As we close the year out with some our best interviews yet, whether it’s Damon Che and Kristian Dunn from Yesness, Jason from Fang Island, or Juan Chi from Zeta, we can’t help but feel pretty grateful. It’s always good to interview a band or an artist that lots of people are interested – but it’s way better when those people are friends and it’s more like a conversation.
Case in point, the boys in Pavlov’s Bell. These veritable musical sommeliers bring a unique flavor to prog and math rock, often pushing conventions to the side to make sure their vision is achieved. For instance, their last album followed people’s dreams and crafted a narrative from them, not the other way around. Whatever they’re working on, we’d listen to them any day – but we’re lucky enough to have them on our short list as well. Every time we open Instagram to see a deep cut Halo meme or mind blowing quantum physics factoid, these are the guys we send them to. But we’ll talk more about that some other time. They’re also insanely hard workers when it comes to honing their respective crafts.
Tony plays bass and guitar-VI for Zeta, as well Codefendants when time allows. Frankie plays drums in bands like Mold! and Makoto, not to mention a handful of others. Oh, and Santi, the band’s recently reintegrated founding member, is a music teacher. Anyone who heard 2019’s Mala Nota can tell you, not a punch was pulled on that record as they morphed and fluxed their way into the echelons of talent like Strobes and Three Trapped Tigers while imbuing every moment with Caribbean / Floridian energy.
In fact, since the band dropped Mala Nota and it’s live edition in 2021, the band has been so busy with everything else it’s actually been since four years since we’ve heard something new from them.
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But as people are about to find out this Friday when the band releases “Do the Nonagon,” their first single from the upcoming EP Physics Isn’t Fair, it’s clear that Pavlov’s Bell have maintained massive reserves of combustible gas. Or perhaps, as the kids would simply say, this is fire.
We’ll be sure to let you know in further detail as time goes on, because the EP as a whole cannot be missed. Yep, we went ahead and listened to the whole thing. For science. PB seems to have a new caustic chemical in their beakers, and whether it’s from all the experience they’ve gained over the past few years or being reunited with Santi, we couldn’t be more excited. Also, if you happen to be in Florida, you should try to catch them over the next week or so as they tour the state with Edhochuli and Caution Children.
Like Tony’s Zetan bandmate Juan Chi pointed out in the end of our talk here, it’s probably the most exciting tour in the region, and what’s better than a good show to shake those impending Christmas-time blues? Nothing, especially if it means you’ll get a chance at hearing Pavlov’s Bell’s latest experiments. The results are darker, heavier, and more concise without losing sight of any of their progressive variables – it’s more Evil Ex than Three Trapped Tigers, if that makes any sense. If it doesn’t, don’t worry: Tony, Frankie, and Santi get into the thick of it with us for the final interview of 2024, where all will be revealed. Enjoy!
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FB: When I moved last, I was like, I know I hid this thing in an important place and I didn’t lose it, but I haven’t found it this whole time…*holds Mala Nota skull pin*
Tony: If you do lose it, you just let me know it we’ll mail you another one
FB: I would never tell you! I put it in like with all my important poster stuff that’s still not really out.
Tony: You’re in St George now? That’s like Southern, Southwest Utah?
FB: The very tip, yeah. It’s on the other side of the border from Nevada… uh, guys, thank you so much for joining me uh this morning, it’s Sunday it’s 9:00 a.m, uh for me anyway. Pavlov’s Bell one of my favorite bands from Florida, thank you guys for being here, really just one of my favorite bands to just chill with and think about the big questions in life. Both in terms of listening to their music but also, Frankie, Tony, I feel like I talk to you guys pretty frequently just about the most random stuff so I consider you guys on that close friends list for sure haha. We have your OG member with you, right? I want to jump into that but I also want to jump into the show that Tony and Frankie and I met – I think that was the Zeta show for the Mochima tour?
Tony: In Eugene, yeah! At Luckey’s. I think the Zeta boys already knew you and were already fans of your band, but if I’m not like totally blowing it we met at Luckey’s.
Frankie: I remember the Zeta guys being like ‘you should talk to Mike, he likes magic,’ and then I talked to you and you’re like ‘oh, I’m like the only person in Muscle Beach that doesn’t play magic!’ or something like.
