The 1/4 Inch Almanac: an interview with Dylan from BALACLAVA
I’ve been a fan of BALACLAVA since I first set eyes on them. I was at Arlene’s Grocery when it happened, waiting for my friend Corey’s band, Bricklayer, to go on. They have a small, low-def, box TV by the bar at Arlene’s that shows you what’s going on in the music space. I remember I was chatting with the bassist from Bricklayer, Zach, when his attention suddenly slid away from me and became locked onto something behind me. This was a pretty normal interaction for these types of shows––there was always some old flame or old bandmate stepping through the door that needed to be greeted, or some technical issue that required fixing. So I didn’t think too much about it. But when ten or so seconds went by of silence, I determined this must be some different kind of interruption. I turned around as well, and scanned for what had taken up Zach’s attention. All that was behind me was that TV.
“That’s pretty heady,” Zach said looking at the fuzzy television, dangling from the ceiling.
“Yeah,” I said. “We gotta get in there.”
What we were looking at were five men in ski masks, jerking and jumping about the stage. One man, holding a microphone, was down on his knees, nearly convulsing as he sang. The guitarist continued to jump up and down as high as he could. The bassist swung his body and bass up and down violently. We rushed into the performance space.
And when we passed through that door, we were greeted by a sound that somehow matched the chaotic scene we had witnessed on the television: the guitar was warped and skuzzy sounding, playing an up and down riff that felt sort of trance inducing; the drums were loud and abrasive and unrestrained; and the vocals were being distorted through an altered microphone that made it sound like some apocalyptic carnival barker. As I approach my thirties, it is becoming harder and harder for music to take me over so thoroughly that I feel compelled to jump into the pit and bump and shove around with everyone. I just don’t have the same energy for it as I used to. But as soon as I entered this room it became clear that that decision to enter the pit was out of my control, and I headed straight into it. I had become possessed by BALACLAVA.
Performing this kind of music and recording it are two very different things of course. This seems like a central difficultly to exposing the world to punk and punk-influenced music. How are you supposed to channel all the energy of the live shows into a recorded piece, that will likely be listened to quietly in private or near privacy? Or should you even bother trying to do such a thing?
These are all questions that seemed important to ask after hearing that BALACLAVA had a new tape coming out: The 1/4 Inch Almanac. So we sent the best and brightest punk-mind we could get our hands on, John Sandahl, down to Ridgewood to ask Dylan some of these things and get an idea of what type of mind is putting together this music.
–Jake Hargrove
Okay song one of the––wait what’s the new tape called?
It’s called The 1/4 Inch Almanac
What’s the first song?
Blue Dollar Signs.
Like hundred dollar bills?
Like hundred dollar bills.
Like how it’s blue now?
It’s more about how money is being funneled into the police. Like back the blue money.
Oh. I just got a ticket yesterday.
For what?
For drinking a beer on the way to the subway. Undercover cop got me.
For how much? Twenty-five bucks?
Yeah twenty-five bucks.
Dang.
Who’s doing the artwork for this tape?
My friend Jackson Glover from Burlington VT. He’s in this really great band Grease Face and has always done the art for Grease Face. He’s been a homie for a long time.
What’s the art looking like? It has some balaclavas on it?
Nah I try to stray from that imagery as much as I can.
Word. So what are the other song names? You said Blue Dollar Signs is about money backing the police.
Yeah like crooked cops getting too much money. Something we’ve seen a lot of.
Like specifically the cops or the money behind it? You got any good lines in there? Like something real punchy?
Yeah in the chorus I say “Blue dollar signs, all I see is blue. Blue dollar signs, I dream in blue. Blue dollar signs.” So it could be about a lot of things but it’s pretty ACAB.
Nice. Alright, other songs. I know there’s one called Simon Steals A lot. Who the fuck is Simon?
Simon is someone I invented. And he’s a blind man. Who lives in a touristy area and steals from people. But it’s so he can feed his family.
Robin hood type shit.
There’s like three lines in the whole song. So it’s a bit of a stretch from what was in my head when I was writing it but yeah that’s the idea.
Simon is kind of a slimy name too. I know two Simons and they’re both fine but whenever I hear their names I’m like, Ooohh Simon has gotta be up to something.
Yeah like a little character. A lot of the songs I write I just try to make little characters.
Pills on Vacation. What’s up with that one?
