Interview with CERCE
Boston, Massachusetts hardcore band Cerce has released a discography LP on their own label, Kerk Records, featuring material from 2011–2013. This interview was conducted by Becca and Patrick.
What made you decide to make an LP? There was a previous release on cassette, is the master different from that?
Becca: We thought it would be a nice way to put that chapter of our lives together before we moved on to new music or the next chapter. And yes, the master is new for this release too.
Patrick: the cassette was a charity release to raise money for Planned Parenthood and a way to get the music in the hands of those who may have missed it the first time around. the Discography LP’s are for close friends, true supporters, and those who enjoy high fidelity audio. the mix and master is exclusive to this release. you cannot hear the tracks the way they are represented anywhere else but this cute pink record. Zach did an incredible job making this music sound timeless. shout out to all the engineers who put in work on the initial releases too…Zach Weeks, Mike Moschetto, Ryan Stack, Alex Garcia-Rivera. salute!
I think records from the 2000’s to early 2010’s tend to be buried in history, so I’m very happy that they are being reissued at this time.
Patrick: for sure. i’ve been deep into the cassette game and collecting a lot of old music as well as music made by friends. realizing a lot of overlooked records from the 60’s and 70’s were reissued on tape and CD after the turn of the century. i still like CD’s too!!! constantly buying old CD’s so definitely thankful people continue to reissue good music on whatever medium.
Becca: Thank you. I’m flattered to even have Cerce’s music compared with nostalgic records making a comeback.
Is Kerk Records an independent label? Is it a label set up for this LP?
Patrick: 100% independent. our label headquarters is a folding table in the garage next to my drum set and i’m pretty sure Becca’s office is a pillow fort with a laptop inside. as of right now, Kerk Records is a label exclusively for the output and continued recorded endeavors of the band Cerce. Cowboy Music…
Becca: We definitely set the label up specifically for this LP, but I have no clue what the future holds. I’m excited either way. I never anticipated the future of Cerce being this way either.
I think Cerce had an emo violence sound.
But there are also songs that are Screamo/Skramz-like, grindcore, and mysterious.
What kind of sounds were you influenced by when you were writing music?
Becca: I am from Long Island, New York and I would probably say Glassjaw has influenced me more than I even realized. I was also super influenced by Kirsten Dunst’s performance in Interview with the Vampire. I appreciated how feminine yet absolutely terrifying her screaming was in that movie. Her age and gender did not hinder that in any way.
Patrick: emo-violence sounds fun. we’re pretty emotional and used to be very violent on stage so that is fitting. mysterious makes me laugh in a good way because we do tend to be very moody and confusing. i jokingly like to say “Cerce is what your parents call screamo”. we fit pretty well into the subcategory of music with yelling that parents don’t like. if anything, we are closer to a pop band solely based on the overall accessibility of the music. maybe some form of experimental hard rock?
we’re not very interested in genres when approaching our music, especially all the little subcategories. genres are mostly made up by critics and labels as a selling point anyways. i understand genres and subgenres exist, but i like to keep it pretty simple when classifying music. we label ourselves punk rock or hardcore punk for simplicity’s sake. most of the members of Cerce have connections to punk and hardcore music. there is definitely a great respect for the lineage of hardcore, especially Massachusetts punk and hardcore.
around 2011–2013 i was listening to Prince, Trash Talk, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, Operation Ivy, Fifteen, Little Dragon, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Lil B, Max Roach and following the work of Pussy Riot. Zach was listening to Totalitär, Cursed, Rainbow of Death, Modern Life is War, and Dropdead. Zac was listening to Glassjaw, The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Touché Amoré, and Led Zeppelin. Tim was originally into Ruiner, Spitboy, Black Breath, Limp Wrist, Cloud Rat, Siege, Fucked Up, and Go It Alone. group influences that were almost entirely shared across the board or talked about a lot during the formation of Cerce include Glassjaw, Rape Revenge, American Nightmare, Congenital Death, Converge, Black Flag, The Misfits, The Clash, The Shaggs, Bikini Kill, Blondie, Lou Reed, Some Girls, Wendy Carlos, Vaccine, Bad Brains, The Ramones, Darkthrone, Pissed Jeans, Led Zeppelin, The Runaways, Naked City, Liturgy, Tile, Rancid, Ceremony, Punch, Last Lights, Mountain Man, Touché Amoré, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and Cursed.
we were all 18, 19, and 20 years old so those years in general were full of musical discovery as well as strengthening our appreciation of music we grew up on. surrounding the production of our new album around 2019–2020 Zach was listening to GFOTY, Sophie, Caroline Polachek, PC Music affiliates, and Bruce Springsteen. Zac was listening to Charles Mingus, Nine Inch Nails, Queens of The Stone Age, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against The Machine, clipping., JPEGMafia, Deftones, AC/DC, Tool, The Jesus Lizard, and Shellac. Tim was listening to Harold Budd, Billy Bang, Meredith Monk, Julius Eastman, Don Cherry, Hoshiko Yamanae, HTRK, and Gloria Jones. Zach was also working on the most recent Dropdead album and remixing their old material which i’m sure was an influence to some degree.
i don’t listen to heavy music as much anymore, but when we were working on new material i was mentally referencing drummers like David Silveria, Wuv, Joey Jordison, and Eloy Casagrande’s work with Sepultura, along with influences from artists like Milford Graves, Kahil El’Zabar, and Sunny Murray. of course Prince was in there too…i always ask myself “what kind of drums would Prince want?”
