#5. New York City Telephone Conversation (OR: A chess game with Gustaf)
Engaging the Big Apple's finest newcomers in the Royal Game.
Dear friend,
I hope this finds you well.
Much to my chagrin, this last couple of weeks the hospitality sector reopened and I returned to my shit job. I’m pleased to report that chess and music remain two hobbies at the forefront of my brain, even if – only a week in – I’m already notably worse at both writing about music and playing chess. With this, I can say that your favourite ‘Music and Chess Newsletter’ Zugzwang will be continuing long into 2021, although perhaps it will be released at ever-more erratic times.
This week I’ve fallen in love with a man called Edan. A mercurial rapper from Maryland, he’s only released a handful of records over 20 years and he loves dressing up. Über psychedelic take on rap, he uses some amazing samples (a great Bruce Haack one springs to mind on a tune called ‘The Gut’) and also has this amazing flow. Beauty and the Beat is the best new-to-me album I’ve heard in years, for serious, check it out.
In this edition of Zugzwang, we have a guest live from New York City on the burner, putting to the test my theory that New York is a place where people are simply good at chess. Enjoy.
Chess Clash #5: Gustaf
Photo credit: Adam Lempel
I’ve been obsessed with New York City since I first saw Doctor Who S3E4 aged 10. Sweeping shots of the great metropolis punctuated by occasional furious Dalek action; that’s what I’m talking about. Over the years, via no-wave, East Coast hip-hop and Lou Reed, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘Micky Blue Eyes’, and ‘Paris is Burning’, I’ve become ever more and more infatuated with New York as time has gone by. One day I’ll be there throwing ice cream up in Williamsburg I’m sure, I’m sure, but who can really say whether it will match up to the romantic notion of the city in my head.
The sound of New York, no, the sounds of it are what have me hooked. That one city has given us so much over the years, and after the pandemic I will make it my business to pay the city of chrome and neon a visit.
This week I’m chatting and chessing with the Big Apple’s finest. Gustaf released their debut double A-side ‘Mine/Design’ last December but had been making waves around Brooklyn and beyond for some time before then. Now a five-piece, they take influence from the dance-punk city stomp of groups like ESG, and Talking Heads. Urgent, but nonchalant, taut, but groovy, they fit right into the city’s vital guitar music lineage. And christ, how do these New Yorkers get bass guitars to sound like that? That’s what’s what.
There’s two tracks out but all sorts of live performances on YouTube. As you can see here, here and here, these guys aren’t fucking about.
At the centre of the project is singer Lydia Gammill, whose onstage persona crosses Mark E. Smith’s poetry contortions with Fran Lebowitz’s Pretend It’s A City ramblings, or at least that’s how it sounds to my dumb English brain. All the while she embellishes the tracks with caustic one-liners like: “You say that I/I’m much to old/to be lo-fi”. Sensational stuff.
But it’s not Lydia that I’m talking to this week. It’s guitarist Vram Kherlopian, whose guitar lines complete Gustaf’s rumbling post-punk canvas with choppy finishing-touch brushstrokes. Originally from New Jersey, he’s been in and around New York for years, playing in various bands here and there, and he also sings backing vox in Gustaf.
`Vram’s playing on the Gustaf stuff reeks of the B-52s cosmic-slop take on post-punk, and I’m not sure I can offer a higher compliment to a guitarist. A founding member of the band, he’s a helluva guitarist, an excellent chess player and an even better gentleman. Calling cross Atlantic we chat while we play, and play while we chat; this is Zugzwang chess clash #5.
While I set up the game I gleam the Gustaf origin story. “We’re all in our thirties”, Vram says: “we’ve all been playing in bands for at least ten years. In New York, it’s hard not to just dabble with different people. Everyone’s fronted their own project over the past couple of years. I thought Gustaf came together in a nice way. We were all musicians doing different things, and then it culminated in some way that we were all really happy with; it just worked.”
“In 2017, my girlfriend Tarra, who plays in Gustaf, was bringing one of her bands, Sharkmuffin to SXSW” Vram carries on. “She asked Lydia, the singer in Gustaf if she wanted to come, and she said ‘sure, let me put together a band, I’ve got some songs I’ve been working on.’ She got us together and played us the music and we were really excited about it.” Four of the current five-member lineup featured in that early incarnation, with Melissa Lucciola joining on drums in time for the ‘Mine/Design’ single. “Since then we’ve played a decent amount of shows, gone on some tours… kept on keeping on.”
