lookit that came outta nowhere

ezra and erika 2007, photo by c bozulich

GOWNS began in 2005 as a very scrappy 2-piece consisting of Erika Anderson and Ezra Buchla on a furry blue rug in Southern California.  It involved mandolins and max patches, contact mics on speaker cabinets, walkie talkies and bullhorns.  The early sound could almost have been considered part of the “freak folk” movement that was popular at the time if not for the squeals of guitar feedback and one-of-a-kind electronic signal processing.  As Ezra later wrote,

“it was an attempt to synthesize several of our musical interests: the formal minimalism and elasticity of folk music, the abrasion of crass-era anarchist punk, the directness and lyricism of grunge rock and the alienating, arguably anti-human time bending techniques of modern digital signal processing. we wanted to write songs you could be fooled into thinking you’d heard before. we wanted to tell the bleakest and most affecting memories and fantasies of our childhood and adolescence, like our favorite grunge bands seemed to be doing when we heard them on the radio in high school. we wanted the computers to take our mandolins and guitars and simple, desperate stories and subject them to another kind of intelligent process, a process appropriate to this time and place: los angeles, CA, early 2000’s? but not really, because i decided early on to use no samples or sequences, only the humans breathing directly into the shine and dust of the fuckup machine.”

'dangers of intimacy' EP original 3" cover

The recording process for the first EP set the precedent for our work habits.  Most of the songs came from completely improvised material.  Some of them were left almost totally “as is”  (feathers, apple, you are on the phone), and some were painstakingly edited, such as the instrumental “crossed out” track.  Released by freaky Riverside whiz kid Wolfie Whitman on his Folktale label.

Here are some audio files from a very early GOWNS’ show in 2005:

shaved women (CRASS cover) 2005

paper (live) 2005

white like heaven (live) 2005

That summer, GOWNS went on a big family tour with Amps for Christ and Carla Bozulich, with both of us often playing all 3 sets a night.  Some photos from that will be posted soon.  After crossing the country we landed at my childhood home in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where we began to record what would eventually become Red State.

Gowns' RED STATE, art by Kyle Parker

Red State is a political record.

A lot of people hear it and think it’s just a drug record.  But the record is not about drugs, it’s about desperation.  This record was made in the middle of the Bush Administration’s reign, when the whole country, maybe the whole world, was just rolling over and giving up.  We were defeated.  The people in charge didn’t give a shit about our protests, the economy was dying, our rights were eroding.  They were slowly grinding the soul and hope out of the nation and  I felt that the middle of nowhere states, the Red States, were getting hit hardest of all.  Red State is a protest record.

From an interview originally posted on Paper Thin Walls:

“when we got [to South Dakota] they had a bunch of old newsweek magazines lying around and one of them had a big cover story on meth, and how popular it was and it had all these fucked up stories and pictures of people who had lit themselves on fire and melted their faces and teeth, and statistics talking about how whole towns in the midwest were on it.  this was during the same time that south dakota was trying to become the first state to totally ban all forms of abortion with no provisions for rape or incest or a woman’s health.  i had just come off a tour of the east coast and before that had been living in los angeles, amidst these kind of liberal enclaves where everyone was an artist and no one had kids.  but that’s not really where i was from, so going back home and then seeing all these mainstream “news” magazines about anorexia and drug abuse and teenage pregnancy, i knew i wanted to make a record about that, because that is what so many people’s real experience is like.  lots of media and art comes from new york and LA and other big cities,  but lots of people live in the middle of nowhere.  i’m from the middle of nowhere!  and i wanted to make something that reflected that experience. “

(For more about the making of the record, the whole interview can be found here.)

The record was released in 2007 by Cardboard Records. It got generally pretty enthusiastic and sometimes confusing reviews, some of which you can read here.

corey fogel

We had our friend Corey Fogel record some drums on the record for the songs “White Like Heaven” and “Mercy Springs”.  We liked it so much we asked him to play with us.  Here is a video of us playing at a house show in Olympia during our first tour together in 2006:

The 3piece lineup increased our musical vocabulary but maintained the chaos and fragility of a typical GOWNS performance.  This is something that used to bother me a lot, playing a show and not being sure if we would make it through a song or not, if the technology we relied upon would backfire and meltdown, or if one of us would get mad and throw a kick drum pedal out the window.  As a performer, it was nerve-racking.  It was a long time before I realized that for an audience member, it could be exhilarating.  Songs were improvised, noise pieces were plotted on paper but never fully practiced, and the electronics were constantly changing and always temperamental.  No one (including us performers) could ever be sure that the set wasn’t going to collapse in an explosion of feedback and poor communication.  But when we did pull it off, it always felt like a great triumph.

Here is a version of “White Like Heaven” from that time period in April 2007, after our first US tour: