Spectrals (aka Louis Jones) takes us through a nostalgic story of how his father’s cover band changed his life forever.

When I was about 15, my dad and his mates started up a punk and new wave cover band. My dad had always played guitar. He would play it when my mam went out to work on a Saturday night. Maybe me and my little brother had gotten to pick a Playstation game or a film to rent earlier in the day, and we would watch that and he would play. I remember I could catch his eye while he cycled through chords and sang songs, and that his eyes would smile but he wouldn’t talk. I came to recognize that zone he got into a lot later when I started to play “guitar trance,” as he calls it. I feel like he and his mates had talked about starting a group at New Year’s Eve parties for a few years on the bounce, but at some point they got keen and the idea went beyond a “what if…” over a few pints. The three of them got together in my living room and rattled through some songs that they’d all agreed upon. To my shame, I didn’t really want much to do with them at that point, even though I was mad on guitar and deep into all sorts of hardcore and pop-punk by then. I could try to dress it up, but I thought I was too cool for it all! I was really sure of what I thought was “good” or “bad” in the way that only someone who knows very little can be.

What I had never banked on was that they’d all get their heads down and get a serious set of songs together. I can’t recall when, but my little brother Will got playing drums with them, and before long they’d roped in a friend of a friend, a proper singer, whose wife had a birthday do coming up, to front them, and they arranged to play at it. I can remember we all arrived at this Working Men’s Club in Cleckheaton in the early afternoon. It had a proper stage and a glittery curtain. As I kicked about in there, avoiding carrying people’s gear in for them, and trying to get my mam to buy me a pint, I was dead nervous for them but couldn’t put my finger on why.

And although I would have never admitted it to you at the time, I was jealous and wished I had just gotten over myself and my bedroom heavy metal mindset and asked to join in. That feeling grew as the night went on. They smashed through the set, buzzing off each other, and the wheels didn’t come off. People even got up and had a dance and a sing-along. I was left feeling like I wasn’t so smart and cool after all. I ended up playing with them for two or so years after that and got turned onto a lot of music that I would have never have had any time for otherwise, stuff that has stuck with me, Elvis Costello, Dr. Feelgood, The Stranglers, etc. More than that, though it was just a right laugh. We did all these little run down pubs and clubs around near where we’re from, Thursday, Friday nights, background music I suppose, passable versions of songs that people already loved. It was beyond you really, beyond showing off. Sometimes we got heckled, sometimes we played for no one, sometimes people went mad for it, but we always got a few pints and me and my brother could take away £50 from a good one. I know I came out of my shell a lot around this time and became a lot less militant about what I liked. My dad and his mates definitely set me going with what I’m on with now, and I’ll always have them to thank for that.

There was a video tape that someone took of us playing at a beer festival at a cricket club, and they caught this big fight that broke out on it. We were playing the Ramones’s “Blitzkrieg Bop” in the background, laughing our heads off while they went at it. I should ask around and see if anyone still has it.

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D.Alex Meeks of the band Hooded Fang (which features prominent members of Phèdre) shares a quick Storytellers with us about the wisdom accrued from growing up on a zoo.

So it turns out I grew up on a zoo. Folks sometimes mentioned this at birthday parties, but otherwise I never gave the fact much particular mind, steeped as I was in the contexts of the thing. A home-video from small times depicts me intently building a tower of blocks, trying to protect the structure from a similarly-aged baby leopard who is quite intent on knocking them over in its young wayward clumsiness. It is evident from the furrowed child’s brow depicted therein that I have never had much patience for wayward clumsiness.

This zoo life established in me an unusual set of notions about how the world functions. From an early age, most of what I learned about sound was from elephants (they also taught me about the danger of crushing and the importance of tenderness), and most of what I learned about secrecy was from a chimpanzee named Dixie, who was like a child to my parents before they decided to make human babies of their own. Dixie, to the best of my knowledge, never told me a single secret, though we tussled in earnest on many an occasion.

I hope to eventually have as much sense as she.

(Curated by Cactus-Mouth)

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Psychedelic Denmark band Halasan Bazar take us through the painful birth and final relief of their new full-length release Space Junk (released via Crash Symbols).

