Words by Jason Lee; cover photo by Adam Saifer. If you wish to skip to the EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW just scroll down yo…
In the French language, the word for gender is genre (weird, huh?) both derived from the Latin word genus, meaning “kind” or “type,” which itself is related to the Latin word gens meaning simply “people” or “humanity” with the word having been imported into English twice (again, weird!) the first time as “gender” with a hard ‘g’ and a consonant added at the end with a meaning likely inspired by the Romance language practice of assigning a binary masculin/feminin gender identity to certain words and objects…
…then the second time around as straight-up “genre” with a soft ‘g” and no tacked-on consonant in the French matter which ends up sounding more highbrow of course as befitting its use in describing artistic and stylistic “schools” such as different genres of literature (science fiction, oral history, fantasy, mystery, poetry, memoir. etc.) ditto visual arts, filmmaking, musical genres, etc…
Photos by Adam Saifer with one by Jason Lee (bottom left)
…which maybe sounds a bit academic but in reality genre (including gender) is an key aspect of day-to-day life acting as a lens for observing, categorizing, mapping, and otherwise trying to make some modicum of sense of the world around us and just as human beings can’t seem to resist splitting the mass of humanity (gens) into clans and tribes in conflict, strict genre orthodoxy can likewise be used to divide, separate. alienate, and group-affiliate in relation to the art and media we routinely consume in the eternal war of “us” against “them”…
…so if genre is a potential instrument of war and if war is death (goes without saying!) then it stands to reason that genre is death or at least violence and not just in an obvious Mods vs. Rockers or Swifties vs. Little Monsters brawling-online-and-in-the-streets kind of way but also in terms of the potential creative crib death caused by too-close adherence to a given genre’s narrow constrains which isn’t to say genre is inherently unimaginative or automatic or doesn’t provide a useful grammar with which to experiment, playing with and against standard generic conventions for instance as so many low-budget filmmakers do with so-called genre films which brings us at last to our designated subject for today namely the New-York-City-by-way-of-Atlanta-two-piece-musical-combo-with-an-electronic-drumbox-as-unofficial-third-member known as Genre Is Death…
…with the pair better known as Ty & Tayler in their civilian lives who by the way are quite lovely people and hopefully don’t mind that I just spent four paragraphs bloviating about genre theory 101 but hey we find their music to be both intellectually and viscerally stimulating which honestly makes us kinda glad they didn’t just call their group “Ty & Tayler” cuz it sounds like a pair of earnest folk singers or disco divas or electro-tinged reggae producers and not makers of mesmeric mashups of No Wave and New Wave gleefully crossing dissonant-down-n-dirty-if-not-outright-insolent-yet-good-humored-skronk-rock with a knack for hooky pop melodicism and tight as a mosquito’s rear-end song structures so yeah genre is death indeed…
…like on “Burn Quick” which is a catchy lil’ ditty buried under layers of sonic grunge-i-tude that barely breaks the one-minute mark or “Receiver” which we fully expect Charlie xcx to sample soon with its manic yet playful back-and-forth chants (BAD!…DOG!…) and a skittering breakbeat-like riddim nevermind all the dashes of darkwave, industrial-wave, drone-wave, coldwave, art-damaged avant-wave, Wavy Gravy wave and wavepool-wave that Ty & Tayler toss into the mix at various times on their debut full-length Talk not that G.I.D. is riding anyone else’s waves but their own…
…an EP or LP (whichever you prefer!) which at ten songs in under 22 minute is just as the AM gods intended and not only that but Ty & Tayler have a kinda genre-less look about them too (not that we hardly even notice such things but we know you do!) what with their black semi-formless garments and dark wraparound shades and jet-black moptop coifs looking like escapes from a witness protection program…
…or better yet a look halfway between Gallic Cool and NYC Beatnik circa the early Velvet Underground but hey that’s the beauty of declaring death to genre cuz places and locales are a type of “genre” too and while Genre Is Death strikes me as one of the most quintessentially timelessly “New York” bands out there at the current moment like we feel like we should be watching them at the Mudd Club in 1983 with Cookie Muelle and Lydia Lunch in the crowd despite G.I.D. being transplanted ATLiens in reality but isn’t that always the way and anyway we’re all for the queering of place…
…so don’t go asking Tayler & Ty to order lemon pepper wet hot wings at J.R Crickets or to reenact the cover image of Sonic Youth’s Goo even tho’ there is a certain resemblance (!) cuz these kids don’t like to be boxed in and we doubt they’re even distantly related to Maureen Hindley or David Smith so there you have it and now let’s get on with the interview shall we esp. seeing as it took us a couple or a few weeks to get this posted for which we humbly apologize to everyone we’ve ever known or ever will know but as a consolation prize we encourage you to check out Ty Varesi’s solo side-project EP East County Pregnancy (demos) also released in November 2024 yo…
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DELI: Y’all have an EP you put out earlier this year called Talk Demos but none of those songs are on Talk. What gives?