Kind of a loose concept but I had this co-worker who was in his seventies. He lived in New York all of his life and used to be a kind of crazy dude, playing funk bands back in the day, and he told me this story once. It was back in the 70s and he and his girlfriend at the time took a bunch of mescaline and went out to dinner. And she started freaking out and had to get out of there. So I wrote that song in the eyes of someone that’s done too many drugs and is out to eat.
I was thinking about this on the way here. I don’t know if it’s more with punk songs but when I write a song I think of it more like a tattoo, or the way that I might approach a tattoo. Like I’m just gonna do it and it doesn’t have to mean something crazy or profound.
There’s definitely two ways to look at it. Sometimes I write and it’s silly, stupid stuff. But I feel I’ve recently been pulling out a little bit of a deeper meaning. Getting more creative with it. The more I write the more personal it becomes, typically. And not to say there isn’t room for silly songs but I’ve just been finding myself trending in the more personal and meaningful direction as of late.
I know what you’re saying. Even stuff that seems stupid can carry a lot of weight to it. Like with a shitty tattoo that might just look awful, it’ll mean a lot to me because it brings me back to a very exact time period. Everything that gets put down has significance even if it isn’t overtly significant. Even the silly songs.
Yeah, in regards to tattoos I’ve never been one to think that they all need to have meaning. But songs I find myself laboring over meaning a bit differently.
Okay last song is called Where Is My Four Dimensional Dog?
Yeah this one is pretty nonsensical. All these songs were written in July of 2022. I was doing this thing where I was writing and recording a song every day for a month. So it was becoming hard to find inspiration to write a song every day. Lyrically it was getting very difficult. But I remember being at work and thinking that I saw a dog in my peripheral vision. But there would just be no chance of a dog being where I was working. So I was like that’s weird. Maybe it was an interdimensional entity. And then I kind of just rolled with it.
You got any hard hitting lyrics from that one? Any lines that get you amped up?
Yeah there’s this one: “Good boy, sit still. Go back, be real. Exist from when God said light shed.” I thought that was funny. Like the beginning of time and there’s just a dog there too.
That’s sick. So you wrote all these songs. And who did the rest? You flew someone in for drums right?
For the demo process it was just me using a drum machine, but for the actual recording of three of the four songs I had my friend Matt Elicone come in from LA. He’s been a homie forever and we’ve been in bands together so I knew he could execute what I wanted. And even bring out ideas that I didn’t even know I wanted. So there are some points in the EP where we’re both kind of figuring out what we wanted on it. Pills on Vacation was like that. And that one has probably my favorite drum sound on the whole EP. He added a lot of his flair to it.
Do you think when Matt adds his flair to a recorded project and then you try to pass it on to your performance drummer that it translates super well?
I’m not too picky about it being one to one from the recordings.
Yeah the recordings sound way different than the live shows.
Which I like. I like having a dichotomy of a live band and a recorded band. I think writing, recording, and performing are all three very separate processes that come together to create a single thing, and I really like respecting that dichotomy. I like it sounding different, even drastically different, when it’s recorded versus when it’s performed. And given that the recordings are all me, I think I get a little more hands on with it.
I really like how this band, similar to Cherry Cheeks, has one person spearheading the project and its recorded output, while also allowing the performances to sound way different. And I’m glad it’s called BALACLAVA, because I can’t fucking stand it when someone calls that type of project their name. Like calling it Dylan. Because that’s not what it is, right? If you just wanted to record it and put it out, you could call it your name but if you’re going to play it live with a bunch of different people, it’s not just you.
And it’s funny, I remember seeing BALACLAVA for the first time as this pretty eye opening experience. Because I heard some song by y’all, like Dumb City or something, and I was sort of on the fence about it. But then I saw y’all play and I was just like holy shit. And then when I went back to the recordings I found myself appreciating them way more. Like they were laced with that energy all of the sudden.
I think this EP, compared to the first demo I put out, is also closer to the energy and sound of the performances. That first EP, Have a Taste, is very low-fi and I was very much just using what I had available. And I still love how it sounds, but there is definitely a bigger gap between those two presentations of the music.
What’s on that one? Dumb City, God Rash, and what’s the other one?
Everything All at Once.
So I was talking to people at work, telling them how we’re going on tour together, and everyone was like, “Wait, how are y’all making money?” And I was like selling merch and shit. And they were like, “Well what are you selling?” And I was like, We got tapes. And they were like “You got tapes!? Who the fuck has a tape player?”
So I wanted your take on why you’re doing this EP on tape?
