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“OFF BOOK WITH BRENDAN WELLS”

ArtpunkINTL interviews BRENDAN WELLS (Uranium Club, Brendan Wells Plant Music, NERV) about Art, inspiration, chess, and the joy of not having the answer.

Interview by Lucas Rose for ArtpunkINTL, 2022

[FULL INTERVIEW TEXT BELOW]

As a unique mode of Art performance and creation, what does The Uranium Club mean to you? How does it allow you to express yourself in ways that other projects don’t? Please be as abstract as you can.

BW: For my involvement with it, the goal is as much communication as possible. I want an album to encourage someone to spend time with it, the type of thing you take into the bathroom to read and look over. I want to approach things with an intent to express ideas everywhere we can: in lyrics, on the center label, the clothes we wear, the things said on stage in between songs, on the album spine, anywhere we can find. I'd like our choices to be conscientious over automatic (are we doing something a certain way because that's how it's done or do we choose it because it will serve us?), and while other times we can be spontaneous then hopefully that spontaneity can be another weapon or resource for ideas, maybe something to reverse engineer into a reference or plot point to inform what we do next.

The way I view art, everything you do as an artist says something, whether it's process, medium, message, product etc. I don't know that everyone sees that, that when you make an unthoughtful choice it can communicate that you aren't paying attention to what you're doing. Are you invested in me as an audience member? I think in ways I'd also equate unthoughtfulness with insincerity, which is maybe a big jump, but maybe at least a lack of sincerity, and when sincerity isn't present that's just as obvious (and it is obvious!) as insincerity. You can be sincere and make something terrible but at least it won't be boring, I think. There is a lot of filler in products. And I get that, it's easier that way.

In that sense I think Uranium Club chooses to be difficult, and sometimes it's a difficult or slow or frustrating process for us, to be honest. But the filler concept reminds me of a promo video for Steve Martin's master class on stand up comedy where he says a big mistake people make is to walk out on stage and say something to an audience like "Hi, how is everyone doing tonight?" It's a mistake because you have missed an opportunity to make a joke. Everything is an opportunity to make a joke. Take out the filler and you might only be left with a little bit after that but now maybe you've stumbled into the power of minimalism.

There’s something about the Uranium Club that feels medical. Songs often come across as stories from the medical or psychiatric fields, telling tales of altered personalities, hidden selves, sickness, sudden traumatic change, proximity to death, and morbid comedy. What motivates the band’s songwriting? What sort of thing could cause a member of the Club to stop and think “I should make a song out of that?”

BW: Speaking for myself as one of three writers in the band, I'm a curious person, lots of Wikipedia and using the interlibrary loan service to spontaneously request books on subjects and artists that pop up on my radar. I jump around between a lot of different interests and thoughts so if something sticks in my brain and keeps my attention then I'll start to ask myself if it could become a song. It has to be something that keeps inviting questions and thoughts beyond what sparked interest in the first place. Even better, I like when even after making a song about something I feel like I could keep writing on the subject because every new angle I view it from invites more investigation. Subjects that involve a moral grey area do that for me, partially because something that makes me laugh is to hear a strong, one-sided opinion on a subject.

One of the funniest characters is one who is confident and wrong. I think subjects around medicine, psychiatry, etc are meaty because of the complicated relationship between science/fact and the personal experience behind/around it. Science has connotations of being right about things, of perfection and rules and infallibility, but what about when things get complicated, when you invite in questions of morality and suffering and the times it turns out you've been wrong for years about something? That's confusing, and I think a lot of my expression comes out of exploring confusion.

Digging around, it’s not hard to find references to an unreleased Uranium Club short film. From my own understanding, the cover art for The Cosmo Cleaners is a relic of this film. What can you recall about that film? Was it ever finished? Was it ever real? If so, are there any future plans for it?

BW: The band members do love Film, and sometimes we try to watch the same movies to be on something of the same page. But one of my favorite ways of taking in Art is through photos of Performance Art. Do you ever hear something about a book or a movie that gets you excited but then the real thing doesn't quite capture what you wanted? That's how I feel about most B-movies; I don't watch them, I get bored. There's a performance piece I love by a Chinese artist Song Dong called Stamping the Water where he is standing in a lake with a large printing block with the symbol for water on it and he slaps it against the water. I feel like I also saw a video of the performance and the video took the magic out of the action for me. The most compelling version of the piece I think is just one photo accompanied by the title.

Titles are really important, I think. It's like a secret lyric that changes the way you hear the song. It expands the narrative, like this weekend when I saw the house of some kids I went to school with who I thought were rich but now the house is abandoned and boarded up. I asked my mom and she told me it's because the parents got divorced and their dad accidentally killed someone while driving a speedboat drunk.

