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Toward Space Bares It All

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The youthful garage-punk trio from Richmond love to get naked, get crazy, and play loud, fast rock n’ roll. Not necessarily in that order.

Garage-punk trio Toward Space has been creating a brainsick space for the homeless and the strange in Richmond since their tween-age days And after nearly a decade together, this is still only the beginning of the madness.

Vocalist and bassist Seyla Hossaini and guitarist and vocalist David Pahtoon met at their local pool when they were 10 years old, and became fast friends. Since then they’ve been inseparable, playing music together and digging into the cult movie and horror scene.

“Ever since we first met each other, we’ve been trying to make something happen,” said Pahtoon. “It didn’t get serious, though, until a couple years ago.”

Pahtoon and Hossaini had been in a couple of bands together, but they had never gotten anywhere — mainly because of the other members involved. “So, we decided why don’t we just do a two piece and just focus on each other,” said Pahtoon.

The early two-piece was inspired by minimalist garage-punk bands like King Khan & BBQ Show. “I would play a bass drum and snare with two kick pedals and play guitar and sing, and Seyla would stand next to me and play bass and sing,” said Pahtoon. “That worked for a while. And then we got a drummer, like, a real drummer.”

Early two-piece days. Photo by Jake Cunningham

After working for a while with another drummer that Pahtoon charitably says “wasn’t the best,” they found their current drummer, Ben Rosenstock. “That was when we started being really serious about it,” said Pahtoon, “when we really became old enough to know what that means.”

The members of Toward Space have their own idea on what it means to be a true friend and bandmate, which may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar. By way of telling the story of his joining the band, Rosenstock sheds some light on the situation.

“It was Pride festival day, 2017,” Rosenstock began. “I was at a party at a friends house after the festival. David was wearing a lovely dress, and he stopped me in the hallway and just goes, ‘Hey man, do you want to join Toward Space?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, of course,’ and he goes, ‘Stand right there.’”

Rosenstock was confused, and a little concerned. “I couldn’t figure out what he was about to do,” the drummer said. “Like, punch me in the face or something? Or kick me? I didn’t know if it was a hazing thing. Then he just flashed me his penis.”

Rosenstock laughed. “I thought, ‘Oh, sweet. Yeah, that’s it. I’m in.’”

It’s Toward Space’s belief that nudity is the best way to show that you care. It’s even made surprise appearances at shows — take this story Pahtoon tells about a show by local rockers Brain Drain that the band members all attended.

“While they were playing Seyla jumps up on-stage completely naked,” said Pahtoon. “It was one of my first times talking to Ben ever, and we were just trying to scream-talk to each other over the band playing, right next to the mosh pit. Suddenly Seyla’s completely naked and lands on top of us. I go, ‘that’s our bassist!’ and our drummer at the time walked up and starts pouring a full beer on her head, and I go, ‘that’s our drummer!’”

“Ben has seen David and I naked so many times, and we’ve never seen him fully naked. It’s just utter disrespect,” said Hossaini mockingly. “He’s a Toward Space virgin.”

“That’s why I still feel brand new,” replied Rosenstock.

The band cites their penchant for nudity as one of their claims to fame, scorning other bands who’ve done similar things in the past, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and their notorious socks.

“The Red Hot Chili Peppers were pussies,” said Hossaini. “We show it all.”

“They have socks on their dicks, we have full on frontal nudity,” added Pahtoon.

Now in their early 20s, Toward Space has been a full-time touring band for a while now. But no matter where they go, the weirdness follows them.

“It really just seems like when we play places around the country there’s always two homeless people there, and they’re like, ‘you guys are awesome!’” said Pahtoon. “It’s like we’re the voice of the homeless people or something.”

“Homeless people love David,” added Hossaini.

Touring has had its ups and downs for the band. They’ve played shows with well-known garage bands like Shonen Knife and NoBunny, and played other shows to almost no one. Even the empty shows tend to produce good stories — like Pahtoon’s tale of their first time in San Francisco.

“Our show was a bust, ’cause no one came out,” he said. “[Afterward,] I had one foot on the pavement, one foot on the car, and this high school kid ran up to me and was like, ‘hey man, wanna buy some shrooms?’” By now, you won’t be surprised to hear that Pahtoon answered in the affirmative. Once the band got to the house where they were staying that night, he proceeded to indulge. That’s when things got really weird.

