Tashme Interview

Tashme play Vevlet Underground at Not Dead Yet. Photo by Angela Owens

Tashme are a hardcore punk band from Toronto. They're trebly and fast, but with enough crunchy parts to keep the dancers entertained. Their lyrics are angry but thoughtful; evoking a spectrum of political and emotional imagery in a few sharply chosen words. Tashme just dropped a self-titled EP on Bandcamp, and the accompanying 7" will be out soon through High Fashion Industries. I recently spoke with them at local hardcore festival Not Dead Yet about the fest, their new EP, and some other stuff. Enjoy.

You guys wanna introduce yourselves?

Lautaro: I'm Lautaro, I'm the vocalist.

Matt: I'm Matt, I play drums.

Campbell: I'm Campbell, I play bass.

Jackson: I'm Jackson, I play guitar.

You play a twelve string!

Jackson: I play a 12-string. I got it to be a softie. It works out pretty well for the hard stuff too. It thickens it up nice for a four piece. It's hard and fun.

Matt: Rather than having two guitars, we have one with 12 strings.

Jackson: That's the better reason. Yeah. (Laughs)

 So how many years have you guys played Not Dead Yet so far?

Campbell: So with this band, it's been two or three now, but I've played Not Dead Yet every year in different bands, and I think everybody's kind of in the same boat there.

So what's your favourite memory of Not Dead Yet?

Campbell: Shit 

Matt: I've got a good one. So, I think it was the first time I went out to Not Dead Yet, and I would have been about 15 or so? I was taking antidepressants and drinking, and I ended up putting a bunch of pins in my face during Gag. No one was moshing. For some reason the show was like completely empty, there was two other shows happening the same night. By the end of that show, I think a couple a big group of people were heading into that venue saw me, and were like "what the fuck happened to you?" I was like "hey man, it's a punk show". That kind of set off my vibe for Not Dead Yet. 

Campbell: I think in general, kind of what you were saying in terms of us being younger and in high school, us getting to see bands like The Rival Mob, or getting to see Omegas play at Soybomb at three in the morning, were very formative punk experiences. And it's been great the older we get as well, but I think those first few years were like a really big deal for us. Especially playing those years and being on the fest was a really big deal for me when I was like 17. 

Lautaro: In recent memory, my favourite set was Una Bestia Incontralble playing Soybomb at an after party. It was like the craziest thing ever. But I guess Not Dead Yet's best memories are about hanging out with your friends and seeing people that you know from out of town come through, and just hanging. 

You guys just dropped an EP on Bandcamp. Can you speak about the recording process?

Lautaro: Yeah, so we recorded at Boxcar Studio in Hamilton. We just did it in one afternoon, and rushed and played a show in Kitchener that night. 

(Laughter) 

Campbell: I forgot about that!

Lautaro: We had the songs written for a long time, and we just kinda got there and ripped through it really quickly. I think that urgency shows in the sound. I'd hope so anyways.

I know there's rerecorded songs on it, are there new songs too?

Lautaro: The rerecorded songs were songs we released to promote the 7" on a cassette. 

Campbell: We didn't have anything to release for Not Dead Yet last year, so we kinda slapped together a promo tape with three of the songs from the 7" and a Discharge cover, just real quick in Matt's basement. But the plan was always to record those songs properly for the 7". So rerecorded in a sense, but only out of necessity, because we didn't have enough prepared for the year before. 

So the first song on the 7" is a politically charaged song, but it's also a personal matter, I think, for Lautaro, because his family's from Chile. 

Lautaro: Yep.

Can you speak on what the song means from a personal and political standpoint?

Lautaro: Yeah, so basically, the song is about the coup d'etat in Chile, and the dictatorship that lasted after for 15 years. It's about what my parents went through, having been exiled from Chile and growing up there -- where my dad was exiled and my mom grew up there -- and how their traumas impacted my identity. That's the gist of it. It ties into kind of the same thing with the name of the band, Tashme, and Campbell's grandfather being held in the internment camp. 

