Amos Pitsch
hey stas, here is a write up about tenement. I hope
this is what you had in mind. I've got some pictures, too. i'll send
them in another email. Sorry, I wrote the majority of this on the road,
so it took awhile. thanks. -amos
amos at BFG in Appleton at night
My name is Amos Pitsch and I compose music for an American
pop combo called Tenement.
In a place like Appleton, Wisconsin, You’re often thought of
as a shell of a human if you look or act different. Adolescents heckle and
police harass the eccentrics, as if the city itself were a child pulling the
legs from a helpless spider. Lost men with hardened souls and stiff faces
shuffle in and out of the paper mills and foundries and taverns. They shut
their eyes at night in their quiet homes, in their quiet neighborhoods; rows
and rows of steaming coffins of all sizes, shapes, and colors. This is the
Appleton that I know, and this is the lands where two thirds of Tenement grew
up. The city of Appleton resides in a cluster of small, working class cities,
crowded along the shore of a lake called Winnebago. This geographic region is
called The Fox Valley. It’s an area rich with deciduous forests and corn
fields, and crawling with slow, simple people. The only weirdos to be seen that
don’t have art as an alibi are either talking to themselves at the bus station,
or completely snapping and killing half their neighborhood. Famed serial
killer, Ed Gein, was from a rural town in central Wisconsin just on the
outskirts of the valley, called Plainfield. So close to us in fact, that some
of us have family members that knew him personally in their time.
BFG in Appleton, WI
Jesse Ponkamo plays bass guitar in Tenement, and also
composes a small portion of the songs. He and I met in high school, finding a
common interest in punk bands like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and The
Descendents.
Anyway, that’s all played out history. It’s been six years
since this band began making music together, and now we live in three separate
corners of Wisconsin. Eric Meyer, our drummer, lives in a very violent, segregated
neighborhood in Milwaukee’s inner city, at a punk house that’s been hosting
shows for a long time called Ground Zero. He works at a tofu factory and
collects punk and hardcore records, recently acquiring Minor Threat’s first 7
inch for 500 dollars. Jesse lives in Madison and delivers pizzas for a living.
He’s been studying chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, collects Free Jazz
records, and shoots + develops his own photography. I still live at BFG in
Appleton; a well known punk house that went from hosting shows to being a
recording studio. Our house is a well known residence in the community as well,
and the Appleton police always have their eyes and ears on the place, from
raiding it for drugs to pulling me into the street at 3 am in my underwear
under suspicion that I’d been involved in a local crime.
amos' fathers' trophy deer on the wall of his home in rural Winchester, Wisconsin
Post-recording of the explosive end of the "Napalm Dream" LP
The nature of the music we play in Tenement is what come
would consider unusual. We consider ourselves experimental, but we’re not
entirely a noise group or a free-improvisation combo. We all grew up listening
to pop music, be it The Beatles, or Abba, or Elvis Presley. When I was young,
country music was popular where I grew up, and my father would often take me to
polkas… so I absorbed a lot of the music of my environment, even down to the Catholic
hymns from church. In high school, we all dipped our feet heavily into punk
music, getting turned on first to The Ramones and Black Flag, then later
digging deeper to find bands like Heresy, The Rip Offs, What Happens Next?,
Gauze, etc… Jesse was into a lot of Metal too, like Napalm Death, Carcass,
Entombed, and Pestilence. Around this time, we met many of our friends from
Milwaukee who played in bands like Holy Shit! And The Modern Machines. They
turned us onto a lot of underground Midwestern American music like Husker Du,
The Replacements, Die Kreuzen, etc… Here at home, we were taking notes from a
local band called Yesterday’s Kids.
amos' bedroom at BFG in Appleton; recording gear, the bed I sleep on, and what I dream about at nigh
They were sweating a lot of pop music like
The Plimsouls, The Diodes, The Everly Brothers, and Big Star. High school came
and went and we each separately found our own niche: Jesse got real into free
jazz after taking a jazz history course in school, Eric kept digging deeper
into more obscure hardcore punk, and I discovered soul and blues music through
a blues compilation record I found for a dollar at a thrift store. These
influences led to our fascination with improvised music, and eventually noise.
Here-in creates the formula: Noise+Rock N Roll+Pop+Soul. This the way we like
to portray ourselves in an immediate, live setting. Our fascination with bands
like The Zombies and The Beatles and R Stevie Moore; people like Geoff Emerick,
George Martin, Henry Pierre, Harry Partch, John Cage, etc… really explains the
way we behave in a studio setting, and the way we treat music business. So many
worlds to pull from to create a single piece of work.
Jesse Ponkamo
So rural Wisconsin is a strange place. Dig no deeper than
the photographic work of Shimon and Lindemann, or the immortal book, Wisconsin
Death Trip. This land of slayed deer strapped to rooftops of station wagons
during hunting season; Wife beatings in otherwise moral homes when the local
sports team loses; Grand orange, yellow, and green sunsets over corn field
country sides; Drooling, slobbering drunks stumbling out of local bars and into
their rust-bucket pick up trucks on hazy-eyed Saturday nights; Big lipped,
bloated, bulging farmers in cow shit soiled bibs talking the local garb about
crop prices, barnyard suicides, and the weather on Sunday mornings at the
greasy spoon; Joe McCarthy and his communist hunting agenda; Cows and beer and
cheese; Bored and frustrated suburban children killing their parents or
themselves; Historic back shed blues recordings for Paramount Records in
Grafton; Snow; Ice; The mail man freezing to death while tying his shoes in the
winter time. This is where we’re from, and this is the environment that affects
our thinking processes, and the way we write music and
create art.
Eric Meyer
the country side of Vinland, Wisconsin; just south of Appleton. A cornfield after harvest.
While being beat to death, you can either lay down and give
up, or spit out the blood and write your name in it. Those blood stains are
starting to look real pretty.
