This will not be news to you my dear reader. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. However, I feel it has to be said.
I know practically nothing. As a middle-aged man living in the western world I have no essential skills. I couldn’t build a fire or identify an edible tuber. I don’t know how electricity works. Pretty much any form of modern technology, trend or social interaction leaves me shaking my head. Not in disgust or disbelief but with a basic lack of understanding. I just don’t understand anything anymore.
I’m a redundant husk, a fleshy ignorant shell.
But…it’s not all boo-hoo-hoo!
Music is my way of connecting with a confusing universe. I can almost feel abstract sounds, lo-fi sounds, textural sounds click into my thirsty synapse blocks like I’m some blissful ‘Happy Eater’. The weirder the better; I let their grain and noises wash away my old grey-beard sins.
But I can tell you that listening to this tape from ‘Squished’ is wrinkling my otherwise smooth cranium.
My baffled brain shoots questions, as quick a chip-pan fire lurching up the polyester curtains. What is happening here? Is this some instant-composition schnarble? Or are things tightly-wound and planned and executed by fat-browed professors?
The ‘Squished’ discogs site is barren of fact but swimming in disinformation; the track titles listed just don’t match at all. Although a song called ‘Home on the Opium’ sounds interesting.
I hear stream-of- consciousness lyrics chanted with amused detachment, bare acoustic guitar played at arm’s-length, plastic yogurt pot percussion and a confident meander through the very idea of a song.
In one way it’s totally in the moment, in others, worked out with a precision based on stoned conversation and slack bedroom jamming.
I peak through the blinds into a world of ‘squished’ and am none-the-wiser. I need a key to this crushed conundrum.
Oh my dear reader! Seek and you shall find. And’ ‘find’ I most certainly did catching up with John Villella, mainstay of the Squished sound-world who unlocks this brass padlock in my mind.
David Eisenhour lichen sculpture (pic Ann Welch)
Hi there John, lovely to meet you. Can you tell me about your journey into making music?
Never really thought about this much but I can give it a go…
I guess growing up in the Pacific Northwest in the 80s and 90s was part of it. Where we grew up on the Olympic Peninsula it was pretty isolated, but we had our influences like MTV with Headbanger’s Ball and 120 minutes. When I was in 8th grade (1988) my cousin who was a real live punk came to visit from the San Francisco bay area, he brought me three tapes: Minor Threat, Christian Death and Operation Ivy. I kinda got hooked on underground music after that. This was back before you could just dial up anything you wanted on a computer, so these tapes got listened to over and over, and copied and passed around. At a certain point my friends and I got turned on to the ‘alternative’ music scene in Seattle, mostly by a new goth girl that moved to our high school. Somebody would go there and bring back the Rocket (the free music focused rag) and we would look at what shows were happening. Then we would walk to the edge of town and stick out our thumbs, hitchhike to the ferry and ride it across to the city in the hopes of seeing some cool music. I remember trying to go see Dead Moon but we were too young to get into the bar so we just listened from outside on the street. We would have hitchhiking races the other way to Olympia to see Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy. It’s kinda crazy to think about this now, I guess our parents didn’t know or care that we were hitchhiking hundreds of miles to see punk shows! There were a few times we didn’t get rides and had to sleep in the woods on the side of the road. Good times!
We had our own weird little scene in Sequim, we made music, but I was mostly a spectator. But at a certain point around 1991 or so a group of us put together a compilation tape of tunes called ‘Hey Gang!’ We made copies of it, made our own labels, we passed them around and traded with other folks doing the same thing. I guess at that point we were sort of inspired by the whole International Pop Underground thing that was taking shape around Olympia.
Fast forward a couple of years, a group of us ‘Sequimies’ had moved to Bellingham and our friend Nellie started working at the Bagelry restaurant. That is when we met Eric from Noggin who worked there too, and we started to frequent the shows that they organized at their place called the Show-Off Gallery. They would do a couple of shows a week and there were a lot of underground bands that came through, often on their way to Vancouver BC. Back then if you were touring the Pacific Northwest you might do a show in Portland, Olympia, Seattle, and then Bellingham, something like that. Noggin played all the time and we got pretty into them. One of the shows that happened was New Bad Things, they all came back to our place after the show, and we became friends. Jeff was with them for that show and that is how we met.
