DUNN WITH LORDS AND LADY KEVIN: LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT.
INTERVIEW AND REVIEW: Kevin Rutmanis (Cows, Melvins, Tomahawk, hepa-Titus) and Gina Skwoz, team up with Trevor Dunn and the late David Livingstone to create the weirdest LP of 2024.
DUNN WITH LORDS AND LADY KEVIN: LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT
OVERDRIVE RECORDS
2024
Kevin Rutmanis has long been a musician whose attitude, skills and output I fiercely admire.
It was a big deal, for me, to get half an hour with him.
Kevin is a core component of my musical genetics. Not just with Cows, of whom I am an enormous fan, but also with Melvins, Tomahawk, hepa-Titus and now - with his wife (and fucking awesome visual artist), Gina Skwoz, as Lords and Lady Kevin.
LALK are about to release an LP together with Trevor Dunn: Last Days at Hot Slit.
Some of it was also written with the sadly departed David Livingstone (RIP), which lends weight and meaning to the abstracted noise, soundscapes and general Fiesta of Non-Convention that is contained within the record’s sleeve.
The loss of David’s musicianship (as evidenced through his work in God Bullies) and lifelong friendship to Kevin and Gina is at the heart of the music they’ve create this time out.
Much of it was created remotely by Dunn and Rutmanis, by sending bass-lines and sound-bites to each other to inspire and augment. All while Gina was learning to play the drums. It’s safe to say that a rabid desire for pushing boundaries, experimenting with (and defying) convention motivates all four players – and each is a true artist in their own right.
Events begins with shuffling drums and an unsynchronised, plonky bass, complimented by a soundscape that is, at once, brooding and imposing.
You could be forgiven for wondering if, at first, LALK are taking the piss - it sounds so disparate and ill-conceived.
That the joke must be on you.
*Expletive Deleted:
Gina - what’s been your musical journey? What’s the story behind the pair of you deciding to play together as well as live together?
Gina:
“I was a teenager in the early 2000s. So a lot of the music that I liked was stuff like Primus and Mr Bungle. All that stuff.
I was always drawn to strange music.
After I left school, I worked in record stores, so I was able to constantly listen to a lot of different stuff. But I didn't start playing drums until 2020, in the pandemic.
Kevin and I shared a lot of music when we first got together, too.
I learned a lot from him.”
Kevin:
“She’s like a lot of us. Digging around in music for years and following threads.”
Gina:
“I was in Australia and I just I thought, you know what? I've always wanted to try the drums, and I just thought: ‘I'm just going to just go for it and see what happens.’”
Kevin:
“The timing was super weird and perfect. She was in Australia. I was in LA, and I'd been having this idea in my head that I wanted to say something that sprang out of bluesy, religious-sounding music.
But I wanted it to have looser drums.
I was thinking about this, and at that point, I didn't even know she was going to be playing drums.
So I had this idea: “I want to do this thing.”
I swear to God, it was the next day, she sent me a recording saying, “Oh, listen, I've been playing drums.’ I was like, “That's exactly what I was looking for!”
Gina and my brother are the two easiest drummers I've ever played with.
(My brother, Sandris) has such a distinct style. I love playing with him. And we learned together, before Cows. He was learning drums and I was learning bass.
We noticed we could have a head full of acid and all the lights off for hours and just play… and we would turn corners at the same time. Maybe it's a little bit genetic, I don't know…”
Then suddenly - and here’s the beauty of it - your ear goes through a transformational process - like learning to listen to jazz - you suddenly hear what LALK are doing in a different way - holistically - you subconsciously accept their non-conformity - and the result is arresting.
You realise that you can’t hear this music on a whim. It demands your attention.
It calls for consideration and thoughtfulness.
You need a few run-throughs to accept it for what it is.
It challenges you in the most intellectual way - before you can submit to it and simply accept the emotional flow.
It’s transcendental and hallucinatory.
Behind Kevin’s slurred and incomprehensible vocals lies an atmosphere and a sincerity that rapidly becomes entirely engaging and all-consuming.
This is genuinely unlike anything you have heard before.
There’s obviously a Residents, Beefheart, Merzbow and free-form influence - but this is not like any of them.
It is entirely its own thing.
Kevin:
“I'm constantly surprised at how abstract people find the music, because I never think of it that way.
I really don't have a grasp of that.