Santi: Frankie is a real Mage guy.
Tony: Yeah, a real wizard.
Frankie: The Wizard the East Coast!
FB: Now that we’ve covered that and I know I’m not mistaken, I wanted to talk about how you guys originally met and the the journey of having your original member a transition away from that and then transition back, right?
Tony: Well, Frankie and I and Santi we’ve all known each other quite a long time separately. Frankie and I played in a band together in high school, that was my first band called Enigma Addicts and we were like a cover band, you know. It was kind of like lame but we had a lot of fun and I think we just hit it off really hard, and Santi if I’m remembering correctly, I met at the end of middle school because you had just came come in from Venezuela, right?
Santi: Absolutely, I got to the US in 2010.
Tony: So we met in high school like early high school and we just vibed really hard, after high school Frankie and I’d band… kind of didn’t do anything ever, but we ran into each other at an Animals as Leaders show, and at that point I had already started germinating on the Pavlov’s Bell music. I was just with a looper in my room doing these little ideas you know, and I feel like that’s like a gateway drug for songwriting 100%, especially when you like feel like the spark. It’s kind of crazy because we’re seeing Animals As Leaders this weekend for the 10 year anniversary of Joy of Motion, it’s a full circle moment.
It’s like five hours away but we’re going as a band, as a pilgrimage… The record that we are about to put out is with the old lineup, but Santi tracked stuff on top too and at this point we’re just the three of us, I mean this whole year we’ve just moving forward, writing new stuff too, outside of this stuff but in general trying to bring the the band up to activity because for a while it was just me and Frankie.
FB: How did that work with Santi coming back to the band?
Tony: When did that happen dude… I want to say that we hung out and it was just kind of like it’s the
same shit, it’s the bug of ‘Let’s Jam,’ you know? It’s too tempting! This band has always had that spirit of
experimentation, literally, and I feel like the science rock bit is, in part, a jab at genre in general because it’s kind of made up you know, but it’s kind of of true because this band has always had that sense of experimentation. We’ve done sets that are completely improvised, like we’re just down to get freaky with it, you know?
Frankie: Jamming a big part for a while, like for those two years where it was just Antonio and I, we would do a lot of gigs where we would get there set up like whatever we want to experiment with and just improvise the entire set. It was interesting, sometimes things would happen, sometimes things would not happen and would go nowhere and people will be very confused in the crowd, like ‘what are you… okay cool, I see what these guys are trying to do.’ I think I have some little improvisations on my Reels.
Tony: I wanted to have one of those sets up as a live record that was just live excerpts of improv, but that didn’t really pan out. It could pan out still, I think that would still be a cool idea to collect the coolest ones and make a thing… it’s also like the capturing lightning in a bottle kind of thing, because it’s literally sometimes you do some shit that doesn’t ever come out the same again, you know? It’s just what happened in that moment.
FB: It’s weird how that can contrast with when you guys practice so much because you guys are in so many projects, and you know what it takes a bunch of repetition be present enough in a part even if you’re having a shitty night personally. It’s funny how despite all of that, shows can still come across like… not necessarily that you’re having a bad show, but like the impression overall on the musicians themselves wouldn’t be the same as walking away from a shocking improv, like ‘what did we just do?’ I wonder if that’s like what jam bands get hooked on, but also if that’s their Achilles heel.
Tony: 100%. Because you can get lost in the sauce man, it can get like too out there, you know? Then it’s just kind of like… who’s this for, you know? It can be kind of safe to just be in that world for 17 minutes you know, I feel like we probably have too much ADHD for that though. We kind are a little sporadic. Probably with time I hope that we can like develop it a bit more and be a little bit more comfortable with improvisation, at least I’m talking for me. But hey, when it goes bad, at least make it weird, you know? Like if you can’t get out, if you can’t make it good, make it weird, you know?
Frankie: Embrace the cringe.
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FB: There’s definitely memories of mine in my own experiences where let’s just say like the most professional or most pressurized settings, like a festival show or something, where something’s wrong all of a sudden at the end of a great song, a great set, but then holy shit this dude’s a bar behind, I’m pretty I’m a bar ahead… I’ve been there one time in particular that stands out, in the very hot summer day in a festival, things were like detuning, the reverberations and everything was off, there was traffic immediately behind the stage… there was no way to embrace what was happening.
