Australia's Aether Sanctum Magazine Reviews Stone 588
interview by Daemien Mortal The brooding and intense sounds of Stone 588 have been issuing from California for the last three years - and in that brief period of time the band have perfected their unique sound, harkening back to the fresh, post-punk days of yore - yet far more sensual, captivating, liquid and ferocious than any of the bands of that ancient and far off era that you might care to name.
Stone 588 is a distinctly mystical experience, as you would expect from singer Terri Kennedy who worked her way across America as a member of part of the now legendary Faith And The Muse during the Procession Tour.
Daemien Mortal: So how did you form?
Dave: The drummer from my previous band, Guts on the Floor, and I decided to re-group and recruited our former bass player Jon McFerson. Then Tracy met Terri (Vocals) at Ipso Facto - the gothic clothing store she owns, and indicated her interest in having Terri sing.
When Tracy decided not to participate we three were left seeking a drummer.
Terri: The drum stool was occupied by Jose Sanchez for a while and then I met Paul Rocha (our current drummer) again at my store, and I mentioned that the band was seeking a drummer, so Paul joined us.
This was the line-up for our first, and most recent cassettes, and the forthcoming CD 'The Door In The Dragon's Throat'.
For 'Eden Lost', our second cassette, we had Larry Salzman on drums and Anthony Siqueido playing bass, while Jon was out of state attending college.
Daemien Mortal: Where did you chose the name from? I did see a novel called Stone 588 the other day....
Terri: We ran down a list of ridiculous, funny, names and we had this song called Stone 588 about a chapter in that novel where an executive is murdered by being pushed out of a high rise window onto the marble balcony below. Very Grisly! So we took the name from the book.
Daemien Mortal: Is that all?
Terri: Ha! If you like mystical explanations there is a legend about the Druid's Alter in County Cork, Ireland, where under the stone circle, the cremated body of an infant sacrifice was found concealed in a large urn, whose burial dates back to c588 BC.
Dave: It was the best name we could devise...
Daemien Mortal: How does it reflect the band's music?
Terri: The feeling behind the name is macabre, and oblique and leave a lot open for suggestion... the list of explanations keeps growing. There is another story about the
588th stone in the foundation of a building in Chicago where the victim of a mob hit was buried to hide the evidence. Also I've always wanted to go to one of those military cemeteries where they have numbered but nameless headstones of unknown civil war soldiers and find the 588th stone.
It's an intense image... all of those nameless corpses....
Daemien Mortal: How would you describe your music? Terri: I think a quote from Phoenix's Lowlife review of our Catharsis cassette might offer an unbiased opinion: "Stone 588's great points are their brooding, stomach quivering hooklines, original, well crafted lyrics, Terri's aching, sensual delivery and Dave's hypnotic, sinuous guitar work,".
Our own bio offers this description: "Stone 588's intense, tribal sound has it's roots in early 80's post-punk era of Killing Joke and Siouxsie and the Banshee's, with a sound comprised of ferocious rhythms and guitars emanating from beneath a murky depth.
Lyrics of dark prose and anguished emotive urgency are aching delivered in a lilting feminine vocal style."
Daemien Mortal: Lowlife also said "Reviewing Stone 588 without mentioning Siouxsie style guitars is like talking about The Merry Thoughts without talking about Eldritch,". I can't see it what do you think? Do you think those comparisons are justified?
Dave: Yes! Before we formed the band we locked ourselves in a dark room and listened to Siouxsie albums over and over to see what ideas we could steal. Terri is getting a nose job to make her appearance more Siouxsie-like and I am currently on a diet of fatty foods to achieve a build more like Robert Smith.
Daemien Mortal: Naturally. I'll take that answer in good faith. Terri: I think a reviewer stated it best "Terri has a fullness, cadence and power of Siouxsie but there's also a delivery, resonance and obvious American inflection that is truly her own."
It's hard for me to see the resemblance to Siouxsie because I sing like this naturally.
I didn't listen to their albums to copy their style! I like Siouxsie a lot....