Kickoff. Vram has the white pieces and opens Italian. E4, knight, bishop. I deploy the two knights defence with the view of employing the Traxler counter-attack if he tries anything funny. “I’m half Armenian, so I went to this Armenian church when I was younger,” he tells me: “there was a chess club there.”
“I wasn’t exquisitely talented at chess, but I’ve always had a lotta fun playing it,” Vram continues: “I remember one little chess tournament I played where I lost most of the games. After that, I’d casually play with friends maybe a few times a year. When quarantine happened, I watched Queen’s Gambit along with many other people, and all my friends were like, ‘let’s play chess I guess.’”
Vram is a strong player though. Immediately he traps my dark-square bishop and I have to sacrifice one of my horses to free it. Or maybe more accurately, I trap my own bishop while lost in conversation and Vram accepts the gift.
Quite quickly we discover that we’ve been watching the same charismatic Croatian chess YouTuber over lockdown. “I’ve been watching Agadmator on Youtube. He has these excellent videos of old chess games, and right now I’m watching the Paul Morphy Saga. It’s a series of 15 minute recaps of his games, with a bit of history thrown in, so cool.”
In future games I have with Vram he destroys me with the YouTuber’s favourite opening, the Evans Gambit, and then destroys me when I try to play it in the next game. I talk briefly about my fondness for early bishop attacks on the F7 pawn, adding “even though YouTube tells me they’re unsound”.
“I think the fun thing about playing at this level is that we’re not gonna study it too in depth,” he says: “those kind of things are totally workable. Cute little traps are laughable at the level of those YouTube guys, but for us we can get a whole bunch of wins that way. I love the Evans Gambit, as white, and the Stafford Gambit as black.”
But for now, in our game things are progressing a bit more traditionally. I ask whether he ever sees old men playing chess in the street like in the NY movies (“Yeah, in a couple of parks in Brooklyn, I love the romance of it”), and we have reached the position below. I’m about to be de-rooked.
“Yeah, I think in that position you can’t do anything other than sacrifice the rook,” he says.
I think chess has been a great escape during lockdown, but there are definitely other things out there that matter too. Well, one thing; music. “I’ve been using Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ to fall asleep,” Vram says of his favourite records to listen to over the last 12 months. “And I’ve loved Mort Garson’s ‘Plantasia’. I must’ve listened to it 50 times in the last month. I’ve been getting really into more electronic stuff actually, like Raymond Scott. I’ve been learning more piano, too.”
ESG are the most tangible influence on Gustaf’s music, a great influence to have. “Yeah, ESG, for me personally, that was always the band. I’ve loved them for a while,” Vram tells me. “I’m a poor drummer, but eight or nine years ago when I’d practice, I’d play those songs. Also, they don’t have any guitar work, so it’s fun to imagine what that would be like, and ESG for me are very informative for just how that type of music should be.”
We are now in this position. I have made a series of high profile blunders, and Vram now has two queens. After the big defeat in Zugzwang #4, it’s not looking good for me.
“This isn’t a very playable position,” I say: “to use the technical terms.” I then proceed to blunder my one queen a couple of moves later in a state of mild panic.
“No,” he says: “I was trying to find a move for you there, and there weren’t any without any immediate repercussions. Excellent game though,” he offers charitably, as we play out to a foregone checkmate, as you can see in the full game below. I am well and truly slain.
I round up with the usual Q: ‘bishop or a knight’?
“Typically a bishop, when it’s a nice open game, but if there’s a tonne of pawns on the board then it would be a knight. Situational but I’d take a bishop, unless it’s already gotten to that closed stage…” Very diplomatic, and almost certainly correct according to the literature I have available to me.
So there we have it. Another defeat at the hands of a favourite artist; I’m making a habit of this. But a spirited contest nonetheless, and it’s always exciting to talk to people from New York City, let alone the guitarist in one of its finest upcoming bands. Gustaf have announced a handful of UK dates in September, as you can see here on their Bandcamp, with a few gaps that I’m sure will be filled in in no time. A band certainly on the rise, but you heard about them here first, as ever, over the chessboard. Godspeed, friends, godspeed.
Epilogue
Following my embarrassing above performance with the black pieces, I thought I’d leave you with a nicer one I did this week to prove that I can do it.
Thank you as always for reading, and if you enjoyed please subscribe and tell your pals. Without subscribers, I’ll never achieve my dream of playing the whole Wu Tang Clan at once. Until next time, find me on chess.com with the username ‘calcashin’, where I will be wasting every spare moment I have.
As ever,
Cal