Tony: I think we’re pretty good-spirited about that, I think we mostly laugh about it when shit it goes awry, which I think is probably the best thing that you can do in terms of a performance because there’s not a lot of things that you can do on guitar or drums that actually track as an error to someone watching that isn’t a musician. People don’t really know if you fuck up, or it’s really hard in instrumental music because it’s like, okay, it’s just weird. But I feel like if you look look that way, if you give that demeanor, like like something’s wrong, it becomes more trackable. You got to roll with the punches.
Santi: I agree with that, I think there is merit in embracing entropy, right? Because we all like
structure, and if you have structure, you can pretty much create anything, but entropy can be part of structure. It could play into the flow of things, and just like Tony said, once entropy knocks on the door you just have to welcome it, and try to put the pieces together again, you know? That can be also part of the art process as well.
FB: I appreciate that because it has kind of an existential aspect to it as well, the way you put it. That sort of leads me into the next question: I love that Pavlov’s Bell has (whether it’s created or something you have received in this way) that you just embrace this ‘science rock’ aspect. It’s introspecting because there’s the ‘just a genre’ aspect like you’re saying butit’s a Java genre like you’re saying but I also feel like it’s less insulting than math rock? I don’t know, how do you guys feel about that?
Tony: Yeah, I feel like it’s accurate, honestly. As nonsensical as it is, and I’ll tell people ‘yeah we’re science rock,’ and they’re like ‘Okay? What does that mean?’ it doesn’t mean anything, but I feel like it’s accurate and it’s kind of a joke but at the same time. Math Rock I feel has such a connotation of a sound, like I feel like it’s so linked to the sound of like… Midwest emo bands, some post-rock, tippy-tappy guitar noodles… really, the problem with genre is it’s very limiting. But it’s also music, which is so ambiguous too, like it can be so many things, especially instrumental music, it can be so loaded with layers of random shit.
FB: How’s that new Telecaster, by the way?
Tony: I fucking love it, dude. I look at it and I’m like, I want to have it in my hands.
FB: Is it something you’d consider playing your bass-IV parts with? Like with a pedal on?
Tony: This this record is all baritone actually, it’s the first record that I play only guitar. During the sets, I’ll have one of these guys and I have a bass-VI too and I’ll swap between. We do blocks so we’ll do the older stuff first and the guitar change makes sense.
FB: Sorry I didn’t mean to like get super off track with the math rock stuff, I realize I am getting into this thing where like as soon as I can, I want to shit on math rock with my boys.
Tony: Please give me your take, I’m curious to hear the disparaging take!
FB: It wasn’t a disparaging take but… in the in the aspect that I was mentioning, science rock, if myself or other bands were to take that at face value, bands that I would think of would be Three Trapped Tigers or Strobes, both bands that even if I were to know nothing about Pavlov’s Bell, if I’d heard them on a playlist, it would make sense. To further that connection, one of my favorite bands that have members of Three Trapped Tigers is Evil EX. It’s Matt Calvert and Adam Betts, you should check it out. Imagine TTT with the the synth stripped way back and more of a distorted baritone guitar situation.
Tony: It’s strange, it’s not that we know any of those people because that music is relatively obscure here in the US. I would say the UK shit, that whole UK sound that’s happening like Cleft, you know, and strobes, Three Trapped Tigers and all that, that whole ArcTanGent scene… it’s interesting how much that has rubbed off on us. Especially Frankie and I were like really basing out on that music.
Frankie: I wish I could have seen TTT this year, that would have been sick…
FB: It is really interesting to think about how American audiences or I should say audiences in the US have a history of sleeping on stuff and waiting for the UK to blow it up and bring it back. Actually, we have such a different interaction with other countries these days, I wonder if that process is more difficult, like slower.
Tony: It’s definitely a dream to go over there, I feel like to play ArcTanGent or Portals or any of that shit would be fucking incredible. I feel like we would be hopefully welcomed into that scene, like it would be a good fit.
Frankie: Some people that I met at ArcTanGent said they had already heard some Pav B stuff and was like, ‘oh cool!’ and they were like, ‘oh, you guys are like Physics House Band.’ I guess, yeah, kind of… I don’t know!
