“I just want it to be so fucking good that The Tote burns to the ground. So that’s kind of what I’m saying, I just want to destroy the venue and everyone in it. That’s pretty much the goal of every gig, but New Years especially.”
Despite these dangerous ambitions Jason explains that everyone is invited to partake in the craziness.
“We just want to have a stupid party and have all our friends down. We try to host it more than a normal gig. We’re putting on a barbeque. We do a spit and there’s vegan food, so it’s not like a skimpy barbeque where you just put fourteen sausages on and the four fattest dudes through the door get it. We actually spend money and cook for a few hours.”
The other bands on the line-up are all closely connected to the hosts and will surely enhance the unruly shenanigans.
“Captain Cleanoff, they’re a grind band made up of members from all different states who are doing really good. Bat Piss are guys from The Tote who work behind the bar. Sewercide are a really young thrash band who are doing really good. Bruiser are like a mix of Tool and death metal, aggressive and pretty technical. The thing that all those bands have in common is they’re friends in one way or another with Blood Duster, so it’s definitely going to have a real friendly vibe,” says Jason.
Blood Duster’s new album KVLT (pronounced ‘cult’) landed a few months ago, so fans should have had time to familiarise themselves with the material prior to the launch. However, it’s actually impossible to hear the album. KVLT had limited vinyl release but the band mutilated the records so they couldn’t be played. They also destroyed the masters, thus preventing any chance of re-pressing. The unplayability of the album is largely a protest against the prevalent disregard for the craft and effort that goes into making music.
“Music has been devalued by fuckin’ multi-nationals to the point where it’s more fun for us to not give you an album. We can make an album and destroy it; that way we get to own it. I’ve never done a deal with Spotify or any of those companies in my life, yet all of my stuff’s available for nothing. They get to make money from McDonald’s ads, or whatever, while the artist gets nothing. So, if you think our stuff’s worth nothing then fuck you, you can’t have it.”
Jason clearly struggles to digest the fact that someone else is making money from Blood Duster’s music, while utterly ignoring the creators.
“On the Blood Duster website there’s a link where you can download the EP [SVCK, which accompanies the album] illegally. You can download the EP for free from a pirate site and you can see that it’s covered in ads. That’s there to show people what’s actually going on. It’s like we have to prove that we own the stuff to get them to pull it down. Is the earth back to front? Did I miss something where companies are just allowed to do that? To me it seems really obviously stupid and mean spirited towards artists.”
Jason highlights that this blatant laundering basically dismisses any rights of the musician.
“If it was just us not making money, that’s cool we’d keep doing it, we’ve been doing that for years! But us doing it so someone else can profiteer it? Nah, you can go and get fucked. I think there should be laws in place to say that all these companies need to come to you and say ‘I would like to use your product.’ Not, ‘we’re going to use your product, you sort it out.’ That just doesn’t happen anywhere else on earth except the music industry.”
KVLT’s punk rock release method states a refusal to be taken advantage of, however where will Blood Duster go from here?
“It’s a hard one, do we just bow down and put out a record? It seems like such a boring thing to do now. People want it, but the value has gone. There’s so much stuff for free, no one has to put any time or thought into it, they just go ‘ok cool, I’ll put that on shuffle’.”
The band has discussed a few similarly unyielding release strategies aimed to remind people to cherish the music they’re hearing.
“We did toss up the idea of individually marking the record with who we wanted to have it, so if you make friends with us you get a record. Then having listening parties, just taking a copy and people can come down and listen to the record and we’ll put it on repeat, people can get into it and then we’ll take that copy home.”
An easy remedy for the general public’s woefully diminished appreciation for recorded music is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future, which makes the Blood Duster’s ambition to ‘destroy new years’ sound like an urgent imperative.
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
