Spartan Jet-Plex, the recording project of Nancy Grim Kells, who also manages/facilitates Grimalkin Records, recently released Live, a new album and film which flips the concept of a live record on its head. Finding themselves unable to play live due to the ongoing pandemic, Kells decided to create an album of what future lives sets might sound like.
Nancy was kind enough to answer some of our questions on the album, as well as their other musical projects, the work of Grimalkin Records, and wider questions on the state of the music scene.
Your latest release, Live, while not a live album in the usual sense, is very much influenced by how you perform these songs live. How is this different to your recorded releases?
What you are hearing outside of all the transition pieces is what my live sets sound like for the most part. I play stripped down versions of my songs and tried to keep the main parts of the songs much like I sound live. I also recorded the songs with my electric guitar which I rarely use these days when recording. I typically use my classical guitar in recordings but I play my live sets using my electric. I imagined that the transition pieces could be played during my sets between songs and the video that Rafa (Rafael de Toledo Pedroso da Silveira) and I created to go with the songs could be used as a backdrop when playing out.
Is playing live something you have learned to enjoy, or is it still nerve-wracking?
I started playing out in January of 2019 and was playing out quite often up until the beginning of March 2020 when everything shut down due to the pandemic. Playing out was scary to me and I never really thought I would do or enjoy it but I pushed myself to get out of my comfort zone. I figured the first step would be just being comfortable playing stripped down versions of just guitar and vocals and imagined once I mastered that, I would start adding things in. The last show I played before the pandemic was probably my best one yet and I was just starting to feel a lot more comfortable. It was still nerve-wracking, and probably always will be, but I was getting more comfortable with it. I felt like people responded to it positively, and I actually enjoyed it. I felt like I got a lot out of it personally and musically.
Playing out is different because I was practicing every day since I started doing it and I was really sitting with songs for much longer lengths of time than I was used to previously, and so as I played them out, I would start settling into the songs and they would slightly change over time. I was writing new songs and would introduce them into sets and that was a different way to develop a song. I would rework older songs and add them or rotate them into my sets so it was just a very different way about working on my music. Once the pandemic hit and I could no longer play out, I decided to make an album of what I imagined a future set might sound like if I had kept playing out.
You have begun to go back and remaster your old releases, an experience that has been both nostalgic and bittersweet. Has this period of revisitation changed your approach to making new music?
The main thing that was really great about going back and remastering songs is remembering and rediscovering some of the songs I’ve written that still stood out to me. That inspired me to start rotating some of them into my sets and reworking them. I’ve been recording and writing for a long time now and so every once in a while I’ll find a bunch of songs I forgot about. I just recently found over 100 songs from 1997-2007 that I forgot about. Most of it was crap but I found a bunch that were decent and I just finished mastering and releasing those on my Bandcamp. I have a few albums of songs like that now (Thoughts, Olden, Backwards, and 13). Those albums are songs that I found later on and were never really meant to be albums.
This set is called 13 (my lucky number) because I narrowed them down to the best 13 songs in this recent set of found songs. When I go back and listen to old stuff, sometimes it brings back the memories of those feelings when I wrote them. That can be overwhelming. Writing and recording has always been therapeutic for me but sometimes that means the songs are just too personal or painful for me to share with others. I left the really heart wrenching ones off 13.
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How do you feel your music has changed since those early releases?
Almost all of these songs were never released anywhere. I would just write and record for myself. I would make tapes and CDs for friends sometimes or upload songs to Myspace but for the most part, I wasn’t thinking of the listener. Now I do more so. I write music with the intention that I am going to release the ones I like or I am intentionally writing albums, but for most of my music-making life, that wasn’t even a consideration at all. The benefit of that is nothing is hidden, censored, or held back because the idea of releasing them wasn’t a consideration.
The downside is that many of the recordings are imperfect or unfinished ideas. I didn’t have the same care involved in the recording process as I do now. There are a lot of good ideas though in that older stuff and can evolve into better songs over time. I think that’s what I like the most about going back through all my old stuff. Relistening now is like going back and taking a piece of myself and seeing it through what I hope are wiser and clearer eyes. I can learn and take from that and mold things into the present.
