Tag: The Cave Studio

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: The Muckers Share an Urgent New Ripper

Emir Mosheni is a Tehran-born, New York-based singer/songwriter, guitarist and frontman of the rising New York-based rock outfit The Muckers. Back in Mosheni’s native Iran, listening to rock music has been forbidden since 1979 and has been relinquished to the underground since then. Mosheni grew up on a contraband CDs from a small retailer in a local mall: The shop owner sold classical Iranian music over the counter, but would pull out a thick alphabetized folder from which the Tehran-born musician would pick out the Western music that wouldn’t make its way to Iranian airwaves. At the time, it would albums like The White Stripes‘ Elephant, Green Day‘s American Idiot and so on.

Those albums and those bands deeply inspired a desire to play music –and to play the guitar. He quickly developed dexterous chops on a nylon string guitar that he inherited from his older brother.

Around the time he turned 18, music piracy began huge, and Mosheni’s music tastes shifted: He started downloading videos from Megadeth, Metallica, Anthrax and others. A five-hour download session led to an astonished viewing of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” video. Not only did that video cement his love for metal, it inspired him to purchase his first electric guitar, a Gretsch Electromatic, which he still plays today.

When Mosheni turned 19, he was called into mandatory military service. His shoulder-length hair — styled after his guitar heroes Jimmy Page, Frank Zappa and Dave Mustaine — was shaved, much to his dismay. When he recalls this period of his life, a time where he had to obey orders from an authority he didn’t believe in or respect, perform repetitive tasks deprived of meaning, and share bunk beds with people he felt no connection to, the loss of his hair was — for him — the biggest offense of them all.

Upon completion of his military duties, he was awarded a passport and began the process of attempting to secure a visa for the US, an extremely difficult task for an Iranian citizen. While he waited for a decision on his visa, Mosheni began writing the songs that would eventually appear on The Muckers debut album — “So Far Away,” “Suspended,” and “Will You Make It?”

When he was 22, Mosheni traveled to Turkey to attend his first ever concert at Istanbul‘s Beşiktaş Stadium — The Big Four: Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax. He stood on line for six hours to get in — and watched in awe as his heroes took the stage, one after the next.

When he returned to Tehran, Mosheni was increasingly convinced of his desire to be a professional musician. Braving the possibility of imprisonment, he played underground house shows, which always ended with the morality police shutting the party down, and attended doing everything they could to not get caught.

After several years of applying for a US visa, Mosehi had a breakthrough: a letter of support from the mayor of Austin Steve Adler, who became aware of Mosheni’s story through Taco Bar owner Dave Dart, with whom Mosheni corresponded with through Facebook Messenger. Finally, Mosheni received the elusive visa that would enable him to pursue music professionally.

Upon his arrival into the States, Mosheni formed The Muckers with Anthony Azarmgin (bass) and John Zimmerman (drums). The trio quickly developed a reputation across New York for their energetic live shows and a sound that recalled both MTV’s early days and 00s alt rock. And Mosheni grew his shoulder-length curly hair back.

The Muckers’ full-length debut, 2021’s Endeavor was released to critical praise from Rolling Stone, who dubbed it, “a record that shimmers with fire and possibility,” and the BBC 1′s Jack Saunders, who said it was “a wild ride of loose hectic guitar playing [that]you won’t be able to get enough of.”

“Suffocation,” the rising New York-based trio’s latest single is the first bit of new material from the band since Endeavor. The single sees the band introducing a heavier sound and a much more direct approach to their songwriting — and as a result, “Suffocation” is imbued with a raw punk rock-like urgency while rooted Mosheni’s dexterous guitar work and the band’s tight and propulsive rhythm section.

“Bands like Misfits with their simple but straight to the point lyrics and Nine Inch Nails’ hectic beats and harsh guitar tones were big inspirations” Emir Mosheni says “This is the first project that I recorded by myself in my home studio. I’ve always felt that my demos are the closest to the sound that I want to put out.” The bass and drum parts were recorded with Lucas Carpenter at Brooklyn-based The Cave Studio.

The song tells the story of a transition, from purgatory to hereafter, “when all the anger and frustration from the past find their way out to destroy and build a new path,” Mohseni explains.

Directed by Yazz Jansen, the accompanying video for “Suffocation” is a stylish and fuzzy romp through Brooklyn with the band, who are wearing full-on rock god uniform.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

With the release of their first two albums, 2013’s Sistrionix and 2016’s Nick Zinner co-produced FEMEJISM, the Los Angeles-based duo Deap Vally — Julie Edwards (drums, vocals) and Lindsey Troy (guitar, vocals) quickly established a blistering take on garage rock that some critics described as Led Zeppelin meeting The White Stripes. Although Edwards and Troy have always relished the challenge of working with the limitations of being a duo, after two full-length albums and years of touring, they felt an urge to reinvent their creative process and sought collaborators to break ties and to allow for an organic, majority rules driven process.