But then holding back some information is compelling too, like how my mom said the dad is dead now too, but didn't say why, so I'm left with questions. I do think movies are great, though, and watching a movie can be more inspiring for me than any other way of taking in Art, even though I have trouble sometimes allowing myself to watch a movie because I worry it's not time well spent if I'm not sick or tired.

Has anybody followed the instructions on the Two Things At Once 7”?

BW: Maybe once, I think. One of the most flattering things I can experience is when somebody lets me know they were listening and they remember what I said. It might be too much to say that I make art or music because I never felt listened to when I was a kid, but if I want to believe what I've learned in the years of therapy I've had then maybe I can admit that. It's vulnerable to express yourself but on the part of the audience I think it also takes vulnerability to participate—to choose to answer someone's question instead of letting it hang as rhetorical. It's a transformative choice, kind of like a magic spell you help complete. It makes the outcome less certain, more charged, more in the moment.

There's this great concept called going "off book" in chess that fits for that. At some point in the world of chess they started keeping a record of every move ever made in tournament play. During a game of chess, every move made makes it a little less like every game played before it, but you can still play an entire game of chess and know that the same choices in the same order have been made before. It is increasingly rare as more games are played and more data is created through that, but if you make a choice that has never been recorded before, the game is now "off book." It's not safe to do that, but it can mean the difference in whether or not there ends up being a Wikipedia article about that chess match. Despite the connotations you might make for words like creativity and Art, a lot of experiences with Art and Music are "on book." If somebody asks you to do something for the sake of Art—clap, answer a question, whatever—I think you should do it because that is a step in the direction of making the experience a little bit less like every experience that came before it.

NERV was explosive, abrasive, and aggressive, a wonderful combination of Powerviolence and original flavor Hardcore Punk. What did you learn with NERV that stuck with you?

BW: I learned to err on the side of spontaneity when it comes to performance. So many times I came up with an idea beforehand, like jumping at a certain moment (or especially with anything I thought would be funny to do or say) and it would turn out so lifeless. It's like giving birth and a wet potato coming out instead of a baby. I'd expect laughter and there would be none and I would feel so stupid, or I would do something and realize I was forcing it into the wrong moment. There are comedians who will work so hard to make their thoughts seem spontaneous when they've actually been delivering the same lines for years, and that can make for a good joke and speak to the mastery of their performance, but that joke can be matched or exceeded if it turns out you have to fart at the exact moment it would be funny to fart. For me to feel right about it I need to be in the moment and respond to it. If you respond, you create communication; if you force it, you might poop your pants.

Bands like NERV almost always end up with one or two good stories from the road. Any come to mind?

BW: The one that I usually tell is about NERV playing a show on tour in Pittsburgh in 2011. It was a grind show we got added to along with Wild Child, a band from Minneapolis we were friends with that included Harry from Uranium Club. Wild Child was incredibly late to the show because that morning they got stranded on the road with a flat tire and then after it got replaced they were in standstill traffic for hours because of a giant traffic accident. They finally showed up after all the other bands had played and were super stressed out and tired and had to play immediately to a pretty small and apathetic audience. They asked if we were down to just relax and watch a movie because they had bought Bruno on DVD at a gas station a few days before and hadn't gotten a chance to watch it. The guy who booked the show invited us to stay at his place and it sounded good—a spare room with beds because bands stayed there all the time, he said he'd make us spaghetti and salad, and the only thing to really deal with was his fiancé was moving in so there would be her cat and his two dogs who were loud but harmless.

We get back to the guy's place and it's gnarly—his dogs are these two giant rottweilers who are barking and lunging and making us uncomfortable. He shows us where we can sleep and it's this room with horror movie posters and flyers for grind shows and a pile of very stained mattresses. It's gross but there's a big TV and an Xbox so we can start up Bruno and he goes to the kitchen to cook stuff and we make the best of it. There's eight of us so I'm sitting on the floor next to the couch and Bruno was really funny. The dogs come thundering into the room whipping around a toy or stuffed animal and run over me and get slobber all over my arm and drop the toy next to Antoine from Wild Child and they chase each other around and run out again. We decompress from that but Antoine jumps up and yells "Holy shit!" and "It's a fucking cat, dude!" I turn around and realize it wasn't a stuffed animal the dogs were playing with, they'd killed the guy's fiancé's cat. I check my arm and see it isn't dog slobber, my arms covered in blood.

