Miranda and The Beat is a young soul/garage rock group from Brooklyn, NY. Last year they put out the fiery single "Don't Say You Love Me" with the stellar b-side "Baby Baby Baby", an instant classic if you ask us. We had the pleasure of speaking with Miranda for this interview and got to learn some more about The Beat. Enjoy!
Remove Records is proud to present you with an exclusive first listen to Straight Sex's psychedelic opus Hoitecathy. Reminiscent of King Gizzard, the Amherst Mass rockers raise the bar with a concept album that is lyrically sprawling and musically ambitious. On top of that, the album is packed with mind-altering grooves and trippy noises to keep you engaged all the way through. Hoitecathy is truly an epic follow up to the group's twin EP's Girl Kiss and Boy Kiss.
There are influences like Yes, Black Sabbath, Genesis, and even Rush creeping into this project, but also more fresh sounds from the likes of MGMT and Tame Impala all over this thing. Yet, Straight Sex's sound is completely original. The group's blazing riffs, surreal detours, and killer vocals all make for one hell of a listen!
We know that fans of Remove's garage and psych releases will dig this big time.
The record won't officially be out until April 3rd, but in the meantime, you can stream it right here:
Deastro has been around for a while, and this week dropped the cool af Fragments, Pieces record. Randy, who is the creator of the project, also plays guitar in the pysch band Characteristics, and produces music under the names SX7 and Sapphire Bracelet. He covers a lot about his past and the city in this interview with some great insights along the way. Enjoy!
Remove Records: Tell us somethings about yourself and your project.
Deastro: Deastro was a project I started when I was 19 I am 34 now. I had tried to start this band with my best friend from growing up called Velociraptor in Arkansas. His dad hit hard times like mine did in the downturn and their family moved down there where they had cousins. My friend got married and I was living on my own, didn't really know what I was doing. Meanwhile my dad worked for Farmer Jacks as a pipefitter and when that went out of business they moved to Baltimore. I met up with them and was working in Baltimore and DC with my brothers and dad doing maintenance on grocery stores. I wrote some of the first Deastro songs then. The name was an accident, it was supposed to be Destro from GI Joe guy but I didn't have the internet because my family was very religious. I spelled it wrong as Deastro. About a month into posting tracks on Myspace this girl wrote me and told me she loved my bands name and said De astro it means "of the stars" and I decided to keep it at that point. Been using the name off and on with different members just living life working, trying to make music. You know its a labor of love. I was touring a lot until I was 25 but just financial stress. I have been in and out of the trades since I was 14 and was pretty much the fastest dishwasher in the world for a minute. Used to work washing dishes for catering companies and schools. Usually had 2 to 3 jobs to support the band and touring coming up. Now I work as an apprentice electrician and solar installer. We got to tour the United states like I don't know 9 times and Canada 3 times UK twice.
It started out with just me playing various instruments live sometimes I would drum and use Reason to make crazy electro at DIY spaces Then I added a drummer so I could focus more on live electronics. After that 2008 2009 I played with a full band and that was when everything was going good, but we were touring non stop and the band said they weren't going to come with me on our first European tour so I did the UK solo. After that I was into more into post punk while making sounds that people consider early chillwave and started playing with my friend Adam Pfaff we toured a couple times and had a really wild time! I was 23 then. One time in San Fran this guy gave us like a half lb of weed in exchange for 1 of everything of our merch. At that point in Detroit it was like probably 45 bucks to get an 8th that wasn't shag so we were stunned haha. I don't think we had ever seen weed that good haha. My friend made me stop and hid it in a truckstop locker before driving into Canada and then we picked up on the way back from Vancouver. Been putting out records here in Detroit now had a couple more attempts with the project this was 2010 At that point I was playing and living with Thor and Gus Brovold and my brother Marty Roy. We were just jamming new stuff all the time this was 20122013Sometimes we would just riff synth funk or do these improvised 4 person techno sessions. We were playing after hours constantly around the city and throwing parties at our loft (1217 Griswold) and North End Studios. . I gave up on Deastro for a minute after that due to some personal things and was just Djing and producing under Sapphire Bracelet and now SX7 this track came out on local electronic label Portage Garage Sounds. I currently play guitar in Characteristics and am putting together a new live project. We will see if Deastro makes it out of the garage again? I feel like making some really intense progressive psych rock some days and if I made another record that is where I would go with it.
What are some of your influences?
