Some words from the critics:
GAS STATION DRUGS, MELTING PLASTIC BUGS, AND THE CULT OF GENRE IDENTITIES:
“You Don’t Have to Get the Channel, You’re On the Show,” The New Album from Music Collective Nobody Ever Does (NED) - An Article by Eugene Hunt
-Music Rating: 4.5 / 5 STARS
In case you don’t already know, Nobody Ever Does (NED) is currently the“cream of the crop” in regards to all types of perplexing, subversive, and perverted music groups putting out trash today.
But they’ve existed on the outer edges of pop music for over ten years, with only scattered demo compilations and one EP strung along to chronicle their entire history in the public domain. And as we prepare to enter the year 2020, the group finds itself releasing an LP on October 31st after being strangely absent for years and years, flying almost entirely under the radar...
But where had they gone? And what are…or is…a NED?
To get nestled into the NED story as of 2019, we need to start with the criminal background of a group which many people have described un-ironically as a “musical cult,” operating in the realms of both outsider music and outlaw music.
I first heard of the experimental rock group on a whim, back in 2016.
I was hoping to find a group that might be on the up-and-up in the independent music scene, or a group that would at least make a pretty good “where are they now” story for trash news outlets like Vice Magazine, or the New Yorker.
Incidentally, several of their names were mentioned while I was researching “outlaw” musicians in New England.
One of Ned’s primary songwriters, Nevin (last name redacted), had been arrested after hosting gambling sessions for Praying Mantis fights in New Haven, CT. He also tried to extort responding police officers by offering them “forbidden fruits.” They did not comply.
Numerous newspapers also connected current band member Luke EE Hunter, in addition to previous band members Zach "Z-Dizz" Drake and “Dr. Jib,” to a convenience store in Groton, Connecticut that had been raided for drugs in 2013.
Cory’s gas station illegally sold various head shop delicacies long after the emergency scheduling ban had hit the streets, mainly Salvia Divinorum, K2, and MDPV - the proverbial “bath salts” that made waves in the media as far back as 2012.
Comments on an article from the New London Day had mentioned that various members of the rock group had been “frequent fliers” at Cory’s before the raid had happened, and I’d heard rumors whispered from musicians in DIY underground in both New London, CT and Brooklyn, NYC.
These rumors typically revolved around NED members starting a cult (among other felonious acts) so they could channel mysterious forces to create music that didn’t subscribe to many of the “coolly vacant” or ironic aesthetics that applied to so many of their contemporaries in the “indie scene." Some folks said they were into “freaky shit,” without expanding too much on what that meant other than to say they “liked burning things,” and frequented numerous sex shops.
Some said they also frequented or created occultist sites in their hometown's landscape to accomplish their goal. Most mentioned the sites on Gungywamp Road and the areas near the Mystic Peace Sanctuary, claiming group members had found those locations to be especially favorable for "piercing the veil." They also claimed that they exhibited “strange behaviors” when interacting at local music shows, with little regard for social decorum, and, in their early bootleg recordings, with little regard for song structure or formula in general. Many mentioned worriedly that they had probably been experimenting heavily with the use of "gas station drugs" and other chemicals as “creative aides.” But no one had heard much from them since the raids in Groton, CT had taken place. A few stray bands, a few shows throughout New England under different project names, but little else. Those in the know explained to me that they’d heard bootleg recordings since then circulating around online torrent sites, and that the members were now scattered between Providence, RI and Brooklyn, NYC.
NED was EXACTLY what I was looking for: the weird factor was there and the story sounded completely ridiculous. I had to find them.
Several of NED’s group members that were named by the articles I had found had various
myspace.com music pages connected to them – Incessant Pop Group, Killed By Cars, Immediate Fiend...
… I decided I’d need to talk to them and see if they were still making music at all: if they were, I would have to risk physical or emotional harm to meet up with them in person and do an article on them.
I finally reached them in March of 2019, when Luke EE Hunter responded to me on facebook, and invited me to a Brooklyn house party hosted by other group members, so I could meet them and try my hand at their indoor bounce house; they all asserted I might also try a few of their cannabis edibles. Although initially intimidating in person, and somewhat manic in terms of presentation, they gave me some pretty in depth detail about NED’s overall chronology and purpose.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stepping into their “den of iniquity,” I was greeted cordially and given food and drink.
