah. She reaches through deep psychic cracks when she performs
Rach: We were all painted white with, like, bald caps so we looked like the body cast. Still, slow replicas. We used sounds from a haunted amp.
When did sculptural elements become part of the band?
Rox: For me, I almost feel similar inspiration for doing sound and for sculpting. Even with what motivates you to make music--sometimes it’s love. But I think it could be the same thing with the sculpture. The type of creating is so similar. And also the way we layer the sound, the slow hacking away, rather than a build, like you were saying.
Rach: Also there’s this kind of thematic, existential materialization of sensory portals.
Rox: That’s what the whole project maybe is.
What role are these objects playing during performances in that case?
Rach: It can honestly be a huge procrastination to keep us from plugging in our gear. Like, ‘Well, we have a show coming up. We should probably make a hand, and buy a motor, and have something spin on it.’
Rox: But it is very important. [Laughs.]
Rach: It’s important for sure. We have a new band Pagan Youth with Rian Pickell [of Dove Ocean, Black Dog, etc.] where we delve into that realm and use ritual objects with more intention. But with RFD there’s not a lot of intentional ritual, specifically, with the objects in that sense.
Rox: And the objects don’t exactly lend to repeated use. It manifests itself in the chaos or frenzy of, ‘What the fuck do we even do?’ This is what happens.
But afterwards these objects are probably some of the only evidence of each performance, or of the experience?
Rox: Yeah, totally!
Rach: For instance, this last show in Australia, we spent more time looking for white eggs than we did getting the set together. Maybe it’s some marketing ploy, but in Sydney, stores only sell brown eggs. So we ended up spray painting brown eggs white in this alleyway, to put in these white wax masks we were going to wear. Eggs-as-eyes. It was part of some elaborate performance idea, but we didn’t even end up wearing these masks, or doing any of that. But it did feel important.
Rox: And it came through somehow actually, to people who had something to say about the set, and the sounds. It seemed to be the theme of the night. It definitely does, in a big way, influence… it changes the environment, whether that’s our intention or not. Fetish objects, I guess, provide an oblique route for transmission.
That’s cool that you guys share that, the desire to follow those diversions.
I’d like to go through some of your records and talk about what was going on when each was made. Do you want to start with Mutual Consuming? Is that upcoming, technically?
Rach: It’s part of a box set with 9 other artists called On Corrosion that just came out. Each album from the set will be released separately in the near future. So it exists now as part of the box set, but the separate release of what we contributed is upcoming.
Rox: A lot of this record was going through a backlog of the past 10 years worth of sounds we’ve collected and used in live shows but not in recordings. So they exist in source tapes, or on samplers. Sounds we’ve been meaning to compile for a long time but never got around to.
Do you remember the context of the sounds when you come back to them?
Both: Yeah, definitely.
Rach: ‘Terminal Ice Wind’ was the name of a loop that we were playing a lot when we were living at Terminal. And we would sort of sink into the velvet couch in the show space and listen to it for a really long time.
What does Mutual Consuming refer to?
Rach: It’s a Chinese medicine term. It’s an aspect of yin and yang. How, if you have an excess of one thing, it almost implies a deficiency of another as the forces shift balance. It seemed to fit the idea of en- tropy and chemical reactions involved in corrosion.
We also just liked how it sounded. The idea seemed pretty apt, culturally too.
Right now, or generally?
Rach: Especially right now. Identity consumption. Just like, identity as a capitalist enterprise; platforms set up to mutually gorge on presentations of each oth- er.
Rox: It reminds me of something I just read. I wrote it down; it’s from The Information Bomb by Paul Virilio: ‘Advertisement in the 19th century was simply the publicizing of a product, before becoming in the 20th century an industry for stimulating desire, is set in the 21st century to become pure communication.’
What, do you think, is meant by ‘pure communication’ there?
Rox: Maybe ‘pure’ in a distilled sense. Like, there’s a sense of immediacy in image proliferation and exchange, especially when it’s tied into identity and lifestyle advertisement.
Was the theme of corrosion part of the assignment?
Rach: Yeah, that was the assignment. Jim Haynes, who put it out, curated artists sort of based around how their sound relates to different aspects of corrosion. ‘Contributions to a lexicon of decay,’ is how he framed it.
Rox: And also, we’ve had these things on tape and corroding, these old sounds. We’ve been reworking all these things.
Rach: And when things corrode they become another thing.
Which release is next, going backwards? Natural Incapacity? I think I have them listed in terms of release date, but I’m not sure when they were made.
Rach: Natural Incapacity is something we made in 2010, but it wasn’t released until way later. It was a period of a whole lot of churning, muddy nothing, in a way. This was the first thing we released with Jim Haynes. When he asked to release something of ours, I was like, ‘This is what we have, and it’s autobiographical, so we can’t change it. And it’s fucking monotonous.’