I'm not trying to be aloof or anything, but none of it has ever struck me.
I'm always surprised.
You obviously have good ears, you're informed, you listen to a lot of music, but to me, it doesn't sound that unstructured, and I don't know why.
(Turning his head): Gina hasn’t been doing music as long as I have, and it doesn't seem so abstract to you, right?
She shakes her head.
Although, in the past, when we've talked music, I remember she was surprised when I played her Snakefinger.
She said, “Do you think this is improvised?” I said, “No, not at all”.
It’s surprising because it just doesn't make sense if you're not making it, I guess.
How would you know?
But I just lost that thread a long time ago.”
Gina:
“When I started learning, I started improvising. That's how this new record came together - I just totally improvised drum parts and sent them to Kevin.
I'm a little younger than Kevin (laughs). I’ve actually learned a lot about how free and improvised music can be, through him.
The improvised aspects are learned in a structured way, so that we can do them live.
Those improvised elements are there, but they're actually being learned from... they've been written.
So it's like: “Oh, yeah, that bit was cool.: And then like, “Oh, we'll do that…”
It's easy for me to play with Kevin. It's really fun and it feels really natural.”
Kevin:
“You know that David Bowie LP, The Man Who Sold The World?
He had those guys jam. He said, “I like that part; I like that part”.
He was structuring the songs based on the band’s performance by picking out elements that made sense.
It was basically the same way we had of doing it.
Only his songs came out a lot better than mine.” (laughs)
Last Days at Hot Slit tests you.
It continually questions if you are really in it to win it; if you’re willing to put the work in to earn the reward.
That’s not to say it’s hard work. It’s not - but you do have to reformat your thinking and expectation.
Re-situate it to face away from convention.
And then it becomes something so entirely alien that it is revelatory.
It may genuinely be the true sound of freedom.
Gina’s drums are not backbeats. They are as confrontational and fore-frontal as a vocal line. Kevin’s bass is sporadic; sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not - in the same song.
The noises that drone, scrape, whine, whinny and feed back throughout every song are instrumental in the purest sense of the word. They adopt the roles of guitars and keyboards - filling that same space in the mix, but as an intense din behind vocal samples and distorted craziness.
*Expletive Deleted:
How the fuck do you structure an album like this?
Gina: (Laughing) “It's alphabetical.
The last track, Indifference, that's a special song for us. That one just went last.
So that one's the only one that's not alphabetical. Nobody realises!”
Kevin:
“I would load them on the computer to do what you're talking about - to structure them. And often I was like: “This is a good order!”
And then I realized the computer just automatically lines them up alphabetically.
I was like: “This is exactly... I wouldn't have done it this way, but this is great!”’
The cuckoos have definitely flown the nest. Haunting acoustic xylophones and pianos tinkle behind (and in front of) harsh and abrasive static electricity - and then drop away for a soaring moment of hookiness before plummeting back down into the chaotic avantgarde, that Rutmanis amusingly considers to be pretty standard rock and roll.
I’m not sure what insight into the mind of the artist that specifically illuminates.
It is, at best, concerning.
The roll and roil of the tracks provide the perfect soundtrack to a Kesey-esque guided tour, by Nurse Ratched, through corridors of unmedicated madness.
Look! There’s Napoleon!
There’s a stoic Native American, over by the detuned TV.
What’s that incessant knocking? Oh - it’s just Marvin the Martian smacking his head against a radiator.
He does that.
Why is there no sunlight in this room? Because Vlad thinks he’s a what??
They used to charge the public a shilling to come and point their fingers at the inmates of Bedlam Asylum. The cost of entry would buy you undiluted time with the most unhinged, detached and upset residents; tortured minds screaming from the catacombs of the mental hospital’s cacophonic cells.
LALK is what that sounded like.
And then… the blues.
An elevating melody.
The clouds that clear. The dissipation of pain.
A moment of conventional coherence.
The fleeting beauty that can only exist within a maelstrom of horror.
*Expletive Deleted:
Why is the final track, Indifference, so important to you?
Gina: “Are you familiar with Dave Livingstone of the God Bullies? He's the reason we're Lords with an ‘S’, because he joined Lords and Lady Kevin, and so we were doing music together, and that was the first thing he sent us.”
Kevin: “I love the song. It’s important to us. We always do it live. It really wreaks of David - in a really good way.