“We were staying in this house with people we’d never really met before,” Pahtoon relates, “and some random dude comes up to me and goes, ‘Hey man, I don’t know how squeamish you are, but check this out.’ Holds his phone up to me, and it’s a picture of him getting brain surgery.”

Gently With A Chainsaw release show at Sound Of Music Studios. Photo by David Morton

The long hours on the road have had both good and bad effects. Sometimes they have brought the band closer; at other times, the hours in a cramped van have driven them to the point of combustion.

“We had a couple shows on tour where we just got to the point that we were beating each other up on stage,” said Hossaini. “It’s not even pissed, it’s just pent-up energy. When you’re in the car on tour, or at least when we are, it’s a lot of shame.”

“It’s like on Spongebob where he’s just like, ‘eh, gettin kinda bored,’” Pahtoon said. “And then he catches the Krusty Krab on fire.”

Along with the heat of boredom, the trio’s obsession with cult films and murder have brought them to a place of creative insanity. They’ve never shied away from onstage theatrics, dabbling in playful makeup and gender-bending attire. But they hope to go further in the future.

“There’s more theatrics coming,” promises Pahtoon. “We’ve always tried to do the whole makeup and dress thing, but there’s gonna be more fake blood. We’re gonna have a plastic bag full of feathers, and I’ll time it right to go, ‘1, 2, 3, 4…’ and throw the feathers.”

“It’ll be like the homicide scene in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, where they cover Connie and Raymond Marble in feathers and shoot them,” Hossaini chimed in.

The group’s love of cult movies came through on their 2018 album Gently With A Chainsaw, the title of which the title is a reference to the 80s cult film Heathers. They hope to follow it with an album that will feature even more movie references and horror themes, and they’ll be taking their time on this one to make it just right.

“All of our other records have been rushed, with a deadline in mind for going on a tour and stuff like that,” said Pahtoon. “I’m happy with the other stuff we’ve put out before, but it was rushed, and now there’s not really a deadline. We are going to try to really do the best we can with it, not just do The Clash first record kind of thing — hurry up and put it out.”

While it may be a while before any new releases are ready, Toward Space are continuing to play out around Richmond, and have shows coming up on Saturday, April 20 and Thursday, April 25, both at Wonderland in Shockoe Bottom. You’re not going to want to miss the wild times and loud rock n’ roll that Toward Space has in store.

Top photo by Nicholas Von Thrower

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

Razorblades And Aspirin: The Punk Photography of Michael Thorn

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Punk photographer Michael Thorn will begin a six-month residency
at Lamplighter Coffee’s Addison Street location this weekend. Starting with a grand opening event on March 2nd at 7pm, Thorn and Lamplighter will be showcasing new photos in the coffee shop every few weeks, and hosting a variety of related events.

“The plan is to rotate images out on about a six-week cycle,” said Thorn. “It’s gonna be an evolving, constantly updated photo show. It’s a crazy idea, and we’re still trying to work out exactly what we’re doing.”

For Thorn, this “crazy idea” revolves around bringing his social media presence into real brick-and-mortar life. “It’s like an instagram feed come to life in some ways,” he said, “as corny as that sounds. I shoot punk stuff, and am pretty much constantly shooting, so in a way this will be like my instagram, which is constantly being updated with new images from shows and events.”

Thorn’s photographs will be featured in Lamplighter’s dining areas, and in the bathrooms. In the bathrooms, his photos will line the walls like wallpaper, to immerse visitors in the scenes he’s shot.

“I’m gonna re-paste the entirety of the bathroom walls with images,” said Thorn. “The idea is to have this overwhelming experience. I tend to print images as large as I can afford to. The whole goal of my work is to make you feel like you’re there, as best I can. So I shoot really close, like right on top of people. When I print my images, I tend to print really large, so you feel like you’re standing where I was.”

The residency will begin with a grand opening party, entitled The Bastards Can’t Dance — like his zine, Razorblades and Aspirin, it’s named after a song by UK punk band Leatherface. Throughout the next six months of his residency, he plans to do a variety of other events relating to the punk rock DIY (Do It Yourself) ideology he subscribes to. A coffee shop may seem like a curious place to host art and events like these, but for Thorn, it’s all about making connections — which is what drew him to the shop known as “Richmond’s living room.”

“In doing punk, hardcore, or underground stuff, you use the venue that’s available to you. It’s democratic and open, and galleries don’t always lend themselves to that,” said Thorn. “Coffee shops are places everyone goes to, and even if those people might not necessarily like the sound of the bands that I shoot, my goal is to make my photos impact people, regardless of their preferences.”

