zach hill (SH Label Page)

Death Grips - The Fever (Aye Aye)

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:40:00 -0700

Death Grips - The Fever (Aye Aye) from “The Money Store”
out April 24, 2012 on Epic Records

Death Grips - Lost Boys (practice)

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:14:22 -0800

Boredoms Announce 111 Boadrum For 11/11/11

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:03:00 -0800

Like they did on 7/7/07 with 77 Boadrum, 8/8/08 with 88 Boadrum, ’09 with Boadrum 9, and last year with, you got it, Boadrum 10, the numerological experimentalist heroes of Boredums will assemble another world-class drum circle this year, on the corresponding date, with an appropriate number of percussionists. This site has details (via P4K) These things are an incredible amount of fun — I caught the original in 2007 and saw it again two years later at ATP (where we had most of them recreate it on arcade games) — and if I were a man of leisure and means, I’d probably book a ticket to Australia because the photos for its location, Island Ferry, look properly drum-circleable, and also because trips to Australia are generally a great idea. This year it’s 11 drummers (including Boadrum vets Hishaam Bharoocha and Zach Hill) and 100 cymbal players. If you want in on the cymbal action, the application to join is here. And if you want to see some Boadrum vets do something pretty Boadrum-esque, check out this clip of Bharoocha with Man Man’s Pow Pow and Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier at this summer’s performance of IIII at Union Pool.

Hella Q&A with Rock A Rolla Magazine

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:38:00 -0700

Zach Hill Q&A with Rock-A-Rolla Magazine out in Issue 33. Click photo to enlarge

Death Grips Go On Tour, Now You Know It

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:36:17 -0700

Death Grips Go On Tour, Now You Know It

This latest Death Grips video is for “Known For It”, one of the more esoteric songs off of the Ex Military mixtape. This is something of a jazz-hip-punk blended concoction, it’s difficult to dance to, not a song you yell to, but both are possible with the right syncopated mind set.

Death Grips are also going on tour, hitting up Montreal, one city in Scotland that starts with the letter G, and a few dates in England, where they’ve been very much anticipated, NME included them in their last issue’s 25 Artists to Watch (and presumably Listen) along with a large photo from their Brooklyn Market Hotel show. Well, they’ve been anticipated everywhere judging by the fan comments (Seattle, Italy, Germany,) .

Dates and places below, or just go to their shows page that helpfully links to ticket purchases:

Sept 23 Montreal (Pop Montreal) @ Club Lambi
Sept 25 London (ATP presents) @XOYO
Sept 27-Manchester @ Islington Mill
Sept 28-Leeds (VICE presents) @ Nation of Shopkeepers
Sept 29-Glasgow @ Captain’s Rest

Sargent House Zach Hill September Release Sale

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:49:00 -0700

In honor of our love of all things Zach Hill we thought it appropriate to share his bounty. So we made a Vinyl and CD deal so you can have all three of the releases Sargent House has put out of his for a mighty fine price! All this month we will have the Zach Hill Ultimate bundles in Effect!

Featuring
Hella - Tripper ( The New Album from Hella! Zach Hill & Spencer Seim)
Zach Hill - Face Tat (Why Haven’t you Already Got this!)
Bygones - by - (Zach Hill and Nick Reinhart join forces, the outcome = sweet)

and you can add a Zach Hill or Hella T-Shirt to the pile as well. Nice.

posted by Sargent House.

NPR Song of the Day : Hella "Headless"

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:36:49 -0700

Hella: Scribbling Outside The Lines

Hella’s Zach Hill and Spencer Seim don’t just color outside the lines of rock ‘n’ roll — they scrawl all over the page, across the tabletop and into the next room. Depending on your perspective, the result is either a dazzlingly unruly abstraction or an unholy mess.

The Sacramento instrumental duo has basically one setting, and it’s full-speed-ahead sensory overload. Hill’s polyrhythmic drum assault and Seim’s jittery, Beefheart-by-way-of-Bad Brains guitar parts volley and tangle frenetically, battling to occupy every square inch of sonic real estate. Needless to say, it’s not easy listening, but with a little patience, unsnarling the duo’s dueling lines can yield exhilarating rewards.

