No Age: Straight Outta Skid Row

Divorce becomes No Age; crashing onto the LA ‘noise’ scene following the collapse of their former band Wives, drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall resolved to produce a fusion of punk rock with ambient, distorted melody.

“We’ve always loved playing music together and never planned on stopping that,” says Randall of starting again. “We just needed to restructure how it was going to be done.” If last year’s Weirdo Rippers was the experimental sound of two friends tinkering around to see what might fly, then forthcoming second LP Nouns is the assured, uninhibited counterpart that can only stand to see their profile rise over the course of the coming summer. “We recorded some of the songs at Southern Studios, which was a huge play day for us,” Randall gushes. “That’s the recording studio that Crass built in this tiny North London flat, we were so in awe of the bands that had come through and recorded there. We just wanted all the ghosts to seep into whatever we were doing.”

This is certainly true of the band’s staunch DIY ethic, opting to handle everything from their own artwork to ensuring that they’re kept busy with gigs held in unorthodox settings; today we find No Age playing to a few hundred curious fans at a Los Angeles library. “We were asked by somebody who works here if we would be interested in performing and we emphatically said yes, for a change of venue,” explains Randall. “It’s just fun to play in different environments, and see how it works out.”

This is still a No Age home game; the venue neighbours Skid Row – a rundown hub for the city’s homeless – where their usual gigging haunt The Smell is tucked away. Randall talks about the ethos behind this humble, unorthodox base for the local punk rock community (which includes The Mae Shi, HEALTH and today’s support act, an all-female punk outfit called Mika Miko) as being reactionary to the “unabashed ambition and callous go-gettingness” otherwise inherent to the city: “It’s very encouraging to know that you can exist independently of the major label and media systems. If anything, it encourages kids to find their own voice through a place like The Smell, where we’re left to our own business to do what we want to do for our friends and a community of people that want to hear this loud, crazy music.”

This craziness, Randall claims, has been ingrained in his DNA since he was 13, until becoming something of a renaissance man in recent times: “Dean and I both grew up in California in the punk-rock skateboard scene where respect for generations of older music didn’t really exist; if it didn’t come from the '80s and it wasn’t from Southern California then we didn’t want to hear it,” he recollects. “I found my feet in the whole rock'n'roll guitar world through bands like Sonic Youth, in the beginning I’d make these feedback loops and work as hard as I could to not write a song. The Beatles were so omni-present everywhere, it was easy to rebel against it – like classic rock, whatever I thought that was – I hated Led Zeppelin for years before I finally got my brain around it, and I thought ‘oh, it’s not all just his voice, there’s actually some amazing drumming going on and some guitar playing that nobody else is really doing.’”

With their scattershot, infectious and imperfect songs like Miner and Things I Did When I Was Dead calling similarly inventive notions to mind, there’s no doubt that No Age are revelling in having somehow harnessed both the structure and the chaos. Dig in.