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FB: You guys could definitely be like other bands on the playlist but you would stand out for sure, and Physics House band is really spreading out into the jazz thing too.
Tony: I think once they started working with that dude Adrián, the guy that played horn in Mars Volta.
FB: He is all over the place! He just did a video game, or he did soundtrack for a video game at least, and he’s worked with a bunch of metal artists too. When we spoke a couple years ago, he just did work with Lee McKinney from Born of Osiris. Yeah, he’s always surprising me. Also, if I remember correctly from our chat, he met Omar Rodriguez Lopez as his father’s music teacher or something like that, it was like he his dad knew him from school. I’ll have to go back and fact check that. Anyway, so now that the record is sort of in the promo cycle, you guys have the new single this Friday called “Do the Nonagon.” Do you guys have any particular memories regarding this song or the recording process for it?
Tony: Yeah, it was Frankie just doing like a weird beat in 9/8, but it felt very square. I’ve always thought of it as like a like a weird goth like nightclub techno song, even though those adjectives don’t really make that much sense in my head. It has very dissonant chords but it’s very repetitive too, and there’s layers that build on top of each other.
Frankie: I remember I was like ‘oh, we we don’t have a song in nine yet,’ and then I was thinking ‘Antonio will be able to learn this!’ And like, I tried playing something, and he kind of couldn’t get it at all! Haha then then I just kept breaking down the beat until it got to where it is. It’s just very square.
Tony: Not condescending at all drummer, thank you, I appreciate that! Thank you for dumbing it down for me. I couldn’t play it yeah but I think it’s a very unique song because it’s very rigid and simple kind of structure like I feel like it compositionally it became much more dynamic… on this record in particular I feel like there’s more dynamic, it’s more intentional, that’s the operative word I think. The whole thing was done with a lot of intention. But I remember jamming that song and just like feeling it immediately, like it was very evocative for whatever reason, that combination of that drum beat and those two chords is really how it kind of just took a life of its own. It’s been a mission to try and get it to actually breathe the way it does when we play it and I think we nailed it.
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FB: It definitely has a cool texture, and I think it’s a good single too because it represents a lot what you’re talking about in terms of being intentional with the production, like the overall um it has a darker, I don’t want to say vintage quality but maybe a tape feel? Does that make more sense? I know that the last record was essentially a pretty wild concept too with the nightmares, and you were probably chasing
a lot of different sonic scenery to match. Not just with the music but with what these people were talking about so it’s interesting to hear the band bounce back on an EP, and it’s cool that it doesn’t really sound like your previous stuff either.
Tony: No it doesn’t, and again, it’s definitely intentional, and I feel like most of it is less of a delineation and more of a culmination of all of the years that we’ve been a band. To that point, like we had made a record prior but it was kind of my first time making a record so like the learning process is like pretty steep you know like when you first make your first record or whatever um it was basically a collection of recordings that were done like however were possible you know like like hey can I go into this room for like four hours and just set up microphones and just be here like fine you know like that was that Vibe you know um mil was like more the culmination of probably like five years of experience of playing together .Physics is conceptual, but it’s a different kind of thing, it’s more of an aesthetic concept. I wanted to make a record that sounded like a physics textbook and I know that that sounds insane but I remember deliberately talking about this with Frankie, and Frankie pretty much got what I was going for immediately. It was almost born in an aesthetic before the music which is weird.
FB: How do you describe that? Wow how can you help us understand what it means to have a record that sounds like that?
Tony: I think it’ll help with the album art and all of that because it’s definitely a big part of the presentation of the music, like all of the visual elements that come along with it. If I could translate that to something sonic, it would be like very sterile or clinical. Like the foam out of fucking beakers and shit you know but in a very clean and sterile environment. I don’t know if I’m making any sense.
FB: Of course! I like the imagery. Particularly for the single that does tie things together. The situation that was coming to my mind mentally when you were saying that was a beaker, a beaker with clear, thick glass that’s not going to explode, but inside is bubbling, like, hydrogen fluid that might destroy everyone in the room forever… I do get a lot of meticulousness on the record as well, like a lot of like the dirtiness but I don’t mean dirtiness in terms of ,like, uncleanliness. You guys are all involved with various projects too – can you guys talk about with how those things over the last few years might have influenced the process either for “Do the Nonagon” or for the EP?