“Headless,” the first single from the upcoming Tripper, has been greeted as a welcome return to form for the band after a short-lived flirtation with conventional rock on 2007’s There’s No 666 in Outer Space. Stripping their sound back down to the basics, Hill and Seim sound leaner and more forceful than ever before.

After almost a decade of wild experimentation, they’ve learned how to rein things in — to give listeners a little room to breathe, and their undeniable chops room to jell into something truly compelling. By the time “Headless” thunders, stutters and shudders its way into Seim’s triumphantly ascendant hook, you’re more likely to find yourself banging your head than scratching your chin. - BY RACHEL SMITH for NPR

Death Grips: Beware

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:15:00 -0700

Adding even more heat to their mind-melting track, ”Beware,” Death Grips have come up with an equally explosive video. Filmed in the California High Desert, the video starts with a sequence of fire-infused day shots on top of an epically disturbing sample from a Charles Manson interview. After some trippy night shots of the running Death Grips MC, he’s showered with patterns of synchronized, firework-like sparks as the loaded lyrics unfold and refold. —Coco Zoabi,International Tapes

“Beware” is the opening track of Death Grips’ Exmilitary debut LP, which you can download for free at thirdworlds.net. They’ll also be playing the Mad Decent Block Party in Los Angeles on Aug 20th and have plans to tour the US this October.

The Quietus: Relentless Raw Movement: Death Grips Interviewed

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 07:51:04 -0700

Death Grips are the singularly most exciting new thing we have heard in 2011. John Calvert asks Flatlander about their methodology, hip hop, Odd Future, California and mental illness. Image courtesy Death Grips.

Brutal, bodacious, ugly like twisted-metal, obnoxious as a shot-out kneecap, completely barmy. Lightning Bolt are great aren’t they? If only they made hip hop like that. And as if by magic… For a neat description of Death Grips’ ungodly racket you need only take a stroll through MC Ride’s diseased mind, essentially the de facto setting for the West Coasters’ Exmilitary, the most scintillatingly confrontational hip hop album to emerge in years. Between foretelling divine wrath, blatting out nightmarish free associative imagery and remonstrating with nearby squirrels, the interfacial, disembodied MC Ride - a damned soul in a twisted bind - will proffer the odd phrase perfectly in step with the acid bath terror-ride unfolding around him. It might be in the context of eating a dead dog he found behind the house, but there’s something self-reflexive about talk on ‘Guillotine’ of “relentless raw movement” and “hidden art, between and beneath” or “serial number, killing machine…stomp music seriously!” - the later of which more or less nails it. Put’ em all together and you get the idea: murder spelt backwards is MC Ride and if pain be the great educator, it’s back to school with you. Guillotine… Yah!

Bona fide hip hop phenoms, MC Ride, Mexican Girl, Info Warrior, back-room tsar Flatlander and polymath drummer Zach Hill are collectively the masterminds behind what after three months of listening still seems like a freak occurrence in the genre. Exmilitary reboots the very form itself, engineering an unconstructed, wires-exposed killing machine for the despatching of rap’s moneyed dandies, and a constant, indeed relentless source of delight for extreme music fans. The purest affront on cashmoney culture you could conceive of, their incendiary mixtape outguns, outwits and quite simply puts to shame their domesticated counterparts in the trebly heights of chintzy Diamante-rap.

‘Freddy Vs Jason’, DJ Yung Tellem: “Welcome to my nightmare…”

A super-kinetic blend of stringent electronics (the shock) and browbeating belabor (the awe),Exmilitary presents a flailing but intricate sound, an eruptive but clinical force akin to controlled demolition: “Subatomic penetration, rapid fire through your skull” (‘Takyon’) is Ride’s phrasing. After breaking hip hop down into its smallest components, with an absolute joy in rhythm and velocity, they have build up a bestial, gate-folded and breathlessly dynamic new formula for bad omen rap. Both rampant and rapier, a mix of the organic and cutting-edge wizardry blends the macabre and the cybernetic, the gothic and the modern - and more brilliantly than a great many of those who’ve come before them. Salem may have the dread, but can they stir up a good circle pit? Can you get down to it? Can you let go?

