#1. Dicing with deathcrash
An interview over the board with the maverick post-rock band, alongside a playlist of outsider synthesists
Dear friend,
If you’re reading this, you’ve taken an interest in my latest project, Zugzwang. Welcome. For years, I’ve written about my favourite music for The Quietus and Loud and Quiet, reviewing albums and interviewing bands. But the past year has brought other interests to the fore; I’ve been reading and writing way more than ever before, but also playing a hell of a lot of chess. A hell of a lot.
I was a bit of a chess nerd in infant school, but quickly abandoned it when new passions like football, drawing and music made themselves known. At the start of lockdown numero uno I downloaded a chess app, an algorithmic computer pal to keep me company on sprawling 2020 afternoons and I loved it. But I would spend an absolute maximum of an hour a week rekindling this passion. When the Queen’s Gambit came out in Autumn, everyone I knew got really into moving the black pieces and moving the white pieces, and then I had a bit of a platform to get really, really into chess. I wouldn’t say I was an amazing player – my ranking’s about 1100, and I regularly get humbled by cheap tricks and miss obvious things, but I just love the game so much. I don’t think this newsletter is impenetrable to non-chess fans, but I’m going to nerd out about it just as much as I nerd out about music.
Reminded of the bit in Bergmann’s Seventh Seal where the soldier chats with death over an immortal game of chess, I thought the best way to interview artists and musicians and other people of interest would be across the board. Although the game in the film actually sucks, and the pieces are ugly, the cinematography is cool as fuck. I’m aware a lot of music publications would be unwilling to maintain this conceit over a period of time, hence the birth of this space. Plus, I’ve always wondered what music is made by people that are good at chess; obviously the RZA’s a great player, you can tell by the way he makes his beats, but who else? That’s what we’ll find out.
But what is a Zugzwang? It’s a German chess term that means ‘obligation to move’. It’s my favourite term in chess, and it means that any move you can make will worsen your position. It happens a lot in endgames, with just pawns and kings. Zugzwang.
Every issue will come with an interview, alongside other bits of writing, reviews, playlists etc. In this inaugural issue, I speak to deathcrash, the mercurial (untitled) recs signing, and attach some of my favourite weird synth-pop songs in the form of a playlist.
With this series, I might examine whether making music is like chess, but I also might not. I’m aiming to release one every week, and look forward to hearing what you think. In the in-between times, feel free to challenge me over at chess.com, where my username is liquidswordzzz.
Chess Clash #1: deathcrash
Patience. Virtue. Think first before you move. This is the philosophy that propels post-rock outliers deathcrash is a belief in the power of slowness and timing. A four piece, Tiernan Banks, Matt Weinberger, Noah Bennett and Patrick Fitzgerald, deathcrash have been amassing a dedicated following for quite some time, as they orbit contemporaries Black Country, New Road and Black Midi.
Taking influence from Slint, Duster, Talk Talk, These New Puritans, etc, their music is custom built for the slow crawl of lockdown days. I’ve been aware of the band for quite some time, and so has everybody else, but it is only now that they release their debut EP ‘People thought my windows were stars’, ahead of an album later this year.
They all hail from London, but there’s something of the sprawling moors and fens of rural England in their sound. Just how Slint and June of 44 seem to embody midwestern US landscapes, there’s an English myst to deathcrash’s sound. A heaviness, achieved without anything much heavy at all. Banks’ personal lyrics are delivered with a whisper, while all sorts of oddball radio samples and mercurial guitar lines wrap themselves around a percussive frame like ivy; indeed, there are very few records that have connected with me in recent years like the ‘People thought my windows were stars’, but there’s something pretty special about deathcrash.
It’s this slowness that makes me think they’re the perfect fit for this chess project. They build enchanting and alluring climaxes so slowly, focus in abundance and calculation aplenty. For that reason, I am excited to see what moves guitarist Matt Weinberger pulls in a duel over the chessboard.
Very quickly it becomes apparent that he is very good. In our first game, Matt has the white pieces and we begin with an innocuous enough E4/Sicilian opening. For no reason whatsoever, I blunder a rook. By the 20th move, three of his pieces are pointing at my king and my only remaining minor piece is in a nasty inescapable pin; I’m clinging on. I have little choice but to trade off my remaining pieces like-for-like to prevent early checkmates, and we drift towards the endgame fairly equal in pawns. However, Matt has a rook and I do not. I test the waters a bit, and decide that he probably knows how to kill it off. I resign. 1-0 in the deathcrash chess clash.
“Realistically I’ve been playing for quite a few years, my dad taught me to play and then I don’t think I played again for 15 years,” Matt tells me. “I have a housemate, Danny, chess mad. He was watching the Queen’s Gambit while I peered over his shoulder; he bugged me to get back into it, so I’ve been playing a lot through 2021.” With the revelation that Matt probably plays less chess than me, and is much better, I change the subject.
“It all began at university,” he says of the band’s origin myth. “I wasn’t in the band at the beginning, and it was kind of krautrock. At that point, I was doing a year abroad at university, and then I came back and one of the members left, so Tiernan asked if I wanted to come and play guitar in this band. He sent me a few albums before I started playing”. As Matt told me that, in my head, I guessed what they might be. “Beak’s second album, Spiderland, Mogwai’s ‘Come on Die Young’, and loads of weird shit,” he said. Right on all counts: “as well as lots of music that existed in the space between those.”
