#109: Aesthetic and sonic principles from power violence
Discoveries of the American Scientific; They are Gutting a Body of Water; The Most Beautiful Moth in America; My Life at The Bottom of the Ocean; Love? said the Commander; I've run out of space
Discoveries of the American Scientific
When you self-describe as a “really nice Indie-Electronic Rock Band from Chicago” and play patient, layered indie rock, of course you’d tour with Jesus Jones.1 It goes without saying. Sadly, said tour was canceled, but you can find Jesus Jones co-headlining with EMF in the UK next month!
When they announced the tour was off, Discoveries of the American Scientific posted a great cover of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” But the video’s on Facebook, which doesn’t embed in Substack, so you’ll have to go there to see it. We all know that ain’t happening. But I can embed this Instagram post that’s relevant to their band name (and our current political climate).
They are Gutting a Body of Water
There are a lot of ways to open a press release about your new album. Philly’s They are Gutting a Body of Water chose darkness:
Fear. Hate. Distrust. Poverty. Exploitation. And in all of this hollowness, where do we find solace? Where do we seek wholeness?
If you answered “brightly colored products on shelves, dopamine-pushing apps or money-making scams, fed to us slowly and methodically to keep us hooked,” you chose darkness too. It goes on:
The hollow promise of having enough money to purchase an unending supply of things that will never truly make us feel complete, the carrot on the end of the stick that we chase forever.
Again, that’s the opening graf. From there, it non-transitions to “LOTTO, the fourth studio album from They Are Gutting a Body of Water…”
Wait, what? Should you stick around for the 900 words (!!) that follow, you’ll understand how those themes inform LOTTO. You’ll also be treated to quotes like this one from frontman Doug Dulgarian: “In a world of perpetually increasing artifice, this record is my attempt to surface through the sea of false muck.” (Is that worse than a sea of actual muck?)
All this before Dulgarian talks about waking up on New Year’s Day 2025 “nose-diving into fentanyl withdrawal.”
In short, Dulgarian has been through some shit on his way leading what Stereogum calls “the most important band in modern shoegaze.” (Keeping with the theme, writer Eli Enis called Dulgarian’s label, Julia’s War Recordings, “the Creation Records of 2020s shoegaze.”)
What he hasn’t been through, seemingly, are interviews asking the origin of his band name. I only found this one with radio station WPTS in 2023:
Our first question is super basic. We love the band name, how’d you come up with it?
First of all, I had a dream about it, and then I saw it as a tattoo on somebody.
Somebody had the tattoo that said “They Are Gutting A Body of Water?”
Yeah, it was like a stick-and-poke.
Maybe it’s bullshit, but Dulgarian has a lot floating around in his brain. Last year’s odds-and-ends comp swanlike (loosies 2020-2023) has a song called “Fight at a Kegger in the Woods and Everybody is Shining Their Phone Lights Into the Carnage Screaming.” So his story isn’t out of the question.
The Most Beautiful Moth in America
I can’t find much information about the New York-based group that self-identifies as “Coldplay for rats.” Clicking through to YouTube, it looks like the project of songwriter Maggie Rosenberg. When I reached out via Instagram about the origin of the name, she kindly indulged me:
I came up with the name several years before the band even became a thing actually. I was on a YouTube rabbit hole watching videos of moths in their cocoons and time lapse videos of them coming out of their cocoons etc. one of the videos was a kind of home made looking edit put together by some guy for his granddaughter or something. It was a time lapse of a Luna moth coming out of the cocoon and there were title cards overlayed describing what was happening. One of the title cards said “do you know why the Luna moth is so green?” And I remember thinking it would be some sort of scientific explanation, but then he answered with just “I think it’s so that she can be the most beautiful moth in America”
More scientific is a recent Facebook post by something called 1 Minute Animals. It proclaims the luna moth “The Most Beautiful Moth in America.” (Capitalized, so you know they mean it.)
I find all moths kind of gross, but I get it. Yet just a few words later, 1 Minute Animals backtracks, describing the luna moth as “one of the most breathtaking moths in North America.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, now it’s only breathtaking in North America? Who got to you, 1 Minute Animals? Was it those cecropia moth goons?
They only have one minute, so there’s no time to get into it, apparently. However, they’re happy to tell you the moths are nocturnal and don’t have mouths. That’s because they only live for a week and spend the whole time having sex. Let us look to the luna moth for inspiration, everybody.
My Life at The Bottom of the Ocean
The little information I could find about this “Midwest-emo grunge punk shoegaze post-hardcore type shit” group tells me it came together in July 2022, and didn’t we all feel like we were living at the bottom of the ocean during the pandemic? Like, with all the pressure and isolation? Please work with me here. I only have so much to go on with these guys.
I did manage to find a bio, so please retrieve your Local Band Bio bingo cards. Anyone have that they are “not to be pegged into any one genre of music”? How about how they’re “one of those bands that has to be experienced for yourself”? Does anyone’s card have a line about “undeniable” stage presence? Come get your prize!
There’s no word on the origin of their name. Searching online only turns up a couple references to people actually using the phrase “my life at the bottom of the ocean,” including a 2017 Facebook post for a mobile game called Fishdom. “I would have never imagined that I’d find the love of my life at the bottom of the ocean!” proclaims a prince who fell in love with a mermaid character or some shit.
People are mad at the game, according to comments on that post and another on Reddit called “Fishdom is a scam.” Apparently you have to keep buying stuff to make it past the levels.