Easter 2012 – On a bus in the Autobahn, Germany

It was bright and sunny, a German deer stood out in a field as Carl and I passed by on the Greyhound. I was busy showing Carl some Gene Clark tunes on my mp3 player; I was tripping on the lyrics to ”Full Circle Song”. It felt like another me had written those lyrics, some sort of time warp, body possession or something…

Funny How The Circle turns around,

First you´re up, and then you´re down again

Tho the circle takes what it may give

This time around it makes it live again

Carl and I were both pretty blue at the time; love had chewed us up and spit us out its other end as fuzzy and confused people. Meanwhile I was tangled up in some sort of existential labyrinth that was heavy on my mind. We were going to Berlin to lick our wounds. It was around the time I was finishing up the recordings for what became Space Junk. The recordings had been very spontaneously done in our rehearsal bunker—as a way to blow off some steam after going nuts mixing our tape How to Be Ever Happy.

I was in the final months of a 5 year relationship and the songs for Space Junk came pouring out in a blend of my bleak existential thoughts and observations of fading love. I was completely lost, doing music in a desperate attempt to feel like my days in pain weren’t a waste of a lifetime; so they would be fruitful, not just a human wasteland of shit.

I remember Carl and I just stumbling around when we arrived in Berlin, drinking wheat beer, eating greasy Currywürst, making fun of our own misery. I remember playing outdoor ping pong, and dancing to The Seeds in some nightclub after complaining that I got orange and pepper with my tequila instead of salt and lemon. That sort of stuff. We crashed at my friends Magnus and Julie´s joint. They were the perfect couple, singing in the shower, making kick-ass avocado sandwiches, laughing the days away with a fruit shake full of hope and dreams of living on a farm in Sweden with five kids and a cow. Meanwhile, Carl and I would be down in the park scoring weed from a guy who lived in a bush. He was our kind of guy, I think. Three days later we missed our bus back to Copenhagen, on purpose, and made our way to a forest on the outskirts of town with Magnus, Julie, and their enthusiastic dog Havi. We had a stone throwing competition by the lake. Magnus won. I came last. The forest was dead as we walked and rays of sun filtered through the leaves. The world was in perfect harmony,  as Carl and I were rotting inside. The only medicine was to keep moving. Always moving. Never stop…

Easter 2013 – On a mountaintop, Norway

The white powdered epicness of the Norwegian Jotunheimen surrounds me as I race through an over-populated cross country ski slope. I am physically shattered, behind me is 26km of conquered mountaintop, every inch of my body aches and my lungs are approaching asthmatic collapse. Somewhere far behind me my family and dog stroll in Sunday tempo (I’d left went ahead long ago).  My vision is blurred and my knees are shaking. I feel I could collapse and dissolve into the snow at any moment now. My mind is busy tinkering and pondering the success of our music. This Easter’s escape is not as bad as lasts’—I’m sane, in control, have plans, a tour, and am two days away from the release of Space Junk. Finally, one year after its painful birth. Everything bubbles and as my legs are telling me to ease up, I accelerate. Stop and freeze or move and burn. Move and burn, always move and burn and never stop.

Funny How The Circle turns around,

First you´re up, and then you´re down again.

Halasan Bazar – Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad from Halasan Bazar on Vimeo.

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“THE AMAZING MOSCATO BROTHERS”—a very short story by Lindsay Tuc.

It might have been 2008. I know for sure it was a Tuesday night. The Walrus and I (I’m serious, everyone calls him that) only ever did acid on Tuesdays, not that we did acid every Tuesday, just that when ever we took acid—it was always on a Tuesday. At the time I drove a 1992 black Mercades coupe and wore a gold watch. I always drove because The Walrus can’t drive, he still doesn’t have a driver’s licence and the world is better off because of that. I am very happy that I am alive and writing this story and I strongly discourage operating a sports car or any other motor vehicle whilst intoxicated.

I dig girls, women too; all sorts of girls. I also dig other things like records but this story is about girls. I can’t remember her name but she was big and dark and South African. We were doing exactly 99 kilometres per hour on the eastern freeway through the pelting rain to meet her and her friend at their town house in Box Hill—we took our hats off to avoid suspicion. The Walrus was text messaging the girls over some dating app I had downloaded for my shiny new iPhone. He loved using the iPhone, and he is good at talking to girls, which was perfect. A perfect storm.