Everything - I always loved Motown and Funk! Patrice Rushen may be my all time favorite, Early Influences were Danielson Family, Unwed Sailor, Johnny Respect, Mewithoutyou, (I wasn't allowed to listen to any non Christian music even the radio) I was really into Detroit Techno around 13 14 and never lost that love when I was a kid they had dance music on late night and I would listen in bed with some shitty walkman headphones straight off my old fisher price alarm clock I had from when I was a kid. Out of highschool it was Blonde Redhead, Bloc Party, Early M83, Boards of Canada, Drecviya, French House. Current faves the Internet, Thundercat, Nate Smith anything Jazz Funk or soul and like live Ballroom Vogue House dj mixes on youtube!
What are some of your favorite venues?
Hmm I like UFO and Outer Limits, because those cats came from the Detroit DIY scene and are real artists invested in treating people right. I mean I never thought I would say this but like City Club might be the only venue that still feels like Old Detroit to me! I mean money is good and all but it has felt kind of corporate for a minute.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in music?
Invest in your emotional health and well being!
What messages or themes are you trying to convey through your music?
Early stuff was mainly me rebelling against the Christian ideas of absolutism. People were always telling me they had the answers but from about 13 I knew there where some cracks in the logic. At first I tried to question those ideas but that was met with a lot of fighting and turmoil. So I dropped out of school to be a minster when I was 18. I felt the church was a sham. When I went to Christian college I could only afford one meal a day. I was a night janitor and often stole to feed myself from the schools cafeteria. I was angry I could see people suffering all around me and these people seemed so aloof. I felt I needed to make music to express how I felt because if I said it in real life it would mean even more problems in my life.
What are you working on next?
Characteristics Full Length, SX7 full length and a top secret collaboration I can't talk about hehe.
How do you feel about the future of music/art?
Hard times make the best art, and Detroit is the toughest. Before this crisis I was feeling so inspired by the energy in Detroit. You know all these new artists coming up are next level! To me and so many other artists from the last wave it is inspiring to see that people are thriving and finding a place in the community! That is what we all were trying to build with our art! I have never seen so many young people of color getting represented in the Detroit music scene either and artists that have been here their whole lives getting the recognition they deserve. I feel like we need more of that and more resources going into the neighborhoods for music and art. If we can get together and get instruments into young Detroit's hands that is like that best investment ever! For real we made the sound that moved the world twice with motown and techno. I think we just have to keep collaborating and helping each other out!
Tender Situation is the solo project of Leah Barnett, a Detroit-based filmmaker and musician who also plays guitar and drums in local favorites Career Club. Tender Situation put out the super cool record Music For Rollerblading last year, and we were stoked to get this interview with her! Enjoy!
We had the lucky chance to catch up with scene veteran and filmographer Peter Kotas (AKA Kid Infinity) to discuss film festivals, documenting Detroit's music scene, Drag, and his now-defunct band Rall Tide.
Dig it!
You’ve been documenting Detroit’s music scene by filming sets. What made you wanna start doing that?
Movies allow for the combination of image and sound in such a way that is so much more powerful to booking agents then playing an mp3 and looking at close up stills the local metro times photographer overcharged the bands to shoot. Since August 2018 when I got my first projector, I’ve been projecting my experimental videos onto my musical performances and any other bands that happened to be in the bill with me. I was usually the only local act supporting touring artists on actual labels, so for legal reasons, I would film my projections I created as they played in these places I had been booked to play, but while filming I turned off the microphone so I never ran afoul of the music publishers mafia. Fast forward to January 2019 and I do my first performance at Nips house on Belmont. That’s where I met Brendan. He was wearing a hockey jersey, and since both my little brothers are hockey players we just naturally got to talking. After that show Nips offered me the spot of basically being the resident projectionist for all the shows at Belmont House. Since I now had a regular venue to project at, I dropped the stipulation that I would only project onto other bands if they played on the same lineup as me. That type of exclusivity is simply pointless in such a small, cash-starved market as the house venues of Detroit.
It still wasn’t until April 2019 when I Performed and did projections at Shireen’s House Big Up Menace X was the last act of the night and his music was absolutely, hands down, to this day my favorite music in this city. I also noticed he was wearing the patch for a local suicide prevention non-profit that I’ve encountered in my day job as a math and science tutor at a boxing gym for kids who got kicked out of school for fighting but still want to finish their education as they train to be boxers. That night in Shireen’s basement he was himself talking about some struggles he’d been having lately. Due to close experiences with suicide in my family, I knew that sometimes we have way less time with our loved ones than we think we do, and as a result, if you have the opportunity to reach out to them and show them that you love what they are doing, you have to do it as soon as you feel that, otherwise you may never get the chance to tell them again. I had my camera in my hand and realized fuck, I will never forgive myself if something happens and I don’t have the music of this moment captured in film. So I turned on the microphone for the first time just in time to record the last few minutes of Jalen’s Big Up Menace X set. I sent him the footage the next day, told him how much I loved his music and that he could do whatever he wanted with the footage, pretty much the exact same terms I’ve given to every band and artist I’ve shot since then. I’ve had the pleasure of continuing to talk to Jalen ever since and we are currently working on a collaboration album with him and Ty aka Greyhound (aka lookwhatilost) under the working title of Chaos Protocols. That should be a full-length album and multimedia experience ready to be released around this upcoming Freaksgiving 2020.
