The Children…, as you have already noticed, follow their band name with three dots, periods, or stops. I detect the implication of something sneakily approaching. Whatever it is, it’s not necessarily coming for the children, but maybe it’s the children themselves, Village of the Damned-style. I say this in hindsight after listening to A Sudden Craving, the second album from The Children… The music evokes multitudes. It’s a layered and cinematic affair with intricate instrumentation, spacious sonic production, and beguiling stranger-lurking-around-the-corner vocals. The songs on A Sudden Craving are also delightfully ominous, spurring a complexity in their deep darkness—a reflection, rather than a warning, of what comes after those three dots. It might be those spooky movie kids with glowing eyes, or it could just be something chasing childhood’s innocence down a night’s cityscape.
The core of The Children… is Michael Wiener, Jim Coleman, and Phil Puleo. Others float in and out, but this trio provides the bulk of the instrumentation and songwriting credits, with Michael also deploying the vocals. Jim and Phil are veterans of Cop Shoot Cop, and Phil has done time in Swans and Swans offshoot Angels of Light. Michael’s artistic journeys have taken him into the avant-garde, as well as writing essays, criticism, and screenplays. Bonus points: Michael is a memorable figure in the fantastic documentary Hail Satan!, described as the film’s ‘performative inspiration.’
The band’s collective curriculum vitae (which I’ve largely truncated—there’s much more to these three) informs A Sudden Craving toward the ambitious, the unrepentantly artistic, and a product of the grimier parts (are there any others?) of New York City. The noisier, perhaps industrial-inflected, side of late ’80s NYC rock echoes throughout, but the imagined spaces frequently found in these songs add a quiet contemplation to the set. Most importantly, it’s a dynamic reading, especially when the album is listened to from head to toe. Whatever malevolent Children… are coming upon us, I’m guessing they’ll be won over by candlelight.
Months ago, I sent a handful of questions to The Children… and received prompt and generous responses from Michael and Jim. However, the interview’s appearance on this site was not as prompt as I suddenly needed a cornea transplant1It went well! I may write more about this soon, or I may not., which put all eye-related goals on the back burner. My apologies to everyone involved, of course, accompanied by gratitude for these illuminating answers from The Children… In this exchange, the two touch on the darkness of an NYC music scene, how improvisation is everywhere, how they embrace a certain definition of ‘gothic,’ and tales from the recording of A Sudden Craving. Enjoy, kiddos.
From the outside, it seemed like there was a sort of “industrial rock” scene (for lack of a better description) in late ’80s New York—dynamic, dark, heavy bands exploring similar themes. Cop Shoot Cop and Swans, which are bands you have a history with, were part of that. For a city that had its share of musical “scenes,” was there something there, threading bands like those together? What brought you to those bands and that style of musical expression? How does this lead to The Children…?
Jim: Looking back, it seems like there was a distinct music scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s in NYC, though I don’t think it really felt like that at the time. I never really considered Cop Shoot Cop an industrial band, though I’m still not sure how I would classify the music that we made. In my mind, ‘industrial’ was Skinny Puppy, KMFDM, the first NIN album. In CSC, we used a lot of samples and scrap metal, so I can see why people may have considered us industrial.
More than Industrial, I think there is some truth to the darkness and heaviness you mentioned. And maybe that’s what the scene was. There were a number of fierce bands in NYC then—in addition to Cop Shoot Cop, you had Unsane, Swans, Foetus, Pussy Galore, Helmet, and Surgery (just to name some).
The spirit and life in NYC, and particularly the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, were foundational for the music that was being created at the time. NYC still has a lot going on culturally and musically, but in the ’80s and early ’90s, it was kind of like the Wild West (the Wild East?). Streets were dangerous, and drugs were prevalent (maybe that hasn’t changed—but it was all sold on the streets). While we didn’t have designer bag pop-up shops, we were able to take over basements and lofts and warehouses and throw shows. There was a lawless desperation that was conducive to dark noise.