Upon request, they also proceeded to feed me various psychoactive drugs, hidden in said food and drink.
The group presented to me was Emily Quarles – songwriter and vocalist, Luke Hunter – songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, Nevin (name redacted) – songwriter, vocalist, engineer, producer, sound generator, keyboardist, and circuit bending prodigy – and Bennett Quarles, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, programmer, and percussionist. Together, the four of them explained they’d completed the first NED LP, and proceeded to play the entire album for me.
As the mood lightened, I turned on my tape recorder – and they didn’t hesitate to jump into an explanation about how they started out together once I asked.
It had been ten years since the first Nobody Ever Does (NED) release as of August, 2019.
“Nedderkoppen,” the cult’s first release from August, 2009, is an EP steeped in mystery and shadowy historical details. Three previous group members – Dr. Jib, Hannah Sutt, and Zach "Z-Dizz" Drake – had all left the group after becoming psychologically damaged by the cult’s dedication to craft and ideology.
“I don’t think they could handle the….horror of our thought processes” Nevin claims.
“Yes, I don’t expect any of us to handle our condition well either, but we continue to make do,” Luke says, with index finger waggling.
“Everyone else seemed to ‘grow up’ "and/or bug out – we just sort of grew into NED. Or 'bugged' into NED. North Carolina kinda set it in stone for me.”
Ensconced inside a beach house on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, the earliest six member incarnation of the group (sans Dr. Jib, whose brief time with the group was cut short by political fervor and a obsession with group foot-licking) had taken multiple doses of unspecified hallucinogenic drugs and haphazardly became obsessed with the idea that they had all instantly been initiated into a cult, in secret - and unbeknownst to one another.
A shared hallucination.
“It was a joke that became too serious before it was ever actually serious,” Emily admits, being one of the primary vocalists in the group. “We’d become obsessed with a melting plastic bug that Nevin picked up off the street in the 95 degree heat that absurdly hot summer day. It had melted into the pavement, much the same way we had mentally. He named it NEDLY, and everyone thought it seemed to be a fitting name. Mirroring a bit of Bill Murray dialogue, someone (probably our early NED member Zach) said “Okay, Ned” in response to Nevin’s hysteria. And that’s where the band name ‘might’ have come from? At least the acronym part…but there was also a more sinister unrelated idea that everyone present in those early days was actually being preyed upon by all the other members of the group, physically and psychologically – as if they weren’t ‘in on the joke,’ and would be sacrificed for the idea of some menacing entity that was the true ringleader of our respective destinies.”
Ringleader of what?
“I wouldn’t hesitate to call any music outfit a shared hallucination,” says Bennett, multi-instrumentalist and primary songwriter of NED, “and I wouldn’t hesitate to say there’s some sort of Godhead acting as the arbiter of…well, everything….more specifically, the arbiter of what we do.
Altogether, the members have agreed to call this strange entity the “Church of NED.” A Church closely related to offhand worship of melting bugs in their relation to the ideas of impermanence and transience.
Nevin explained this “melting bug” and supposed “Church of NED” to me in even more detail.
“Oh, that FUCKING FLY! We all got to watch that thing get burned into pavement …but only after I tried to save it by screaming at it for 4 to 5 minutes. I think that whole Church of NED thing is legitimate though. There’s a lot of New Age woo out there which I’d hesitate to buy into, but whatever happened to us in North Carolina had permanently changed us in a way I’m not comfortable discussing too much. I think we may have tasted the forbidden fruit too soon, maybe even opened doors that shouldn’t have been opened. It’s been a blessing, but in other ways it’s also just….(sic) too much of a curse.”
(Addendum: The “curse” proved to be too much for Zach, who – with a head full of acid – refused to acknowledge the terror of his body’s need to produce fecal matter, and became obsessed with his damaged psyche and need to poop. He would leave the group shortly after the first EP, citing a “nervous breakdown” following extensive drug use and different mental issues associated with the cult paradigms instituted by his fellow group members. As of 2019, he was unavailable for comment, but is rumored to only listen to DMB and Sublime With Rome now; music history will inevitably claim him as an “acid casualty” rivaling both Syd Barrett and Skip Spence. In a fitting tribute, NED included a few guitar line originally recorded by Zach in 2011 on "Git-a-Long-Lil-Doggie").
Following the incident with the fly, they setup a temporary recording studio in the beach house, and proceeded to spend two days creating the EP “Nedderkoppen.”