Well I think we are just lucky enough that we are in a niche market for it. It is kind of silly that people will buy them but I buy a bunch of tapes. And there are a bunch of people like me out there as well. People in the community buy them. It just is how it is. Which sounds strange to someone on the outside I’m sure.
And I personally love everything about tapes. How they look and feel and putting them together. But it’s definitely interesting how that market has remained strong in this little world.
Yeah it was hard to explain to my coworkers but like all my buddies have fucking tape players. It’s just part of it.
And it’s very much a part of underground and local music. Which I think makes it even more special. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to press a record one day, but for now tapes are cool.
And sometimes they kind of sound like shit. Which is part of it, ya know. It’s not about making this clean and perfect thing. I get stoked when I get one that’s been pressed over something else it and sounds like dog shit. That makes it more fun for me.
For sure.
Okay, let’s talk about you a little bit. You’ve been in bands before BALACLAVA.
Plenty.
Where at? Western Mass?
Mostly Central Mass where I went to college at Fitchburg State University. That’s kind of where I fell in love with DIY music. Didn’t really exist for me in high school before that. The place I grew up, the South Shore of Boston, was just kind of lame. Super suburban, there was maybe one black kid at my high school, and all there really was in tow were car dealerships and Dunkin Donuts. And practically no small businesses. So once I left and went to school somewhere else and realized that other things existed, that’s also when I found DIY music.
Did you always play music?
I always played guitar, yeah. And I had a band in seventh grade with my buddy Matt. We covered Bulls on Parade and Seventh Nation Army. And Brain Stew.
Brain Stew! I remember I bought my first electric guitar, and I had just smoked a bunch of weed, and I went to my brother’s place with my friend. And I remember just smoking weed and playing Brain Stew over and over and over again. And then the cops banged on the garage door. And we didn’t know it was the cops so we just thought it was like a buddy or something and then we open it and all this smoke is billowing out and the cops are like “You’re sounding pretty good, but the neighbors are complaining.” And we were like shit my bad. But we didn’t get into any trouble or anything which was sick.
Nice. But yeah, so, um, going to college.
Right.
I’m living in this town and starting to see all these local bands and that was the time that I really started getting into music. There was this band called Bay Faction that was playing in this basement that I had gotten wind of on campus or something. And I went there and ended up hitting it off with everyone in the house and I eventually moved into the house when I was a junior. From there we started amping up the shows and taking in donations. We started getting bands from all over the east coast. Philadelphia, Vermont, New York, and Canada. And that’s when I really started falling in love with making music. We had this massive house and bands were coming from everywhere and crashing.
Massachusetts does this thing––and it might be a thing elsewhere as well––but there are just a lot of colleges in Massachusetts. And they are all in low income towns and cities for the most part. And that’s for a few reasons but the benefit to DIY stuff is you can get a whole house and put on shows all the time. I think we were called the Hipster House, which we thought was kind of funny because it was mainly punk music but we kind of leaned into it.
Was it dirty?
Yeah it would get pretty disgusting. We would have a hundred people come through for shows. But it didn’t bother me really. It was kind of sick to be living like that for a little bit.
Yeah living in those places is hilarious. Now when I go play a show at one I’ll find myself like picking up an extra beer can or something just because I know how bad it can get. Is that house still going on?
Last I heard it’s gone. I think the pandemic sort of ended it. When we left there was a group that came after us and took care of it and kept it going for as long as they could but last I heard it’s gone.
Then after that you moved to New York?
Pretty soon after.
And then BALACLAVA happened soon after that? What was the story there?
Yeah so the inception of Bala definitely stemmed from me moving to New York and just stopping all musical stuff. I had a band in Boston but when I moved to New York that sort of fell off for me. But I was still going to shows all the time and I’d be sitting in the crowd just like “Why am I not doing this?” It would really bum me out honestly. And at some point I had to stop going to shows because it was getting too depressing. It’s my favorite thing in the world and I’m not doing it. Just sucked to feel.
And even trying to put a band together was a little tricky. I had some homies that I would jam with, and in jamming I hoped something like a band would come of it. But nothing would really happen. Like seven or eight jams and then nothing. No one was ever like, what if we made a band? So I was like alright, I need to take control of this.
And I’d never really done that before––put it all together by myself. Bands in the past I’ve been super close with everyone and the sound was very much a product of everyone, and so this was the first time where I was like, alright I’m in control and it’s going to sound the way I determine it to sound. Which is good. I like it.