Thanks for sharing. So you guys are political, those kinds of things impact you. I'd be interested in getting your take on this. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that lawmakers don't have to consult indigenous groups when they're making laws.

Campbell: I was talking about this the other day. Somebody said, "what the fuck is happening?" and it's the same thing that has always been happening. It's unfortunate and it sucks, maybe it's callous of me and maybe I'm jaded. But I don't think it should come as a big surprise. They're doing the same thing they've always been doing, right? Like I think it's a big deal and it's something people need to keep being aware of and pushing against and fighting against. But, the status quo remains the same at the end of the day, and you gotta keep rolling with the punches and pushing back against that kind of thing.

 Cool, alright, thanks a lot guys.

Campbell: Thanks a lot, buddy. 

Lautaro: Thanks.

Scene Report: 6/30

I've been missing the scene lately in favour of cottage parties, cuz all my normie friends are taking weekends off. There were a bunch of shows last Saturday.

There was an ALBUM release show for a local band in Oshawa. Northshore (Northshorehc on Spotify) at the Moustache Club (RIP!!!). I'm listening now. It's heavy and produced well. Let's see if they have the stamina. Currently on song 3.

A band called Tree Fort put on a house show in North York, too. Last time I went it was all smoke and cologne and blonde women kissing. Some dude stripped down to his underpants and rolled all over the place. I anxiety puked because I had a date the next day. Will hopefully be going back soon.

Update on the Northshore album: they have a chorus that goes "we are the fucking north!" Haha.

Peace,

Vince

RIP XXXTENTACION

xxxtentacion was a great artist for years before his passing. He was more than a hype rapper. His Soundcloud songs had screams and breakdowns in them. I remember listening and being like "yo this is heavy af!", and there were hundreds of people in the comments writing "Free X".

Those comments really tripped me out.

I think the Tupac/Biggie comparisons for him and Lil Peep are inevitable, in memes at least. Dude may be as iconic in real life too. Time will tell. RIP to a talent.

Scene Report 5/27

This is a scene report from my neck of the woods. I had a busy week! I saw two shows, which is a lot for me.

The first was Allergy and Tashme at Faith/Void on Sunday. I wanted to see Tashme because I met Lautaro a couple months ago. I missed them on April 27 at the benefit show cuz I was getting wild in Talla-Fuckin-Dega, baby! They were great on Sunday. Allergy is a tight band who play fast punk, but they have way too many pedals. I was making sour faces during their set, and the guitarist threw a water bottle in my general direction. Coincidence? I wanted to creepy crawl on their pedals. The band might have sounded better.

I overheard some kids talking about a dude who was X'ed up at a show but smoked weed the day before. LOL DRAMA!

The second show was Backtrack et al. at Coalition. It was a pretty hardcore crowd. Hardcore kids are the nicest people, but the crowdkilling is too much for me. There was a guy outside playing a tree branch like a theremin which was pretty trippy. Definitely look for him at the next show and give him a dollar cuz that shit is jokes. Regulate was the band I wanted to see most. I became hip to them after their singer Seb was on the first Axe to Grind. I was gonna ask him about the Migos but I chickened out. Backtrack was pretty good. "Their Rules" went over great live. The other bands were chill I guess.

There was some drama in the parking lot before Backtrack's set. Some dude was going off. Apparently he tries to fight at every show and his girlfriend cheated on him. I certainly don't want it with that man. I hope he overcomes whatever's making him mad.

I finished some album art this week for a project scheduled to drop on June 2nd. It was a favour for an old friend. I'll post it here once it drops.

Happy International Women's Day

This image doesn't match with the visuals of my blog but I don't give a fuuuuuck

I would like to dedicate this special day to a lot of great women. Mostly my mom and my sister. Dr. Jessica Langer deserves a lot of credit for being an inspiration to the women in my class. Those aforementioned women in my class deserve a lot of credit for putting up with Ben and I, as well as generally being awesome. Thanks to all the women in my life.

International Women's Day should be every day, but it's not. If you're a woman, be proud! Today is your day.