Reminiscent of German Kraut Rock groups such as Neu! and CAN, it also blurred classic rock and post-punk structures into a post rock format, sitting comfortably enough alongside scat singing, shoegaze, and sounds originally from experimental acts from the 1940s onwards. They also melded together the tribal sounds of 1980s rave music and electronica with stray bits of pop music and other innumerable snippets from various genres with scattered instrumentation to create an EP without any clear origins story.
They maintain the band’s sound exists outside of any real social influence, and that they are simply the conduit for “larger, more important forces.”
Although being hidden from sight for over a decade, and with few (if any) live performances to date, the EP’s influence has been immeasurable in 'hidden' music circles of various cities across the United States.
Each of the EP’s 4 sprawling tracks has “NED” in the title, a consistency that Luke says is representative of NED’s group-think mentality. He shifts uncomfortably on the couch while questioned about NED’s defining philosophy before he finally responds. “We may not fit the exact definition of a cult, but whatever we are doing always operates as a sort of group oriented deity worship session, most likely directed by a higher power from levels of consciousness and reality not typically accessed by most people unaware of the “NEDSPHERE.” Luke explains that the NEDSPHERE “is an intuitive alignment grid that the band members tap into to avoid the need to write or notate individual music parts. Instead, we rely on an almost entirely stream of consciousness methodology, as well as relying partially on the use of manipulated equipment and machinery to aid each group member's utilization of indeterminate music sounds and effects.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The strategy of “NEDSPHERE” is more apparent in 2019 than ever, and the different layers overall, forged by greater production quality, have made NED's music more empowered, deeper; reaching ever higher.
The difference now? Some of the tracks here are actually pop songs (!!!)
Hiding in-between the lines is various political commentary, especially on the floaty space rock of the LP's title track, convincing the listener that this current reality can only be a cruel in-joke from God and government establishments of some kind, where everyone is “on the show” - it must be "burned down").
There are also songs about drug dens, poverty, loan sharks, addicts, hustlers, conspirators, and saviors (the dank and wet grooves of “Damp Disco" asking everyone to "find a new place to dance," and the substance copping paranoia of “Call the Cops”).
Other songs use eerily disconcerting phrases to scare listeners and provoke existential thought (the terrifying pulse and word salad of “Clown Car,” where Public Image Limited collides with horror movie music and future funk to assert a lurching dance party from hell). Post punk meets country banjos and lap steel on “Git a Long Little Doggie,” easily the most obtuse and difficult soundscape imaginable, mangling country music’s outlaw images with prairie landscapes to hint at rambles about tax evasion, selfhood, and the struggles of familial bounds, all before fading into a psychedelic Glen Campbell version of “Home on the Range” that results in a noise freak-out before reaching a meditative ambient conclusion.
…but there really are actual pop songs from NED now too!
“Kids” is a beautiful narcotic nod to 1990s Lo-Fi music, a bittersweet pop music ballad, with the type of ethos that could only belong to a group like NED. It is followed by the Lonely Island-meets-Steely Dan-meets vaporwave-meets-Washed-Out-meets-Jackson Brown-meets Jerry Paper track “Hot to Trot,” a love song for a horse called “Tony Danza” that casually states “all the cowboy’s cowgirl’s daughters want to be restrained” in a singular (but oddly fitting) ode to the bizarre sexual sentiment of horses convincing humans to “ride” them.
“NED in the head” is neo-psychedelic music at its finest, bending backwards cymbal rushes over burnt guitar licks and self-assured vocal lines, while maintaining rhythms from shakers, tambourine, and other melodic elements typical of only the finest pop music; it sounds like The Rain Parade re-imagined for millennial dropouts who think Mac Demarco is God. And standout track “Not Very Spooky” sounds as if it could easily be a Madonna highlight from the early 1990s, a dance track steeped in rural psychedelia via acoustic guitar and reverberated hand claps that refuse to fall into easy categorization (along with most of their music, for that matter). “I think I wrote that one about (sic) tripping in the woods with Nevin” Emily says. “Something about mud and bugs, it probably falls in line with the tradition of Nedly and melting critters.”
(Addendum: The group also repeatedly keeps referencing “Long Dog” in our conversation; I have no idea what they are talking about, but the way Luke refers to Emily as “the boss” is something I find to be endearing even though I worry she may be the ringleader of more “darker” elements of the band (interdimensional travel, real estate, travel agency companies, etc.))