Rox: And it’s two hours long.
Rach: And it’s two hours long. Well, the idea with that was, you have this really long ponderous thing, one CD. And you have to go put on the 2nd part, but it’s more of the same thing. You can’t get out of it. It’s relentless. At the time things felt like an impossible onslaught.
What was going on personally?
Rox: Saturn Return shit.
Rach: Saturn Return shit. Weren’t you crashing in a boat reading Moby Dick?
Rox: Yeah, at one point. For a lot of that recording I was collecting sounds from the ports around Oakland and the Alameda Naval Yard, and also U-Boat sounds. There were collections from the library of underwater bombs and things. I was sort of collecting all these sounds without any intention of it turning into anything. It just felt good to do.
[to Rach:] I think you found it. I didn’t expect that to be anything I would share with the world, or you, even. But I think you found it and were like, ‘This is what’s happening right now. This is what life is right now.’ You re-worked the whole thing. Because it was longer than two hours. It was really fucking long.
Rach: I would listen to it in that narrow room all the time. It was just this thing that bubbled up that was what was happening. It was like an underwater implosion of drudgery--impossible, monotonous slag that just surfaced. For anyone who cares to know, or wants to get into the symbolism, we have Saturn and Mars conjunct, with a close Pluto in the 7th house, squaring our sun and moon. It was a lot of internal, underwater intensity, and intense interpersonal dynamics. It felt like a protracted psychic cold war.
Rox: With U-Boats.
Can you still listen to stuff you made a long time ago?
Rox: It’s easier for me to go back. I can’t listen to things immediately.
Rach: I feel like a big part of the recording process for us is hate. You know? Hating it all. Almost like, you haven’t really finished it until you’ve reached that point. I think everyone experiences this: If you’re editing something for a while, you don’t even know what you’re hearing anymore. So you’ve definitely got to step back.
Rox: I think it’s cathartic, listening back.
Rach: Well, also because you remember what was happening at the time. But that one, we felt almost bad for releasing it. [Laughs.]
Because of the duration?
Rach: Duration and content. [Laughs.] I mean, we wanted it to exist. We initially intended to self-release it, but were approached to release something, and we were like, ‘This is the next thing. This is what we were going to do.’ This was the first thing we did with Jim Haynes. And he was perfect, because we had envisioned it packaged in rusted metal, and that’s his specialty. So it worked out well; he did a great job on it.
What about Anxiety of the Eye?
Rach: We did that at Margaritaville. We had just gotten out of that one warehouse in Berkeley, The Foundry.
Rox: A lot of the Foundry sounds make it on that record, because it was immediately after living there. And a lot of that felt like living on the edge of capitalism.
Rach: Definitely. Living in the decaying ex-steel foundry and peeing in jugs. Living with Shawn.
Is Shawn on the record at all?
Rach: Not on that one. Actually, Shawn doesn’t make it into RFD recordings. Because we have, it’s either Shawn’s Band, was one of the names, or Today’s Economy. Those are our bands with Shawn.
What would you say Shawn’s role is when he’s involved?
Rach: Shawn’s always a welcome presence. He likes to zone the fuck out. That’s when we met Shawn, on the bus [*a friend’s repurposed AC Transit bus, used for years as a mobile venue in Oakland], when it was parked outside of Pine Street. Some band had left their gear on the bus, and the 3 of us just started playing.
Rox: Shawn likes to... he does the same thing. He’s almost the only other person we can play music with. If you listen back to the recordings [with Shawn], you’re closing your eyes at the same time he is; you’re feeling it.
Rach: You sink into it all.
Rox: He kind of gets it in the same way, I guess.
Rach: He gets it, yeah.
Rox: But yeah, there will be times listening with him where you’re closing your eyes at the same time, getting into the same space. I guess that would make sense to you, because you know Shawn. But maybe not...he’s so erratic otherwise.
Yeah. Feel free to over-explain this stuff for the reader.
Rach: Shawn is a verbally cryptic genius / chess champion / artist from the Bay. His mind went to a secret place he stopped letting anyone in on long before we met him. He’s definitely special in our lives in general. Even though he doesn’t talk to me right now. I mean, he’ll still be like, ‘OK, I’ll come move out there [to North Carolina] with you.’ [Laughs.] But he’s not actively talking to me.
He would do vocals with you sometimes right?
Both: Yeah.
Rach: Vocals, playing a bass or something, hitting stuff. Basically, Shawn is always welcome to play, if he actually will.
Did he ever tour with you guys?
Rach: Oh, yeah. Well, not really tour, but we drove to New Mexico and played some shows with Black Dog. Shawn had just found a little bunny hopping around in the street, and he put it in his backpack and called it Lil’ Shawny. This was on Easter. So we took her along, too.
What about the name, Anxiety of the Eye, is it a Georges Bataille reference?