“Moscato!” The Walrus yelled from the passenger seat, directly into my ear, as if he’d been kicked in the nuts. “We need to get some fucking moscato.” We promptly got the off of the freeway. Both of us knew that moscato was some kind of sweet wine and that the girls wanted at least one bottle to drink. We doubled back and slid into Brunswick East like Luke Skywalker diving his X-wing into the death star. “You know what we are” my trusty navigator said as a statement, not a question “the fucking amazing moscato brothers!”—he swears a lot. He went into some dialog about how we were valiant knights delivering sweet wine to two damsels in distress or some of the usual bullshit he spouts; I was concentrating on the road. Somehow we made it to the Railway Hotel in one piece. We strolled into the bottle shop like it was nothing and informed the poor lady behind the counter that we were the official moscato brothers and that we needed two bottles of moscato and a small bottle of whiskey pronto. I paid, The Walrus left a twenty cent tip.

Long story short, as this is a very short story, we made it to Box Hill in high spirits. Beeping twice as instructed we lit a cigarette to share and marvelled at the tonal qualities of a Mercedes car horn. The two South African girls switched the light on and let us in.

“Aaaay it’s the moscato brothers!”

My South African princess was a lot bigger than she looked in her profile photo, her friend was pushing four feet tall at best and wearing a hospital gown and bracelet. The Walrus would like me to point out here that he had no intention of sleeping with either of these girls as he had a girlfriend at the time who was prettier than anyone else’s girlfriend I’ve ever met. That girl could stop traffic, and eventually left him for Jennifer Hawkins’ ex boyfriend. She never liked me anyway, so stuff her.

Sooooooo cuddly… I could have cuddled that girl for the rest of my life and still be happy with my accomplishments. I pushed my head into her massive bosom as she stroked my crotch and sipped moscato and it was fantastic. The tiny girl was on the opposite couch teaching The Walrus how to swear in Afrikaans. The room was littered with African animal plush toys, it was pure bliss. We were on safari. We had reached our destination. Time stopped.

According to The Walrus, the cursing lesson progressed into stabbing lessons as the very small girl in the hospital gown had a knife discreetly hidden upon her person. South African house music that we had never heard before was blaring out of the stereo, which I quite enjoyed until The Walrus suggested that we leave immediately… I suggested that we all get naked. The Walrus had had a knife pressed to his ribs and was bleeding. He stood up screaming bloody murder, pulled out his favourite aluminium knuckle duster and dragged me by the back of my shirt outside to the car. Dude totally killed my high.

Since then I have deleted all dating profiles, sold my car and enjoy cycling, not only for the financial benefits but also for fitness and public safety.

The post Storytellers: Lindsay Tuc appeared first on PORTALS.

Daniel Bachman tells us the outrageous tales from his month of ups and downs on tour in Europe.

Back in September I had the opportunity to play a month of shows through Europe. I somehow wrangled my sister into joining me on the ride from Amsterdam to Istanbul, taking trains, local flights and a car when a friend could lend a hand. The two of us had done a fair amount of traveling through the US growing up, but aside from a couple of camping trips to northern Ontario as kids, we’d never been outside of the country.  Pushing through travel jitters, the flight went quite smoothly, and after a layover in Iceland we finally arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport around 7am. With some solid food in the two of us and adjustments to the time change, we were set for the first week of shows. In that week, we found kind and talented people trying hard to make us feel at home, and put on solid shows. With Germany, France, and Belgium under out belt, we were getting excited. We had this shit in the bag man, no problem. We ate vending machine waffles and European Coca-Cola products all the way into week three, when we hit a snag in moral and energy, and unfortunately found ourselves in wrong place wrong time circumstances.