The Evolution of Instagram

A post shared by Vince Guglielmi (@spacepope666) on Dec 17, 2015 at 1:28pm PST

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I came late to the Instagram game. I think I joined in 2012. All my friends already had it. I remember my boy saying, “it’s all about what you like, man.” Instragram triggered a weird pattern of behaviour in me. It became all about the two m’s – models and memes. I started taking a lot of selfies, and for some weird reason, I wouldn’t let my followers/following ratio go below 1.

Instagram was different from Twitter and Facebook in that it didn’t reinvent the wheel. There were a million photo-sharing platforms Instagram had to compete with, but some of them were kinda douchey. Instagram was successful because 1) it was primarily a moble app 2) it focused on the “social” part of social media and 3) it simplified the shit out of everything. They made it all about easy metrics – follows, likes and comments.

From this combination of simplicity and visual appeal arose primordial versions of what we now know as “the influencer”. People were thrust into the public consciousness just by having popular Instagram accounts. We knew their faces, fashions and lifestyles, and we also knew how powerful their reach was.

Companies took to Instagram for much of the same reason. Unlike other social media platforms, you could straight up advertise on Instagram and people would react with it in droves, as long as it looked appealing. This really bode well for photographers, visual artists and the fashion industry. Inevitably, strategic partnerships began developing between brands and influencers. This crossover started with detox tea companies (as the old joke goes), but real companies eventually got wise to Instagram’s marketing potential. Somewhere along the way, Alexis Ren ended up in a Hyundai commercial.

Instagram used to be my favourite app until recently, but things have changed. The explore function used to be my favourite. Now for some reason I can’t make it single photo view without clicking on the pictures, and when I click, it takes me to an “explore page” of just that account. Does anyone know how to change this? It’s seriously ruining my procrastination steez/meme dm’ing. I also don’t like the new algorithm-based timeline, I find it buries my friend’s pictures behind all the Tinder bots I’ve been tricked into following. 

The Evolution of Twitter

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I joined Twitter in first year of college, 2009. Twitter was introduced to me in journalism school in terms of its capabilities as a "huge rss feed/wire service". Twitter made it easy to give real time updates on live events, which you could classify using this new thing called hashtags. This was called livetweeting.

If you had a public account, everyone on the Internet could easily access your tweets - a capability that didn't exist anywhere else. You could also personalize your profile to an extent that didn't exist on Facebook, but with less of the options for ugly shit that made Myspace a disaster.

The public relations students at my college were probably learning about Twitter as well. Twitter revolutionized PR. If someone had beef with/questions for a company pre-Twitter, they would have to write a letter to the editor or some shit. With Twitter, people could write literally anything about your company and millions of people could see it just by searching your company's name. I feel like this forced a lot of companies to start using social media. It used to be like the fuckin wild wild west before all these companies figured the game out. You would get real time help and genuine solutions just by talking shit on a company online.

Microbloggers were popular on Twitter. Mans would have all their tweets be about a specific thing, and interested people would follow them. I remember when the dude from "Shit my Dad Says" got a book deal, which legitimized him irl. Funny, cuz nowadays authors are legitimized when they get a blue checkmark on Twitter. How times have changed.

The evolution of Twitter's features/interface has -until recently - been subtle. However the company's "off the field" evolution has been anything but.

Oh dear...

On one hand, Twitter has always struggled to monetize it's success. Plus you have the whole awkward takeover/dismantling of Vine. On the other hand, Twitter has been a key tool in actual political revolutions. It also became a "demilitarized zone" where otherwise boring companies started developing their own voice and even feuding with each other. Twitter's main differentiating factors, the @ and # functions, are now staples across social media.

Twitter changed a whole lot in 2017. The character limit doubled. The Timeline changed from chronological to algorithm based. I'm starting to see garbage in my feed just because someone I follow liked it. Twitter is more and more resembling Facebook to me (aka advertisement soup). I get the feel Twitter may be doing some last-ditch attempt to save itself.

You used to go on Twitter to laugh at dril. Now you go to watch Hamburger Helper combat sexism and see the President of the United States threatening to start WWIII on a daily basis. I honestly don't know what to think of Twitter anymore.