Rach: Yeah, I mean, the Bataille thing is in there, but it’s not so straightforward.
Rox: The cover of it is a cochlea. It looks like the eye, but it’s not; it’s the inner ear.
Rach: [It’s about] the anxiety of perception, perceiving. Being a thing that perceives among things to perceive, some of which also perceive.
That record seems distinct from the others somehow. Maybe it’s because the sources feel really varied?
Rach: Yeah, that one definitely felt like mixes of places. Especially places in California. It definitely had that more intentional grab of, like, Afton Canyon sounds.
Rox: That’s this small swamp in the desert. You’re in the desert, but you can hear frog sounds. That made it in there. And an image of The Foundry is on the tape also. It’s very much little snapshots of that time. We were spending a lot of time in the desert. A lot of the field recordings are in parts of the desert, with metal littered throughout it, abandoned shit. That might be a little difficult to explain, but that record has more intention behind the narrative than anything we’ve done.
It almost felt more cinematic. I listened to it while walking around a lot.
Rox: Well , I think a lot of it is creating this space.... The idea is this thing in between sensation and organ, that materiality springs from. That’s what we were going for. Where you’re located in this place between materiality and sensation. And what that longing is, where it comes from. Because it’s a felt-sense, but it also materializes in a way that can be captured by these organs that were developed to perceive.
Not just the eye, but...
Rox: The ear or, even, yeah. And, what are they after? What is the desire? That kind of thing. The way I think it is supposed to make you feel is in-between.
Side B, ‘Western Sensorium,’ is like an open love letter in a way, like from the organ to the object it can never fully reach in an absolute way. The whole thing is also a bit about the anxiety of the ‘I,’ and Western expansion in general. The whole myth of progress.
Rach: Is that album post-Buddhism?
Rox: Yeah, totally.
What do you mean?
Rach: Well, since we were young we were always pretty influenced by Eastern thought. Our dad had books lying around. We had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and we were into the artwork. But we would also read it, and the Diamond Sutra, or certain Bud- dhist texts that were around. They always made more sense than whatever Christianity was available to us.
Rox: But I think it was more available than any- thing. I don’t think we had many Western influences as far as...
Rach: I just mean insofar as American culture is generally Christian. But these books were just lying around. It wasn’t offered to us specifically; we just saw it. So I think that went hand in hand with acid. But it wasn’t until much later that we actually learned to meditate. And that was more of a concerted goal, going to a place to meditate.
Rox: That was post-Natural Incapacity. After that we each began doing meditation. Spent about a year in India.
Rach: Natural Incapacity was recorded so much earlier. So this would be our post-meditation-experience record, which is interesting, because it’s all about sensation.
Is the first record the Heating Up The Ovens one?
Rach: No, that’s the second. Well, actually we have a first one, on RRR Recycled Tapes.
Rox: Birth of a Much More..., that [title] comes from Mike Williams of EyehateGod. We contacted him. We happened to have his book with us in the medical study, one of his books of poetry. And he happens to be from High Point [NC], which is a town that’s kind of close to our hearts.
Rach: So we wrote him and asked if we could use it.
Rox: And also, with Eyehategod, it seemed to be fitting. Plus, the title. The title of the poem was, ‘Cancer as a social activity,’ or something like that. So it seemed to go with Relay For Death in a way.
Rach: That was definitely something that we happened to bring to the study. Someone lent it to us, I think.
Rox: I think our first tape was called Feticide though. [Laughs.]
Rach: We did have a first tape called Feticide. This was before the Recycled tape. Actually, maybe [Aaron] Dilloway heard that and then offered to release something. I think there’s one lying around the house still.
Do you want to talk about the band name?
Rach: I think it was the era of unfortunate punny band names that we were all subject to.
I see shirts at thrift stores that say Relay For Life pretty often.
Rach: Yeah, that’s a big cancer awareness thing. We definitely didn’t intentionally reference that. It was more just, a dumb pun, I guess. But that name stuck. I guess you could probably get more deep on it, but...
What about the They’re Heating up the Ovens... record? That was the second one? If you count the med study record as your first proper LP, that is.
Rach: Yeah, then that would be the second.
Rox: Have you heard that? Because I don’t think anyone has. A German label reissued it. Well, we self-released it, on No Rent Records, when No Rent was ours, and Jason Crumer’s. I know people have it. We actually made a handful of orders.
Rach: It was all dipped in hair and tar.
Rox: We definitely spent more money sending them than we got for the tapes.
Rach: There was this jarred food that had been in my Grandpa’s basement for fifty, sixty years or something. Didn’t we put one in one of those jars and send it to Holland or something?
Rox: We sent a few impractical things to Europe. We didn’t make much back with postage and stuff. That’s why we don’t have a label and Jason does.
[Both laugh.]
Rach: What was happening then? I really like that album.