I tell him that I see deathcrash as a European equivalent to bands like Slint; how their music is shrouded in a sort of moorland mist. “All of us are from London, but I have family scattered about,” Matt tells me. “As a band those landscapes resonate with us. We use a lot of those images as press shots, partly out of shyness, but partly out of the feeling that there’s a connection between the music and that kind of landscape.” The front of the EP is a darling painting by Kaye Song of a mist-shrouded harbour; perfectly evocative of the music contained.
A big part of the bands sonisphere are the samples that they seemingly pluck from obscurity and weave seamlessly into their winding tapestries. ‘People thought my windows were stars’, the title track from the EP is one such example; Banks’ lyrics are entwined with a myriad of samples add to the stirring composition.
“The first one is some recordings that Tiernan found,” Matt tells me. “I think, an American Counseling Association thing.” It’s a taping of candid conversations about mental health, from a psychologist in the not-so-distant past. “I don’t know how he found it, but it resonated with us so we put it on the song. It was off the back of some discussions we were having as a band about dealing with personal issues. We’re quite an open band, and we’re very close to each other.”
“Initially that song was only the second half,” Matt adds. “The second half begins with what was a River Phoenix sample, where he speaks really candidly about learning to play music for one of his films. His family said ‘you can use it if you pay us twenty grand.’ Obviously we didn’t have that kinda money, so we got an American friend to re-record that. I don’t know how allowed I am to say that, but I’m sure it’s fine.”
The start of the year saw the band release the full ‘People thought my windows were stars’ 12 inch, which sold out in 24 hours. The A-side features the previously released title track and ‘Bind’, which came out last Autumn, and the B-side is made up of four new songs, ‘Songs for M I-IV’. “We recorded them all in this one session,” Matt adds. “Straight onto tape, and it had this very nice feel to it. We added some radio samples that we recorded on the day. We liked it too much to release as a vinyl only B-side, so it’s up online.”
“We used to do the last two live,” the guitarist adds. “‘Songs for M III’ was a song Tiernan wrote, which was really cool and doomy, and heavy in a way that isn’t obvious. Implied heaviness.” I like that: “I thought that was dope, so I tried to write my own version, which is ‘Songs for M IV’.” ‘I’ and ‘II’ came from open-tuning jams Matt conducted with frontman Banks, and the whole suite has been cut into a slow film by director Peter Treherne. deathcrash’s slow intensity is at its best here; more so than any other band I interview for this project, deathcrash make music that you’d imagine someone good at chess makes.
I have one more question before initiating a rematch chess clash with Matt from deathcrash; “knight or bishop”?
“I have to go for the humble knight,” Matt adds. “It can do such freaky shit, always catches people off guard. The way you can pin so many different things at the same time. The bishop’s cool, but the knight is always the one that forces massive blunders.” We agree to a rematch, this time I have the white pieces.
Round two. I play the London system, and am forced to quite quickly trade a ‘humble’ knight for two pawns. It’s a much closer game. At least, I tell myself this, until move 23 where I take what I assume is a free knight with my bishop, only to find that it is a trap. Matt slides his queen is on to my back rank and there are no escape squares. Checkmate. 2-0. Game over. Well played Matt, well played deathcrash.
Deathcrash are very much one of my favourite bands around; listen to the debut EP here.
Zz Playlist #1 – Outsider Synthesists
I love music. I love it so much. All the music. Rock, pop, jazz. All the music. Japanoise, Cumbia, plain. All the music. Every week, I’ll playlist a favourite genre, or artist, or concept. This week, I thought I’d start with a playlist of slightly off kilter synth-pop, EBM and dance music. I’ve been loving Greek composer Lena Platonos and her magnum opus ‘Galop’ this last month, and that was my starting point. Nothing quite cuts through you like the perfect synth line, and here we have that in abundance. Well good.
On the below (or here) playlist are favourites from across the globe. YMO’s gleaming technopolis might be my personal favourite, or William Onyeabor’s gleefully off-kilter charisma, or maybe even Duran Duran’s baroque-pop zinger ‘The Chauffeur’, but rest assured, everything is good.
Writing I’ve loved this week
Writing this feature, these two interviews by Robert Davidson for Loud and Quiet and his excellent blog Blind Spot were my favourite pieces of writing on deathcrash I came across.
This Quietus piece on Anita Lane, one of my all time favourites, by Eleanor Philpot is well worth a read.
And Fergal Kinney talking to all time favourites Life Without Buildings on the 20th anniversary of ‘Any Other City’ made me deeply happy, too.
I’ve read and loved Nick Hunt + Tim Mitchell’s “The Parakeeting of London: Adventures in Gonzo Ornithology” this week. A chronicle of all the folk myths surrounding the deeply beautiful and nourishing presence of parakeets in our city. More info here.
I wrote about Gazelle Twin’s wonderful new ‘Deep England’, a retelling of AOTY 2018 with a drone choir. Read it here.
Cool chess thing I’m into this week
Here’s the really nerdy bit hidden at the bottom. In games this week I’ve been getting a lotta joy out of the early bishop attack (Bxf2/Bxf7). I’m told it’s thoroughly unsound against sharp play, but it’s a lot of fun – forcing the king to move forwards early. I like this game a lot, and I have been deploying it to similar effect recently. Try it yrself.
Thank you for taking the time to read the first issue of Zugzwang. Please tell your friends about it, and hopefully this can grow and grow and grow. Stay safe, and take care.
As ever,
Cal