We were in Paris and had to be in Barcelona the following night for a show. When we stepped off the platform of our connecting train, we were accidentally pepper sprayed by Parisian rail police who were trying to spray some asshole kids punching each other in the face. Coughing, snotty, and blurry we somehow ended up at the station for our sleeper car to Barcelona. The train was quiet until an older gentleman pounded his way into our room, sat down next to my poor sister, and talked to her in a language she doesn’t speak until the sun came up. She didn’t sleep, energy and moral at a low. One more connection and a couple of hours later, we ended up in the town where the promoter was waiting to pick us up. Now, I tend to fall into a pretty heavy tour bubble where current events pass me by (it took my two weeks to hear about the BP oil spill a couple of years ago). So when we got in to Barcelona it was to our surprise that there were metro bus strikes going on. We all cram in to the most crowded train I’ve ever been on, guitars and bags spilling everywhere, and eventually make it to the venue.

The show was in a small packed bar where everyone was smoking hash (a lot of it) and by the time I was done playing my set I was feeling pretty far out, as I stood outside of the venue. I was talking to a guy from Philly about this City Square Festival he was at where people threw pipes and pieces of metal at the crowd to shut then up, when some water balloons fall down from above and hit me on the side of the face. In broken English some guy then said, “I’m pretty sure its not acid.” Thank God he was right, but whatever was in that balloon swelled my face and turned by eye red for the entirety of our 10 our train ride the following day. In the fourth and final week of tour, I had the most intense week of travel I’d ever experienced, with Romanian disco hotels, 5 am taxi rides in Istanbul, and ethanal poisoned liquor in the Czech Republic… but thats a whole other mess.

Can’t wait to go back.

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It’s no secret, we’re huge fans of Denver psych-rock outfit Tjutjuna. They’ve played a number of our showcases, they’ve rocked Denver—one of our favorite cities—for years, and ultimately, they continue to rock our personal socks off time and time again. On April 30th, they will rock us once more with the release of their sophomore LP, Westerner, which can be pre-ordered on limited edition vinyl through Fire Talk Recs.

In the meantime, read a NSFW story about AK47′s, video games, heavy drinking, and touring via Tjutjuna‘s Brian Marcus.

On our last tour in October, on the way to the PORTALS CMJ showcase in NYC, our first show fell apart in a pretty spectacular way. We left Denver on time and drove ten hours to Kansas City, Kansas. On tour, when you play DIY venues, you never know what to expect. Sometimes you get awesome places like Rhinoceropolis in Denver or Ball Hall in Chicago and sometimes you get a small clothing store that is closed. We got the latter.

Finally, after an hour at a bar that was aptly named “Timewarp”, we got in touch with the owner of the venue. 20 minutes later she lets us in the store and we head downstairs to where the “venue” is. I use quotations because it wasn’t really a venue—it was more of an unfinished basement with half a PA, and it looked like a place spiders and house centipedes would rent out on the weekends to have orgies. Then our opener showed up, introduced himself as John, looked around the arachnid sex den and said, “no fucking way”.

He then suggested we forget the show, go back to his place, we could drink and crash there for the night. He had arcade games and beer. Cool. We’re down, we’re tired, we’re thirsty, we like video games. Perfect. We told the owner of the shop, who, at this point was still trying to invite people to the show that was no longer happening. We told her that we were cutting our losses. She apologized profusely and we got to talking and realized we had met about 5 years back when she was visiting Denver. We had mutual friends; members of Tjutjuna had even worked in her family store. It was one of those weird things that happens when you travel that makes you realize the world is in fact a small place.

So we head across the border into Kansas City, Missouri and arrive at John’s house. We get drunker than Joaquin Phoenix in ‘The Master’ (probably not, but embellishment is the key to good story telling) and played video games. After a lot of beer and a lot of games I see a hand gun out of the corner of my eye. I’m entirely apathetic when it comes to guns, but seeing one unexpectedly is pretty startling. Turns out the neighborhood we were in was really bad a few years ago and when our new friend (John) bought the house he decided to invest in some protection. One of which was an AK47, famously immortalized by both Ice Cube and the patriot John Rambo.

Offhandedly, our hosts mention that they keep the AK47 above their door at night in case of intruders. As we left the next day it dawned on me that, that could have ended very badly. As awesome as our hosts were, we really didn’t know them. Their version of arcade games involved slapping each other in the face. What if they were light sleepers? What if they were sleepwalkers, what if they suffered from night terrors? What if one of us drunkenly got up in the middle of the night use the bathroom and they drunkenly forgot we were staying over? They could have killed Rob or Fernando or worse, me. It was a weird and completely unexpected beginning to a tour that was a lot of fun. John, if you’re reading this, thank you very much for the hospitality, that was a fun way to spend a night that could have been really disappointing. This song’s called “Mousetrap”, we would have played this song that night.

