Erase everything, start from scratch: The Blackbird Spyplane Interview with 100 gecs
They come through talkin' their new EP, new album, the power of ripping up all yr hard work, the corniest man in L.A., sui-generis sauce and more "unbeatable topics"
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— Jonah & Erin
100 gecs — their vibes are fun, their chunes are massive, we love this band. Their 2019 debut album, 1000 gecs, was a trippy experimental electronic-pop gem where they jumbled together a bunch of old sounds (pop-punk, death-metal, R&B, dubstep, noise-rock, ska, jungle, ‘90s computer-muzak ephemera) while helping to invent a new one (hyperpop)...
It was the kind of assaultive paradigm-shifter where you listen to it once and it might make you feel insane and old, but then you listen again, and again… and you start to feel insane and young !!
The gecs — Laura Les and Dylan Brady — have more beautiful deranged music where that came from. Today (Fri Dec 2) they dropped a surprise 3-song EP, called Snake Eyes, and it is hard as h*ll. Meanwhile, for the past few months we’ve had their fantastic single “Doritos & Fritos” on repeat: reciting the absurdist lyrics; wondering if it’s a critique of the crass commodification of natural spaces and the global homogenization of culture; and letting the ill slap bass riffs reverberate off the walls.
It’s one of the tracks on their excellent, long-awaited second album, 10,000 gecs, which will finally be out on March 17, 2023, and which we can confirm contains mad sick kaleidoscopic f**ked-up stadium-punk energies.
Even more impressive than that, though?? Laura and Dylan look mad cool and wear weird s**t well…
So last week I (Jonah) was stoked to hop on an Encrypted SpyVideo Call with them and get into such topics as their sui generis sauce; why the music-note symbol is funny & tight; finding your real voice through unreal Japanese Vocaloid software; and the daunting but powerful creative move of caring so much about a project that you destroy all the work you’ve done on it and start over from scratch…
Blackbird Spyplane: We’re talking a few days before you’re about to surprise-drop the Snake Eyes EP, so I haven’t heard it. But people reading this as of Friday Dec 2 can hear it — so please tell me what emotions they’re feeling, what epiphanies they’re having…
Laura: “They’re thinking, Whoa!! Listen to this crazy good music, holy s**t, oh my g-d, I can’t believe this is entering my ears, holy f**k.”
Dylan: “They’re thinking, I need to buy the shirt and hoodie for this EP, it’s so good.”
Laura: “They’re thinking, I wish they came out with this on a Flexi disc. If we did that, people would roll up weed in the Flexi disc and smoke out of it. That’s the mind frame people are gonna be in.”
Blackbird Spyplane: How does the EP relate to the next album?
Laura: “So it’s 3 songs from sort of different sources. One song is ‘Runaway.’ It’s one of the first demos we had for the new album, like right when we dropped the last one and came back from tour. Dylan sent me the demo, and I was like, We definitely need to make this a track, but we didn’t finish it for the album. The EP was a great excuse to finish it and mix in this other ballad Dylan wrote. ‘Torture Me’ is a song we did for one of the online sets we did, and we were doing a couple sessions with Skrillex and he was, like, ‘I’d like to work on that,’ so we fleshed it out with him. And the other one is ‘Hey Big Man,’ which has been our opener for live stuff forever, with big rock drums like most songs on the new album — nice and blown out. I’m in love with the EP. Especially because we were working on the album for so long, it was nice to have fun again — when you get into the weeds with an album, and there’s pressure, it felt really nice to do something different and fun.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I’ve been listening to an advance of 10,000 gecs, and the s**t rocks. I read that over the past few years you generated thousands of ideas and demos, winnowed those down to a dozen songs, then scrapped it all and started over again. Ripping up a project and getting back to a blank slate can be pretty good advice: You might think all that work was wasted, but it’s not — every choice, experiment and false start lives on in what you do next, in some form…
Laura: “Some of the early songs survived — ‘Hollywood Baby,’ which has a big single vibe, we’ve been working on for quite a while. But yeah, at a certain point we looked at all the songs and were just, like, Can we do better? Can we make something more interesting? Try new things? Coming off the first album, personally, I was in a place of, What the f**k do we even do next? It’s nice to not be complacent. We wanted a new vibe. So we sat down and said, Let’s f**king scrap most of it and see what else we can come up with.”