Santi: Wait also, I just wanted to add something to your previous question about this question of whether the experimentation informs the concept of the the album or whether the initial concept that we form in our heads shapes the record. Frankie and I went to this math rock concert in Palmetto, I forget their name, it was just two brothers… that it was a guitarist and drummer… Clout Chaser! There was something very interesting about their songs, they will have sections in which they’ll have a very calm flow but then all of the sudden the dynamics will go all over the place it will play super loud, very riff-y, and stuff but they had this back and forth. Right after they played I told them ‘wow, I just like how you guys play with… what’s this word I’m looking for… volatility. There’s times of low volatility where everything is super structured, but then there’s high volatility right? That’s a great concept to use for for any sound, any song you want to make. And terms of the physics stuff you have this low volatility vs high volatility, so that is a data point that can be found in science that you could use in a way to express something. That’s a key part of this album, how do we take the concepts we see in nature, in electricity, and in science basically, and how do we bring it to life in terms of audio, sounds, melodies, etc. so I think that’s a key aspect of this album.
Tony: I think Santi put pretty beautifully, I think you have your clip there haha. Santi is a classical musician and a music teacher, like he’s in the music world 100% but would you say that Pavlov is probably the most ‘band band’ that you’ve been?
Santi: Yeah absolutely, even like very influenced as well by Tony and Frankie uh when it comes to exploring math rock and a bunch of other sounds and aesthetics. Of course, that has informed my way of viewing or listening to music, my expectations about compositions, yeah. I don’t have anything to complain about!
Tony: Santi really is a musical polyglot though, like he can really talk, and talk a lot of languages. I feel like probably the most special thing about having the three of us back now is just the flow that
we have with each other, just like a really good energy. But eah the last couple of years have been insane even though we’ve had losses, we were still playing a lot. We were touring and playing with our other bands, and with Zeta, I got to fall back in love with the bass guitar, the bass is my first instrument, and probably the most connected that I feel to an instrument. Guitar and bass-VI have been always like a creative outlet and so I always feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m just kind of like exploring because it just lends itself to writing songs. But yeah, I fell back in love with the bass, I fell back in love with heavy music. I had not really been listening to that much heavy music when we toured with High on Fire, and for me, that was so inspiring, dude. Like I just like fell back in love with big, dumb, distorted chords you know? It’s so visceral, it’s so catharti. But also, appreciating simplicity I think on my end, all of that kind of informs where I’m at now with my playing and I think it’s just heavier, it’s noisier, it’s kind of weirder in general. At least for me, I’m kind of curious to hear what Frankie’s experience is.
Frankie: I guess for me, like working with this other band that I play with Mold!, it’s kind of like an exploration of like my work ethic in a way. I don’t know, I just like learning this music, it’s originally composed by the band and then I kind of internalize it and interpret it my own way. I just work like really hard to try to make something sound real, and it’s different how we workshop the songs as opposed to something like Pavlov’s Bell where it’s more spontaneous. Bringing it back to the physics stuff, one track in particular from the EP that I can think of is “The Thing.” I kind of took some processes that I would do with my other band and then I worked it into doing a back and forth with Tony and you’re like ‘oh, what do you think of this?’ and I feel like I kind of want to explore more of that into going into whatever comes next.
Tony: You haven’t heard this track yet, Mike! What I sent you for the EP didn’t have this song, it’s like a last minute edition but it’s very it’s cool dude. I know, my bad! It falls into this category for whatever reason of these shorter songs that just fuck. I don’t know, I don’t like, I love a one minute song for some reason. It just goes so hard it goes so hard. “The Thing” was definitely sick to work on, like we never even met up to play that song, it something that with a drum machine and a synth and then I sent it to Frankie. Frankie cut it all up and tracked drums and we layered them with the drum machine, and it’s badass. But also for like the touring aspect, this is the first year for PB ever that we’re doing two tours in one year. We did one back in April and we’re doing one again in December.
