A.Cave #1 — MEET MY FRIEND VENOM
Talking with Dylan McCartney [The Drin-The Serfs-Motorbike-Crime of Passing]
The Drin’s Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom was one of my favorite albums of the past year. Venom threads an industrial dub membrane around a garage rock skeleton and twists that combo into a set of truly memorable songs. On The Drin’s Bandcamp page, a series of tags reads “grim ice punk rain village,” and that sums up their downcast appeal in a suitably succinct manner. This is bleak music that throbs with a cautious hope, luxuriating in the sticky conundrum of life itself. Scope that oil puddle before you step in it, there might be a rainbow shimmering within its borders.
The Drin is led by one Dylan McCartney, possessor of a compound nomenclature handed down from the rock gods themselves, but McCartney isn’t fixated on writing ditties about peace, love and ladies in pillbox hats. McCartney is in a staggering amount of excellent bands; to the point that one could accuse him of being a greedy little tunesmith, but the saving grace is that we get to enjoy this music too. The Serfs are New Order glimpsed through the occluded lens of Coil, while Motorbike is pure rock n’ roll swagger. Under the cover of the pandemic, Termination released a minor classic (which is begging for a vinyl release), while the coldwave punk of Crime of Passing seems destined for the big stage. The guy likes playing music with his friends, and we like hearing it, so we thought we’d ask him a couple few things.
pic: Ben Lehman
Gimme DM’s origin story.
I come from a family of people who have a lot of reverence for music. From the moment I was born, I was listening to loud music and enjoying it. I had different phases throughout my childhood and teenage years, but then I went to college and I met Matt Walter who just kind of laid it out for me. Matt passed away a couple of years ago. He got me into Can and minimal synth; every week he was exposing me to some mind-blowing other world of sound. I was reading books like Rip It Up And Start Again, looking up every band and getting into Cabaret Voltaire and all that shit.
What was Cinci like around this time?
Back then, Cincinnati was straight-up a dead zone. When I was 19-20, there were three or four bands that would play every show. There were people still doing stuff in little sectors, but it was pretty dry. Over the years, it’s built up, with more people interested in playing music all the time. It’s still really small, but it grew from something even more miniscule. My friends who were a couple years older than me taught me things that still resonate every day. I had a lot of good guidance. The Torn Light guys put out my first seven inch, a band called Mardou. I learned a lot about being in a band from that group.
You and Dakota (Carlyle) are in like 3 or 4 or more bands together. How did you guys meet?
He came to a lot of the Mardou shows and I knew that he was playing in other bands in town. Then we had a few asides where we talked about the same weird shit we were both into, and then we ended up working at the same restaurant. We were working at the Yacht Club and we were kinda at the bottom of the barrel. We are both really restless guys who like having something to do all the time, so we chose to spend a lot of our time making art. We were joking about our plight and we started hanging out and playing synthesizers, trying to emulate Absolute Body Control and shit. We were trying to imbue our desperation in life into those like early recordings as the Serfs.
Can you tell us about the Digitone?
I just know that Dakota spent like hours and hours and hours making the synth tracks really powerful on that thing. We keep emailing Elektron to give us a promo Digitakt. So far, no dice.
When did (Crime of Passing singer) Andie start playing in the Serfs?
Pretty early on, because we made a record but had no intention of playing live. We set out with that in mind, trying to emulate Chrome. They played their first concert in Italy. You know, like, we're not gonna play live, we're just gonna make an album and go to Europe. Once we started playing live, we needed help putting it together, so Andie joined. We had a tour that was scheduled right when COVID broke out, so we had to cancel that. But then it all kind of came true—we went to Europe for six weeks last year. Every single show was a great time. It was a full-on dream come true and I felt really lucky. Bilbao in Basque Country was fucking amazing. We played on two boats. In Hamburg, they tied my drums down to keep them still because the boat was rocking around. The Pit’s in Belgium was wild. Covered in graffiti, dingy as fuck. A couple of pissers right out in the merch area, so you're just peeing in a room full of people, which is pretty funny. They were very welcoming. I saw old tags of Cincinnati projects from the ‘90s. We played in Budapest which I really wanted to do because my mom was born there and my grandparents grew up there.