I think that messy collaborative thing takes so long to find the sound. And it’s always going to be different from what’s in your head. So I really see the appeal of doing it yourself.
Yeah it’s really cool not to be answering to anybody. I was really lucky with the band I had in college. We all lived together and they were my best friends. Still are. Matt and Chris. But we were super tight and always knew what was happening. And that connection is just hard to find. We knew the influences behind the project and what we were doing. We were all listening to the same music, living in the same house, living the same life. Living the same life goes a really long way honestly. Eating together, throwing all the shows together, meeting all the bands together. It was just a very special and tight knit time. But it’s hard to get that back once you leave it.
Are those guys in any bands right now?
Chris is but Matt isn’t currently. He’d like to be but sort of the same deal to my story. Moved somewhere, starting from scratch, and then just having a bunch of jams that don’t really go much further than that.
It can be hard in a new city too, right? What I’ve experienced in New York is that it can be a little clique-y. I suppose it can be clique-y anywhere, but I was lucky enough to make it into the clique in Minneapolis. But after leaving that and going to another punk city it hasn’t been as easy to enter the scene. Punks got their guard up. I don’t know if it’s a cool guy thing, or what.
Yeah I’m not really sure what it is but I know what you’re talking about. New York has an absurd amount of people. So I think once you find like-minded people, you might start to restrain yourself from meeting more. It can be a bit of an overload. So people just get comfortable running with what they have, maybe.
So how did you end up meeting your bandmates for BALACLAVA? Also name drop ‘em.
James, Arif, Angus, Steve. Knew James from college. He was good friends with my friend Chris. So I’d known him for a few years and he was already living in New York. So he was the first person I approached about the band and he was pretty instantly about it.
Arif and Angus I met through other mutual friends. It was pretty organic. And then I met Steve because he was the drummer of this band Libby Quinn. And I sort of poached him and asked him if he wanted to play in Bala and he was pretty about it. But everything was pretty organic.
Did you have to do much convincing? Did they make you play them songs? Or was it like they were all buddies before bandmates? Or maybe, alternatively, it was like bandmates into buddies?
I think everyone besides Steve was a buddy before they joined the band. So it wasn’t too hard to convince them. And then once we had four in on it, it was easier to sell to Steve.
But I showed everyone early, early demos. Before I had the full idea of the band. So everyone knew about it at every stage while I was fleshing it out.
And the first thing y’all put out was Have a Taste, yeah? That was last year?
2022 I believe.
But you have so many other songs stored up right?
Yeah I’m really excited to get 1/4 Inch Almanac out so I can move onto other stuff.
Yeah what’s the typical song writing process like? I know you were just doing the one song a day thing last month.
Yeah that’s sort of been the process for all of BALCLAVA. Going into month long stints and doing one a day. And typically I don’t do much to a song after the day I make it. I might go back and add something or change something but 90% of the time it is how it is after that first day. Of course there are a bunch of shitty songs that will emerge in that month. But typically there are enough good ones to make a tape. And that’s what I’ve done with these last two tapes.
Except Have a Taste. The songs on that one were cooked for a little bit longer.
And you record them all on this TASCAM 388?
Yeah these four songs that are coming out were all recorded on it.
How did you procure this device?
Craigslist. I’ve wanted one for years. Ever since I read the liner notes to Damaged Bug’s Hubba Bubba that said it was recorded straight onto a TASCAM 388. And I love the sound of that record so I immediately googled it and it looked sick. But I was eighteen at that point, and they’re pretty expensive. I remember looking at them online back then and they were seven hundred bucks and was like, fuck, I’m never gonna be able to afford that. Then ten years later I’m looking on Craigslist in New York and find one for two grand. And I’m like fuck, now or never. I gotta buy it. But, yeah, the price on them has just been climbing higher and higher every year.
Why do you think people want them? What type of effects are on it?
No effects. I think it just sounds good. It lends itself to a certain aesthetic.
It’s pretty hard bodied too, right? They don’t break?
This one’s from the 80’s. You have to get it serviced but yeah they’re pretty durable. But the sound of them is what does it for me. The crunch you can get on the drums is crazy.
How long can you record on it?
A tape is thirty minutes. And a tape is thirty dollars. But it’s quarter inch tape––hence, The 1/4 Inch Almanac.
And where can people get this tape?
John Sandahl is a writer and musician from Minneapolis living in New York. He is the lead singer of Liquid Lunch. He’s fucked up in the head.