It was between 2 and 3 am on a sweaty night in Upstate, New York at the Kingston punk rock bar The Basement where Jucifer had just destroyed the stage along with openers Hooker Dragger and stoners Dead Unicorn. Outside the doors of the non-assuming little rock club (which has hosted The Supersuckers and Murphy’s Law among others) is a grimy stretch of run down street called, ironically, Broadway, evoking dreams of stardom. Kingston was the first capital of New York State back in the days of perceived unbounded and colonial promise of expansion. Now it is run down and drug infested, but the punk rock bar and scene is great and in full swing, while other parts of the city are rather quaint. A band like Jucifer visiting and delivering their aesthetic sort of calls to mind the disparity to me between the poles of this city and how people’s lives are often shaped by their vision of obstacles or how they choose to live and conduct themselves. You can get run down or follow a safe and maybe more stable path, or you can think outside the box. Jucifer have decided to do the latter and manage to have an amazing existence. They even somehow find new frontiers, something waning in the U.S.A., albeit through the pursuit of new musical terrain rather than a geographic push West, so to speak.

As the band was breaking down their seriously massive stage set-up, guitarist and singer Amber Valentine sat down with me while her drummer and husband/musical partner in life Edgar Livengood kept at it. I hadn’t slept in days having worked crazy shifts at a restaurant and drinking (just to keep going) a plethora or Cocaine energy drinks Ray from Fear Factory/Arkaea had sent me, so I was out of my skull from that and thrashing up front to Jucifer’s grind and epilepsy inducing light show. I could barely stand and kept yelling, “I do cocaine!” ala. Dr. Roxo the Rock’N’Roll Clown, so that shows you my brain state. Amber had just gotten done playing and it was real late, so the planned interview took some really super cool detours into late night philosophy as well as all things rock’n’roll! Wheeew!

MORGAN Y. EVANS: Let’s see. We are here at 2 am in lovely, Kingston, New York at punk rock Mecca, The Basement. Thank you for coming back and playing here for us again! Your last show here with Tiger Piss was righteous!

AMBER VALENTINE: It was a pleasure. Thanks.

MYE: Everyone was fucking really excited to have you come back through. It gets some blood pumping in the scene. So, you’ve probably been asked this but you and Edgar seem really unified up there on stage, but also…is it a good way to work out “domestic issues”?

AV: [laughing] All the bloodletting we do up there is not against each other.

MYE: Yeah. I was watching Edgar’s face at time’s drumming during some of the drone parts and it just looks like a release of all tension into that buzzing void. I was just teasing.

AV: It’s weird. It’s like being a machine, but in an emotional way. It’s like we’re pistons and it is going right and we are firing together and we feel like one, weird...thing. I don’t know what that “thing” is. [laughing]

MYE: Yeah, yeah. I always thought about your live sound, that parts feel organic, like it is what just happened through your interactions together. Other parts are like, “Here’s a really cool grind part that’d be fun to play.” It doesn’t feel overly calculated, though. Some songs will have a lot of parts or it will become this sort of huge beast of noise. I wondered how much, since you spend a lot of time together [laughing], obviously…How do you go about writing?

AV: It’s almost nine years since we’ve been living in our tour vehicle and never having a house and never having a practice space. A lot of the writing the past decade has been stuff that tends to happen on stage. It will evolve. The last fifteen minutes of our set right now is stuff that started as a short improve and we’re still adding to it every night at this point. If I have an idea for a certain song with specific parts and time signatures that are more complicated, where we have to both know where it is going before we play it in front of people, then we’ll sit and work on it.

MYE: Yeah, I imagine you driving and saying each other, “Duh nuh nuh daaah?”. “No, dah dah DAAAH!!!” [laughing]

AV: We really do things like that! I’ll be driving and he’ll be sitting in the passenger seat and I’ll be singing guitar parts. He’ll start hitting the dash and using the floor as a kick drum until we get the idea. It’s good that I’m driving, ‘cuz if he was playing drums on the gas and brake that’d be bad!

JOHN FAY: [bassist of opening top notch grind-band Hooker Dragger, walking back into venue] I do that all the time!