In the field of spooked, bad-vibes dance music, alongside various footwork artists like DJ Yung Tellem and RP Boo, the Californians currently hold the patent on futuristic, horror-driven urban: hip hop to get at the evil in you. There’s something very sci-fi about ‘Takyon’, ‘Lord Of The Game’ ‘Culture Shock’ and ‘Thru The Walls’ - 3rd world raves both grungily vérité and virtual, jacked into a frantic mainframe and ruled over by a militiaman with the appearance of a black planet shaman and the formidable presence of a sleep-deprived Frankenstein. It’s neon-lit but crumbling like the acid-eroded architecture of Blade Runners’s neo-L.A. and though the entire length of its centre runs an artery of cold-blooded paranoia. They’ve christened their recording studios The Klink, as in a prison, which on the eponymous track they imagine to be under constant attack from shadowy ninja-like creatures and the local police respectively.

Displaying all the characteristics of a phenomenon in the making, alongside recent releases from Shabazz Palaces, Main Attrakionz, Araab Muzik and Odd Future, Exmilitary is often invoked by a growing consensus convinced that hip hop is undergoing some form of transformation. Either that or leftfield hip hop is going pop. At any rate, in future the hip hop cognoscenti will have to give serious consideration as to what qualifies as vital in mainstream rap. Bad news for them, good news for us. Let’s call it a comeback.

The Quietus took a knee with founder member Flatlander to discuss the future.

How did you meet? Is Zach Hill a hard man to avoid in Sacramento?

Flatlander: We met through mutual friends and a couple of us lived on the same block for a few years. Zach is around in Sacramento, but pretty reclusive and in and out of town.

How did you conceive of Death Grips? Were there any no-go areas established or creative goals you fixed in your head, before going forward?

F: It’s an energy outlet. We’re out to make classic records and future music. There are no boundaries.

Can you explain the title of your album?

F: We chose the title because of its connotations. It’s a loaded word that inspires instant visualization, a knee-jerk judgement. Society will have its pre-conceptions of us, but there is no good or evil, only a complex series of experiences and circumstances - [referencing hermetics] ‘as above so below’. Heroes and villains are man-made concepts, and it’s society that dictates where it is you come in the spectrum.

Exmilitary seems a million miles from mainstream hip hop in its current form. From your raw, goonish style and ragged production (reminiscent of Gaslamp Killer) can we infer an opposition to these styles? Any pet hates when it comes to the contemporary big league?

F: The music is not reactive in sound or aesthetic. We make things very naturally. It’s raw because we’re raw. We size up our work next to our own ideas of how the future will look, feel and sound, not in relation to what other artists - mainstream or otherwise - are doing.

Do you think ‘indie hip hop’ has a unique value-system?

F: I wouldn’t generalize things like that. A value system is a highly individual thing.

Do you ever feel there’s a reactionary element resisting change in hip hop?

F: Not just in hip hop, in everything. In most concepts the unknown is initially threatening to people in most contexts.

It seems like a really good time to release Exmilitary, coinciding with indie hip hop’s most high-profile release of its lifetime - Goblin. You are receiving a lot of blog-space on account of Exmilitary, but also from music fans rushing to compare and contrast you with Tyler and co. Do you have an opinion on OF?

F: Yes, we have a lot of respect for what they are doing creatively.

As was the case with pre-signed Odd Future, you have offered up your material free-of-charge on the web. In today’s climate is this increasingly the only viable channel a hip hop act can use to establish themselves? I ask this in mind of the likes of Lil’ B who cultivated his fan base on the internet over a series of years?

F: We welcome a situation in the future where all digital information is free for the people, but where all physical releases are also available to purchase for the people that are into the material aspects of owning the record, or are rooted in the record store culture.

What strikes you on first listen is how utterly accessible Exmilitary is. While it might not be what you term pop music, the songs are consistently catchy. Was there a conscious effort towards remaining exoteric? The avant labels like Def Jux and Anticon have seldom released anything quite as undeniable.

F: That’s a conscious thing on our part. We write with popular structure in mind. We make universal music and universal songs.

What role does Info Warrior play within the band?

F: Co-music production and co-video production.

There are several tracks dealing with the police (‘Klink’, ‘Thru The Walls’). Can you tell us a little about how it is living in Sacramento in 2011, outside the establishment. It has a reputation as a multicultural but perhaps conversely a peaceful city. Do you see Death Grips as a product of the area?

