8 years of sweat, robots and chaos.
https://replicator.bandcamp.com/
I spent almost the entirety of my 20s in a band called Replicator that played LOUD, noise rock. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing at first, and then we figured it out. We were around long enough to see trends come and go, but we were happy to do our thing. We played to 600 people, we played to 6 people, but the intensity was always the same. The songs themselves frequently made little sense at first listen, turned on a dime and did weird unexpected things. However, we played them hard. The people that got it, got it… most didn’t. We didn’t change the world or anything, but we meant something to some people and we gave back a little of the ass kicking that music gave us. We also put together a body of work that stands on it’s own merit and that hopefully people will enjoy for many years to come. For some reason, the intensity of this band sometimes put me in a weird space, it usually took me about 5 minutes to “come down to earth” and be a regular person after we played. I don’t think it’s too silly to attribute that to level of performance we put on. When I think back to the time that I spent with Ben and Chris (and for a little while Todd), driving from city to city and making absurd song after absurd song, I really have to smile. We did everything on our own terms and had a damn fun time doing it.
Replicator predated a lot of the web 2.0 stuff that is so omnipresent there, but being the ferocious saints of angry nerds anywhere, we were well represented.
I’m going to try upload more stuff on that facebook account up there, but time is a valuable commodity. You may have to get all web 1.0, sorry.
Anyway, here’s something I wrote for the liner notes in our last ep, it puts it all way better than I can. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I was paraphrasing the Big Black break up announcement in the beginning. Hahaha, cruel irony!
There’s something to be said for a terminus, closure, for having the guts to push the button and set the self destruct active. End it on top, before the inevitable slide into self parody and hackery. Oh, how I wish I had the power to make other bands do the same.
In a sense this band could not have existed at any other time, the end of the world always seemed right around the corner, yet things just kept grinding on in increasingly goofy and scary manner. Replicator arose during the era of the iPod, the internet, and when cell phones went from a novelty to a near necessity. Mediocrity and fear held sway, usually at the same time, and when we were written about we were called paranoid, and/or chaotic.
The fact of the matter is this band was always reflective of the world around us, albeit through our warped and runaway allegorical perspective. It wasn’t so much paranoia, as a cracked mirror and if we brought the chaos, it’s because the world itself did a pretty good job of bringing it too.
We were never the kind of band to follow a trend, or do what was popular, in fact our timing seemed to always be a bit off, and we never really offered what people wanted. Every once in awhile it was what they needed though, which is different.
Stubborn as a mule and making music just about as ugly, we always did our thing with 100% enthusiasm and intensity. If you were into it, great! But it existed without outside approval or desire, a shambling, spasmodic beast that dragged itself along without outside provocation. Flawed? Perhaps, but never insincere.
I never told people I “played in a bandâ€, I played in Replicator.
Not everybody got that, but it was an important distinction, as this band was a family and tried our hardest to be an uncompromising force of nature. I feel absolutely overjoyed to have spent every second with these fine gentlemen, my brothers of different mothers, putting together something greater than the sum of its parts.
Look: We never fit anywhere easily, and in fact, the only places we did fit in are the places that we forged ourselves with the other ones that were the last ones picked. The freaks, nerds and weirdoes that didn’t fit in with the cool kids, but didn’t much give a damn either. See, it turns out the cool kids were all insecure and really weren’t that cool anyway. Besides we outlasted most of them, and outclassed even more, so we won by default.
We had a good run; we far exceeded all our wildest expectations, and then some. We saw places we never would have seen otherwise, met people we never would have met otherwise, and had experiences that will last a lifetime, and make for some very funny anecdotes later in life. (Tragedy+Time=Comedy). We did our best to give back the ass kicking that music had given to us, and hopefully touched a few lives in the process.
Vans were broken, so were glasses. Relationships and credit wrecked, Hearing was damaged.
Goo
There’s something to be said for a terminus, closure, for having the guts to push the button and set the self destruct active. End it on top, before the inevitable slide into self parody and hackery. Oh, how I wish I had the power to make other bands do the same.
In a sense this band could not have existed at any other time, the end of the world always seemed right around the corner, yet things just kept grinding on in increasingly goofy and scary manner. Replicator arose during the era of the iPod, the internet, and when cell phones went from a novelty to a near necessity. Mediocrity and fear held sway, usually at the same time, and when we were written about we were called paranoid, and/or chaotic.
