NO AGE
The LA ambient punks reflect on their compulsion to progress
Always proud practitioners of DIY ethics, Californian ambient punk duo No Age are back with a self-recorded album that’s presented in handmade boxes. And with a totally re-constructed sound plus an eagerness to instigate debate, it’s thrilling to hear their melodic feedback leaking from speakers once again.
We’re sitting with Randy Randall, the duo’s guitar wielding, pedal stamping noise merchant in a café next to London’s Corsica studios, where the band are playing tonight. Now in his early thirties, he recently got hitched and moved from LA to the suburbs. Maturity doesn’t seem to have hindered his energy though. Maybe it’s the black coffee he’s sipping (along with drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt, Randy is vegan), or maybe it’s because he’s so hyped to be back on the road. Either way, he speaks quickly with the wide-eyed passion that his Black Flag tattoo would imply.
Following tonight’s gig, No Age are doing a stint of festival shows before they embark on a three month tour which sees them play a different city every night across America and Europe. So with the band’s reputation for cranking it up to ear-punishing levels and possessing bespectacled indie kids with the sweat-soaked, stage diving spirit of US hardcore, does he feel a slight sense of dread when he sees that list of gruelling tour dates in front of him? “To be honest, I haven’t even looked at it. I just know when the tour starts and when it ends. And I like the idea of it,” he grins. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if I like the punishment, but I get excited about the preparation, packing the right amount of socks and the right amount of guitar strings. And with the shows I like the ritual of loading in, setting up, performing and breaking down. It’s very much a daily routine, it’s not boring, it’s actually comforting. So when I get back home from touring, I get this feeling at about 5pm where I feel like I should be loading up for soundcheck. And when the sun goes down, I get this real urge to play the songs.”
No Age first emerged from the highly mythologised DIY noise scene at The Smell, an all- ages, alcohol free venue located in downtown Los Angeles. Their name was painted onto The Smell’s shabby exterior, with the mural forming the cover of 2007’s Weirdo Rippers, a compilation of raw EP tracks that also put the words No Age on the radars of overseas music journalists and onto the t-shirt of Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood. At a time when the UK’s stale indie scene was becoming increasingly assimilated into the soundtrack of Hollyoaks, residual fans of guitar bands became excited by the new American crop of scuzz- poppers, slacker-surf-punks and shit-gazers warping 80s and 90s influences and adopting faded Polaroid aesthetics. Rightly or wrongly, No Age got filed alongside the likes of Sic Alps, Wavves, Times New Viking and Vivian Girls, and in 2008, The Guardian enthusiastically described No Age’s single Eraser as “dreamy pop-punk for all the kids conceived to My Bloody Valentine”.
Fast forward half a decade, and now No Age are about to drop An Object, their third ‘proper’ album and the follow-up to the excellent sophomore Everything in Between. Three years seems like a long wait to the digital generation that most No Age fans belong to, but Randall insists the band have put in a hard grind. “The last album came out in October 2010, but we toured right up until we started writing this record in 2012” he says. “But there was a short break, y’know, we did get to sit on the couch for a while, I think we did watch a movie at some point! And the writing process took a lot of time. Because when we plugged in the guitar, it sounded the same, and we were like ‘you know what? We’ve made that record already’.”
The band’s compulsion to evolve comes welcomed, because despite the consistent quality of No Age’s discography, it was admittedly time for them break out of the fairly narrow template of their prior two albums: punctuating four-chord bangers with shoegazey interludes of melodic distortion. One of the first things you hear on An Object is the previously absent sound of a bass guitar, followed by the yelled lyric “Who do you think you are?” It’s an introduction which boldly declares No Age have fucked with their formula, a pre-cursor to an album that’s built with unorthodox song structures, cellos, detuned guitars and re- wired amps.
“We mixed a lot of it in headphones, but then we tried listening to the mixes on a phone, or in the car, or on crappy laptop speakers”, Randall explains. “We’d be working on the mix intensely all day and then I’d get home, put it on, walk into the next room and close the door to hear how it’d sound then. It got pretty geeky.” When we ask Randall about An Object’s artwork (the record comes in an orange box adorned with the kind of bold typography typically associated with the band), he seems to take a similar sense of pride in No Age’s DIY practices. “We had this concept really early on, to physically manufacture the packaging ourselves. We did it with an offset printer then we redesigned the shape. And there’s no glue on the inlay. Me, Dean and close friends and family all folded each one by hand for 5000 CDS and 5000 LPs and then stamped it. Even the name, An Object, it’s physical. Not that we’re against downloading, the record is for everyone, and we don’t want to exclude anyone. But why make something physical if it’s just going to get thrown away and no one will care about it?
“And I can understand why someone wouldn’t feel like they have to pay for something that’s digital, it just doesn’t seem real … like it’s on your phone”, he admits. And, of course, the truth is a lot of people don’t feel obliged to pay for music these days. This has indirectly created problems for bands who are expected to maintain an element of punk sentiment. Bands like No Age, for example. In an era when it’s almost impossible for a band to scrape a living wage by selling their recorded material, when the alternative music industry is increasingly dependent on the financial input of brands in order to survive, a rebellious, anti-corporate ethos seems less sustainable than ever.
At the end of last year, No Age stirred up controversy at a Converse-sponsored show in Barcelona, where they halted their set halfway through to project a video they’d made which showed footage of Christmas shoppers, crying babies, sweatshops and excerpts of text accusing the company of using foreign factories with poor working conditions. When pushed on the subject, Randall opens up, advocating debates on these issues and arguing against short-sighted sloganeering. “I take it at a case by case basis. I think for me growing up skateboarding, I experienced a similar situation. There were a lot of skate companies who really did care about the culture. I think it’s possible to run a record company or whatever and to really care about the music. So it’s not like we’re anti-capitalist, know what I mean? Make as much money as you need to make, but you need to ask yourself about how you relate to the culture. Are you a culture vulture? Is it vampiric? Some of these companies want to come in and exploit a trend. I don’t feel like music is a trend, to me it’s my life.
“If anything, something like the Converse show was just us calling all of this into question. And we didn’t even have an answer for it, we weren’t saying Converse is fucking evil, we were just asking ‘Why are we playing this show? Why have we been invited to play?’ We didn’t say if it was wrong or right. It’s not that simple. And I think in today’s Twitter style, 140 character arguments, the room for grey areas is disappearing.”
By this point of our conversation, we realise that we’ve had twice as long with Randall as we’d previously agreed. But there’s also a feeling that we could sit here chatting all night, and right before we slip off the dictaphone, our circular discussion about the post-modern clusterfuck of being an ‘ambient punk’ band in 2013 is lifted by his instinctual sense of optimism.
“I like punk from the 70s and 80s. The people who played that music are now parents or even grandparents. I wasn’t even born when those records came out. There’s a kid now who was born in 2008 when our album Nouns came out, in five years that record will be ten years old and they might hear it ten years later”, he muses. “I feel that since 2000, everyone has been making it up, like no one really knows what the fuck is going on, no one really knows what the culture is supposed to be. But there are songs and genres which stand out, that communicate a feeling honestly with the audience. I turned 19 in 2000, I didn’t know what the fuck to do, but I just thought I’d try and do something the best I could, and then pass it along to the next generation.”
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An Object is out now via Sub Pop. No Age play Simple Things Festival, Bristol on October 12th. Tickets available here.
Words: David Reed
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