Rox: That was also pretty environmental. Global warming style. At that time there were a lot of--
Rach: Environmental crises?
Rox: Yeah, maybe that’s what we were kind of centered on thinking about.
When was that? Were you living in California?
Rach: Yeah, we had been.
Rox: Some of that was recorded in the mountains of North Carolina. ‘Big Satan’ was recorded on a goat farm. That was the name of one of the goats. And there was little Asmodeus..
Rach: Some of it was recorded in those giant tubes that were in that lot across from Pine St in West Oakland too.
That’s cool. I used to like recording in there.
Rox: People were getting pretty wrapped up in Alex Jones style things. Where there’s this big conspiracy, like ‘FEMA’s taking over;’ ‘They’re making the frogs gay.’
Rach: Well, our brother was blaring that shit 24/7.
Rox: We also had a friend who got really deep into it and kind of lost his mind, got arrested. It threw him into a schizophrenic episode. This was before Alex Jones becoming such a household name. But I remember it feeling like, every- thing’s fucked, but maybe it’s more fucked than even that. Where are you going to go? Everything’s heating up, you can’t get out.
Rach: Which, it was. It is now. but in this whole other way...
Rox: But, perpetuating it with the ideology, too.
Rach: Or like the result of that paranoia has showed itself to be the breakdown of critical thought more than New World Order takeover fear or whatever. It’s fucking weird to think about.. the cultural impact of conspiracy and the brand of political division you see now.
Rox: He’s [Jones] so tied into the alt-right these days, since Trump’s election. But early on he was just this voice that people listened to on radio, or Youtube, or something.
He really exploded into the mainstream.
Rox: Yeah. Shit’s pretty inverted these days.
Are there public figures or current events you find yourselves thinking about more recently? Does any of that seep into the music?
Rach: It’s hard not to think about how inside out everything is and the bizzaro kind of cultural inversions going on, but there’s no big intentional impact on our music. If it happens I feel like it’s more in retrospect, maybe more than during recording. It’s all a bit more psychically submerged, what we tend to draw on rather than events or public figures.
Rox: We have been asked to play things that were curated around concepts or figures like Lovecraft or Timothy Morton.
Rach: Yeah. In that case something about our sound evoked that figure for someone, and we get a set together and gear it a bit more intentionally to concepts in their work.
Do you think the noise category is one that makes sense for RFD? Or could it just as easily have been something else?
Rach: I think it makes sense. It’s just so based on friends. Maybe that would make it circumstantial. But I feel comfortable being part of that lineage. I don’t know what else we would do. What would we do?
[Both laugh.]
Haha, that’s fair. I guess I mean as opposed to performance art, or some category like that.
Rach: Holiday music? We really like playing on 4/20, especially when it falls on Easter.
Rox: We played a show on Easter when it fell on April 20th one year. We had a giant rabbit jump out of a paper mache bong while we ate boiled eggs and lit homemade smoke bombs. We had samples going from Wicker Man.
Rach: It was all pretty pagan.
Rox: The last 4/20 we played in Oakland we made two human-sized joints and projected faces on them. The joints were at a pie eating contest, so the faces were covered in whipped cream, chewing.
Rach: We put dry ice in them, they looked like they were smoking. Caroline from Krudz made pie eating noises while we played from behind the joint bodies.
Rox: So I guess you could say performance art?
Rach: I think we’ve been accused of making ‘old man noise’ since--
Rox: Since the beginning.
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experience anyway. everything is.
Rach: All the bugs.
Living in the swamp, just how loud
You incorporate a lot of non-sound elements too. What makes RFD a band, rather than some other type of project?
Rach: We never really wrote songs, so just the experi- ence of improv was really revelatory at first. Just being in that space live where you kind of can’t hide with- out performing. Like the tightrope. So, even though it wasn’t like we were writing a performance, you had to get in a performance space mentally. And that was really appealing to us when we started, to have it evolve into something.
Do you guys find that it falls into roles between the two of you?
Rach: I feel like I go “kroosh krooosh,” [low booms] and Roxann goes “eeeeeeeer” [high pitched whirring]. That’s pretty much it.
[Laughs.] I guess I meant, process-wise. Is there a division of labor?
Rach: We are definitely really anti-hierarchy. That’s why it was always hard for us to play with other people. We’re really not down with it, and have a hard time with it. We can be like ‘“Fuck you,” if we have to, to each oth- er. No one has to really take on a role of, “This is what we’re going to do.” I think it builds on the sound, and the feel. If you have something, you throw it in there.
Rox: Yeah, something to sort of bounce off of.
Rach: I think our biggest challenge is getting motivat- ed to do anything, recording-wise, or performing. We just have to plug everything in. But as far as which one of us is making us start, I think that changes.
So you’ll improvise or mess with source material as an origin point?
Both: Yeah.