And here’s the official video for “Desert Song”, another standout from the new album:

Curated by Speaker Snacks.

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Benoît Pioulard shares his love for North Manitou Island, a little speck in the middle of Lake Michigan that inspires him greatly.

My favorite place in the entire world—at least, on the list of ones I’ve visited—is North Manitou Island, which is a little dot in the middle of Lake Michigan just northwest of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Shoreline.

I’ve been out there on a few camping excursions, the first couple of which were with my dad, but after that, totally alone. It occurred to me recently that the last time I set foot on North Manitou was in 2007, just prior to my 23rd birthday. This realization made me a little sad, you know, in the sense that this was almost six years ago and—while an amazing number of good things have transpired since then—my little life, the only one I get on this planet, is slipping through my fingers.

I recalled the way I’d anticipated that trip for weeks, the fact that it would be my farewell to Michigan as I prepared to move to the west coast, all symbolic and that. I diligently arranged my pack, gassed up the car, booked a night at a dumpy local motel in Leland, and took my leave.

The ferry to North Manitou—and the only way to get there, for it has no landing strip, no electricity, no roads—leaves 3 or 4 mornings a week at dawn, and if you miss it, tough luck.

The hour-long boat ride is almost always incredibly choppy going through the area of Lake Michigan that the tiny tugboat-sized ferry has to traverse by necessity, but on this occasion the trip was strikingly, almost unnervingly, calm. A grey-white cloak of misty fog hugged the water’s surface and droplets of it collected on my eyelashes as I sat on deck. I had the sense that I was on Charon’s boat, crossing to the beyond. I know that sounds silly, but it’s absolutely true.

This is the first time I recall having a true sense of the infinite, feeling that I might be on this little boat forever, and if I were, I would be ok with that.

Surely enough, though, we arrived at the island’s only dock, next to its only ranger station, and there was a giddy sort of serenity on the faces of the 6 or 7 other people who’d been on the boat, suggesting that they’d felt something similar to what I’d experienced.

That week, without any instruments at my disposal and only a notebook to keep me company, I wrote and wrote and wrote every day—in between lengthy hikes and excursions to the few abandoned houses and the graveyard that remains from when North Manitou was a logging settlement in the 1800′s—and came up with a half-dozen fully formed songs that existed only in my head and kept me company in a truly inexplicable way.

This had never happened before, nor has it happened in the same manner since. Some vital part of me is still out there, waiting to reconvene.

Stream “Margin”, the lead-off single from Benoît Pioulard‘s new record, out March 4th via Kranky, below:

Curated by Speaker Snacks.

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A late 80′s cartoon called Vytor: The Starfire Champion, some fictional characters named Skyla and Myzor Sarcophogus, and a pair of animation-studio-running parents had a lot to do with Tyler Burton’s decision to name his future R&B project Vyxor…

I grew up in an animation studio. Every day after school I was in the animation studio. Late nights at the animation studio, cereal for dinner. Walk past reception, past the darkroom. The storyboards were tacked on every wall, so you could follow the narrative down the hall (the dino dude grabbed his skateboard and gave chase in panel three). Walk through the corrosive cloud spilling out of the ink and paint department, past the clumsy grey-green ‪Moviola‬s, outside into the parking lot, past the porn studios and the model airplane manufacturer, the budget movie theater and 50′s diner, and into the quiet, comforting mush of the light-industrial enclave of the San Fernando Valley.

In 1989, Vytor the Starfire Champion teamed up with Skyla to defeat Myzor Sarcophogus and reclaim the Saturn Orb. This sci-fi battle for power and peace and one-liners was fought over a period of four episodes and then quickly shut down. Big production costs and no toy deal contributed to an early cancellation. Even the awesome lightning-summoning synthesizer weapon featured in episode #2 couldn’t save it.