GENRE: We wrote those songs last year. Chronologically they felt like part of a different artistic period. We still wanted to put them out but didn’t think they were part of the same creative burst of energy. They were of a different era and we grew out of them.
DELI: The sound on the record is pulverizing. It really captures what you guys sound like live in a way most records don’t. How did you all go about approaching the production side of things?
TA: Our friend Jesse Sattler is a sound engineer. He recorded us live at our OWL [Our Wicked Lady] practice space. We played through our set and mixed live while we played. Then [Jesse] just broke it up and did some post-mixing. The album wasn’t mastered. He’s seen us live a lot so he was able to capture what we wanted on the spot—the expansiveness, the heaviness, the distortion but keeping it from getting too muddy.
TY: Jesse’s seen us enough to know our live sound has a big presence. He knew our sound. He made the space where we recorded sound like it was a big space, even though we were recording in a small room.
DELI: Let’s backtrack a bit. What’s your journey been like moving to New York from Atlanta, and how do the two compare?
TA: We’re from North Atlanta. Forty minutes outside of Atlanta. The band we were in there was just nowhere creatively. It was sort of, honestly, all about getting drunk in our friend’s basement. We had only played a couple shows after four years of being in this band. At a certain point we started to take it more seriously and realized we weren’t on the same page.
TY: We were really set on making a certain sound. We really were trying to make Southern sludge music. That put us in a box obviously and we felt restrained. And now, with the new name, we play whatever comes to us immediately and find a way t make something out of it. I think New York is a great place to start fresh. And I myself had only been here a couple times before moving to New York City. It spoke to me.
TA: It spoke to me because I was born here and I wanted to move back. Since I met Ty 8 years ago I told him I wanted to move back to New York.
DELI: What kind of drum machine do y’all use?
TA: We use Yamaha RX-11, an ‘80s analogue drum machine. It was a bit strange honestly. Our former drummer was super talented actually, a really intuitive payer.
TY: He was a super drummer. I’d played with him in all the bands I was in before. Once we parted ways and moved to NYC, we obviously had to figure out something. We wanted to play as many live shows as we could but have reliable drums.
TA: We didn’t want not having a live drummer to keep us from making music or playing out. And we didn’t really want to add anyone to the mix either. Even though our last drummer was very talented, the dynamic wasn’t quite right. We needed to have someone to compliment to the dynamic. But even with a drummer who’s talented, we already had a perfect dynamic on our own.
Photos by Jason Lee, no not me the other one!
For this next portion of the interview, The Deli went through the LP/EP song-by-song to see if G.I.D. had any impressions they wanted to share and to ask a few specific questions about individuals songs. The results may surprise you…
GENRE: [The first track] “Beyond Good People” speaks for itself.
DELI: On “Burn Quick” the line that really sticks out to me is where you each yell “IT MAKES ME SICK!” in quick succession. What really makes both of you sick? Either literally or figuratively. Or both. Also, any reason for choosing “Burn Quick” as the first proper song on the album. [N.B. The opening track “Beyond Good People” is more of a noise-based sound sculpture than a song per se.]
TAY: For me, a certain kind of desperation really nauseates me.
TY: Not anything with food. I’ll eat anything. [pause] I’ll have to come back to that question. About the song sequencing, we were intentional about the running order. [“Burn Quick”] is such a quick burst of energy…kind of nice for the beginning.
••• “In of It” sample lyrics: “I am the object / inside an object / I am the object / In of itself / (And I like it a lot) […] It ends / it ends / it ends…”
TAY: Identity is a running thread on the record. This song has to do with identity.