Nellie and I decided to go to Europe together and pass out our tapes. Eric gave us the name of Dylan and Lisa in Scotland, and we showed up at their door. (Editor’s note. Eric mentions this trip on his post UP05) They were watching Kojak and chillin’, but they decided to take us out for cider and sherry. We couldn’t really understand a word they were saying but we made friends. They took us around, it’s kind of a blur to remember all the details, but we went to lots of shows, we went to a noise music festival in Leeds. We got to see A Band, Ashtray Navigations, Prick Decay and many others. Jeff showed up there too, that was cool! My mind was blown and I just got deep into noise music, when we came back from that trip, we made most of the music on the Squished tape.
Were there any formative influences that fed into ‘Squished’?
Once we got turned on to noise music we just kinda went with it, probably the major influences were Noggin, A Band, Prick Decay, Harry Pussy, Sun City Girls, stuff like that.
At points there’s a whiff of England’s ‘The Shadow Ring’ in the sparseness of the arrangements. Am I warm?
Never heard of them but I think Simon has…
Who is playing on ‘Short in front, long in back’? I’m picking up at least a few voices and guitar styles.
Good question! Myself, Simon, our friends Jake and Dean, probably others.
How did you end up with a tape on Union Pole?
Well eventually I was roommates with Jeff and Jason from Irving Klaw Trio in Portland, I was the groupie/roadie for one of their tours across the US, so I guess at some point Jeff asked us to put out a tape.
Your lyrics are wild. At times arcane and poetic. They can seem like improvised free-verse. Others seem ripped from ‘found sources’ a maths text book for example. And others are more song-like. What’s going on here?
Yep definitely improvised. We did a lot of thrift store shopping; we tried to find weird books and records. The math book was probably just what was sitting there. No intention as far as I can remember…
I love the way you have left some of the process on the songs. At one point someone says, “lets rewind it and record it again” and there are occasional background shouts and laughing. Can you tell me some more about that?
We always were trying to just improvise, maybe at one point we thought we were on to something, so it was suggested that we try it again.
Fisher-Price Record Player (Pic from ebay)
I’ve looked on the usually reliable Discogs and can find nothing else for ‘Squished’ except this tape. Was ‘Squished’ a band? Did you play shows? What were they like?
Oh wow, I didn’t realize there was anything on Discogs. We had the Union Pole tape and one other release on the Cactus Gum tape label out of Oklahoma; that was a split tape with our other band Frogger. Squished was sort of a band, but I think we modelled it after A Band, kind of whoever was there at the moment was in the band. We played one show that I can remember, it was in Sequim. We invited Mathew Hattie Hein and Irving Klaw Trio to play a show there, and we opened. Our goal was to have the whole soundscape set up and then we would leave the stage and the music would keep going, produced without humans.
We really liked to create our own music makers. We had one device which was a Fisher-Price kid’s record player, you could find these commonly in thrift stores back then. We would find the weirdest records we could come up with, then we would use a razor knife to scratch the record from the hole in the middle towards the outer edge. Once you started playing the record, depending on how many of these scratches you made you could get it to make these rudimentary ‘beats’ and the record would skip with every rotation. We set up a few of these and ran them through some effect pedals.
We had another one called ‘the flosser’. For that one we took a boom box and ripped the cassette tape head out of it. We fashioned it to the outside of the boom box. Then we took a violin bow and restrung it with clipped lengths of cassette tape that had sounds we had recorded, then we would play it over the tape head like a violin, back and forth. It was weird, I think every single person left the theatre during our performance.
The title ‘Short in front, long in back’ has to be a celebration of the infamous ‘mullet’ hairstyle. The Mullet is quite the rage with younger folk in the UK right now. What do you think about that?
The mullet was the rage for hessians back then so it makes sense that it would be making a come-back 30 years later.
Do you have tape art or song titles? Or do you have any pics of you playing at the time?
Not sure about that. There might be a picture somewhere….we originally named our noise band “Sequished”, a play on words for our home town of Sequim. But somehow it ended up being spelled without the e.
What are you listening to now? Any recommendations?
I listen to lots of stuff. Recently going deep on West African psychedelic guitar music- Rail Band, Super Biton, Rokia Traore, Terakaft, stuff like that. My wife does a radio show on our local community radio station KSKQ 89.5 FM called “Folk Espresso”, so I listen to that. My kids play fiddle music so we end up listening to lots of fiddle tunes. I recently discovered the RTE Irish language music stream, so that has been getting a lot of play. I can recommend my friend Lisa Ann Schonberg, she records ants walking across the rainforest and lots of other sounds from nature and shapes them into soundscapes with her drumming, cool stuff.
