Pigeon Spins Featuring an Interview with impulse nine

impulse nine - NOTHING IS EASY

Music for your personal apocalypse.

A guitar-heavy, cinematic spectacle chronicling the grief of a string of familial deaths, and the joy of time spent with them, but it’s instrumental, so you get all the emotional heft without having to listen to whiny lyrics.

After hundreds of demos and over two decades, impulse nine debuts to the world as an instrumental amalgam of shoegaze, hard rock, and post-rock, with influences from ambient, 90s rock, and many other places.

Steve lives in Tucson with his spouse, one standard-issue cat, and two extra-chaos (orange) cats. He loves B-sides, graphic design, and typography.

NOTHING IS EASY is the product of over 25 years of musical isolation. In 2016, a series of personal tragedies renewed his dedication to music, mirrored by societal changes that also made their mark. With the release of the album, he hopes to put those tragedies behind him and looks forward to more collaborative efforts in the future.

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Interview with impulse nine

(•)> What's your Hot Take - your most controversial music opinion?

"U2 was the most interesting band of the 1990s, and D'arcy was the lynchpin of the Smashing Pumpkins in their glory years."

For U2: They completed the most-radical transformation of any band with a #1 hit, collaborated (in various ways, including opening bands, remixers, etc.) with the widest variety of musicians (by far), bore witness and had a hand in creating some absolutely wild positive historical moments, won the least-likely Grammy of all time, and, oh yeah, sold a few records.

That list of collaborators (remember, this is JUST in the 1990s, and I'm leaving out anyone I don't recognize): Brian Eno, Paul Oakenfold, Sinéad O’Connor, Johnny Cash, Luciano Pavarotti, Wim Wenders, The Pixies, Rage Against The Machine, Primus, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Fun Lovin' Criminals, The Sugarcubes, Public Enemy, Bob Dylan, Mary J. Blige, Smash Mouth, Third Eye Blind, Howie B, Placebo, Skunk Anansie, Oasis, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, Big Audio Dynamite II, PJ Harvey, Salmon Rushdie, Lou Reid, The Velvet Underground, Pearl Jam, The Ramones, BB King, Apollo 440, Flood, Daniel Lanois, Alan Moulder, Christy Turlington, Milla Jovovich, Danny Saber, Holi, Craig Armstrong, Marius De Vries, Butch Vig, Roni Size, Christy Moore, David Wojnarowicz, William S. Burroughs...

For the Pumpkins: I should note at the outset that I have no hard evidence for this, it's just a kind of triangulation from reading a lot of interviews over the years. With that important caveat out of the way: D'Arcy was the reason the first and most popular iteration of The Smashing Pumpkins worked.

She was the only one consistently willing to tell people 'no,' and, crucially, also the only person in the band who liked music more as a listener than a performer, which is crucial to keeping up with new music to inspire the rest of the band.

There was no Spotify, there were no playlists. The Internet was in its infancy, MP3 as well. The band was constantly either touring or holed up in the studio, neither of which is great for finding new music, especially for Billy and Jimmy, who practice constantly.

Moreover, new music had to be physically bought, and moved in to the bus/studio. When you have someone like that feeding interesting music fuel to a creative machine, you get the depth, breadth, and diversity of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness/The Aeroplane Flies High. When you don't, the machine starts eating its own parts, and you get the insular, claustrophobic creativity of everything since.

(•)> That's all, Folks! Check out impulse nine on the Pigeon Spins Playlist