MYE: Me too. I try to only drum and drive while at red lights, but y’know…

AV: [laughing]

MYE: John from Hooker Dragger here and I were talking earlier and he suggested a funny question for me to ask you. You two live on the road 100% on tour all the time in your RV and you often play for punk shows with squatter kids who are used to hopping trains and stuff. Has anyone ever tried to stow away on top of your fuckin’ Winnebago? [laughing]

AV: [Smiling] Every once in awhile, every once in awhile.

MYE: Like on the roof?

AV: Yeah. We have a big dog that doesn’t like strangers. He’s a mix breed. He’s got some chow in him. That’s probably where the guardian part comes from, but…That’s a good deterrent. People usually don’t want to be eaten.

MYE: Heed this warning, Crusher readers!

AV: A guy one night, we were playing in Oregon and we had a roadie with us. We found him lying behind our trailer and blood on our door! At first we thought he had been hit by a car but it turned out the roadie had passed out drunk in the road behind our trailer! The blood…we had had our door unlocked and someone had opened the door and had gotten bitten badly enough to have bled like that. We felt terrible, ‘cuz this was somebody who’d come to our show that probably wanted to talk to us before the show or whatever. We were like, “Fuck!”

MYE: Still, you don’t just walk right into someone’s RV.

AV: That’s the weird part. Who thinks that’s ok? Especially if you hear a dog barking!?

JOHN FAY: I pick up a lot of hitchhikers but I have a huge dog and I tell people to get in the car. They run up when I stop and it’s like, “Hey thanks for the rid…” [imitates huge dog barking]…”Ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh!!!”.

AV: [laughing]

JF: I say, “Just get in the car! It’s gonna be cool.” “No, man! You’re some kinda crazy person trying to feed me to your fuckin’ dog”. I feel bad, but…He’s fine once people are inside, but they usually don’t get that far.

AV & MYE: [laughing]

JF: Goodnight, y’all.

AV & MYE: Goodnight.

MYE: This next question will sound insane, probably because I am very sleep deprived. The dronier music to me is like, what I think of as the music I respond to most nowadays as my own sort of psychedelic music. Drone/sludge riffs take you places. But then, I was watching Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West with Charles Bronson and total fox Claudia Cardinale. I was thinking that actually everything in life is actually always psychedelic because no matter what we do, Earth is still always traveling through space. We are always in space! So even cowboys in the desert and dust, they are all space cowboys! [laughing]

AV: [laughing] That’s a valid point. I think about the blocks of reality fairly often. It’s completely perspective based. I have vivid dreams and I feel like things happen in the dreams and who is to say that’s not as real as what happens right now. The mind is what experiences reality and when it is sleeping it produces something so real that your body has to produce serotonin to keep you from reacting and hurting yourself in this world while you are in the other world.

MYE: That’s really cool you say that. One reason I brought up space that isn’t totally left field is that when you were playing tonight it sounded so big, I got images in my head of planets. Saturn’s rings. What you just said, I was just reading The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep (by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche) and the guy is talking about how when you are awake and processing, the consciousness is in the light of day and then retreats when we sleep. What is left is almost like a groove in the record, like our preconditioning that we build up leaves karmic traces that we aren’t really conscious of that leave impressions. He said basically to allow yourself to feel this but also step aside and see it objectively and allow yourself to see how you might be programming yourself symbolically one way or the other. Like you said, it is as real as reality, not necessarily that it is another world, but that it is also part of your “real” life.

AV: Yeah. It feels like that and you can teach yourself things in a dream or answer questions you have in a dream that have been in the back of your mind. You’ll wake up and know what to do and say, “Oh, I just finally figured that out.” It’s a weird way of, like you said, stepping back and allowing this part of you that doesn’t normally have a voice to speak to you.

MYE: That reminds me of what you said about when you feel like being locked in as a machine together onstage. Like lucid dreaming…I think, your band has done a lot of live musical improv where you have to anticipate things and feelings coming next. How do I summarize this without sounding like a crackpot? I saw a lot of old friends tonight who came out to see you play and sometimes I kind of anticipate things. I wonder if I’ll see a person and all of a sudden you do after a long time. Maybe it is a build up of energy. Sometimes it’s event based like this where people gravitate to that. Sometimes there is also kinetic energy in playing and also a kinetic energy in the subconscious. Life is movement and your music reminds me a lot of movement a lot more than other bands. Many bands remind me of a “genre” more. The drummer of Rush once said that the motion before you hit the drum is as important as how you hit it. Am I making any sense?
I seriously haven’t slept in three days.