Even now, I do not start a level unless I have 28 diamonds. I do not start a red level without either a black mine or a yellow colour bomb. I do not start a purple level without a red dynamite. I do not start a challenge level without both a yellow colour bomb and a red dynamite.
How fun!
Love? said the Commander
Normally you steel yourself for bleakness when you learn a band took their name from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Love? said the Commander. What kind of love?
Falling in love, I said.
The Commander looked at me with his candid boy’s eyes. Oh yes, he said. I’ve read the magazines, that’s what they were pushing, wasn’t it? But look at the stats, my dear. Was it really worth it, falling in love? Arranged marriages have always worked out just as well, if not better.
That passage follows a whole monologue from the Commander about how women are better off as baby machines with no autonomy. Today it sounds less like a future dystopia and more like a trad-wife influencer on TikTok. Nolite te bastardes, etc.
Anyway, this duo from “PhilaJersey” self-describes as “slow burning cinematic emo that’ll make ya feel stuff,” which sounds much more positive than Margaret Atwood’s novel or Hulu’s relentlessly bleak adaptation of same.
The duo even has a fun 30-second intro video on YouTube, explaining “who we are and what we do.” They have a series called Spaces, where they record “live performances in unique locations” (including one where member Kate Hall received a tattoo while playing piano) and The Public Domain Song Project, where they record songs for various media in the public domain. Mostly silent films.
Turns out “cinematic emo” is pretty literal and not, as I expected, another way to say “atmospheric.”
They also describe their approach as “maximal minimalism,” because you need to put your literature degree to use somewhere.2 While they don’t specify what, exactly, maximal minimalism means, the fact that they’re a duo that prominently feature the word “slow” in their bio should give you the gist.
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Hey, speaking of lit majors, this Philly band that plays “music for winter” takes its name from the English translation of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, a 1970 novel by Austrian writer Peter Handke. It’s about a washed-up pro soccer goalie who murders a woman, then hides out from the police in a town. As the New York Times put it in 1972, “This description of the book as a thriller doesn’t capture the deliberately exasperating experience of reading it.” (The reviewer meant it in a good way.)
To name yourself after an early novel by a shit-stirring3 avant garde writer is a nerd flex of the highest order. Next, the septet went after your freshman year reading list by titling their most recent (and apparently final) album The Iliad and the Odyssey and the Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, “Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader!”
Said reader is singer-guitarist Ben Curttright, who has a BA in English Language and Literature/Letters, an MFA in Creative Writing, and taught at Temple University. (Reviews at Rate My Professor give him a 3.9/5, with 70% of respondents saying they’d take his class again. Seems solid?)
The band is on pause, if not completely done, due to “a lot of boring personal and logistical reasons,” according to an Instagram post from summer 2024.
I’ll keep an eye out for what Curttright does next. Maybe a group called Woodcutters, inspired by Thomas Bernhard? That would be the talk of the English Department’s non-denominational end-of-year party!
Fate Propels the Falling Scythe
When I spoke with the legendary J. Robbins earlier this year, he shared a genre descriptor I hadn’t yet encountered:
I only recently found out that screamo turned into “skramz.” I don't know if it’s a subset of screamo, or if it’s just the way the kids are talking about it now.4
I don’t either. But NYC band Fate Propels the Falling Scythe do, because they identify as “skramz emoviolence metalcore” on their Bandcamp.
My brain can’t really process the words “skramz emoviolence,” because I’m old enough to know Jesus Jones. When I searched for “emoviolence” to get context, a post on the r/Emo subreddit explained:
skramz is a joke term that was made up essentially to mean “real Screamo”. Its only purpose is to differentiate between the DIY hardcore and Screamo scenes from the post- hardcore and metalcore of the 00s that the Hot Topic/ warped tour / taste of Chaos crowd was mistakenly calling Screamo.
SnooHabits5900 goes on to explain, “Emo violence is the subgenre that pulls in Aesthetic and sonic principles from power violence.”
So emoviolence is a subgenre of skramz? And that’s an actual sentence I just typed?
OK, sure. The demos on Fate Propels the Falling Scythe’s Bandcamp draw heavily from metal and hardcore. The music recalls Converge, but with slower interludes and vocals best be described as “hysterical.” Not funny hysterical. More like “being tortured by the Serbian mafia in a basement.”
Check it out for yourself, particularly around 1:45:
The band played their first show this past May, so I can barely find any information about them, much less the origin of their name. One link sent me to the fan wiki for Fate, the “procedurally-generated dungeon crawler RPG released by WildTangent in 2005.” It has a Reaper Scythe (you know, the 10th weapon in the Polearm Class), but I don’t think they’re connected. I’m just trying to get my head around “skramz emoviolence,” y’all.
POST-SCRIPTS
Dammit, I meant for this to drop earlier. My new plan is to publish on the 10th of every month. Fingers crossed.
Next month is our annual Halloween music hootenanny!
Jesus Jones with opener Ned’s Atomic Dustbin was my first club show. August 29, 1991, at the Unicorn in Houston!
I’ll have you know I was a print journalism major in the late ’90s, thank you very much. Basically that means I learned how to make horse carriages just as cars became a thing.
Nearly half of his Wikipedia page is devoted to controversies, much of it related to his full-throated support of Serbia.
This part didn’t make it into the final interview, probably because I was so confused by it.