For Thorn, feeling a connection between his art and the venue where he presents it is more important than getting his work into conventional gallery spaces. “At Lamplighter, I really resonate with that — they are into creating that space for possibilities,” he said. “Beyond that, coffee and punk are really well aligned — people have been writing songs about that forever.”

And that connection goes even deeper for Thorn, a lifelong coffee shop habitue. “To me, it feels like a natural alignment,” he said. “I spent my youth sitting in coffee shops that would stay open until two in the morning, just because I had nowhere else to go.”

A relatively recent arrival to Richmond, Thorn has been part of punk and hardcore scenes around the country — and beyond — for most of his life. In the 90’s, he played in hardcore bands, but later realized that being a musician just wasn’t his calling. After really getting into writing and photography, zines became his focus.

“I had a camera and would casually take pictures, which I lost a lot of, moving around so much, before being able to save stuff digitally,” said Thorn. “I’ve never really been good at playing in bands — I figured out early on I’m better at documenting things. Doing photographs stood out to me, because it gave me a way to still participate in the culture.”

But his goals weren’t all as high-minded. “There’s a bit of selfishness to it,” he admits of being a photographer. “When you’re in a band, you have to collaborate, and work with three or four other people. But if I’m taking photos, it’s all up to me — and that carried over into zines.”

For several years around the turn of the millennium, Thorn served as a coordinator for Maximum Rocknroll, a San Francisco-based zine started in the early 80s, which was for decades the most widely-read punk-related periodical.

Now he produces his own photography-specific zine, Razorblades and Aspirin. The zine acts as a documentation of the numerous shows he shoots. Whenever he can get the funds together to print up 45 to 60 pages of photographs, he puts a new issue together.

For Thorn, zines are intended primarily to express appreciation for the culture they document — something that he sees as a struggle in this day and age. “I think is more difficult than it’s ever been,” he said. “It’s doing things because you actually care about them, instead of doing things just because it advances your band, or your own agenda. I’ve worked in that world of publicists, but with the DIY stuff, my heart is saying, ‘Fuck all that.’ I see more value, and feel more, in people’s work when you can tell it’s [created] because they’re moved by it.”

During Thorn’s residency, he and Lamplighter are planning a whole host of special events that are currently in the conception phase. There will be concerts, featured artists, art shows, and more.

“I have vague notions right now,” said Thorn. He has a variety of goals for the project, including bringing in bands and working with other artists. “There are other photographers whose work I really like, and think is much better than mine, so I’ve thought about making one rotation where I curate other people’s work. And then publish a zine based off of that.”

For now, nothing definite is planned beyond the grand opening, but keep an eye out for more “cool shit” to come. The grand opening of Razorblades & Aspirin Presents: The Bastards Can’t Dance is this Saturday, March 2nd from 7 to 9 PM at Lamplighter’s original location, 116 S. Addison St. For more info, click here.

Don’t Touch My Bikini: Weekend Playlist by Mike Doughty

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Every Friday evening, RVA Mag once again brings you an outstanding playlist curated by influential artists, musicians, and institutions.

This weekend brings us the wonderful opportunity to jam out with a playlist from Mike Doughty. Former frontman for Soul Coughing, Doughty is a talented, unique songwriter with a knack for mingling jazz, hip hop, and funk styles into his fundamentally rockin’ repertoire.

Since the dissolution of Soul Coughing in 2000, he’s amassed quite a strong discography of solo albums. However, in recent years, he’s been returning to the work of his 90s group, recreating the original inspirations and giving us solo versions that reveal new ways of seeing those beloved songs. He’ll be doing precisely that when he comes to The Broadberry on Tuesday, February 26 — his current tour finds him celebrating the 25th anniversary of Soul Coughing’s classic debut, Ruby Vroom, by playing it in its entirety.

You can grab tickets for that show right HERE — and you should! But until then, you can enliven your weekend with a highly varied and always awesome playlist created just for you by Mr. Doughty himself. He’s got all sorts of sounds for you, from blues and soul to jazz and funk to hip hop and punk rock. What all these tunes from highly disparate genres have in common is that they’ll keep you dancing all weekend long.

Move aside, Virginia, and let the man go through.

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

Unraveling Academia With Queer Punk Feminist Julietta Singh

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*This article originally appeared in RVA Mag #35, on the streets now at all your favorite spots.

Author and academic Julietta Singh flunked out of college on her first try. Now almost 20 years later, she’s a tenured professor at the University of Richmond, and she’s authored two books — both released in 2018.