I have always been drawn to the dark and heavy. It just feels truthful. Joy Division, Gang of Four, Killing Joke—these were all bands that resonated deeply with me.
Post Cop Shoot Cop, I have continued to grow and explore musically and creatively. I’ve done purely electronic stuff as Phylr and filer coleman, I continue working in the noise rock area, collaborating with Chris Spencer as Human Impact, have scored a bunch of indie feature films and TV serials, and am doing some more experimental installations. The Children… is part of this continued exploration, expansion and collaboration. The heaviness and darkness are still there but are part of the picture, not the whole landscape.
Michael: While I have family roots in New York City that always brought me here in childhood, I arrived to live here as a post-collegiate adult at the tail end of the period you reference, and the noise rock demimonde you describe lured me like a moth to a flame, initially as a music critic, scene denizen, fan. The early ’90s Lower East Side, blighted and embattled in the wake of AIDS and the overlapping crack and heroin epidemics but creatively thriving, possessing a kind of fierce joy in the shadow of these crises, was a darkly fertile petri dish that unleashed me—a voracious twenty-something emerging from a DC-based childhood that was, on the one hand, privileged, sheltered, but on the other, volatile, as the son of a child Holocaust survivor and a manic depressive.
I met folks like Jim and Phil—Jim specifically through his then-girlfriend, whom I had also dated briefly while she and I lived in DC, just prior to our nearly simultaneous NYC migrations. I interviewed Cop Shoot Cop for a magazine. My dialogue with Jim continued to simmer through the years, as we ran into each other in various, often music-oriented scenarios and picked up threads where we’d left them in the wee hours some nights before until, after years had passed, in the late aughts, our ongoing conversations finally coalesced in this long-gestating project—which has incrementally evolved, mostly in live settings, and with a variety of collaborators, ever since.
This latest stage of the band culminated with a couple of key recording sessions in the mid to late ’10s that have been, at long last, documented on a record that has been carved out of that sonic Rosetta Stone. But yeah, that was the uncanny rhythm of the period, and its serendipity provided regularly life-affirming jolts amidst the chaos and depredation. In the wake of the epochal Nirvana signing and subsequent spectacular rise, fall, and almost immediately mythical aura surrounding that band, these underground noise acts from NYC and elsewhere were, shockingly, being signed to major label deals, Cop among them. Most of these contracts ended up being ephemeral, but the bands’ outsize influences quietly, almost subliminally, persist. The Children… is a modern-day project that most certainly channels the era’s spirit in that it’s intensely ambitious but uncompromising. Where it differs, I would say, lies in its sense of gravity, its meditative wisdom, worn in by the passage of time. That aspect nuances the project’s ostensibly abrasive texture and softens its jagged edges. The Children…’s music is more layered than many of those projects were, which can also be said about Swans, especially as that band has evolved.
The press release quotes the self-described genre of The Children… as “gothic blues ambient.” What does each of those three elements bring to the band in terms of influence, methodology, and/or approach? I find it interesting that “ambient” is placed last, that it’s not “gothic ambient blues,” for example. Is this intentional? Would a different order mean something else?
Michael: We deploy this term with tongue in cheek, and yet there’s truth and resonance to it. Gothic might be a flippant reference to the musical genre and closely linked subculture, but it might also be a more sweeping cultural reference. Without digging in too deep historically, gothic might call to mind ornate, austere medieval architecture, which was often ecclesiastical. Certainly, that resonates in the thematic content of some of this album’s tracks, their mood, aesthetic—they’re baroque, florid, at times, there’s a severity, a punitive thrust there—evoking the Inquisition, perhaps. On that note, Gothic literature—Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne—is an even closer analog, especially where the album’s themes are concerned, evinced in these songs’ figurative language, channeling spiritual turmoil.