I’ve never told Jalen or anyone except people very close to me this story and we’ve never talked about the patch on his jacket or anything that relates directly to it because the things that it represents do not define him, they do not define our relationship, and they do not define anyone who’s ever had to confront such issues. The only thing that defines any of us is the beauty we are able to share with this world in the vastly limited amount of time we are afforded in this too short lifetime which we are given on this world. And Chaos Protocols is gonna be some super beautiful shit, dear readers.
I have yet to release that Big Up Menace X at Shireen’s House performance because was still figuring my way around how to mix the live audio my camera records and I didn’t want to fuck that performance up just cuz I was an idiot without training wheels. Starting the next show I attended after that, the early May 2019 Toeheads/The Hand/Lollygagger show at Nice Place was the first one I packaged with credits and art and uploaded to YouTube. Thus the Hand are the first Bat Might Film live show release by serial number at BAMF-003. 10 months later my most recent release is LA band The Paranoyds as BAMF-236. For reference, the final cut of Unseen Saga is BAMF-077 while the first cut is BAMF-001.
As somebody who spent years playing to empty local venues despite receiving national recognition and acclaim from publications and other cities we toured to, I am deeply aware of what a band sees through their eyes when they are playing on stage. I am also aware of how those images can hurt and discourage those performers from hearing how great their set actually was. So my goal once I started recording the shows with audio has always been to create a document of the energy that flowed from the stage to the room as these talented people perform, and to package the document with enough fun titles and animations that the artists can see themselves and these empty venue shows from an entirely different perspective than the one they had in the moment it was being filmed. Hopefully it helps these bands to realize that the people in the audience who compliment them after a “bad show” aren’t idiots who don’t understand how much went wrong on stage, but they are people whose perspectives allow them to see past all that and actually appreciate what was done that night.
You’ve been pretty busy screening The Unseen Saga around the country at film festivals. Where has it taken you? Coolest person you’ve met?
The Unseen Saga has taken me a lot further than I thought it would. I’ve screened it around Detroit on the sides of buildings a bunch of times and make events and invite people out, but I’d say maybe 10 people have shown up total across 3 events to actually watch it, so it’s nice to be able to go to these film festivals around the country and be recognized by theatres full of people from around the world who are able to see it first as a work of art and not just something else to do on a Saturday night with that kid infinity guy who shoots all the videos. So many people in this town would rather take naps and do dabs rather than fully invest themselves in supporting the many wonderful artists of this city, support that literally requires no more than them showing up to the place. A mental health-focused film festival in Los Angeles called FF Fest. The Short Attention Span Theater Film Festival at the 8ball Saloon in Ann Arbor where it won Best Animated Film. A horror film festival at a convention in Charlotte, North Carolina filled with southern accented clowns draped in blood-splattered confederate flags carrying around horror-themed merch and waiting in line to meet Freddy Krueger, and now, at this moment, I am typing the responses to these questions on my phone with my feet up on the seats in the back row of the world-famous Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood where my film is screening for the Golden State Film Festival. Someone else’s movie is playing right now, but I don’t know how many more chances I’m going to have to conduct an interview like this in this way so I gotta do it while I got the chance.
The coolest person I’ve met was Matthew Lillard aka Shaggy from the live-action Scooby-Doo movies aka the main dude from SLC Punk aka the killer in Scream aka the dude whose head explodes in the back seat of a cop car in season 3 of Twin Peaks and causes David Lynch to pause dramatically then shout “Yep! He’s dead!”
I figured since my movie was screening at a horror con film festival where a bunch of celebrities would be signing autographs all weekend, I might as well draw some pictures of them and make prints for them to sign to all my friends that I’ve watched those movies with who have supported me through the years. I didn’t have enough time to make them all myself, so I commissioned some beautiful Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, Scream, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre art from Will Lorenz (genius artist) and I made pieces for the other 8 celebrities to sign, including one official cross-collaboration with Will where I took his dreamy Lightning McQueen Victoria’s Secret piece and printed it over a drawing I did of Adam Sandler’s Uncut Gems character joining Abraham Lincoln, Chubbs (played by Carl Weathers), and the Gator in the clouds at the end of Happy Gilmore. Carl Weathers was mortified when his assistant placed that print in front of him. He was very confused and physically repulsed/taken aback by the print, and nothing I said was making him feel any more comfortable. His assistant gave me 40 singles for change and he told her no more autographs for the rest of the day after that. Don’t know what his deal is.