I thought the band had broken up. But you have officially declared that you haven’t broken up, haven’t you?
I’d like to ask you about the history of this area. Is it a difficult topic to talk about?
Becca: Yes, we did break up in 2013, but somehow along the way realized we missed each other greatly. It can be difficult to talk about. It is a lot like a romantic relationship where you break up and somehow start talking again years later. In some ways we picked up where we left off, in other ways we were so excited to tell each other what we’ve been through and how we’ve grown.
Patrick: after playing again in 2018 we realized we have way too much fun together and enjoy this music so we’re keeping it going at our own pace. not difficult to talk about by any means, but maybe sort of embarrassing or telling of our character at the time. we were all young, selfish, and completely lacked communication skills. i think our initial break up in 2013 could have easily been solved by a few solid conversations, maybe a few yelling matches, and then a nice hug out at the end. we all like to hug and kiss each other now so it’s cool.
Regarding feminism, the situation seems to have changed between the time of Cerce’s activities and the present day.
Especially since the late 2010s, I think political connectedness has become a big part of the culture.
Do you think the situation has improved in terms of the anger you were expressing?
Patrick: it is sort of like things have changed but nothing has changed. i’ll let Becca speak on this one…
Becca: In some ways yes and other ways I do not feel things have changed. For me personally, it felt like years ago I was trying to articulate the ways I was being treated. I wasn’t mature enough to fully process what was happening and also felt like people didn’t want to hear my perspectives. Now people are listening more, but still not doing much to change their biases. As the only woman in the band, I personally feel like people treat me like some sort of default-customer service rather than addressing the whole band. And I’m the worst person for that too, because I’m a bit shy and closed off.
You named a lot of influential artists in response to my question.
Some of them are close to punk, and some of them are far away from punk.
What the hell kind of influence did Kyary Pamyu Pamyu have on Cerce?
Patrick: i was trying to be absurdly thorough and also as truthful as possible in regards to what we were listening to during that time. it was also very important to me to have everyone’s individual input to show how different all of our tastes are. we don’t agree on everything musically and i think that is what makes for good music. Kyary’s obsession with cute and cuteness is pretty admirable. we definitely value cuteness as a band. i think we all heard her music around 2012 and were pretty impressed by the production so i guess more so the music of Yasutaka Nakata than Kyary Pamyu Pamyu per se. Pamyu Pamyu Revolution is a straight up fun album.
Becca: I know when Zach Weeks and I were living together in 2012, we would listen to Kyary Pamyu Pamyu a lot. I’m not going to lie and say I was listening to a lot of punk music during that time while we were writing. I think I was listening to a lot of music that felt hyper-feminine to me, because I had spent a lot of years earlier doing the opposite.
I’d like to talk about the bonus tracks.
I was listening to the tracks I DL’d on bandcamp until the album LP arrived, and at the end a pop song suddenly came on and I thought I had the wrong file to play.
I heard that this is a cover of Paramore, but why did you choose this band? What was this cover about in the first place?
Becca: This was used for one of Zach’s school projects. I believe he had to mimic their production style, thus Patrick and I were asked to mimic Paramore’s drums and vocals.
Patrick: yea, i think on the downloadable version we have some noise tracks and the Paramore cover as bonus material. we have always been appreciators and participants in the fields of improvisation, sound art, noise, musique concrète, and experimental music as a whole. i think the first noise track was a collection of feedback scraps from previous albums or other adventures in the studio and the other track was a cross country project that was pretty fun. we were all away from each other for a summer and got asked to contribute an original song for a tape compilation so we decided to record a collage of various improvised activities. i was teaching music at a prep school near Chicago, Illinois so i went to the school’s performance hall where the drum set was, turned on GarageBand, and went to town. Zac and Tim contributed guitar sounds from where they were. Zach recorded a pretty ominous bass loop, contributed some feedback, guitars, as well as compiled and engineered the whole thing. Becca was doing something like playing patty-cake and singing nursery rhymes with her little brother which was sent as a voice memo.
like Becca said, the Paramore cover was an engineering project Zach was working on to completely rebuild a popular song from scratch in the studio. not much more to it. Becca likes Paramore. Hayley Williams has a good voice, Becca has a good voice…we decided to include it in the digital release solely because it exists. there is also the obvious novelty and irony that comes along with that recording.
Has the reissue of the LP brought any changes around the band?
Becca: What’s funny is, answering these questions, I was just thinking about how invested we were in each other’s lives back then. Living together, doing school projects together, etc. Reissuing the LP has not brought any changes itself, but we’re no longer living the same lifestyle. I mean, all 5 of us currently live in different states. We’re now dependent on group chats and phone calls to keep things moving.
What are your future plans for Cerce, if any?
I hope this interview will help people who haven’t heard of Cerce to listen to the band. They are too good to be lost in history.
Becca: Thank you. That’s very very kind of you to say. I kind of always hoped Cerce would stay unknown during my lifetime and then maybe gain some hype once I was dead. Regardless, we’re working on new music at the moment. I commented to my bandmates recently, “Bad news is I have a lot of mental illness to work through. Good news is I have plenty to write about for future lyrics.” I’m grateful that Cerce is continuing as a band.
Patrick: Cowboy Music.
Cerce
https://cerce.bandcamp.com/
https://kerkrecords.bigcartel.com/
The person asking the questions in this interview is Akihito Mizutani.
I run 3LA -LonglegsLonArms Records- in Japan.
3LA: https://longlegslongarms.bandcamp.com/music