The studio quickly moved on to other projects. And I casually watched over the next decade or so, immersed but never a part of the meetings and deadlines, the successes and stresses, the gleefully dirty-minded illustrators and voice actors, the Northridge earthquake, the devastating water damage, the multiple relocations, the dedication of a small team, the steady decline and eventual closure.

I’ve been composing and recording for many years now, but recently my method shifted, and my music changed. Unsatisfied with my standard cache of emotional tropes and genre signifiers, I wanted to create a narrative outside of myself, a separate universe, something cartoonish and a little silly, operating at an exaggerated velocity. A new property with shades of sci-fi, unto itself, and probably no toy deal. I looked back and decided to borrow the Starfire Champion’s name, accidentally tipping over the ‘t’ in the process. I invoked Vytor’s name to summon the promise of an animated epic filled with sky castles and magic orbs, but more importantly, to remember the studio at its best: the positive creative fantasy without the business. The name looks convoluted, but there’s a simple, personal meaning behind it. It gives me the strength to continue working on this musical passion project, which luckily, no one can cancel.

Curated by Speaker Snacks.

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There are people that you meet that are indescribable. The way they speak, the way they think. One of those people for me is Frank Hurricayne. The ultra-positive folk singer from the northeast is a vagabond whose sole mission on this planet is to sing his songs to all. Frank’s unique vocabulary and psychedelic life experiences allow him to create a wild world for the listener to dive into, while simultaneously existing there himself.

This past November, I was fortunate enough to have Frank play at my house in Orlando. Right before his last song, he went off on this story about an experience while he was in the Smokey Mountains. Without me knowing, my roommate recorded it. We have for you a transcribed version as well as the audio for your listening pleasure. Be sure to keep an eye out for Frank, you never know, maybe he’ll pop up in your town someday.

Here is a recording of Frank telling his story:

And here is the transcribed version:

Oh, so I was working spiritual Smokies, oh yeah. The Smokey Mountains. Between Tennessee & North Carolina this holy June. For a month, [I] was working on the spiritual trail, maintaining and stuff.

I met all kinds of psychedelic characters, oh yeah. I met a psychedelic backyard wrestler slash dude that breaks peoples legs when they owe money, oh yeah. Half the time I think he lives in Tampa, FL from what I hear. He might be in the audience tonight, you never know. But then again, he is a seven foot tall, huge motherfucker, backyard pimp. So, I don’t think he’s here tonight. He might be outside the door. You never know. You owin’ any dollars to anybody between here and Austin, TX, oh yeah, you better watch out for Rotten Jim Cotton. He pops mad steroids. He tried real hard to get me to do steroids with him. He’d be like, “that shit gets you hyped! When you doing the steroids and you driving down the street, and somebody like, cuts you off in traffic and you just want to fucking crush their head inside. This shit is fucking awesome man.” I’m like, ” dude, I don’t know if that sounds like something that I want to do my friend.” But, I really appreciate that he was trying so hard. He was cooking up dishes that he called “mac-a-roidy and cheese”. Real hard to get me to do steroids, just mixing it in there. And I was like, “dude, I ain’t down for that.”

Oh yeah, he wore some bad shoes on the hike. He went up and also forgot his tent. On the first night, there was a huge rainstorm, and he slept out of this little tarp with a bunch of holes in it. And he was freezing almost to death. And so I hiked down off the mountain and got him a tent and picked up a whole bunch of moonshine. But the next night when I got back with the moonshine and Rotten Jim Cotton’s tent, he showed me his feet. He had gangrene on his toes. He toes had turned green and black. And they was fucking, the nails was popping off and shit. It was fucking sick. And I said Rotten Jim, I got to doctor your shoes man. So I cut out the fronts out on his shoes and he walked around like that for a few days. But for three days, he was stuck deep in this mountain with the gangrenes toes. We didn’t leave for three days. But he said to make his body heal quicker, he did not eat. He didn’t eat anything for three days and he just chained smoked Buglers the whole time. Reading psychedelic novels. All kinds of things.

He taught me how to play Texas Hold Em’. And I beat him one night in a long game, a couple of hours. He almost crushed my head off like I owed him money or something. Oh Rotten Jim Cotton and me, we was fucking chilling out in Howland at 4AM while shotgunning beers. A true gangsta.

But while I was hanging, there was all other kinds of psychedelic characters, oh yeah. Many different psychedelic peeps. And I was on a break one day, for two days. So, I went down to Hot Springs, NC to play a psychedelic show on a back country porch. At this backyard, there’s this gangsta named Big Ted. He had a moonshine still in his backyard, oh yeah. He was puffing pounds of ganja on stage and chugging all kinds of alcohol and wilding the fuck out on stage. And up pulls the police car to the front of the house. And they see us next to the moonshine still, puffing and performing. Cops get out the car; it was the head sheriff and the deputy. They get out the car and start walking towards us and they stop. We’re still blazing and playing, hoping that shit isn’t going to go crazy. All of a sudden the sheriff goes, “O-ooooooooo!” Then I realized, he was digging the tunes, oh yeah. It was a pretty chill mother fucking joint. So we went on puffing and playing.

The show ended and we was all kinds of mother fucked up. We heard all kinds of psychedelic engines, revving across the rivier. And I said, “what’s going on over there?” They said it was a holy Hell’s Angels rally. And I said, “WE SNEAKING IN THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” And so we went across the river. We walked straight into the Hell’s Angels bike-o-rally, me and like six other people. They didn’t say nothing to us, we just cruised right in. We didn’t have no motorcycles, or nothing. Everybody’s just eyeballing us like crazy, but nobody said nothing. Then all of a sudden, a lightning storm starts striking. Crazy thunder in the air and rain is pouring down. The Hell’s Angels are all popping shrooms and they all have handles of whiskey and there’s all these huge topless ladies everywhere. They losing they minds and the whiskey, everybody is dumping it across their bodies. And the rain is coming down and the shrooms are just popping in. The Hell’s Angels are wilding the fuck out.

I hear off to the side a crazy sound system with some music coming out. I realize that Artimus Pyle, the drummer of Lynyrd Skynard, is playing at the Hell’s Angels bike-o-rally. We go to the huge stage. There’s like a 1,000 Hell’s Angels and big ol’ topless ladies. We are flipping our lids. He plays all the hits like, “Sweet Home Alabam[a]” and “The Ballad of Curtis Lizzzo” and all those holy tunes. And then he comes up on stage, and the rain is at its peak, and the lightning is striking and shit is going crazy and everybody is pouring whiskey on top of themselves still. It was crazy there. The topless ladies are just grinding all over the place. It’s crazy. The bikes are coming through the crowd and revving and shit’s on fire, and shit is going down. And Artmius screams into the microphone and says, “WHAT SONG ARE WE PLAYING NEXT?! FREE BIRRDD! WHAT SONG ARE WE PLAYING NEXT?!”. And a thousand motherfucking topless ladies and Hell’s Angels and me and a couple of gangstas we yell, “FREEE BIIRDD!” And all of a sudden they erupted into a 30 minute version of “Free Bird”. The fucking lighting is striking all over the place, the topless ladies are grinding, and the rain is coming down like crazy. Everybody is losing their minds.

It was a holy time. One of the most spiritual things I’ve ever seen.

Curated by Tiny Waves

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Beneath the pop harmonies and synth-laden lulls, Beat Culture strikes a sensitive note. In the latest edition of Storytellers, the young American whisks us away with more than just his perfectly crafted songs. Come with him, and us, on a journey to Indio.

Let the pilgrimage begin.

The official website for the city of Indio, California boasts a photo with three young adults pasted, via Photoshop, in front of a “teen center,” a basketball hoop, a palm tree, and an ambiguous blue swirl that maybe represents the wind or the ocean, neither of which exist there because it’s a desert. “The place to be,” the banner at the top says.

I realized it was the place to be when one night I looked to my left and saw a sweaty, bearded man weeping as his childhood hero played “Two Headed Boy, pt. 2” against a backdrop of unfiltered desert sundown.

Let’s call him “Bob.” He could be anyone, but let’s call him Bob.

Bob is in Indio. Not for the teen center or the basketball hoop or the palm trees, but for a very specific reason: the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

Located in Indio itself, at the “Empire Polo Club,” Coachella draws roughly eighty thousand music fans from all over the world. It’s a three-day pilgrimage—an aural Mecca of sorts.

Inside, palm trees are flooded in garish purple light; twisting, blinking constructions burst out of the ground, and concertgoers dance in pits while spraying each other with hoses and listening to tribal chants. A Tyrannosaurus Rex sculpture made from scrap metal and wood stands above the horde, silently watching, jaws lined with rust and frozen in a permanent grin. Thousands and thousands of sweaty, and by Sunday, more-or-less goddamn putrid, human beings flock between five main stages under the unrelenting desert sun (also: Tupac hologram).

No one is here for the sights, though.

Bob is here because he heard Mazzy Star on the radio when he was twelve years old and a year later they became the soundtrack to his life. He put one of their songs on a mixtape for a girl when he was seventeen. Now he’s twenty-three and they’re playing Coachella and oh God he’ll do anything to go and he did and now he’s here.

“Mary” is here because one night she couldn’t sleep and someone sent her a song and the entire world stopped for five minutes. She cried because it was beautiful and now she can finally hear the song in person and now she’s here.

“Chad” is here for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He’ll end up with a free t-shirt and a headache.

“Tim” is here because he lives in Indio and has nothing better to do.

I noticed the ferris wheel first. There’s rarely anyone actually in it, but it looks beautiful, especially when the sun sets and the silhouettes of palm trees fade into the foreground and the lights from the food tents come alive and you’re exhausted and dying of heat and lying in the grass and watching it all happen. I never ended up riding it.

Bob probably hates the security checkpoints and searches. The anticipation and the ever-present sun and the ever-present smell of people’s shit (both definitions) left out in the sun make him dizzy. He has to sit down. He can never scan his wristband the right way and the security guard always gives him a look like, “Christ. Come on,” and has to scan it for him while he stands there with his arm limp and embarrassed. It’s ten in the morning and the people behind him in line are drunk as hell. But finally, Bob and Mary and the men and women and occasional unsuspecting child are released into the wild, free to fend for themselves in the desert.

And so, eighty thousand people pass into the Empire Polo Club daily.

It’s hard to describe how I felt during the time in between entrance and exit. One moment I was pressed up against the VIP barrier in an attempt to get closer to Flylo as “Computer Face//Pure Being” rumbled through the crowd; the next, I was lying in the grass with friends and hearing Radiohead play “Reckoner” and felt aligned with everyone and everything.

It’s hard to describe how I felt. And by the time I started to grasp at the idea, it was past midnight and we were being sent away by security—on the way out, where eighty thousand people move in one massive, gyrating flock, a herd. “Bohemian Rhapsody” can be heard spreading through the crowd. The line never moves because the gates are so narrow and the people get restless, it’s like in an hourglass, there’s nothing you can do to get more grains of sand through, you just have to watch and wait and let it happen but it’s so hot and smells like the drain in your bathroom that you’re always careful not to step on.

Music has a direct path to the “emotive” part of the brain, often bypassing the troublesome “thinking” gateway that we sometimes get caught up in. We form connections with songs we don’t even know the names to. When certain frequencies and amplitudes and waveforms meet our ears, someone slips an ice cube down our spine and we smile or sleep or tear up—instant gratification.

Coachella caters to these basic human desires and instincts. You eat only when you get hungry, you rest only when you can no longer stand, you sleep, you devour the music, and you eat again.

“Fucking animals,” I remember someone muttered as he narrowly dodged a freshly-laid (human) shit on the path.

Objectively, it seemed that very little separated the lucky eighty thousand from animals—covered in sweat and dirt and stains, often stripping, throwing things, breaking things, lining up for things, moving in herds and nurturing our own ingrained desires.

But then, we remember why we’re here.

We’re here because we’re willing to step through other people’s shit, to wear the same clothes for days, to subsist off frosted flakes for lunch and churros for dinner, to sweat and drink and sweat and drink until we feel like kitchen sponges wrung out over used plates—we’re willing to do that to be in a crowd of thousands with balloons flying overhead, smoke and sweat in the air, waiting for that one moment, that single note that Bob and Mary and Chad and Tim know so well, the note that got them through black nights and wasted days. And when it comes, it doesn’t matter whether we’re animals at heart or not. Right then, we find God and our pilgrimage is fulfilled.

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