Tell me about Termination.
Termination was a COVID project. That was me, Dakota and Jerry Westerkamp from Vacation (who I played drums in for 7 years). We recorded most of it in my room in the summer. We were taking lots of acid and listening to Spacemen 3. We played one show at a skate park and added a couple weird friends in the mix, including someone who had never played before. And then we just never played again. We did make a music video though.
How did you meet Sam from Feel It? Now he’s moved to Cincinnati and is based there.
He booked a Serfs show in Richmond and we stayed with him and his partner. Shortly after that, they visited, then decided to move here. Sam and Kat are awesome people. I love hanging out with them. Sam's a machine at what he does. I trust him a lot. He's opening a record store soon.
What’s the deal with Motorbike?
Similar to Sam, our friend Jamie from Swansea, Wales ended up moving here. We're good buddies and we all play music, so we just decided to start a band. It was basically centered around Jamie and him fronting a band that we were all in. We wrote a bunch of songs and it was super easy and natural. Drums were my first instrument and still my favorite.
How about Crime of Passing?
That was a project that Andie and Dakota started as just the two of them, five or so years ago. I joined maybe three years ago. They needed somebody to play keys, so I learned the parts and we've written some tunes together. The other guys, Chuck and Brad, have played since it turned into a full band. I kind of just joined as a fan. Andie is such a powerful singer.
Considering you have all of these different projects with some of the same people, is there ever an issue of deciding what song is for which project?
It's pretty amorphous, but it's definitely connected to who's in the same room at the same time on the same day. I never really have to think about it that hard. It always feels pretty evident. For instance, as soon as you're incorporating more than a couple of synths, it's probably a Serfs song.
The Drin! What is it? Where is it? When is it?
It's a river in Albania. There’s the Drin and the Drim River. I debated which one to use. I wanted to release solo music, but I didn't want it to just be my name. I wanted to play live and I don't like playing solo, so I recruited my friends. As soon as that becomes the case, in my mind—it's a band, it's not a solo act or whatever. It might have started that way, but to me now it's a full-on band and the people in it are all contributing. The first two albums are pretty much me playing all the instruments, although Dakota played on some of it. They're all patchwork. Most of it is a series of different ideas coalescing into one quasi-cohesive whole. The most recent one (Today My Friend…), we just pulled all the most out-there stuff that we had and put it together. We're always recording stuff when we're not playing live, and then we obsess over them for however long and piece them together as an album. But the record that we're releasing this year, all six of us are playing on it. They're all so good and talented. Anything that I’m envisioning, they immediately pick up on and intuitively turn into their own thing, which is awesome. It's all about having good songs. Our whole crew understands that.
That makes a lot of sense that you’re named after a river considering how much water and rain imagery there is in The Drin’s music. It’s so evocative of place.
It's definitely trying to take you to a place. I kinda can't help but do that. Just putting the filter of my factory-poisoned Cincinnati brain into whatever place I see.
pic: Maxwell Denari
The Drin loves the dub.
I became exposed to that music and was immediately so entranced and drawn to it, it’s ability to take you to an otherworldly place. And then you learn a little bit about how they did it and try and emulate it. It's just really powerful music to me and I try to find my own way of doing it. I hear my own life through glimpses of that stuff. The sounds of dub are quite industrial. Pere Ubu was the blueprint for trying to make music that sounded like that. That's what I like to make. I like to make grey dub.
What’s the newest Drin release “37 Buried At Helltown?”
That’s us rocking live in Jerry's basement. He’s one of the brains behind Vacation. He’s steadily put together a really amazing studio called the Checkered Flag and he records all kinds of stuff there. One day I asked him to record us live so that there was some evidence of it. Then we decided to put it out and use the money to throw towards the new studio he’s building.
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