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Photograph by Mabel Suen
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Photograph by Mabel Suen
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Photograph by Mabel Suen
“It's never really been about melody or rhythm; I'm more of a textures guy. I find that I'm always chasing sounds that I've never heard before,” says David James Bell, the musician whose name—when thrown into an anagram generator—remixes to “Jaded Evil Lambs.” Under that moniker, Bell mixes found sounds with circuit-bent toys and a torrent of keyboards for a scene that, at first glance, looks supremely scatterbrained.
As for genre, Bell has had many labels thrown at him, but doesn't own up to any in particular—not even noise. What he lacks in song structure is supplemented by a tendency to tinker and his mastery of the gear.
“Of all the terms I've heard, junk-synth seems most apt. It's a description of my rig. Just these little thrown-away, two-dollar keyboards and one analog synthesizer that's really nice, but older than me. It's a bunch of shit cobbled together,” Bell jokes.
At the top of 2016, Bell wears many hats in St. Louis music. As a promoter, he books Way Out Weirdo Wednesday, a monthly convergence of subversive acts at the Way Out Club. By curating the Paradoxal Pterodactyl Podcast, he provides a nuanced look into noise music through digital mixtapes. His more conventional work comes from a studio setting, where he remixes and collaborates as a producer and beat-maker.
“There's never enough time for all my projects,” Bell says, whose recent gig at the helm of Way Out Weirdo Wednesday comes from past years of booking at the Way Out Club. The spot was once a regular stomping ground for Losers Make Good, a pop-punk group Bell never technically played for. Instead, he took on a role that's often met with ridicule: the local band manager.
When Losers Make Good landed a gig at the X Trials (for ESPN's X Games) in 2001, Bell produced T-shirts and accompanied the band to Dallas. But due to a contract snafu, they couldn't sell or give away any merchandise. This left the crew stranded without a way to make gas money to return home, so Bell conjured up a show last minute (one that started at midnight on a Sunday) and scored enough funds for the teenaged band to return home.
For the better part of a decade, Bell cut his teeth by booking shows, passing out flyers on the streets and spreading the word online through the budding days of social media. His perspective was one of an outsider looking in, even when putting up his own money to help bands produce records that he would never see a return on. When Losers Make Good dissolved in 2008, the members went on to form Love Kingsford and invited Bell to play keyboard.
“I never had a lesson or practiced. I'd never seriously given it any effort. Basically, they taught me simple melodies on keys and I just cloaked them in a bunch of effects,” Bell adds. He ran a telephone through a vintage Moog, using a distinct voicing for back-up vocals. The approach was something of a gimmick for Love Kingsford, whose hardline indie-rock meshed with Bell's tendency for exploration.
From the early aughts on, Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center has been a venue almost synonymous with the genre of noise. The modest room has brought in acts such as Animal Collective, Xiu Xiu, and Wolf Eyes and even played host to Noisefest, an annual celebration of experimental music that ran for more than a decade. Bell attended the latter on a whim, where he met the woman he would later marry (at a ceremony inside Apop Records, the now-defunct record store).
Bell counts Noisefest 2008 as a critical point where he met many artists that he still pulls influence from, even to this day. While working with Love Kingsford, he also sat in on a number of shows with Catholic Guilt, a long-running noxious noise cult based in south St. Louis. The duality of songwriting and performance art has given Bell a distinct perspective, one which is well worn by a decade's worth of helping his friends “make it” in the music industry.
After splitting with Love Kingsford, Bell spent much of 2011 and 2012 working on concepts while incubating new ideas. He typically worked in groups, so his first solo show was more of an experiment brought on by friend and future collaborator Brad Schumacher. Jaded Evil Lambs would later come to replace Bell's name on show flyers as he settled into an exploratory style all his own.
“When I go to put together sets, what I really try to do is never hook everything up the same way twice. I always try to have a unique mix of gear dialed into settings I haven't used before,” Bell adds. His latest endeavor, Zero Control, combines a glitchy-synth style with propulsive drumming from Drew Gowran and vocals from rapper Sentel Brown.
On March 25, Bell celebrates his 37th birthday with a new digital release, St. Paul Sandwich Cuz, and a pair of concerts at Kismet Creative Center. 2016 is a critical point for the artist who has come into his own as Jaded Evil Lambs and hit a serious stride as a promoter for subversive music in St. Louis.
We met with Bell to talk more about where he stands at the cross-section of booking shows and performing while heading off a long-running podcast series with new projects on the horizon.