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We toured with Chew in April, and those are people that are connections that have been made through touring, but getting to play with them as Pavlov’s Bell was so fucking special because that’s a band that remembered. I remember Chew playing in Miami before Pavlov’s was a band and being so inspired by the rawness, just very influential so for for me it was a big moment. And in December, we’re going to tour that Edhochuli, a fucking powerhouse band, I don’t know if you’re familiar Mike, but…
FB: Oh I am, I was actually was talking to Juan Chi about them yesterday! I interviewed him at 9:00 am yesterday as well, so I’ve had a great couple of days / mornings with my friends haha. Edhochuli was a band I heard during my research for one of the Tuesday Music Dumps and when I was done it was only record that I kept going back to… Juan Chi blew me away by telling me that they were basically active for the last like 20 years? I had no clue they were so old I thought, I thought that they were a new band! So yeah I have a rabbit hole to go down with those guys.
Tony: 100% , with those guys I feel a very strong parallel with them and Zeta in the sense that once you see it, you get it. The live shows are that powerful, that’s my favorite way to enjoy them for sure.
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FB: Where’s the tour going?
Tony: Well they’re doing a whole thing but we’re just playing the five shows with them in Florida, along with this band called Caution Children which is a Jacksonville band that’s also very epic with members of Jillian Carter, a very quintessential Florida metal outfit. So we’re playing with heavy bands which is fucking cool. I’m a little scared but at least we’re playing before them!
I think it’ll work, even without leaning into being super heavy the last record I would say would make a perfect opening thing for Animals As Leaders one day, the technicality and the musicality are both there. And it would be a perfect sort of match in my opinion, maybe for someone who’s at Animals As Leaders’ shows because they know of it and appreciate a couple songs but they’re like also like ‘a lot of this shit doesn’t make any sense to me.’ Then they’d hear you guys and say, ‘well, all or most of this made sense to me.’ When are you seeing them again?
Tony: I think one week from today, I might try to take him a record or something, we’ll see!
FB: Just tell him Fat Mike sent you!
Tony: Yeah right haha ‘I’m here from fat I’ll fucking pull up in this…
FB: Oh man, that’s… is that like a an older NOFX shirt? It’s got this horrible clown on it with pizza. I’m so glad you got to do at least one of those three final shows that they played in San Pedro, that’s where I grew up.
Tony: Oh wow, I was so enamored with the fog there, I saw a seal I saw fucking wild seal like dip into the ocean and I like I’ve never felt so alive, it was incredible. That was a surreal day, dude, I’m still processing it. I don’t want to like super like hijack the interview but I wanted to tell you this because I know like that you fucking love NOFX. San Pedro was a really special day. Like, our set was a disaster kind of, but the energy was so strong that it didn’t matter, it was insane. But afterwards, the sun was setting and that show was at like, the pier, where cruise ships go out. It was very beautiful, very scenic with all the trailers against the water and stuff.
But we’re at the last catering right, this was the very last show, the last catering that NOFX would have. All the NOFX shows were super familial, everyone would go eat together and you’ll see everyone there, like El he is always like the first in line, dude. He already knows when catering is coming but anyway, the sun is setting, and dude we were there with Marcel Fernandez and Gabriel Duque – Gabe went to film everything and I think one day he’ll probably make something with it, but we’re there with Marcel us right we get to the catering it’s Tim Armstrong and the dude from Bad Religion, just sitting there against the sunset. We got there like early it’s was like holy shit, we introduced ourselves and we were hanging out, and more people come, more people come, and like all the tables start to fill out. We have our oown little table you know, it’s Zeta, and that moment was just so touching. You look around and it’s like a who’s who of punk music, fucking iconic music that shaped a sound, and everyone’s just eating together, the sun is setting, and NOFX is about to go on for their last show ever. There was such a crazy energy in the air dude, I don’t know how to describe it but it felt so beautiful to see Zeta like have its place there with Marcel, Gabriel, everybody… it was surreal dude.
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FB: Well first of all, thank you for telling me all that, that’s a really beautiful story. Doubly so because I can picture it so well, I know exactly exactly what you’re talking about in terms of the environment and the sunsets down there. I mean honestly, probably Tim and Brett sit wherever they were sitting probably more often than you think, it’s just so close to L.A. There was all kinds of people down there, Red Hot Chili Peppers, I think we saw Marilyn Manson at a Carls Jr once, it’s just that kind of the place… but that scene almost sounds like something you’d experience after you die, you know?