I've known (God Bullies), since the of beginning of Cows and they were always a group of scandalous people. Things went sideways constantly.
And David - he just keeps working with people – no matter how crazy things get.
He was one of those people that could just put stuff aside and keep at it, regardless of the craziness (so I’m glad the new LP is great).
We miss David a lot because I worked with him a lot over the years, and he just...
Man, the David element is very strong in David.
I don't know how else to put it.
It was a real delight to work with him. It was always easy and fun.”
And then… which is the real LALK?
Is it the levity or the intensity? Which is the real beauty?
The unhinged and unrestrained chaos?
Or the tiny crumbs of airy breath in the giant loaf of suffocating lawlessness?
It’s all in the balance.
Riddle me this: When was the last time a record really made you think?
When was the last time a record defied expectation and convention, so entirely, that it flipped your world-view on its head, even for just as long as it takes for it play itself out?
It’s been a long time since something so affecting has occurred to me, and that, in itself, is a wonder.
In a world that feels like it has no surprises left for me, a trump has been played by Rutmanis, Dunn, Livingstone and Skwoz.
And that, Dear Heart, is surely what it is all about?
Just like the work the pair created with hepa-Titus and the many lathe-cut limited releases they released in lock-down, true unique quality is at the centre of the art they create with LALK.
The presentation of Last Days at Hot Slit doesn’t disappoint.
Kevin:
“Overdrive, (the label releasing Last Days at Hot Slit) are careful, which is good. Like Rock Is Hell, who released the hepa.Titus stuff. They really work hard (on production quality).
We've been really lucky.
I think it's a nice chance for people to have a higher quality object.
They're boutique items for people that can't usually afford to buy art.
I think it works because of a combination of people that are drawn to that type of thing, interesting and unusual, made by people that have the talent and skill to do it, too.
There are, of course, people making boutique stuff that isn't very nice. Their heart's in the right place, but they don't have the skills.
With all the advances in technology, people have the tools to make high quality, great stuff. But that also means there's so many people doing it that don't necessarily have whatever it is in their capability.”
*Expletive Deleted:
Just because you can hold a paint brush doesn't mean you're a painter.
Kevin:
“I don't think everyone realizes that.
A big part of it is about enjoying it. In the earliest days of photocopy flyers, we spent so much time doing it, because we thought it was hilarious. And the same with Hazelmyer - we'd go over there and glue shit together, then just laugh our heads off and put it out…”
Speaking of Tom Hazelmyer, erstwhile cherubic head-honcho of AmRep Records, it would have been remiss of me not to mention Cows…
Kevin:
“You know none of that (completely fucking mental) stuff was preconceived.
It really wasn’t.
We were just doing… We called it a joke - we would say, “Oh, this song needs a joke.”
What we meant was an event.
And that's how we did our live things.
We were really influenced by Vaudeville. We loved that.
It's been the same story with me the whole time I've done this.
What I think something looks and sounds like is not what anyone else thinks it is.
What you said about Lords and Lady Kevin, people said about Cows: “It's so abstract! Are these songs structured?”
They really did.
We'd look at each other and go, “I thought they were snappy rock songs!”
That's (genuinely) what we thought!
We practiced a lot, which I didn't realize until years later, a lot of people don't do.
We just liked it. It was fun.
We had to form something that worked live.
Recording is a completely different beast.
And now with computers; oh, my God. I can't imagine what would have happened if Cows were able to go: “Let's put this verse here and just move it and hear it!”
I don't think it would sound the same.
We did things the easiest way we could.
That was it. Easy. That was the motive.
We were really good at keeping the ball rolling or improvising with it. We could have done it for hours. Shannon would tape whole practices, on the cheapest cassette player, because that's what we had back then, we were broke.
Then at home - we were roommates - he would go through the cassettes and find a little bit, and he'd say: “I found this thing!”.
And then we'd build a song off that.
I remember when we would do records and we'd be laughing the whole time throughout recording: “This is hilarious!. Let's do that!”
We’d record the whole thing, and we'd listen to it and we'd go: “Why is it such a bad vibe? It seemed like we were having such a nice time!”
We were always surprised by that, because it seemed so funny in the moment.
And then all of a sudden, the vibe wasn't that hilarious.”
And that, dear reader, is a very worthy epitaph.
Ave, Funster!
Love your writing, I’m also going to check LALK!