Your label/collective Grimalkin Records continues to go from strength to strength, and it has been great to see artists like Backxwash getting coverage in large publications. What are you plans going forward?
I hope we keep growing and expanding in new ways. Mutual aid is at the focus of most of what we do. That has been growing and we are excited about that. We hope to be able to grow more as an international collective as well. I was laid off the end of March and so Gr has become my sole focus and it’s my full time job now- it’s like more than one full time job really. We’ve picked up a lot since the pandemic in terms of support and also work and so I couldn’t even keep up with the level of work Gr has become doing the job I had before I was laid off. It was never intended to be my sole job, but here we are.
At first I was devastated when I was laid off. My job was really important to me, but now I see it was a blessing and I feel like a lot of the disability advocacy work I was doing with my job is something that we can bring into Grimalkin. Almost all of us in the collective have disabilities or are on the spectrum, and so really Gr has become all encompassing for me. I feel like it has all of my loves and passions, and after getting laid off and investing myself even more into this work, I feel like it’s everything I’m supposed to be doing.
The collective also really believes in what we are doing and so what I felt initially was a pipe dream really now seems like a possibility. It helps a lot to have people believing in you. We really are trying to create something different and special within the music community and show others that there is a different way. You can forge and create new ways. You don’t need to exploit and profit off the backs of artists. There are better and more sustainable ways built on mutual aid and support. We never profit from artists so the only way I will ever be able to do this as a job and also pay others for more than just freelance work is by patrons, Bandcamp subscriptions and grants, and it does seem like that may be possible one day. I guess time will tell.
What role do you believe music/art can play in these difficult times?
This is a difficult question to answer because I am dissatisfied with the main stories that have been told through art and music, with the people telling those stories and controlling those stories, with the people who own art and music and with the people who decide what is of value and what should be heard and seen and remembered. Grimalkin strives to create something outside of those constructs.
Of course I think art and music is incredibly important, but more than anything, we need to create spaces that are outside the structures that exist now. That may sound weird when we are becoming something like a LLC but that choice was mainly made to legitimize what we are doing so that we can’t be easily shut down by the government. I’m not a fan of working within these systems. I used to believe in that bullshit (working within the system to change it), but I no longer do at all, but still in order to survive you do have to work around the systems and structures that exist in order to survive.
White people control the music and art world and that needs to change. People need to relinquish their power and do more to support others. I believe white people with means and power in art and music need to make real amends. Reparations need to be paid with time, money and labor. I strongly believe in the value and reward of being in the service of others. Grimalkin’s role is forging a path for a better way and hopefully setting an example for others and inspiring others to do the same or in finding their own new ways for creating supportive spaces in their own communities.
Art and music can be many things to people, especially during difficult times. We all need to listen and learn from others, especially from marginalized people. From there you can begin to see the change you hope for, and from there you need to do the work within yourself. I want people, especially white and cis people, to stop talking the talk and performing bullshit and get serious about what it is going to take for us to have a better and more just world.
I always have hope though even when I feel like I don’t. It is okay, especially now, to feel like quitting somedays or like we will never have the change we need, and maybe the whole planet will be extinct before we get there, but all I can do is focus on the present and be mindful by envisioning and investing in the future I hope for. We can each work on ourselves and hopefully inspire others. If you’re digging deep enough inside yourself and doing the work and practicing it in your daily life and then taking that energy to meet and organize with others, even if it is small like what we are doing with Grimalkin, then that is something.
Grimalkin cannot take on the shitty music world all alone but we can carve out a space and make something real, and hopefully that will keep growing and inspire others, and then hopefully that will keep on growing and slowly affect change within the music world, and hopefully that will also grow and branch into other things since music isn’t all that we are doing in Grimalkin. Even if we can’t change the world today or even tomorrow, we can at least make the one we are in right now more livable and sustainable
Live by Spartan Jet-Plex is out now and available via Bandcamp, including on the cool VHS edition you can see below. Also head to the Grimalkin Records Bandcamp page to see other forthcoming releases, their website for more information and consider becoming a patron via Patreon.