We all start standing up and freaking out and the guy walks into the room from the kitchen, sees the dead cat, and loses it. "Holy shit, that's my fiancé's fucking cat. She's gonna fucking leave me, man. They're gonna put my dogs to sleep. FUCK. I'm so FUCKED." Then for some reason he turns on us and starts yelling at us. "Why didn't you guys do anything? That's my fiancé's fucking cat!"

The guy stops and puts his face in his hands and starts crying. We're all just standing there looking at each other and not knowing what is going on and half watching Bruno, which is still playing, while the guy cries. After a while he tries to straighten up and bring things back to a level of normalcy.

"Well," he says, "the spaghetti's done."

With Brendan Wells Plant Music, Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods and Mort Garson’s Plantasia seem like the obvious points of inspiration (based off nothing more than assumption), but it’s got a lot more going on too. What points of influence do you take for your quieter explorations of sound (other than plants)?

BW: The start of the project came out of a very anxious time in my life—I had tried moving to San Francisco to help run the magazine Maximum Rocknroll and it fucked my life up and was even making it hard to listen to punk for awhile. I was trying to search out classical music I could connect with but was gravitating more towards things that felt simplistic or minimal and natural. I was wanting to make music like Steve Reich, Terry Reilly, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, but like most things it's been filtered through my limitations. I don't know how to "play piano" necessarily but I can run a keyboard through guitar pedals and hold down some of the keys and try different things until I discover something I find compelling. Or I might not have the patience to systematically compose something like Steve Reich that explores overlapping themes and frequencies but I will record two separate tracks that ignore structure and meter and play them both at the same time to see what comes out of it. I also find something incredibly transcendent can come out of music without percussion or drums, or something that doesn't use those devices but still creates rhythm and forward motion. It's more tied with a spiritual pursuit than other things I might make.

In your opinion, how’s the Twin Cities scene doing these days? Anybody that’s been catching your eye that you feel hasn’t gotten their praise? Does the scene feel alive?

BW: I would say that it's healthy, it's fine, it's existing. I would not say that my experience today is a heyday, but as long as things are happening then that means things in the future can be nurtured and artists have a place to grow instead of having to start from nothing. I think though that there are things going on that I'm not in touch with that are happening, just not exactly in the scene I've been attached to.

Things have changed a lot since I first visited Minneapolis in 2008. Punks aren't as smelly. Fewer dreadlocks. Those things weren't my niche necessarily but it had an exciting identity. But in Minneapolis I think there is always an audience. When a new warehouse venue opens up people will be there and excited. The people here are very supportive and want to see music. The music I'm most excited about in town is pretty new and hasn't been recorded yet so there are things to look forward to but not a lot I can easily share right now except for a few live videos.

[Brendan provides the following links:]

Pig in the City : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3ji81yq4Y

Psychic Sports : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtcKe1mMC4Q

Egg Girl Girl : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiGXUMOnuHY

Which release(s) do you find yourself most proud of for each of your projects? Do you have a favorite song or songs from your own body of work?

BW: I think the first vinyl release for any of the projects I've been a part of is a big deal to me. Growing up and loving bands and music and never thinking that would be something I'd ever participate in myself, having something on vinyl feels like tangible validation for me of participation in a part of culture that I have looked up to so much. Making a tape with Plant Music was also a big deal. It was the first time i'd recorded and released music without playing in a band and again isn't something I thought I could do. In a lot of ways I have low self esteem so these things have been life changing.

One of the things I'm most proud of is a short-lived band from 2017 I was in called Ozone 120's. I played guitar, which I hadn't done in a band since 9th grade, and that helped change the way I talk about playing music because I would say "Well, technically I CAN play guitar, but I don't know how to 'play the guitar'" because I only knew how to play power chords and that didn't seem good enough to me. Now in my mind if you're able to make sounds you like with an instrument then I don't see that as illegitimate or something that should keep you from thinking you're not a musician or something.

What do you see when you look at the current world of Art? What is plentiful? What is lacking?

BW: Working in the limitations of your means is what is going to lead to authentic / unique / individual expression and I think that is increasingly rare. That's why musicians from different cities and different experiences with different resources will sound different and to me that's what makes Art exciting: that there's more of it out there to experience. There's something sterile about doing things the "right" way. That can end up meaning a focus on recreation rather than something I'd call a creation and I don't often find much credibility in that. I know there's an easy argument to that, that there's nothing unique or creative about bands who play guitars or even all art period but to say something like "Nothing is original so why should it matter?" is going to lead to a lot of product that I find lifeless. I don't think there's any excuse for boring Art.

I also think pun names have to go (Joanna Gruesome, Ringo Deathstarr, Olivia Neutron-John). That's an excuse for an idea. It's like having the opposite of an identity unless you're a Grind band or something because they're the only ones who do it right and with a worthwhile sense of humor.

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