Other than Carl Weathers, almost all the celebrities I met at that convention traded contact info with me and told me to hit them up while I’m in LA. I’ve done so and will be able to talk more about that with you off the record, but should shut the fuck up for now. Spoiler alert: everything is going great out here.
To most of the kids in the scene these days you’re known as the man behind the camera, but less know you were in a band yourself! Tell us about your band. How did it come together?
Any legendary gigs?
Rall Tide came from the ashes of Vezina, a band I created for a final project in my Adaptations class in film school. Our assignment was to adapt anything from one format into another format. So I adapted the life of Terry Sawchuk, former red wings goalie in the 50’s when they were cranking out Stanley cups. He set many longstanding records and was the last of his era to play goalie without a face mask. He had a bit of a tragic life which ended when he and his teammate/roommate got in a fight in the middle of the season and he ended up passing from the injuries.
So naturally, I adapted that life story into a rock opera and recorded the soundtrack for that rock opera and submitted that as my final assignment. The soundtrack “1,000 Scars” is 18 songs long and is mostly solo tracks with only me, though certain tracks feature the live version of the band who would play the album at shows in Detroit and Ann Arbor for the next year plus a few months. That band on record and on stage featured Maria Nucilli (current drummer for Outrageous Cherry, Deadbeat Beat, and many more great projects) on drums, and Keith “Shredder” Smith on bass. We debuted it live at the Belmont Bar a week after I got the grade for the project, and we debuted it at a venue at Belmont and Campeau which no longer exists.
Over time I wanted to ditch the college class project feel that the name invoked in me, so we switched the name to Sweet Kin, the name of. Black Lips song from their album Let It Bloom which is about To Kill A Mockingbird. I asked Cole of the Black Lips what that song was about at a show the year that album came out and he was surprised I asked, said the band had no idea how to play it cuz they didn’t think anyone cared about it, and that the lyrics are him trying to turn To Kill A Mockingbird into a song.
Sweet Kin featured many members including Nick Dufour (Laughing Man, Divine Comedians) and Eric Allen (Loose Koozies, Craig Brown Band) and others who popped in and out for a tour or practice or two. We were really good but everyone else in the band had a main project and I wanted at least one other band member dedicated to this band and this band only, so I put the Sweet Kin name on the shelf and moved on.
Pitchfork covered y’all?
Eventually around 2010 I met my guy in Nick “Goebbels” German, the punkest fucking drummer ever. The drummer that was so punk that even after I got us positively reviewed on pitchfork he quit our band to drum for a Bloodshot records artist who fired him because he was too punk to drum quieter when she wanted it to be quieter.
Nick rules so hard. He’s the one on the cover of the second Rall Tide album “World Series Hangovers” in which they said we “rip like Mascis and sing with the nasal confidence of” someone I’ve never heard of. The incredible guitars on that album are Mostly due to the interplay between me and the other guitarist, Nate German, Nick’s cousin who joined our band for about 3 months with the aims of it being a full-time thing, but life got in the way and he ended up having to leave us to take care of things. Thank god it was the 3 months me and Nick had set aside to record anyways. Our guitar interplay worked like this: I let Nate turn his guitar as loud as he fucking could, and I stayed the fuck out of the way. When mixing the album I pushed his guitars even louder and buried my rhythm in the mix because what was the fucking point, Nate was way better than me and the songs I wrote sounded better with things that way. Pitchfork agrees.
The first Rall tide tape was a solo beat tape I made where I played a sampler live onto a single track of a tape machine, and whatever the mix was live, that was the mix.
The third and final Rall tide tape was called ”When You Meet The Rall Tide, Kill The Rall Tide”, a co-opting I’d the Buddhist phrase “When You Meet the Buddha, Kill The Buddha” It featured a new drummer who had replaced Nick as well as a synth player who mostly did coke and forgot to plug his equipment in. Despite me really not wanting to, for the most part, it became yet another solo project for me. It’s great. I’m really proud of everything I do on it. We never got a chance to play the album live. But we were able to play the country songs live. They didn’t want to do the electronic songs live, so whatever, we kinda just disintegrated and nobody ever really heard the album even though it's on tidal and Bandcamp and everywhere fine music is consumed.