Perhaps the guitar effects Dave uses are similar in sound in some respects, but what we write is devised from a lot of hard work and creative efforts, not sitting around playing someone else's riffs or aping their style. I've done lots of other types of music besides goth including jazz, swing and folk, and I spent those years during Siouxsie's 80's heyday doing serious anarchic punk rock - not like this Green Day pablum!
Daemien Mortal: You recently had a trip to Europe... How did you find that continent compared to the US?
Terri: I've been on vacations to London and Belgium. The scene in Europe is much more involved with the core of the music and not fashion and posing.
People are refreshingly genuine and friendly. The crowds at shows number much more there... 500 to 800 people at those I attended. We usually play to less than 100 people in LA! Though during the Procession tour there were crowds of 600-800 in places like Tampa, Florida and New York.
European record stores and radio programs seem to support a wider variety of what we consider underground music. No so in LA which has this reputation for being home to legendary gothdom.
The more accepting, supportive scenes are in San Fransisco and Europe, where it is more mainstream and nobody cares how you look. Here people act like they're still in high school, with all the snobbery and gossipy back-stabbing that goes on.
For me goth is more intellectual, romantic and personal. I think Europeans appreciate more that kind of depth, subtlety and romance with roots in classical art and literature without the emphasis on the trash culture and reactionary puritanical values we worship here in America.
My European trip was fruitful too because there I met my Belgian boyfriend, whom I married two weeks ago! Daemien Mortal: Well congratulations!
Daemien Mortal: What musical event changed your life?
Jon: Seeing Siouxsie in 1982!
Dave: When I got sexual favours from a girl after a show. She liked me because I was in the band.
Paul: After playing live with my first band....
Terri: The GBH riot in LA in 1984 and the Dead Kennedys riot the same year.
Sliding around on a couple of inches of tear gas while the cops chased you...
What a rush! I felt like I was part of a really important anarchist movement, then I grew up!
Daemien Mortal: What inspires your song-writing?
Dave: My own desire to progress and become a better musician- to write new and better material.
Jon: Just being surrounded by other people to help blossom the ideas...
Terri: Lyrically I am inspired by literature, films, history, disaster, and the suffering of relationships!
I find myself writing melodies and lyrics while driving! I sometimes dangerously prop a notepad on my knees and write whatever comes into my head.
That is how the last song on the CD ("Of The Ambush Of God") was written, en route to the recording session where I insisted on taping it immediately so I wouldn't forget it!
Sometimes I do the 'found lyric' thing too, just to get the creative juices flowing. Sometimes I'll visit a coffee house where they have a lot of cheesy donated books, like romance novels from the 50's, and flip through the pages to see what words my fingers land on with my eyes shut.
From the thusly formed profundities a song can germinate. Dreams are always a good source, as I write better late at night. The inspiration behind some of the songs are:
* "Lightning Rails" about the scores of overworked Irish & Chinese immigrants who died building our nations rail system,
* "Sunset Abyss" covers the subject of crop circles and Celtic folklore,
* "Door In The Dragon's Throat" is one of those to delve into treacherous romance,
* "Night Behind The Mind" pays tribute to the women who were horribly mistreated in the name of God during the witch hunts, and "Ruination" tells of a Golem, a destructive being created out of clay for the purpose of destroying one's enemies...
* I also write about ghosts, vampyres, death... the predictable territory of goth lyrics. Daemien Mortal: What are your plans for the future? Your long range goals?
Terri: We have our first CD 'Door In The Dragon's Throat' out now.
It will contains a few songs from our first cassette, 'Eyes Of A Statue', some new recordings of material from 'Eden Lost', three songs from 'Catharsis', and five new songs.
21 tracks in all! We released it ourselves.
We learned a lot after the dishonesty we experienced at the hands of [a former label] who produced 'Eden Lost'.
If Australians want to get there hands on our material, they can send for a merchandise catalogue from Ipso Facto.
Jon: Yes, we want to push the CD to the max! Global domination. Getting to the point where I can just arrive at a show and everything is already set up!
Paul: For me... playing so often we don't need to practice.
Daemien Mortal: Any closing comments for our gentle readers?