F: Yeah, it’s very diverse but also very ‘California Conservative’. It’s the [state] capital which automatically makes it a heavily regulated environment. Living on the fringes we’ve all experienced being apprehended and harassed by the police many times. I wouldn’t call it peaceful at all. Maybe out in the suburbs, but that highly depends on what neighbourhood you’re frequenting. Where we are at it’s vagrant, violent and drug-addicted. There are no frills out here, it’s raw.

Is there anyone you have your money on in the locality? Oakland’s Main Attrakionz seemed to be doing something really special.

F: Main Attrakionz are great. There’s a lot of amazing creative people in this region doing their thing.

In the video for ‘Guillotine’ we’ve noticed MC Ride is careful to wear his seatbelt, adding to the impression that the character he projects isn’t someone you want to be sitting beside on a long flight. Almost like he’s a good citizen, repressed, buttoned up, conscientious about the rules, but on the verge of going off the deep end. Was this intentional, an oversight, or just good in-car safety?

F: Yes, of course it’s intentional. We obviously had the option and foresight to not use a seatbelt, but that misses the point. It is not real - the outside is static, the inside is static, and the seatbelt is fucking static. Everything is static, just eating away at the individual. The material world and many things within it are designed to keep us half-dead, and we’re trained to think these things are keeping us safe. We reference the weaponry of fear and our music and vision isn’t about being hard or tough, it’s about being real and raw, and feeling our shit. We counter with energy, everything is energy.

You get all types of high concept taglines thrown at you, from “like ODB listening to Fugazi, while chainsawing Portishead’s studio” to “Edgar Allen Poe + NIN”. I also hear a grime influence, conceivably shades of HEALTH, New York art rock like Black Dice, Liars, footwork, noise, MIA and no wave (clues - the Charles Mansun quote; the fatalism, talk of self destruction; “Fuck Yourself ” goes ‘Culture Shock). Can you settle the score? Can you site a few primary influences?

F: Human nature and how we experience it, or perceive it individually and collectively, is our main influence. Music is the dumpster that we throw that trash into and other people dig around in there for things that they can use or relate too. We all dig for the trash.

It seems that while Odd Future rail against their horrorcore label, it’s Death Grips who can legitimately claim to being distinct from the archetypal h-core sound, despite the unrelentingly macabre subject matter on Exmilitary. On account of the beats mostly, which also mark you out from the pre-millennial paranoiac stuff released on Def Jux, most notably it’s an obvious departure from EL-P’s material.

F: We lay claim to nothing. Death Grips is its own process with its own headspace. It enters and exits alone.

‘Lord Of The Game’, ‘Takyon’ and ‘Thru The Walls’ feature tribal/ reggaeton rhythms. I hear a little bit of Angolan Kuduro; a kind of brittle, deep-bass, techno-informed funk which is danced to with a zombie-like, electro-convulsive mania. In its original form it’s a delirious, nonsense music and very subtly dark. In Portuguese Kuduro translates as ‘hard ass’ or ‘stiff bottom’ - kind of a perfect description for Exmilitary’s particular cadence. Any connection? As with Kuduro, the world beats on Exmilitary should by rights provide some colour, but somehow don’t. It’s a leaden palette.

F: Rhythmically we are very into a primal feel, stomps, pulses etc, which are the rhythms that are naturally wired in all of us. The use of negative space within bounce is also a mantra. The emphasis is on feeling that point where sound is not happening within a beat, making silence the groove.

Taking into consideration the low-tech, pixellated look to your video; the visuals you use at the secret Press Club gig on YouTube which depict a screen desktop falling foul to viruses; and the electromagnetic, distorted textures on the record (redolent of James Pants), there seems to be a reoccurring motif of ‘information overload’. It’s a term Alvin Toffler coined in Future Shock and also alluded to on Death Grips’ ‘Culture Shock’ [DG’s most data-damaged track where MC Ride implores the listener to ‘Chock Yourself’]. This sensory angst seems to be a running theme on Exmiltary?

F: Yes, we make reference to masochism by information. The name of our band alludes to a technological stalemate, a war of attrition that will exact its price on our bodies.