AV: I’m with you. [laughing] I haven’t slept in years, adequately. I was thinking while driving the other day about how people approach music. A lot of people, they wanna be creative by learning what other people did and then build with that. Neither one of us really approaches music that way and it drives us to not do things a certain way, which other people might interpret as us not doing it “right” or something. It feels good to be creative out of reverence for sound and rhythm and space and the motion.

MYE: Even your home is always actually in motion on the road!

AV: Yeah. I think it’s like a different...There’s like two different camps. In one camp you know exactly what genre your music falls into always and you don’t deviate from that. You have everything about you match with that, tattoos and what you wear. The whole thing. It’s a package you understand and everyone understands and if you don’t do that it sort of confounds some people, but it brings to you the people that will truly understand the sort of…I was gonna say “roundness” because I am thinking about planets now thanks to you. There’s a planetary, holistic quality to allowing yourself to go any direction if you don’t approach things in such a “genre” based way, and that’s really important.

MYE: Yeah.

AV: It’s very important to us. Obviously freedom is something that’s important to us, since we have to be moving all the time. [laughing]

MYE: People like signifiers and it is beneficial in some ways when you are younger and figuring yourself out, but people get stuck in it. It’s great for some things but you can miss out on other friends that way.

AV: Some people take longer to learn it because of the experiences handed to them early in life. Just because someone likes the same band or has the same hair doesn’t mean they are cool at all! It doesn’t mean anything. They could be horrible. [laughing] The core difficulty of humanity is not understanding that and you get every type of militant “anti-other people” premise out there. People think if people look like them they are alright and everyone else sucks.

MYE: It’s brainwashing. Even the term “music” means so many multi-faceted potentials.

AV: I’ve heard people say, “That’s not music,” about us or other bands that don’t fit mainstream radio. They think grind-core has nothing musical about it and they don’t see the skill level.

MYE: They don’t even know the sociology of it and where it sits in the architecture of metal and where it comes from and goes back to this and that and England and blah, blah, blah.

AV: What we were talking about before with reality and perspective, it has so much influence on what they think and it’s hard to work against that. You have to be really self-aware.

MYE: Like in that Tibetan book the author says you have to keep practicing at awareness of getting pulled into non-objective clouded seeing. He says the irony is that in describing more admirable ways to act you still have to describe things using dualistic terms for reality, concepts of “good” and “bad”. It is supposed to be more objective, as reality is very learned, but the irony is that in order to explain that bigger picture you have to use dualistic terms, so people know what you are talking about!

AV: Totally. Human discourse and…even within yourself. There are people who absolutely know what they think and there’s no room for doubt. Then there are people like me who always question everything constantly and they always might be wrong, but don’t feel bad about it. If I am wrong, whatever. You learn. I still think what I think but allow that it could be totally fucked up. [laughing]

MYE: But then you have a good out. [laughing] “Hey, at least I tried.” So are you working on another release coming up to follow L’Autrichienne?

AV: Yeah, we have a split CD. Our part is basically an EP. It is coming out on a Canadian label.

MYE: You’re driving up to play there, tomorrow?

AV: In about four days.

MYE: You have a little break?

AV: We have a break, literally. We have to get our brakes done.

MYE: Fuck, I think I do, too. I work doubles at a restaurant all weekend and then I think my brakes are going. There goes that cash!

AV: Oh, man. I think we need major expensive stuff. But we’re going up there and the split will hopefully be coming out in the next few months. It’s with a band called Show Of Bedlam. They are from Montreal and their former bands were well known. I’m not sure if that’s gonna be released separately in the U.S. or not, but we’ve started recording a full length that we’re planning to get done by the end of the year and have out next spring.

MYE: Cool. I like to talk to people and have cool conversations in developmental stages, not just around release dates. I did that with Sick Of It All once.

AV: Yeah, and you can talk about other things than just pushing this or that record.

MYE: I think this was a good 3 am conversation!

AV: Definitely. [laughing]