Jon: Take no cues from anyone else. We make our own rules and laws. We don't care how much make-up the next guy is wearing...
Terri: Look for Stone 588's CD Door In The Dragon's Throat. We've progressed and solidified a lot... honed our creative talent. the Catharsis songs have received a good amount of radio airplay, and people have commented that the recording quality is the best we've done yet.
Ruination seems to be the most popular song... it's harder and aggressive... and people responded very positively to the poignancy of Door In the Dragon's Throat too. But wait till you hear the new version of that song we recorded for the CD.
We spent more time and greater efforts re-recording several of the previously released tracks - creating fuller and more mature performances, thanks to Eileen from Dichronic Mirror who engineered the recordings.
Additionally we're working on new material that we have yet to record. Some exciting, fresh, songs are starting to coagulate from some pretty wild jams!
Daemien Mortal: Tell me what are you like as a live band? What are people going to experience when they come to visit you?
Dave: Something dark and intense.
Jon: Loud, tight, powerful. Don't stand in front or you'll get mowed down! Sweaty and nerve-wracking. Wild and uncontrollable... while we look at Dave for song cues.
Terri: Occasionally we get fog on stage and lights that are actually directed at us! Really our shows are atmospheric and fiercely intense without being fake or pretentious, wearing white faces for putting on a fashion show.
We try to inject humour into the performance and not be deadly serious. If something doesn't come off as planned we're used to rolling with the punches and not letting the audience know, unless it's blatant, then we laugh at ourselves!
We have no desire to be gothic pin-ups. We just love dark music, literature and scary places like haunted houses and graveyards.
We individually have goth souls inside us, and it comes out in the lyrics and the music and not in superficial trappings.
People in the audience pick up on that, I think, and that is the soul of our style and performances.
When audience members take time to chat and are appreciative for what we're doing it makes it worthwhile.
Daemien Mortal: So the audiences are supportive?
Jon: Once they are converted to our cause, more than likely they are. By explanation I don't consider myself a part of the goth scene.
Each goth band seems like an entity in itself, left unto its own devices. No friendship - total goth Darwinism!
Terri: We are fortunate that there is a growing interest in our band, but locally there are a lot of people who still go to Helter Skelter (An American club -D) to dance to the same ten year old club hits and aren't interested in new bands. There are very few venues for local musicians to play live in our area.
And even fewer are clubs that treat bands with respect. The pay-to-play policy and/or mandatory pre-sale ticket sales tactic of getting bands to put money up front to get a show is still prevalent in LA clubs. It's not like we expect to be treated like rock stars, and we don't have illusions of grandeur about ourselves. The reason we do it is because we love playing music, but some gratification is a necessary motivating factor. Getting paid is a rare and platinum moment for us! The real remuneration is audience response. When people in the audience dance while we're playing for have eye contact with us and aren't hiding under a veneer of cool disinterest, that is a real moment of conscious connect ion and very satisfying for us! It was really cool when we met a genuine fan at one of our shows who told Dave that he'd learned the guitar parts on our Eden Lost tape! Dave in his usual tongue-in-cheek manner said how pleased he was that he had an under-study in case he dropped dead!
Daemien Mortal: Do you think it's important for bands to still play live these days? So many bands who depend heavily on technology are quite boring live.... They lack a certain something...
Terri: I guess it depends on the style of music you're doing. If everything is pre-programmed and sounds just like the recording, you'd better hope the musicians give a lot to their audience visually to make seeing them worthwhile. Although a lot of people whine when their favourite band doesn't play the songs just like the record!
For us it's important because it is a chance to connect with the audience. I'm not really an overt person, so it's not a chance to play rock star. I usually just close my eyes a lot, and just feel it!
Even with all the hassles that goes with playing live, like the technical difficulties, smarmy promoters, not getting sound checks or getting paid, it is still the EXPERIENCE you can't achieve while practising or recording.
Recording is another joy altogether, though. It's harder to get that live feel, but it's nice to go back and fix your mistakes and do stuff you can't do live like vocal harmonies and guitar overdubs.