The overload also plays into what is an embarrassment of styles, the density of the sound and the fact that the album plays like a radio broadcast. Almost like a post-digital, impossible crate-digging session?

F: It sounds like a broadcast because it is a broadcast.

It’s almost as if Death Grips’ music is determined by the method of distribution? That’s to say the technology is the message, not the medium.

F: It is both. There is a element of duality in every facet of Death Grips.

There seems to be a British influence on here - shades of Kevin Martin, techstep and IDM. How much have you had to do with British music?

F: Yes, we listen to a lot of British music. More so on the electronic and/or psychedelic side of the sound.

Is ‘Takyon’ in reference to the hypothetical sub-atomic particle by the same name, purported to travel faster than the speed of light?

F: Yeah. We’re very into science. ‘Takyon’ is in reference to the particle, and in-song, it’s a metaphor representing the sensation of either becoming that particle or harnessing its energy.

How did you come up with ‘Guillotine’? It turns on a knife-edge, that song.

F: Death on death, die or be dead.

Would you describe your music as surreal?

F: Partially… Death Grips are an outlet and a way to connect with people through something other than conversation or analyzation, to create something we don’t have words for yet.

Pairing hip hop with the aesthetics of mental illness has always seemed like a world of subversive possibilities to me. Imagine a landscape where the hip hop male has no control. The genre’s relationship with mental illness has been a conspicuously sporadic one, theoretically because it’s a culture where depression is viewed as a weakness and psychosis equates to a state of being out of control; control being a denominator all male rappers must convey if they are to beat the street.

MC Ride’s most obvious progenitor, DMX, was committed last year, along with Gucci Mane, while in 2008 The Game broke down on camera shortly after admitting to XXLmagazine that he was having suicidal thoughts. Tyler The Creator wouldn’t be nearly the same artist without his ‘issues’, while an artist closely aligned with Death Grips, James Pants, titled his recent EP My Troubled Mind. All of a sudden we are confronted with MC Ride holding his head together by the temples in the promo for ‘Guillotine’ (which you directed) and it seems like a direct acknowledgement of a malady plaguing more of our hip hop stars than is publicized.

While horrorcore could be understood as an outgrowth from the high early mortality rates faced by inner city teens (Death from firearm is still the leading cause of death for black males ages 16 – 25), what Death Grips traffic in is subtly different; what could be termed ‘psycho rap’. If Death Grips were a patient, their condition would be the type depicted in Darren Aronofsky’s math horror Pi. So say My Dark Twisted Fantasy is some Fauvist dysmorphic self-portrait, Death Grips embroils MC Ride’s consciousness in a schematised Braque-esque maze, a gloaming constellation, a synaptic thing.

F: We don’t give a fuck that rap stars or music people are mentally ill. That’s a joke. We see and experience what people call mental illness every day, and have personally lost many friends and family to relatable head spaces. It is subjective and very complex. I think our view point is that everyone is mentally ill including ourselves, and so that naturally reflects in our art and content. But what some people call ‘mental illness’ can also be seen as a survival mentality to others or those experiencing it. Everyone is sick, to some degree.

Ride is willing that madness, revelling in it - conceivably for art’s sake, which brings us back to no wave. I especially like the image “I’m blowing anthrax off my palms” from ‘Culture Shock’.

F: That’s a fear reference….

You could argue that it’s the strains and constraints of fronting a masculine facade that results in the creation of dual personas. Consider Eminem, whose remarkably dark single ‘Guilty Conscience’ put Dr Dre head-to-head with Slim Shady for Marshall Mathers’s soul, in a duologue which served to further mythologize the rappers’s trifurcated persona. But you get the feeling that Ride is unable to syphon his corruption into a second body, so he’s bursting at the seems, or trapped, as he is in your videos in an electronic looking glass (and angry about it). Your promo for ‘Full Moon’ reminds me of Aphex Twin’s television image in the video for ‘Come To Daddy’.

F: We have concepts, but there are no ‘characters’ or ‘persona’s’ in this group. We have no use for an alter-ego because we aren’t on a masculine, tough guy trip. Or ego thing in the first place.