Last year, the duo collaborated with The Flaming Lips on the Deap Lips album. Edwards and Troy also worked on songs for their most recent effort, Digital Dream EP with Warpaint‘s jennylee, KT Tunstall Peaches, Soko and The Kills‘ Jamie Hince. Of course, those collaborations led to an age-old question for the duo: “Will you ever add a third member?” And Instead of adding a member, they decided that for them, it would be more of a creative adventure to collaborate with a bunch of different artists and friends rather than to commit to just one.

Slated for a June 18, 2021 release through Cooking Vinyl, the Los Angeles-based duo’s forthcoming Josiah Mazzaschi-co-produced American Cockroach EP was recorded at The Cave Studio and finds Edwards and Troy continuing their to collaborate with different artists and friends — including Eagles of Death Metal’s Jennie Vee (who’s also an accomplished solo artist in her own right) and Savages‘ Ayse Hassan.

The duo explain that the EP “is a collection of songs we’ve been working on for while that run the gamut for rom deeply personal, to outright satire and everything in between. These are songs for the underdog, the outlaw, the defeated, for days when you feel like no one understands you or you can’t do anything right.” The EP’s latest single “I Like Crime” is an anthemic and sleazy ripper centered around fuzzy and propulsive bass chords and an ass-kicking, name-taking swagger that reminds me a bit of Crocodiles and others.

“Jennie Vee, as it turns out, is our perfect partner in crime,” the members of Deap Vally say of their collaboration. “We had so much fun jamming out and then creating this song with her. She is SUCH a total shredder. As the song formed, it ended up being about the nuances of right and wrong, legal and illegal, and the compulsion we all have to ultimately do what we will.” 

Jennie Vee adds “Recording with Julie and Lindsey felt very fresh but natural at the same time. It was the first time I had experienced jumping into the studio to vibe out ideas that would lead to a fully finished song so quickly. Getting started is often the hardest part in the songwriting process, but in this case with the three of us, we just had to show up that day and from there the music took over as our guide. Then it was up to us to piece it all together. ‘ I Like Crime ’ stands out to me as groovy but urgent, a juxtaposition of mood. It rocks, I had a lot of fun, and would show up for Deap Vally and the music any time!” 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Night Dreamer’s Contemporary Take on New Wave and Goth

Deriving their name from a composition written and recorded by the legendary jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Night Dreamer is a new collaborative project that combines the divergent talents and musical voices of Smashing Pumpkins’ Jeff Schroeder and Southern California-based classically trained, New Wave multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Mindy Song into one unified, artistic vision. Introduced to each other through mutual friends, the duo can trace the origins of their latest project back to early 2017 when they met up for an experimental session at Schroeder’s Chicago-based studio. . “I had no plan other than to just get together with Jeff and see where things might go,” Night Dreamer’s Mindy Song recalls in press notes. “But then once we got going, it was an immediate explosion of sound and inspiration.”

As the story goes. about an hour into their first time working together, Song and Schroeder came up with “Treasure,” the title track off their forthcoming debut EP, Treasure. Slated for an October 11, 2019 release, the EP was mainly recorded at The Cave Studio with Josiah Mazzaschi, a producer, mixer and engineer, who’s worked with The Jesus and Mary Chain and Built to Spill among others — and the EP’s material reportedly finds the band meshing elements of dream pop, noise, heavy metal, goth and New Wave among others. Interestingly, each individual track is imprinted with a singular sonic aesthetic that came about roughly halfway through the Treasure EP recording sessions.“At first we went down a more traditional route in the recording, with live drums and live bass, but then Mindy asked if she could mess around with those tracks and take it in a different direction,” Schroeder recalls.

Working on her own after Schroeder returned to Chicago for tour rehearsal, Song started to reshape the material through the use of drum machines and synths, which managed to amplify the intensity of Schroeder’s guitar playing. “Usually it’s difficult to blend guitar with electronic music in a way that works,” says Schroeder. “But what Mindy sent back to me was so much more exciting than what we’d done before, and put us on a completely different trajectory.”

Treasure’s first single is the shimmering and mesmerizing “Another Life.” Centered around buzzing guitars, tweeter and woofer rattling 808-like beats and Mindy Song’s expressive and plaintive vocals, the song feels like a subtle modernization of the work of New Wave/goth titans like Sixousie and the Banshees and The Cure — but instead of wallowing in the darkness, the song manages to have an upbeat message of rising above one’s currently shitty circumstances, that things do get better in time.

Directed by John Isberg, the recently released video finds the members of Night Dreamer performing the song in an abandoned loft. Shot in warm yet simultaneously soft light, the video finds the duo escaping into the emotion and message of the song.