Blackbird Spyplane: The album’s really fun, and really funny — there’s one lyric from Laura that I had to rewind a few times: “Queen of California, hot like the heat is / Got Anthony Kiedis suckin’ on my penis.” Did I hear these BARS correctly 😤!?
Laura: “Look, that man loves California, he loves on women — I hope he’s not offended. I think he’ll be okay with it if he ever hears it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I think so, too. Speaking of California icons, I hear some blink-182 on “Hollywood Baby,” but I wanted to ask you about the wild slap bass on “Doritos & Fritos,” which threw me back to crazy old ‘90s Primus records. Were they in your heads at all when you wrote that song?
Laura: “Primus were definitely in our heads.”
Dylan: “I’m a huge Les Claypool fan. Les, if you’re reading this, we’ve been trying to get with your manager for years.”
Blackbird Spyplane: The Primus revival might start here...
Laura: “They don’t need to revive s**t, they’re good, they’re chilling, that band goes incredibly hard!”
Blackbird Spyplane: The “Doritos & Fritos” video stars a pair of flying gecs drones. I heard a rumor that the same dude who made pterodactyls for Jurassic World made those for you…
Dylan: “Yeah, Chris Maggio, who directed the video, found a mountain of a man in San Diego, named Otto, who wears many hats, and many of them involve making strange things fly through the air. He squeezed us in between his Jurassic World commitments.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Do you still have them?
Dylan: “Yeah, they’re hanging in my studio. But they are not easy to fly.”
Laura: “And it’s hard to find a place to fly them. When we played Coachella we wanted to fly them over the audience, but it turns out it’s hard to be able to do that — ”
Dylan: “—apparently it ‘isn’t safe.’”
Laura: “We’re always going for a dangerous vibe with the live shows, and usually it gets vetoed, but we have a couple ideas for what to do next with them.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I want to ask about clothes real quick. Where do you like to get them, and how do you like to put them together ?
Laura: “Let’s do a quick fit check. I’ve got on a tank top I bought from Target two days ago, and Victoria’s Secret boxers that I just wear as shorts. For me it’s whatever’s comfortable and around, mostly. But Dylan is dripping crazy.”
Dylan: [Shows off his bootleg Tweety Bird gecs tee from when they played Lollapalooza 2022] “I’ve got the limited-edition gecs shirt. I’ve got on Adidas shorts… a Grateful Dead weed hat… [Aims his phone down at some Balenciaga black-rubber HD sneakers, below bottom left, with a chunky toe cap and cutouts on the sides, on some alien trash-goth s**t.]
“And shout out to Elly Golterman for making our wizard cloaks and hats, too. She snapped.”
Laura: “H*ll yeah, with the Lakers colors, fitting with the album’s L.A. theme — we’re all about L.A. on this one.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That reminds me to ask, what are some off-the-beaten-path spots you love in L.A. ?
Dylan: “Old Style Guitar Shop, and Corn Man.”
Laura: “Corn Man.”
Dylan: “He’s a dude who sells corn from like 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. Corn in a cup and corn on the cob. You can find him on Google Maps, but he pulls up to the same spot each time.”
Blackbird Spyplane: [Does some Googles] Oh this guy’s a legend. His corn looks delicious, thank you. OK you both sent over some special cherished possessions to talk about. Dylan, what’s up with this painting? It looks very puffy, very tactile — almost like a claymation prop.
Dylan: “I got this as a birthday present from Elly. For a while I was really hung up on the 1-4-5 chord progression — I still am, but more 4-5-1 — so she knew that, and wanted to make me something, because she makes birthday presents.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That’s a great idea. Make yr friends birthday presents.
Dylan: “She arranged the hearts in that chord progression, and the canvas has been stuffed with fabric and then oil-painted.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You’re big into music notes — you got one tattooed on yr chest, they’re all over yr wizard cloak, it’s in the logo for your label… I was thinking about the unlikely trajectory the music note has had over the centuries, where it started off in this very exalted, dry, classical sheet-music context, but now when you see a music note there’s usually something kitsch and a little humorous about it… Like on the gates at Graceland or on the neon sign of some funky piano bar.