Blues music, perhaps needless to say, was spawned under duress in the shadow of oppression. Far be it from The Children… to embody white man’s blues. And yet, we all face oppression in different forms as human beings. As briefly touched on above, I have been personally shaped by inner conflict by confronting it and transcending it, and I suspect that’s true of Jim and Phil, as well. The Children…’s blues is a primal yowl, a catharsis we all must seek in unifying the warring factions within us.
And the ambiance is endemic, ubiquitous, and omnipresent. It hovers around us, immanent, liminal, at the edge of perception. Some ambient music might be characterized as passive. Ours is more of a tectonic landscape, shifting and unearthing new forms. The vastness of this music, augmented by Jim’s majestic production, establishes ambient as the landscape that the blues inflect, with a gothic twinge. Voila: gothic blues ambient.
Also, from the press release: “The spirit of improvisation fuels the most fully realized, incendiary art.” What role does improvisation play in the writing and recording (and perhaps live performance) of The Children…’s music? How do songs form, and where do they end up? Do you have any thoughts on why improvisation, which many would think of as loose and untethered, can produce something that’s actually “fully realized” as well as “incendiary?”
Jim: Ultimately, I think all music and creative endeavors are born from improvisation. While some artists may start with a concept and consider making something manifest an act of execution, every creative act is, in essence, a step into the unknown. It’s risk-taking; it’s not knowing what the hell we are doing. This exists on a spectrum—we have all heard bands and seen artwork by artists who know all too well what they are doing, where it’s devolved into a formula. But even in that closed circuit, each creative work has some foundation of improv and risk-taking.
With all that said—with The Children…, we (Phil, Michael, and myself) did consciously step back from our known and established creative habits. We tried to clear our preconceptions about what we know in terms of how we make music and how we are creative. All the tracks on the album came from immersive improv sessions where we would PLAY. Through this process, some things lived, and some things died. The elements that survived became the building blocks of the songs. Vocal melody lines and lyrics would evolve in and from these sessions as well.
Part of the incendiary nature of it revolves around risk-taking and the resulting expansiveness. We took risks by considering what a song could be, what instruments we played, and with production. This definitely rolls into what we have done live as well. Every show we have done has had different instrumentation and a variety of different collaborators; we have created specific environments and theatrical elements for our shows. And while we will touch upon our established songs, we also can segue into improv states in our performances.
Michael: I’m a trained actor who has performed with an eclectic range of collaborators in a variety of contexts, and I’ve learned a lot from making music with Jim and Phil. I coined the above phrase to describe my own practice and body of work, but I think that Jim, Phil, and I were drawn to each other instinctually because this resonates intrinsically for all of us and is the very essence of our music. The so-called final product you hear on this record remains entropic, in a state of formation, in that we’ll continue to reinterpret these songs and unearth new layers in live performance. In that context, “fully realized” can be understood as a way of recognizing the acuteness, the immediacy of the process—to completely embody what’s percolating in the given moment, to harness its potential. If we’re fully present, we ache, reverberate, resound, and find power in our naked vulnerability. And that’s conveyed to a listener, an audience. Which could very well start a fire, literally or figuratively, real or imagined. This music is the product of Jim, Phil, and I sitting in a room, deeply attuned to each other. We begin by listening to one another, and then we respond. The act of listening is both generous and generative, an osmotic, interactive process. We build on each other like waves, and mountains emerge from that roiling, contrapuntal sea.
I’m impressed by the album’s recording quality. Was achieving this an obsession? Tell me about the recording, the sounds we’re hearing, and the album’s resulting impact on the band itself.
Jim: I am really happy to hear that! Recording this album was totally piecemeal. We recorded most of it with extremely limited equipment in an artist’s studio in the Catskills. I did a lot of pick-up recordings in musicians’ apartments and at Martin Bisi’s studio. We did one session at Hoboken Recorders. It was all over the place.
Through the process of recording and post-recording, I did significant work on all the tracks in my home studio. I never really considered them “done.” It was always in my mind to get back to them and really get them where I thought they should be. But then, some time went by, and Chandra from Erototox said he wanted to release it. And I was able to listen with fresh ears and hear the beauty of what was there—imperfections and all. At the end of the day, tons of production was done on this, but it still sounds honest and raw.