••• “You” sample lyric: “I love you […] Nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I need a drink! […] I’d rather stay here / than wait here / It’s all in your head / It’s all in your head.”
DELI: What’s your favorite drinks..could be an alcoholic drink or non-alcoholic.
TY: At a bar my favorite thing to drink is a Miller High Life. $4 or $5 is all it takes. Or if I’m doing a shot, whiskey.
TAY: I second Miller High Life. That’s my Georgia. That’s all we did was drink in our drummer’s basement. The loudest band I’ve ever been in.
••• “Essential Things” sample lyric: “I…want to know…essential…things…“
DELI: What’s an essential thing that someone should know about Genre Is Death, or about your music, that they’re not gonna know if you don’t tell them…
TAY: This is a good question. [pause] I think this applies to both of us..don’t want to plop just anything down on the table. I think we take ourselves seriously in the sense that we consider ourselves as students of experience, seekers of truth. And the way we explore that is through music.
TY: We will outdrink you! We have infinite riffs. Literally, given the name…the way we create is so loose, we don’t really restrain ourselves in any way. We can literally bounce off each other all day. We love to create. We can make music endlessly. We can bounce off it all day.
Honestly, usually we’ll kind of jam. Tayler will pick up her bass, start playing a riff. I’ll kinda join in. Mess around with a little bit. Then one of us creates something out of that. If something sticks out, we record immediately. At least as an audio file on one of our phones. Or we can plug into our computer and start a recording session–do a quick little demo to come back to, or have the drums so we can record it live.
••• “Receiver” has the aforementioned “bad dog” call and response…
DELI: Have y’all had pets before? Or currently?
TY: Yes, a dog. She’s so sweet. A German Shepherd and pitbull mix named Crumb. She’s adorable, but deadly. The best of both worlds.
TAY: A lot like Crumb this song has a lot of energy. It feels good to let it out on stage, the immediacy. It’s the one that brings you right back, pulls you into it, after the last song.
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••• “Images” sample lyric: “I’m choosing myself…I can’t be mad / I’m just an image […} Making an image / make me up an image / and I like it“…
DELI: This one gives me real Siouxsie & the Banshees vibes with those flanged guitar arpeggiations.
TAY: When I was in high school, the first Siouxsie songs I heard was their cover of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence”. I got really drawn in and got into post-punk and goth during my senior year as a result. Something about the guitar chords, the sounds. It’s melodic but it’s dark. I like the mix where Siouxsie’s voice is so bright and pretty but the music itself is often grim. Especially on an album like Juju.
TY: I would say one band that honestly impacted me was Lynyrd Skynyrd. They kind of raised me as a guitarist. My family being from Georgia, my grandfather would literally blast Skynyrd all f-ing day. So I got to know them really well. Their guitarists are insane. Any time I heard them I wanted to play guitar. They’re insane songwriters too. Lynyrd Skynyrd are timeless to me. Any time I could listen to them.
••• “Hot Rats” sample lyric: “We like hot chicks / we like hot chicks / we like hot chicks / with big tits (“I like hot rats”)
DELI: Is “Hot Rats” a Frank Zappa homage? Maybe about “Willie the Pimp”? Or “Peaches en Regalia”…
TAY: We actually covered “Willie the Pimp” in our old band. We would go around blasting that song out the windows in George and feel like we were the coolest people ever.
TY: The song is actually kind of nostalgic to us. It takes us back to that song.
••• “ID” sample lyric: “what would you have? […] I want what you have“
TAY: This songs grapples with identity as well. It’s about what I see as an epidemic of romanticizing other people’s lives, wanting to be someone else, competing with people para-socially.
TY: That’s my favorite song on the EP. It gets stuck in my head. I like playing it. Even further down in the running order it pulls me back into it.
••• And lastly the title track “Talk”
TAY: I love Ty’s guitar on the opening. The song is like a seance.
TY: We wrote it…looking back on it now, it’s a very hypnotizing song…I think my guitar was tuned incorrectly, turned down, totally different than what we’re normally in. But playing it like it was in normal tuning it sounded cool. So we started playing with that and added the drums which start off almost dancey but then it speeds up a gets more manic and we just jammed on it and Tayler threw a vocal on. starts.
TAY: It’s the darkest sounding song we’ve created. I enjoy it for that reason alone.