You said you are going to Portugal for your birthday. That’s quite a trip from Oregon. What are you looking forward to over there?
Turning 50 so I wanted to go somewhere I have never been before, eat good food and see cool street art. Somewhere with good lichens and birds. We went to Madeira and got to see lots of cool endemic species. Got to check a few new ones off my life list of birds, and I got to see the laurisilva forests, an ecosystem I have always wanted to experience first-hand.
Kilmartin Glen’s lichen colonies (pic from Scottish Tourist Board)
I know this sounds like a daft question but…are you the same John C Villella the lichen specialist? Can you tell us a great lichen story?
Yep, that’s me. Well…seems to me lichens have most psychedelic forms of all of nature’s creations (at least of the things that live on land). They are endlessly fascinating in their forms and colors. A couple of years ago my family and I went to the Kilmartin Glen in south-western Scotland to see the Neolithic standing stones, I was intrigued to see what 4,900 years of lichen colonization looks like, it’s a Scottish national treasure for sure, not only for the stones but for the lichens that are covering them, amazing!!
With more of a roadmap from John my Squished listening sessions start to reveal a logic and pattern even my beat-up brain can follow.
You tell me you enjoy the track-by-track footnote approach I occasionally take. So I prepare a breadcrumb trail for you my dear reader; my miniature musings on masterful musicians.
But…as a bonus John has passed on my questions to his ‘Squished’ co-player, Simon, who adds his comments which dovetail into my trail perfectly. Simon’s comments are in the square brackets.
Track 1 – Prison diary extracts chanted over a double-slobbering acoustic guitar
[Part one. John Sr. Lives. Part two. Clapping on the pillow of love. Lyrics are just my weird poetry I liked to write stream of consciousness.]
Track 2– Wine bottle knocking reveals Terry Riley’s Hawaiian dream?
[Outer space – this is John on guitar and Simon banging a bucket or something. Gotta be me based on how rhythm-less it is. Sort of works though. It’s like if you took noggin and slowed to 1/10 the speed.]
Track 3 – The real ‘Math Rock.’ Problems set to skeletal music
[Jake with math wisdom on the third one)
Track 4 – The oldest story. Famous Dad leads to son’s downfall (via motorcycle stunt)
[This is Jake and John. First part is just Jake. Second part is about the great Robbie Knieval. Some really good lyricisms between John and Jake here – the voices almost blend together. John’s humor is a tiny bit more hidden sarcasm while Jake’s is upfront. Nellie in background laughing at one point. Possible I’m playing electric guitar on this one?]
Track 5– Slack ping and broken-elbow guitar glistening
[We had this broken neck guitar and hooked up a string and a pedal to bend it and get that weird twang.]
Track 6 – an opus of broken rattle, harmonica and metallic ribbon vibrations
[‘Don’t shoot her’ is something I think we were proud of in terms of just keeping it cool. As the name implies, it’s about restraint sometimes. We had a tendency to get way more jam-mie so just being sporadic and light keeps this one good. Harmonium, juice harp and guitar, and some harmonica too so it’s all three of us. Plus we had this toy chime piano in there.]
Simon also adds some excellent background details
We listened to Noggin and Prick Decay, Harry Pussy and stuff. Shadow Ring was great but I don’t know if I’d seen ‘em yet. I think I first saw them in Boston ‘96 but not sure. Sun City Girls is a big influence as well as free jazz stuff like Sun Ra – anything freaky we could find.
Most of this stuff is before we really got into scratching records or playing tape loops. I was and am still curious about creating sounds, and visuals these days, that I haven’t experienced before. But like pretty organic stuff not doing computer manipulation or anything like that. Trying to do something unique or whatever.
These were recorded in John’s attic in Squim and high street in Bellingham.
I think the question about leaving some process in the songs is a good one and that was definitely something John liked to do. Reminds me of your idea of just doing a show where you’re tuning and warming up and that’s the whole show. Something beautiful and unplanned.
Make like Trouble Funk, and let’s get squished for a dollar right here…
https://unionpoletapes.bandcamp.com/album/short-in-front-long-in-back-up52
OR…you can download the whole damn Union Pole discography of 76 tapes for $5 here. Don’t be cheap!
It won’t surprise you to learn that I often make mistakes! Please leave a comment below if you spot a mistake in the blog or have a tale to tell to drive this Union Pole story forward. Everyone is invited on this ride.
All my ideas are stolen 
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