In a nod to the indie rock still popular in Brooklyn these days, “Call the Cops (Don’t Call the Cops)” is a wonderful update to the emotional rescue available from listening to acts like Broken Social Scene and American Analog Set, but with the added levity and grit of acts as disparate as Thin Lizzy, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Yo La Tengo, and Brian Eno – the whole thing being filtered through hidden messages such as “Send me to jail, like PAUL MANAFORT” (yes, seriously, listen closely to vocals there….).
Honestly, the move into more conventionally unconventional convention is a welcome one for NED’s evolution. I think their next LP will be groundbreaking.
“I try to impose elements of sanity to the more experimental instrumental tracks, and in doing so, some of them have slowly morphed into pop songs” Luke Hunter mentions, cartoonish as he emphasizes every other word with a beer bottle clasped by three fingers. “It isn’t that Nevin and Bennett’s instrumental working tracks don’t have conventional structure; it’s more so that those guys have intentionally buried it for me in the sand. And I think of the parts I add to turn these songs into pop music as being tiny little turds hidden in the litterbox, with the litter being the other data comprising the songs. We all go together like, turd and litter.”
The group collectively thinks this is a bad analogy, but Luke shrugs it off.
“None of you are really giving quotes for this article anyway, I’ll just say whatever the dick I want then.” They all smile and proceed to imbibe on the “forbidden fruit,” a concoction of (REDACTED).
Bennett and Nevin assert that there are still plenty of experimental tracks “for all the street freaks and other “NEDS” too,” since NED has not forgotten its earliest recordings and purpose as a subversive music group.
“After All” is the most experimental NED song to date, with virtually no song structure, but features an abundance of euphoric motifs that stagger off into infinity. “HSN” is (quote) “a really fucked up 13 minute Donna Summer impersonation that made me want to cry” (according to Luke Hunter), while “Sleepwatching” takes instrumental pop music to bold, dance-y new heights, subverting the idea of car commercial music by adding Kraftwerk-esque vocal treatments and vocoder, constantly evolving along with bouncing bass and ecstatic guitar treatments. The sublime “Refrain,” using the album’s opening title track as the basis for an ambient bliss-out journey bookend, rivals that of anything done in the past 50 years of spacerock; it’s absolutely stunning. And the album closes with an experimental bonus track, a cover of Meat Loaf’s “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad.” This vaporwave freakout, with trap music drums, Fender 6 bass, and Arp Odyssey tilts, smoothly references Hall and Oates as well as the smarmy yelps of acts like Toto and Christopher Cross – all while blending acoustic and electronic instruments.
The NED sound has truly become expansive: this LP uses the musical touchstones of dozens of artists but does so without any clear family tree, and in a deliberately stony, Lo-fi sort of way too. I asked them if this was the plan the whole time; all the group members shake their heads no.
They look concerned for both past and future, but only in a “what’s for dinner?” kind of way.
“We’re more cohesive, but somehow less cohesive at the same time” Bennett states. “You should probably expect a more polished sound on our next recordings, but I’m not going to tell you what direction we’ll be taking because I don’t really know. I can tell you this though: we’ll be going…somewhere.” They all break out in laughter as I struggle to follow them down their apartment’s stairwells, so I can sleep off the evening’s head candy.
As they walk me to my Uber at the end of a ridiculous house party, NED also tells me that there is a vault of some 60 -70 unreleased recordings that they are currently sitting on, which they plan to release once the label wars to sign them have been settled and distribution has been planned. They have multiple new EPs also in work as they’ve recently become increasingly prolific songwriters.
Fittingly enough, the group has also had numerous other secret monikers (Clasius Claperyon, Immediate Fiend, and Luke Hunter to name a few of the more ridiculous ones) and they plan on releasing this music too at “the right time” – when “the people are finally ready to hear what the truth sounds like.”
I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time we all get to hear the truth.
I think that anytime will be the right time for these interesting, and entirely mysterious people; watching them stand completely still as the Uber pulls away, they almost look timeless.
They are timeless, but yet, full of time.
There couldn’t be a better time, really, for the world to finally meet – and maybe even BE – NED.
Just watch out for those melting flies, and stay away from the gas station drugs, if you can.
Those gas station drugs will fuck you up every time; take it from NED.
-E.H.