After spending over a decade in the slog of academia, Singh has had a breakthrough year. Her first published work, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, was released in January by Duke University Press. Her latest, No Archive Will Restore You, was fresh to the shelves this November from Punctum Books.

Both books were written from a queer feminist perspective, but they couldn’t be farther apart in terms of style and content.

Unthinking Mastery is a dense, academic text that draws on postcolonial theory and queer theory, analyzing the concept of mastery in modern politics and anticolonial movements. It’s primarily a scholarly text, but the book also contains scattered autobiographical elements which aren’t typically found in academic writing.

“I used experiences from growing up, as a racially-mixed person in a very racist, small city in Canada, to elucidate some of the concepts I was trying to talk about,” Singh said. “The book became kind of infused by auto-theoretical writing, where I inserted myself into an academic book where I don’t belong.”

Her newest book, No Archive Will Restore You, takes this idea to an extreme, fully merging academic theory with autobiographical writing. It engages with a range of intellectual ideas on a deeply personal level.

Singh’s willingness to stray from the confines of academic writing is partly due to her own off-kilter journey through academia. She barely made it through high school, then dropped out of college after her first year. Around that time, she was working on and off as a tree planter in the Canadian bush: A popular summer job for alternative youth in Canada, where the logging industry is a major economic force.

“Basically a bunch of weirdo youth,” Singh said. “A lot of punks, hippies, crust punks, and all different kinds of young people pay their way through their education, or their lives, by replanting clear-cut forests.”

“We would plant thousands of trees a day, and just lived in the woods in a communal space where nudity became totally mundane. Everyone was living this radical, communal life.”

She was also involved in the local DIY scene in her hometown of Winnipeg, which gave rise to bands like Propagandhi and Personality Crisis. She spent several years working as an amateur journalist, although she quickly became disillusioned with the work.

Singh finally returned to school in her mid-20s, but said that her formative experiences in DIY spaces stayed with her as she went through her undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

“I never felt in sync with it,” she said of academia. “I always felt that I was a few steps off.”

According to Singh, she approached No Archive with the DIY attitude in mind, and it shows. The book’s collage-like narrative is artfully- and urgently-written, and embraces a certain ‘devil-may-care’ attitude not often found in academic writing.

The book is part of a growing body of feminist and queer-feminist literature, called auto-theory, that counts authors like Maggie Nelson, Wayne Kostenbaum, and Paul B. Preciado in its ranks.

“It’s a style that refuses the distinction between the theoretical and the personal,” Singh said. “Instead of theory being something that’s very head-in-the-clouds, theory becomes something very intimate to thinking about one’s life.”

No Archive Will Restore You is separated into six sections, which zig-zag between storytelling and abstract speculation. The book is written in non-linear fragments, but continually returns to themes of queer identity, race, and the body.

Singh’s narratives are deeply entangled with the work of other academics, and draw on the works of Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida, and Elaine Scarry to expand on her ideas. Intertextual analysis and impressionistic anecdotes are intertwined to construct a piece of literature that defies easy categorization.

The book uses theory to think through big questions like pain, motherhood, and love in the internet age, and returns over and over to the body as a place that is both politicized and intensely personal. The following passage takes a literal approach to this duality, as the author remembers the research of a fellow graduate student:

“She was several years ahead of me in her PhD, writing about Argentine women who, as political prisoners during the last dictatorship, stored subversive literature in their vaginal canals. She called this ‘The vaginal library.’ Both metaphor and place, the vaginal library seemed to me an embodied archive in organic ruin. It brought the notion of “preservation” into the cell in a doubled sense: into those cages that imprisoned women, and into the cellular structures of their bodies.”

The passage illustrates the overlap between autobiographical narrative and theory, as well as the free-flowing style of the book. According to Singh, No Archive began as a collection of poetry, but ultimately veered away from its poetic format as she began to incorporate disparate, stylistic elements into the work.

“There’s a lot of ways in which it engages with existing genres and existing conventions in writing, but it also exceeds them, or slips away from them,” she said. “It’s poetic, but it’s not poetry. It’s got essay-like qualities, but it’s not an essay. It’s autobiographical writing, but it’s not a memoir.”

Singh began working on the book during the writing of Unthinking Mastery. In many ways, she said, No Archive was a response the rigidity of the academic work she was doing at the time.

“Writing Unthinking Mastery made me really want to think and feel and write in a different way,” she said. “It felt like something urgent that I needed to put down on paper.”