The fact of the matter is this band was always reflective of the world around us, albeit through our warped and runaway allegorical perspective. It wasn’t so much paranoia, as a cracked mirror and if we brought the chaos, it’s because the world itself did a pretty good job of bringing it too.
We were never the kind of band to follow a trend, or do what was popular, in fact our timing seemed to always be a bit off, and we never really offered what people wanted. Every once in awhile it was what they needed though, which is different.
Stubborn as a mule and making music just about as ugly, we always did our thing with 100% enthusiasm and intensity. If you were into it, great! But it existed without outside approval or desire, a shambling, spasmodic beast that dragged itself along without outside provocation. Flawed? Perhaps, but never insincere.
I never told people I “played in a band”, I played in Replicator.
Not everybody got that, but it was an important distinction, as this band was a family and tried our hardest to be an uncompromising force of nature. I feel absolutely overjoyed to have spent every second with these fine gentlemen, my brothers of different mothers, putting together something greater than the sum of its parts.
Look: We never fit anywhere easily, and in fact, the only places we did fit in are the places that we forged ourselves with the other ones that were the last ones picked. The freaks, nerds and weirdoes that didn’t fit in with the cool kids, but didn’t much give a damn either. See, it turns out the cool kids were all insecure and really weren’t that cool anyway. Besides we outlasted most of them, and outclassed even more, so we won by default.
We had a good run; we far exceeded all our wildest expectations, and then some. We saw places we never would have seen otherwise, met people we never would have met otherwise, and had experiences that will last a lifetime, and make for some very funny anecdotes later in life. (Tragedy+Time=Comedy). We did our best to give back the ass kicking that music had given to us, and hopefully touched a few lives in the process.
Vans were broken, so were glasses. Relationships and credit wrecked, Hearing was damaged.
Good times were had.
-End Communication-
-Conan Neutron, March 2008
For those that are inclined towards nostalgia, here’s the old bio text shifted to past tense:
–
Intense! Bombastic! Fierce!
Replicator fever… CATCH IT!!
Straddling the fine line between technical precision and reckless abandon, social commentary and smartass revelry, Replicator endeavoured to bring something unique and worthwhile to the overall culture of this independent music thing while somehow managing to overcome the signal to noise ratio of vapid defanged post punk disco retreads and the latest astroturf “garage band” fad with the marketing dollars of the cool hunting multinational corporations.
Alive and well for 8 years now, Replicator recorded a third (and final) full length release in summer 2006, with Mr. Vern Rumsey (Blonde Redhead, KARP), of the band Unwound. The new record, released in May 2007 on Olympia’s Radio is Down wa called Machines Will Always Let You Down. Their second full length album “You Are Under Surveillance”, in 2004 was on Substandard Records. Recorded at Mr. Toad’s by bassist/keyboardist/recording engineer Ben Adrian, Surveillance followed up the “lost” DBBLLVVZZNN split release with the band Lower Forty-Eight , as well as the well received “” ep in 2001, and 2000’s ”Winterval”, engineered by Mr. Bob S. Weston IV.
Replicator steadily played hows in and around the bay area, west coast and US since late 1999. They worked towards creating a solid fan base, in a supportive community of fantastic ‘outsider’ bands, in the creatively fertile bay area, based on a combination of great songs and exciting live performance.
In other words, substance over style, every time
Replicator played throughout the US with bands like Melt Banana, Trans Am, Rye Coalition, Big Business, Blood Brothers, Oxes, BABYLAND, Hella, Vaz, Stinking Lizaveta and many, many more.
Hailing from Oakland, California, in the San Francisco bay area. the suspects were as follows:
- Conan Neutron | treble guitar, tape deck/laptop, voice
- Benjamin Adrian | bass guitar, keyboards, voice
- Christopher Bolig | drum set
- Todd Grant | thrang guitar (Live 2006-2007)
Replicator shows were boisterous, loud, energetic, intense and, fun.
Thank you for your interest.
Here is some video, weirdly we played all over this great land of ours, but I can only find video of two shows in the bay area. Go figure!:
