BOTTOM TEXT’s “Garnishing”—covered here by me (:p) back in January—still gets heavy play thru my compy speakers. Lo, my joy when El cuarto elástico dropped a digital BOTTOM TEXT full length, WHAT DOTH LIFE?, right in the mad midst of Aries season.
As I listen I think, “¯\_(ツ)_/¯Who the eff is BOTTOM TEXT¯\_(ツ)_/¯” and through the law of attraction or some other force field they land in my Inbox and I get to ask BOTTOM TEXT about BOTTOM TEXT:
So BOTTOM TEXT is Milly Allen Cohen, Ray Alfonso, and Sam Hafferty. We are are all from Miami. Shortly after convening as a certified crew crew we all played our first show together at an event called Art Basel Distraction as BOTTOM TEXT’s predecessor Jesus’s Dad, which has all of our current members in addition to our pal Misha Lukov. We started off as being more concerned with immersive performance and fun but for our first show as BOTTOM TEXT (International Noise Conference 2017) we decided to focus more on sound and ~cohesive sillyness~. We have been particularly interested in exploiting our place as youth in a kind of very adult DIY community and city and turning it into a self-criticism of sorts against ourselves, as well as an exaggeration of the way that we feel outside generations view us. We do this with our sound by abusing playful instruments/machines and silly sounds with uncalled for bits of distortion and aggression. Our sampling of both mundane and absurd elements from everyday life is really important 2 help us create a more confrontational experience in our sound.
Fun, playful, absurd: ✓check ✓check ✓check. But, these freaky files are also full of a meta-type transparency that makes a lot of sense to me. This is art of hanging, jamming, sketching, drafting, and improvising, and having that actually be the thing itself and not just an idea that goes nowhere. Hitting buttons and keys, opening and closing browser tabs, not taking things too seriously. Having ideas, having a time, asking lots of questions, but not questioning too much. Just going there. I think of my favorite quote from an interview I recently read with Klein, “Eventually, I was just like, Fuck it, why not? It doesn’t even matter.” Because it really does, and it really doesn’t.
In college, many of my nights were spent with my friends gathered around a huge piece of paper. We’d each add text and drawings to the page (the tapestry, really) to fill it up with scenes and stories. This feels like the audio equivalent of that, but, all of my questions are not yet answered. What doth “garnishing” even mean? What is “ratatoing?” And who oh who is Josh Katz?
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