Can you offer us any clue as to what direction your debut proper will take? Currently there seems to be two sides to Death Grips; the rock/guitar aspect and the electronic side. Then there’s ‘Full Moon (Death Classic)’ which is harsh and stripped back, essentially Ride and percussion.

F: We are recording nowm at the same studio Exmilitary was recorded, with the same group of people. We record what we refer to as ‘familiar music of the future’. It has to be blowing systems in 2099. So far, everyday has been different.

John Calvert , July 14th, 2011 09:15
.

Many Moods - Collaboration with Delicate Steve for Japan

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 09:18:07 -0700

Steve Marion aka Delicate Steve and Zach Hill have collaborated and created the song Many Moods to benefit The Japan Chernobyl Foundation.

&amp;lt;a href=”http://delicatesteve.bandcamp.com/album/many-moods” _mce_href=”http://delicatesteve.bandcamp.com/album/many-moods”&amp;gt;Many Moods by Delicate Steve&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

** All Proceeds go to The Japan Chernobyl Foundation (JCF). **
We’re very happy to get the chance to help the JCF with this song. We set it up as a ‘pay what you will’ download, with all proceeds going to the Japan Chernobyl Foundation. Any donation would mean a lot to the organization who are currently very active in the earthquake and nuclear accident relief effort. You can read more about it here: jcf.ne.jp/about/about7.html. The track is also available as a free download. Thanks for listening~~~

Interview with Midtown Monthly

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 13:46:07 -0700

I’m just going to say it: Zach Hill is the most extreme musician in Sacramento. A self-taught drummer and founding member of the deconstructionist duo Hella, Hill has earned accolades and fans both here and abroad for his signature brand of hyperkinetic drum destruction.

Hill’s double-kick crunch has found him collaborating with a veritable who’s-who of indie-rock: Marnie Stern, Wavves, The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodríguez-López, Prefuse 73, Deftones’ Chico Moreno, Matmos, Pinback’s Rob Crow, Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, and Joanna Newsom (to name but a very, very few).

Hill’s artistic endeavors also include his illustrated book, Destroying Yourself Is Too Accessible, (which came packaged with Masculine Drugs, the Zach Hill and Holy Smokes album) and a line of T-shirts for Altamont, the clothing company featuring his graphics.

Currently, Hill splits his time between his solo work, the Japanese drum juggernaut Boredoms, and the rap-punk of Death Grips.

Midtown Monthly: When did you first start drumming?

Zach Hill: When I was about 14, but I got my first drum set at when I was 15. It was this no-name drum set for like $150 from this family in South Sac. It was a white, really bottom-of-the-line, piece-of-shit drum set (laughs).

How was your drumming at that early stage?

Oh, it sucked (laughs). I started out playing fast punk music, but not really knowing what I was doing. I understood how to do certain things in my mind, but I didn’t have the practice or the abilities physically to do the things with the drums I wanted to.

What was the first band you were in?

Technically, the first band I was in was with my friend Julian Imsdahl. We just wrote these really short, one-minute songs. We didn’t have a name. The first “real” band I was in was called Clyde. We actually played a few house shows and these weird hardcore shows and a couple of shows at The Cattle Club. But that was short-lived.

My teenage years were really spotty, because I was living kind of transient. I left home when I quit high school and moved to Grass Valley and Nevada City where Julian and I ended up living on our own. We started this band called Legs On Earth, which is how I met Spencer [Seim], who eventually became the guitarist in Hella. It was this weird chain of events kind of thing.

When did you start Hella?

Well, we stopped doing Legs On Earth because there were drug problems in the band and stuff. We kind of all went our separate ways. I ended up going out to San Francisco – I was living there, but I was working here, basically – and playing in another band called Crime In Choir. That was like 1999 or 2000.

Spencer went away and did this QVC kind of shit where he did infomercial-type stuff live inside of Wal Mart. He was in Indianapolis and then decided to come back. We moved into this house in Oak Park and we started Hella in 2001.

How did you develop your drumming style? You’re a pretty mellow guy, but when you get behind your kit, you go berserk.

Honestly, that’s what helps me to be a mellow dude, because I have that outlet to wield around the other side of me. I have a release, you know? That’s what my draw was to even playing in the first place was recognizing that I needed a release, because I wasn’t that mellow when I was younger.