Laura: “Yeah. Maybe it’s because, like, who’s writing sheet music anymore? It exists mostly as a symbol of music, not an actual way to write it — in our circles, anyway.”
Dylan: “I love music. I love the iconography of music. So I was really excited to put this painting in my studio, except everyone wants to touch it when I have sessions. I wanna touch Nighthawks. I wanna touch Guernica. Do I do it? No.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Laura, you chose a cool-looking Yamaha device — what is this, exactly? I was trying to look it up and I half-gathered that it’s programmed with the voice of a virtual 16-year-old Japanese pop idol called Hatsune Miku who sings words you type in for her?
Laura: “Kind of. There’s a lot to unpack, so I’ll gush about Miku for a second. Miku is a Vocaloid, which is an audio program Yamaha owns, where you type words in and draw in notes, and it’ll sing it. There’s a bunch of Vocaloids, but she’s the star, and she’s kind of become a virtual celebrity — she doesn’t exist physically, but they do whole Miku concerts with crazy holograms. It’s very cool, people should look up some Hatsune Miku songs.
“So this interface is called the AG03 Miku. They have a regular version and this is literally the same device, it was the same price, but it has Hatsune Miku on it, and this light-green motif, which is her color. I think the target demographic was streamers. It has inputs and outputs and certain functions, like, you can pre-program a compressor on your voice — it’s neat. So I ordered it from Japan. It’s what I recorded all of 1000 gecs on. I’ve retired it now, but I still like having it around.”
Blackbird Spyplane: D*mn, I’ve been sleeping on Vocaloids.
Laura: “I got really into the idea of Miku, and Vocaloids in general, because there’s no limit to how much you can just f**k your voice up and manipulate it and make it into exactly what you want. Some of the more adventurous Vocaloid people will do crazy things that no one could actually sing, and Dylan and I like to do the same thing — we turn ourselves into Vocaloids, more or less.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I love it, it pushes the notion of the cyborg into a wild realm. It’s interesting in the context of the new album, though, because there’s a bunch of moments where you sing with your voice relatively unmodified — a decision you’ve mentioned feeling some trepidation about. I think you could make an argument that ultimately your “real voice” isn’t any “realer” than the super-processed version.
Laura: “Absolutely not. A lot of people on the first album were, like, I wonder what their real voices sound like, and it’s, like, B*tch, this is our real voice. It’s no less real than anything else. But this album I did try to embrace more of, like, F**k it, f**k you, this is what my voice sounds like not sped-up — still heavy on the Autotune but, like, I’m gonna try to make this very raw. And then at the opposite end of the spectrum there’s a song like ‘757,’ where Dylan goes absolutely insane with this plugin we use, Waves Tune — we draw in all these MIDI notes, s**t you could never sing. So the mix of the two is nice: a human-caught-in-the-machine type vibe.”
Dylan: [Deadpan faux-pretentious voice] “It’s kind of like we’re at the intersection of art and technology.”
Laura: [Laughs] “We’re at the bleeding edge of up-your-own-a** philosophy and art and technology.”
Dylan: “I almost had a philosophy minor in school, actually. I was one credit away. I read a bunch of old-a** dudes I can’t remember. But the teacher was really good. Shout out to him for making me stoked about life.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That’s a nice note to end on. Shout out to being stoked on life.
Laura: “Shout out to being stoked on life. Go touch some grace. Stare at a mountain.”
Dylan: “Eat some fish.”
Laura: “As fresh as you can find it. Go hang out with a cat. Get a tattoo. Even if you regret it. You won’t regret it. You’ll want it forever.”
100 gecs are online here, where you can preorder 10,000 gecs, and on Instagram here.
The Cla$$ified SpyTalk chat room is here, full of very cool people with very cool recommendations.
The Global Intel Travel Chat Room is here, featuring earth-spanning GOAT-locale recommendations.
The Master Jawn Index, featuring earth’s best Spyplane-approved things, is here.
Dylan and Laura are magic. And their team is too. Elly totally knocked its out of the park with their robes and Dylan’s iconic hat. ❤️ them so!
Great article 🥰
One of the Mama Gecs.