Tony: Yeah the energy was kind of funeral vibes in a way because it’s like the death of a band, you know? Like a willing death of a band going out on your own terms, that’s what they did basically so that was the vibe was like mourning but also like holy shit, we’re all here. We’re just like spectators of the thing really, like that’s not really our scene, like we started playing NOFX two years ago which is a fucking trip… I’m talking too much you guys, sorry.
FB: No you’re fine, that was good little Tony Story but again, it’s very important very beautiful and I think as I said yesterday to Juan Chi, this is important stuff to get down and it’s an honor to have this moment that I can document for other people that are into punk music. It seems like the Florida scene too is connected to… I don’t want to say this the wrong way, but like, folk music, in the way that folk comes from like working class experience, from everyday experience comes, almost universally accepted experiences. You all have drastically different lives but you all work your asses off. Considering you all have pretty high work ethic I feel like you also are all very humble about it and this connection to just being a common nice normal person is so appreciated on a personal level. But I think it also helps make it real when you try to be like, humble, it solidifies this connection between folk and cultural pathways for punk rock. Math rock, as I’ve been thinking about the loss of… well, like if Punk is an extension of folk, and if folk as we understand it is an extension by way of 50’s and 60’s beatnik stuff, when it gets amplified, it’s not necessarily a disconnect. Maybe math rock can kind of be grandfathered into that, but I don’t know I love that. You guys aren’t pretentious pricks, you guys know probably a lot of pretentious pricks, I know I do. There’s a one and four chance here, there’s at least one prick in this call haha it’s me.
Tony: I’ll say this – I think the thing that unites us as a band is the love for the thing, the reverence for the craft. All of us are pretty obsessed with music in general and I think that when you love the thing
enough, there is a distance between yourself and this bigger kind of entity, right? For me, at least, like even though we are like playing the instruments and doing the thing, there is like a bigger picture, it’s more like our contribution, you know? It is a humble offering, in a way, because it’s just our take on it, it’s not definitive of anything, it’s just our thing. For Pavlov’s, our friendship is a big part of why we even do this, because we just like hanging out with each other and playing music. So I think having it grounded in that and not having it be such like a like a grandiose thing even though it means the world to us, not putting our art on a pedestal and respecting it and having reverence for it. But still being able to laugh about it, you know, like it’s absurd. Art is absurd.
Santi: I wanted to echo on that real quick – of course, this could turn into a very long philosophical discussion but I’m just gonna say, you know there’s this question of how connected is the art to the artist right? I mean there’s some truth to the following thing which is that you cannot disconnect the artist to the art, right? There’s good argument for that, but I believe also that I have many arguments for the contrary. Art is its own entity, and can be disconnected from the artist. When we look at a painting for the first time, or we listen to something, and we don’t know anything about the artist, that piece of art becomes something that is inside of our heads now. The way we interact with that art becomes ours, with no with no thought of the artist. There’s a lot to be said about that how art itself is its own entity, even though we participate in bringing something to light. Composing is just a celebration of exploring in this context, sound, all its possibilities, all its combinations, and also lack of combinations too… so I just wanted to echo on that.
Tony: Beautifully, beautifully put dude, it’s like when we hang out, it’s this shit all day haha. But you know, your favorite record is yours… right no,w the record is ours because only we know about it, you know? But eventually when it’s out in the world, it’s technically made by us, but it’s not ours, it becomes
it belongs to the people who listen to it, and love it if they’re out there.
FB: It’s a painful process to let go sometimes.
Tony: This one was painful to make, like it was lineup change album andthat can be difficult, and we had to readapt and basically start over. We got the mixes started in like 2021, so for two years it was just in limbo, and just this year I was really able to get the recordings and start working on them. But once the ball was rolling again, it was a beautiful experience. There’s no feeling like it, honestly.
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If you want to hear the rest of the interview, which goes into even more (Mars Volta hot takes, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the benefits of maté, and Total Science, for instance) be sure to catch the last 45 minutes of the interview here!
Big thanks again to Frankie, Tony, and Santi for the conversation. What a hoot – don’t forget to catch them on tour with Edhochuli and The Caution Children. We’ll know if you did.
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