Do you ever have drummers approach you and ask you, “How do you do that?”

Yeah, pretty often. It’s funny, because I really don’t know how to explain it to them. What I do on the drums is based on feeling or a sensation of doing it, not on thought. It’s physical for me, basically.

I don’t know the terminology to define what I’m doing; I’m not a technical drum geek kind of guy. I just happen to hear certain things and play like that… I just have ideas and I practice them. Everything else is coming from a raw place of energy.

Have you ever injured yourself while playing?

Oh, many times, yeah. I’ve broken my fingers, my knuckles, and my toes. I’ve torn an eyelid with one of my sticks. I’ve hit a tooth out before. I’ve broken my testicles twice coming back down on my seat. It’s very physical.

A lot of the time, playing a show – or even practicing – hurts. But that’s part of the draw for me, because I like pushing myself. The feeling of discomfort or hurting is kind of a familiar thing for me at this point.

How many different projects are you involved in now? It just seems like you are a workaholic.

Definitely a workaholic (laughs). Right now I’m actually trying to consolidate the things I’m doing. It’s really hard because actively – say, in the sense of when I’m going out and playing live – I’m doing my own thing, which means I’m doing a lot of improvisational, more free-form, noise-oriented shows. Death Grips, Boredoms and my stuff are the main bands I’m doing now.

Hella’s still active in the recording sense. We have a new record coming out this summer, but we’re not planning on touring for a number of reasons – we’re kind of doing different things. Spencer’s working for Tim And Eric’s Awesome Show; he’s getting into TV and comedy and stuff.

This year I did this track with this guy, Delicate Steve, from the East Coast. Then there’s this guy, Spoek Mathambo, from South Africa – I played on his record, which comes out on Sub Pop later this year.

I played with Justice Yeldham last year. He’s amazing; he plays electric glass. He’s got a contact mic and basically breaks [the glass] over his face, and it’s the sound of that that you’re hearing. It’s a wild sound.

You do a lot of art too, right?

Yeah. I guess you could call me an illustrator, or a conceptual artist. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of video work … My ideas within visual art come through in certain elements of music that I make.

So, when do you find the time to do all this?

I don’t really do anything else. I really work on what I’m doing 24 hours a day. I don’t sleep that much, honestly.

By Tony King

Hella Tripper - Pre Orders

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:26:28 -0700

Hella Tripper Vinyl or CD or Special Bundles are now up and available for Pre-Order. 275 Limited 11x17 Album art posters to the first orders of bundle packages.
Orders will ship before release date. You can also order the new Hella Tripper shirt individually.

Death Grips "Spread Eagle Cross the Block"

Tue, 10 May 2011 15:34:12 -0700

Death Grips - Spread Eagle Cross The Block

no stock footage — 916 ripping it
Directed by: Terroreyes / Contributers: Sean Stout, Danny Seo, Abner Requanna

Skaters: Tristen Moss, Vincent Thor Kenney, Shane Headlock, Kyle Duval, Rob Mason, Taylor Bingaman, Brent Wilson, Apollo Cuts & Cody McEntire

Stereogum premieres First Track from new Hella album

Sun, 08 May 2011 15:01:17 -0700

In 2007 I wrote a brief, less-than-positive review of Hella’s There’s No 666 In Outer Space, the record where the Sacramento noise-rock duo expanded to a quintet and started sounding like a rootsy Mars Volta. It appeared inSPIN. The guys gamely turned the pith into a t-shirt. My issue with There’s No 666 was (what I saw as) the aimlessness created by those extra members — i.e. the shift didn’t seem necessary. So then, four years later, it’s great to be able to announce that Hella have a new album on the horizon that finds the core of guitarist Spencer Seim and drummer extraordinaire Zach Hill back as a streamlined, well-oiled twosome. As of today the 10-song album has no title. Ditto this song. But you can still listen to it just fine. And it shreds.

Hella – “Untitled”Download

Hella’s asking fans to create a video to go with the song. Once you do, post it to YouTube and/or the band’s Facebook page. The goal is to find “the most amazing, insane, awesome videos possible.”

Look for the album at the end of July or first week in August via Sargent House.