Michael: Your reaction to the record and Jim’s response to this question reinforce our above comments on improvisation, I think. In a sense, you can’t work backward. Too often, today’s recordings—and works of art in general—aim to be seamless, meretriciously smooth productions, a kind of tyranny of the pristine that conveys vacuity and homogenizes the end product. The most affecting work distills something pure, unvarnished. It may be refined, but it remains unmuffled. This brings to mind various crude phrases along the lines of putting lipstick on a pig or polishing a turd. What is “perfect,” anyway? Too much artistic product is calculated, made in response to what its creators imagine might be embraced, or bought. Start from a raw place, from a rupture. Gaze into what might at first seem to be the empty void within. Look closer. There’s precious, unrefined ore there for the taking—buried, stashed away in some secret place, not easy to extract, perhaps, but within reach. “Perfect” to me signifies hollow, sleek, overly polished. It’s often skin deep. Enduring work has layers, depth, and inscrutability. It can’t be categorized, framed, or contextualized. The creative Platonic ideal, in fact, lies in the coruscating contours of the devastatingly imperfect, the exposed wound. Apparently, this record was destined to sound exactly the way it does and the way you heard it.
I can’t get enough of “Mellon Faced Briar.” That’s the song that keeps drawing me in. What’s happening in that song? What’s the story? Why do I dig it so much?
Michael: It definitely stands out among these tracks, and yet, I think that we’ve succeeded on this album in that it’s wildly eclectic sonically and structurally but also cohesive, which I think is a product of the sequencing, the fractured, primal lyrical idiom I write in throughout—which generally doesn’t have a linear narrative arc and can be impenetrable but does set a prevailing mood—and the distinctive, recurring instrumental textures that Jim, Phil, John [Nowlin], Rock [Savage], Kirsten [McCord], Norman [Westberg] and Johnny [Gasper] have imbued this record with. But I do think “Mellon” could be a breakout of sorts if it reaches the right ears. It’s The Children… at our most primal, unhinged. It embodies both the band and the album’s names. It’s uber-Freudian, neanderthal, and atavistic in that way, id-ridden. It’s a club track that only the most unselfconscious and uninhibited will be able to dance to. And it’s just fun, no? Suppose I had to suss out the picture being painted here. In that case, I’d say it’s about being an adolescent, that first heady, overwhelming rush of discovering your sexual urges and, in the process of doing so, abruptly severing the umbilical cord, leaving mommy and daddy behind. Jacking off or fingering yourself in the soft glow of the bedroom, door tightly shut. Loudly proclaiming your identity—to yourself, at least—for the first time in the revelatory wake of this sensually reifying discovery. And how that formative moment lurks, in some ways uncomfortably, just beneath the surface forevermore.
The band had an amusing exchange when Phil was clarifying the spelling of “Mellon” for the album design. If I recall correctly, I’d originally chosen “Melon.” Something whimsical about a Melon Face. But there was a miscommunication, and we quickly grew attached to “Mellon Faced” for its ambiguity. It’s a provocative neologism that suits this neo-Gilded Age, hearkening back to the storied American family and its most prominent scion, Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury and briefly ambassador, a seemingly indestructible symbol of, for a time, American supremacy in the roaring ’20s, and then, all-too-suddenly, her excesses and corruptions, in the shadow of the Great Depression. So a “Mellon Face” might be a duplicitous, craven one, with a gleaming, perfect smile, but the tendency of the smiler to sneak off and incessantly masturbate in the corner.
I’ll finish this by asking for something you love that more people should consider.
Jim: A sense of humor and an attitude of acceptance. Because life ain’t all that serious, and acceptance is the key to most problems.
Michael: Indeed.
❈ The Children…’s A Sudden Craving is out now on Erototox Decodings. You can purchase the vinyl directly from the label and the digital evidence via Bandcamp. The album is also streaming all over the place.
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