You booked and promoted shows for the better part of a decade before joining a band yourself. In what ways did starting off as a band manager inform your inner workings as a performing musician?
Well, it was neat getting to closely observe the recording process firsthand multiple times at multiple studios, with multiple engineers, before I ever sat down to do that myself. I don't think I picked up any special tricks or industry secrets or anything, but once Love Kingsford had bought our own recording gear, and especially when I first started making noise on my own, I found that mixing was pretty intuitive for me. But more than anything, it just prepared me for life as a solo musician, and eventually re-emerging as a booking entity.
Booking shows and making flyers are like riding a bike. I just had to figure out which of my old-school connections I could carry over from the punk/rock days to my new noise life, and make new connections from there, but the process is essentially the same now as it was then. But now I get to indulge myself and my tastes, instead of chasing an audience to support an entire band looking to one day “make it.” I had gotten totally burned out on promotions before, and there are still aspects I consider a headache, but it feels pretty good now to put on a show that is exactly what you want to see and hear and having it make everyone else's night too, and I feel like I've been pretty successful at doing that lately.
I know what I am doing is kind of a niche thing, but the people that put in a little effort to take a chance on one of my shows, they find something they weren't expecting that they really appreciate and will take away with them. And they haven't been shy about letting me know either, which has been great. It's a wonderful feeling for me, to feel like I'm doing something that gives back to the scene, even if it's just in my little corner of it. I'm a fan of music, and want to see more music happen, that's why I did what I did then, and that's why I do what I do now.
While performing in the rock-based Love Kingsford, you also moonlighted as a satellite member of noise band Catholic Guilt. How was the creative process between the two projects different? To that end, were there any similarities that surprised you?
Love Kingsford was a much more structured affair. We all contributed to our own parts, but when it came down to it, most of the time Tim Dotson was very much the main songwriter and knew more or less what he wanted to push us to produce. Some songs came out of jam sessions, and there was a fair amount of experimental tendencies in our process, but often when Tim came to us with a new song he would already have a rough recording of guitar, bass, drums and vocals, sometimes even keys.
Catholic Guilt was usually more of a "well, let's see what you've got" process—much looser and egalitarian, and less concerned with replicability (at least, during the periods I've worked with them, there have also been periods where their work was more structured). I've never seen those guys do the same thing twice, and that's something I really took away from them and tried to emulate in my solo career.
I feel like improvised performances are a more thrilling way to play, flying by the seat of your pants. But now with this Zero Control project, even though we are keeping it pretty loose and jammy, coming up with recognizable, repeatable songs has definitely stirred some nostalgia in me for the old days. As far as similarities, I'd have to say the sense of camaraderie has been about the same across all of the projects I have worked on. There's not much out there that makes for more effective bonding than making music with someone.
Many of your shows involve performance art—could you share with us one of your favorite moments from a show?
Well, let's see; during the Losers Make Good days, there were two different shows with marriage proposals in the sets. I actually got engaged at Noisefest one year (we married at APOP Records), so that's an odd running motif. What else? I was part of the infamous "sandwich porn" Catholic Guilt set at Mangia Italiano, which was pretty unforgettable. Then there was the Jaded Evil Lambs set I played at the "Dungeonfest" Sean (of Catholic Guilt) put on at his house. All these solo acts played, and you had to climb down this crazy staircase into this little cellar about the size of a small closet that you couldn't stand up in, and you played down there in total darkness while the sounds were pumped upstairs to speakers in every room of the house, and the backyard where everyone else was hanging out BBQing and splashing around in a kiddie pool.
Most of my favorite memories from shows are watching other people's sets. Probably my favorite show I've played was when I sat in with Catholic Guilt at Bonerville on a bill with Drunkdriver, who made the ugliest, angriest sounds I've ever heard, and whipped up an intense, mostly female mosh pit while the dudes hung on to the rafters for dear life. The most intense performance experience I've probably had was the Noisecamp experiment I put together at a local festival called Interfuse with Brad Schumacher, Errin Henry, Austin Case and several other friends. We built our own venue in the middle of the woods out of PVC pipes, tarps and plastic sheeting, and ran a generator to power a ridiculously loud PA system and a skeezy thrown-together light show, then blasted a campground full of hippies and raver kids with sadistic sheets of feedback and nauseatingly warped beats for three and a half days straight.