I made a lyric zine of collages for the lyrics to the songs from that album, made large prints of them, and put them up on the outside brick wall of a local bar who did not appreciate it and that led to the booking agents for that place (who booked a whole lot of other places everyone knows and loves) enforcing a “don’t book Peter” policy at all of their venues and their friends venues, which was pretty much every venue I had been performing at from the ages of 18-25 when this band took effect. So it was hard to find the energy to support the album on my own in exile from all the friend groups and gathering spaces that I had relied on for friends and comfort throughout the most important years of my life to that point.
So I just started reaching out to performers that don’t perform in those venues anyways, such as Mic Audio, Huey Boombox, YodaKai, Mixo, the Stereo Boys, and other hip hop artists to put their stamp I onthe music that I was creatinf but had no outlet for. Anything I couldn’t find someone to add their voice to just went into a vault where I stockpiled all these songs for a later day when I’d have a better understanding of what to do with them.
I focused on large canvas work for a while and displayed several month-long multimedia exhibits at galleries such as Tangent in New Center and Atomic in Hamtramck. “Detroit is Different/New Detroit Is Different” remains my proudest gallery work to this day.
After a while I got my first blu ray quality camera and started filming the shit I got up to while everybody else on my timelines was out posting uninspiring pictures of themselves at miserable-looking shows at all the venues I wasn’t allowed at.
And now a tiny fraction of the unreleased music that I’ve been stockpiling all these years composes the soundtrack of “The Unseen Saga” and is released under my music performance name Bryni Makiko which is a combination of Irish (Bryni) and Japanese (Makiko) words which respectively mean “burning” “child of pure light”.
Beyond the music scene, you also document drag shows. Why is it important to give that a spotlight as well?
The first time I met a drag queen was when I was 13 at the Mashed Potato Club in Chicago with my mom, two older sisters, and my oldest sisters large group of friends who were all in town for my sister's 21st birthday on St Patrick’s Day 2002. One of her friends heard the Mashed Potato Club has amazing dinner and you could even order Mashed Potatoes with M&M’s in it. Sounds great to 13-year-old Pete. Once we get inside tho, the place is a full on discoteque nightclub with queens carrying trays of Jell-O shots everywhere and lining the walls of the restraint we’re giant black and white photographs of some of the most beautiful cocks you will ever see. Me and my sisters and their friends are highly aware of all this, yet my ultra-conservative Mom is blissfully unaware of the uncomfortableness I’m experiencing due to the ultra-conservative way she raised me and my sisters (which we have all fully broken free from years ago, Praise the lort). Puberty’s raging full force through my body and the only other place I’ve seen cocks like this was my uncle's basement porno stash I never told anyone I found and the websites I’d been caught looking at on the family computer between Napster download sessions of mislabeled Wu-Tang tracks.
I think my confusion is understandable in such conditions. The fact that the food was taking literally hours to come out was not helping things. Sensing my situation, my sister offered to take me back to the hotel and get a pizza and rent a movie. That night was the first time I saw the Royal Tenenbaums. So that did wonders for clearing up my confusion that night. Sarcasm font.
All of this is to say: I’ve spent most of my adult life exploring all the fun ways that people choose to express themselves, because I believe that if you give people even the smallest space to breathe and fully embody themselves, they will show you wonders that would’ve otherwise been locked away. I had been attending each Gender Bender since the first one in August 2018 when there was me, my girlfriend at the time (still a great person doing her thing), the bartenders, and the other performers as the only audience for the first Gender Bender in the Ghost Light Lounge, back when the stage was by the front door instead of the bathroom like now. I always figured that most people/monthly events had their own camera people, but no, apparently they don’t. So after I recorded that Toeheads/The Hand/nice place show, a few days later was the May Gender Bender and I figured the performers there would appreciate some non-Tripod footage of their performances, one where the camera actually flowed and moved with the energy coming from them and the music. Turns out they did appreciate it and I’ve been filming each one I’ve been in town for. I would like to train an apprentice for a few months to eventually take over for me just because I’m gonna be spending so much time traveling this year that I’m not sure how many Gender Benders I will be in town for.
What’s next for Kid Infinity?
The boring movie I’ve been texting through in the back of the Chinese Theatre just wrapped and the projectionist is scrubbing through the USB file for the next film to make sure the file works and isn’t corrupt, so the next thing I’m gonna do is take my feet off the seats in front of me and do some schmoozing in the lobby with other filmmakers who don’t understand my work at all, then go for a stroll down Hollywood Boulevard and laugh to myself like a crazy person about what this life has turned into.