Daemien Mortal: Do you think that music being lost under waves of technology and technological enhancement?
Jon: I can see the trend developing towards more technology, but I can see just as many people against technology. As far as replicating other instruments, I want to see the human element involved.
Paul: Machines will never take over. Humans will never lose the ultimate control over the planet.
Dave: I'm into the Anton Le Vey idea of artificial human companions, perhaps even replacing the car as an object of desire, as in getting the latest model, better than your neighbours. (Hmmm???? Dave has confused me again -D).
Jon: Technology can enhance but should not dominate. The most boring music to me is programmed music like Depeche Mode.
Dave: It's human nature to ultimately want control. Terri: I think music with programmed rhythms like what they play at raves is OK for dancing, but not for music to sit down and really listen to. I like what technology can do to give our recordings the best sound.
I got the chance to use a Neumann Mic during the recording of our CD, and really came to understand the importance of advanced engineering for vocal recording, and how it gave a warmer tone to my voice like I hear it in my head.
I think it's great that it's now possible for musicians to afford to have home studios to do serious recordings, and how portable DAT players make it easy to do remote sampling on location, of factory sounds and the like.
Daemien Mortal: When your songs are played in clubs for people to dance to, people you don't know, how does it make you feel?
Jon: Disbelief! Dave: It makes me feel good that people think we're good enough to play.
Terri: I got a taste of that on the Procession tour. I was a back-up singer for Faith and the Muse and when we played in San Fransisco they played a Stone 588 tune at the House of Usher. I peeked out from backstage and saw people dancing to Lightning Rails and I nearly fainted! I never thought of our music as being danceable in the traditional goth sense. It's harder-edged and more guitar oriented than the disco goth with programmed drum machines and sequenced keyboards.
Daemien Mortal: Do people ever know, or even suspect it's you?
Paul: No, nobody recognises us!
Terri: Only when I run up to people and make them listen reverently! Actually I have to deal with that a lot in my retail store. I often sell Stone 588 cassettes to people who don't know I'm in the band. I don't even mention it to them when they enquire about it.
Then they open the J-card and look at the picture and then at me and the truth comes out! But if they act disinterested then I start babbling about the band and that usually clinches the sale.
Sometimes people even want me to autograph their copy!
Daemien Mortal: What is the strangest thing that has ever happened to you?
Dave: Seeing several Ghosts over the course of my lifetime.
Paul: I've never seen a ghost, but felt a presence.
Terri: We recorded our second cassette in a haunted studio.
The engineer told us about a child's laughter being heard and an amp jack that was securely installed in. We never saw anything, though.
Once while practising Dave was recording some song ideas on an old cassette that had been taped over several times. He played it on his car stereo and between two of the songs a deep, scary voice said "Yaweh is NOT the one you love".
Nobody had walked up to the tape player and said that (Obviously Satan did -D) - it just appeared on the tape. it could have been a bleed through from the other side that simply sounded like those words.
It was an old tape after all! We also did a backwards reverb effect on the Eden Lost version of Stygian Darkness that produced something that sounded like I was singing 'Lucifer' three times followed by 'Jihad In Israel" when the vocal was run in reverse.
END NOTE: You know that sounds like listening to the cassettes I have stored in my car. Anyway with those spooky, chilling and doubtlessly terrifying warnings about what you may hear, or better, may not hear from Stone 588. This band deserve your attention immediately.
Many thanks to Terri, Dave (A very suspicious and unusual character), Jon & Paul for taking out the time to get involved with this interview. To contact Stone 588 send $1.25 + $2 international freight for the latest catalogue from Ipso Facto at 517 N. Harbor Blvd, Fullerton, CA 92632 USA.
The first two cassettes, Eyes Of A Statue and Eden Lost cost $6 each plus $3.50 freight. Catharsis is $3.50 + $2.20 freight, and the CD Door In the Dragon's Throat is $13.99 + 3.75 freight.... And now you know what to do. You may go now.
All parts Copyright (C) 1996 The Aether Sanctum, except where stated otherwise.
Original can be found on the web at:
http://www.goth.org.au/about/archives/2/stone588.html