People would wander up and ask what we were doing, and we would just shove instruments into their hands until we ended up with a massive hour-long twelve-person jam session complete with hallucinatory ravings, thelemic incantations and nude hula hoopers. It was the most giddy, fulfilling, hedonistic, I-can't-believe-we-get-to-do-this experience I've ever had.
The monthly concert series, Way Out Weirdo Wednesday, is an extension of your Paradoxal Pterodactyl podcast. Can you speak more on the connections between the two?
I decided if I was going to start booking shows again, I would try to make the lineups sound like the podcast, which means diversity of styles and with a logical progression to the show that may not be immediately obvious, but affects you in a real way on a gut level. We DJ the greatest hits from the podcast feed between sets at the shows too, which is kind of surreal for me, because I just kind of push episodes out of my computer and into the void of the Internet, and hope people connect with it, and I am never really sure how that part of it goes.
It's becoming this weird self-reinforcing incestuous feedback loop. The podcast started as an outlet for us and our friends' music, and as people caught on and interacted with it, that circle got wider and wider. And now we are putting these people together on a stage out in the real world, which then gets captured and injected back into the online stream, bringing in more people, and then people are now meeting each other at these events and hearing new things and getting together and coming back with an all new collaboration to gift back to us. It's really starting to look more and more fractal to me when I step back and look at what is going on. And I have always loved that kind of matchmaker-type facilitation, honestly.
If I make something happen musically that wouldn't have otherwise, even indirectly, it makes me really happy. That's why, even though all the glory is shared with my fellow curators and everybody else whose music makes it into the show, the podcast is probably the project I am most proud of, if I'm being honest. Plus it's kind of a like a low-rent version of having your own record label, which was always been my teenage dream. Another funny thing about the podcast and the live shows: I HAD NO IDEA THERE WERE SO MANY AMBIENT ARTISTS IN ST. LOUIS. It makes sense to me that they would gravitate towards Paradoxal Pterodactyl, it's certainly part of the spectrum we cover, but WOW they have really come out of the woodwork eager to play this concert series. That's been a very pleasant surprise.
As an artist who plays in the very broad genre of noise, can you cite any direct influences that you feel shape your approach to live performance?
Well, I was a huge industrial fan back in the day before I ever fell in with local punk bands or ever went to a noise show, that's what I was listening to. So when I am collaborating with other people, especially in projects like Zero Control or my old recording project Fry 13 (every Friday the 13th for several years we would get together a random assortment of whoever was available, plug-in and record and see what came out the other end), I always find myself using Pigface as a reference point. The revolving-door freestyle anything goes approach of that band made an inestimably huge impact on me and my concept of what it is possible to do with music.
With Jaded Evil Lambs, I'd say there's a little Skinny Puppy flavor to some of my sounds, but they are executed in more of a grubby, Throbbing Gristle kind of way. When I am feeling drone-y or heavy, there's more than a little Swans that comes out as well. Soundtracks For The Blind is probably my favorite record of all time—there are so many rich textures to be had there, that period of their output is definitely an influence aesthetically. As a feminist, perhaps that's an unfortunate one to admit to these days, but that's the truth.
To date, you have not produced any physical releases—this is common practice among many self-proclaimed “noise artists” who prefer to keep some level of anonymity. Is this a conscious choice for you, or a product of circumstance?
That's entirely just a matter of time and money. I'd love to put out some tapes. I've got theoretical agreements to put out splits with several artists, but it's not been a pressing issue. Whenever I have the material for a release recorded, I don't have the money and whenever I have the money, the recorded material inevitably feels too old and dated for me, so I end up just putting it up on Bandcamp, which is a perfectly acceptable outlet for me. I like that platform quite a bit.
If I were to go on a tour, I would definitely want to have a physical release of something to take with me and sell, but as long as I'm just kicking around St. Louis, the money I'd spend getting tapes made inevitably gets plowed back into gear instead, buying parts to circuit bend these rooms full of old keyboards and kids toys or to build an effects unit from scratch. Now, if someone were to offer to release a tape of my stuff on their label, I'd jump at it. But so far that's not happened. I'd say one way or another, there will be a tape eventually, probably not this year, but who knows. I'm calling it a medium-term goal.
Catch David Bell twice this weekend. He performs as Jaded Evil Lambs on Friday, March 25 at Kismet Creative Center (3409 Iowa) with Instinct Control, Zarzutzki and Riverbody. Bell will perform as part of Zero Control on Saturday, March 26 with Jack Toft, Willis and Zak M, also at Kismet Creative Center.