FADER: Death Grips "Guillotine It Goes Yah"

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:54:25 -0700

When you get an email that says INTENSE AVANT HIP HOP in the header you don’t think, you click on it and cross your fingers in hopes that it lives up to the claim. Sacramento crew Death Grips definitely does just that, for better or worse. “Guillotine It Goes Yah” and the accompanying Ex-Military mixtape proves that things really do go in cycles. The way that Bobby Brown was once amping like Michael, these dudes are amping like… um… maybe Dalek? Techno Animal? Anti-Pop Consortium? Atari Teenage Riot? (Google ‘em, kids… or don’t.) They’re definitely amping though, and with a very mid-to-late ’90s disposition. It harkens back to those golden days when we still thought the future of music would bring nothing but gltichy apocalyptic war cries, back before weed strains got better, everyone artsy signed up for Tumblr and subsequently fell into a collective nostalgic haze. The world may not exactly need a rap record at this pitch right now, but it’s refreshing to know that someone made it anyway. Angry and tormented rapping always wins.

Death Grips - EX Military Mixtape FREE DL

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:05:00 -0700

Death Grips - Exmilitary Mixtape by deathgrips

“We we’re pretty excited when the first Death Grips track dropped, and this is pretty much more of the same raw-ass shit from the likes of Zach Hill & Company: Angry and aggro, anarchic and dead pan, pushing the instrumentals to new levels of grit and industrial damage.

There’s also the non-sequitor Major Lazer-biter “Lord of the Game”, which has Mexican Girl dropping in as some kind of Santigold proxy. But there’s nothing here that really fits cleanly into the east coast commercial rubrick that turds out tracks that slip onto A-Trak mixtapes and might was well do support tours for Tiesto. Even when they try for some kind of dub-steppy lo-end theorem with the “Cut Throat” instrumental or “Culture Shock”, it’s like they threw out Pro Tools and cut the record with a buzz saw.” - IMPOSE

TRACKLIST

01 - Beware
02 - Guillotine
03 - Spread Eagle Cross the Block
04 - Lord of the Game (ft. Mexican Girl)
05 - Takyon (Death Yon)
06 - Cut Throat (Instrumental)
07 - Klink
08 - Culture Shock
09 - 5D
10 - Thru the Walls
11 - Known for it
12 - I want it I need it (Death Heated)
13 - Blood Creepin

Inside the Drums of Death Grips

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:42:00 -0700

Inside the drums of Zach Hill recording Death Grips. Brought to you by Thirdworlds.net directed by Flatlander.

Death Grips - Lord of The Game

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:30:30 -0700

After dropping their first single, “Full Moon (Death Classic),” Sacramento hip hop-noise hybrid Death Grips (featuring Zach Hill) just posted a new video for “Lord of the Game.” VHS-driven visuals continue to dominate DG’s aesthetic; a grainy, tornado-like spiral scrambles night shots of city streets and night clubs. Like “Full Moon,” a multi-faceted rage is felt throughout the track, but this time the noise element is overshadowed by an emphasis on neo-old school hip hop. The song wraps up with “Fuck where you’re from, fuck where you’re going, it’s all about where you’re at.” We couldn’t agree more: we totally wanna be where DG’s at. —Coco Zoabi, International Tapes

Death Grips

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 18:41:43 -0700

Five months ago, Zach Hill started jamming with some friends and neighbors around his hometown of Sacramento, CA. Overtime, their hangouts slowly mutated into a full-fledged hip hop project called Death Grips, which features two other collaborators, judging from the image at the bottom of their website, thirdworlds.net. The site launched earlier this month and has a staggering amount of output (two videos, six downloadable songs, and a gif!), all of which was created collaboratively by the Death Grips crew. While getting lost in the sea of multimedia waiting for you, be sure to treat your eyes and ears to the intense, visceral video for “Full Moon (Death Classic)”. —Ric Leichtung, Altered Zones (via Coco Zoabi)

MP3: Death Grips: “Full Moon (Death Classic)”

Download MP3s and a video on thirdworlds.net, keep your eyes peeled for Death Grips’ mixtape, out later this year

3 Unrleased Wavves with Zach Hill Tracks

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 18:23:12 -0700

Zach Hill produced and played drums on a never released album with Wavves here are 3 of those songs.