The author is currently working on several other books that are still in the early stages of writing. Her upcoming works deal with a variety of topics ranging from environmental issues to queer and feminist representations of extinction.

“All my preoccupations are about the end of the world,” she said.

Top Photo by Alexis Courtney

Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten Makes America Great Again

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Johnny Rotten, one of the original purveyors of all things punk, is, these days, apparently Making America Great Again (MAGA). The punk icon, who has been living in Los Angeles since the days of the Sex Pistols, was spotted ahead of a show in Louisiana wearing the dreaded MAGA shirt while hanging out of a window having a pre-gig smoke.

The Sex Pistols are one of the best known punk bands in the world. Their seminal album Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, released in 1977, introduced the world to a searing, snotty, arrogant style of punk that revolutionized music and the social landscape that accompanied it. The Sex Pistols, fronted by Rotten, have been known for outrageous and provocative stunts throughout their storied career, like trolling the Queen of England during her Silver Jubilee (also in 1977) and band members wearing Nazi swastikas as part of the band’s branding — wearing a MAGA shirt seems mild by comparison.

The Daily Mail reported that during an interview with ITV Britain, Rotten spoke about President Trump, saying, “What I dislike is the left-wing media in America are trying to smear the bloke as a racist and that’s completely not true.” Telling a story about the time he pissed of the president by stepping on Melania Trump’s dress at a function in New York City, he said, “I have a habit in doing this, which I don’t do deliberately, but if women insist on wearing dresses that are ten miles long then I will accidentally put my foot on it… So I stood on his wife’s dress and he spun around and was giving it all the tough-guy stuff.”

Regardless of his antics, Rotten also claimed that his becoming an American citizen was partly influenced by the policies of then-President Barack Obama. Speaking to Noisey in 2015, the singer said, “Oh, I would’ve never done it during the Bush years. The way America presented itself abroad — as greedy, egotistical, violent monsters — was horrible.” He went on to say that America under Obama has the potential to be a “nation that actually cares for its afflicted and wounded and ill and disenfranchised.”

God save the Queen.

 

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

Photos: United Blood XII Hardcore Festival

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Last Friday and Saturday nights saw the 12th Annual United Blood Festival take over The Canal Club in Shockoe Bottom. United Blood is a hardcore fest, showcasing an offshoot of punk rock known as hardcore due to its heavier, more metallic sound, its tough, no-frills presentation, and its street-level lyrical realism. Beginning in various American cities at the dawn of the 80s, hardcore has established a strong tradition in the intervening decades, and this year’s edition of United Blood celebrated that tradition with performances from established legends of the scene, while also presenting many of the scene’s best new bands.

The big attraction for many this year was the thrill of reunion sets from two celebrated bands from the early 2000s. While people were excited about reunions from bands that were formed nearly 20 years after the dawn of this underground subgenre; hardcore remains a very youth-oriented movement even today, and it’s no surprise that many attendees would be seeing both Count Me Out and Shark Attack for the first time.

Richmond locals Count Me Out were a particularly powerful draw for locals of all ages, whether they wanted to relive their teenage years or get a dose of the sounds of their hometown that they’d been born too late to catch the first time. The two 12-hour days of music had a lot of other inducements to offer, from NYHC legends Madball and Connecticut vets Death Threat to current bands putting new twists on the genre, including Turnstile and Twitching Tongues, among others.

The website where tickets were available for purchase warned buyers to “ENTER AT OWN RISK” in bold capital letters, and one glance at the frenetic dance-floor antics on display throughout the festival was enough to demonstrate the aptness of such a warning. As befits the music, hardcore dancing is an aggressive, intense display of controlled violence — fists and feet fly as some audience members go charging through the crowd at full speed and others dive from the stage onto the upraised arms of the crowd.

However, despite the intensity of this physical expression, there’s a sense of togetherness and unity that unites the audience, which can be seen in the way those who trip and fall in the pit are immediately picked up and placed back on their feet by those around them. It’s also on display in front of the stage, where fans singing along to the choruses of their favorite songs are often given a chance to sing along into the mic by band members who see themselves not as rock stars but as peers.

While it may be inscrutable to outsiders, the initiated tend to think of the hardcore scene as a family — one that feels more open and accepting than mainstream society and even their biological families. When they’re here and this music plays, they are at home; they are together as one. United Blood.

Here are some of the best photos from United Blood XII:

Photos by Branden Wilson. Words by Marilyn Drew Necci

 

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond