Jane Jane Pollock

Jane Jane Pollock is an experimental pop group from Thomasville, GA (and Northern Florida too, apparently) whose self-titled debut came out earlier this year on their own label Flea Ridden Kitten (which gets my nom for best label name of the decade). It was David Levesque from the ridiculous FL group Levek that gave me the tip, so you know you’re in for something special:

Jane Jane Pollock – Stuck on a Highway Island

It’s so nice to hear a female vocalist that doesn’t try to sound like Feist or Regina Spektor. “Stuck on a Highway Island” is a bizarre track truth be told, in that it sort of creeps up your spine at a moment’s notice. Dissonance is pretty hard to master, much more difficult than picking a melody from a treasure trove of proven chord changes, but Jane Jane Pollack are giving it everything they’ve got. The song’s a dark enclosed space: vocals hover like thick smoke, xylophone punches are hazardous marbles on the floor, and piercing synth violins meander through creaking doors and windows. It’s a marvelously constructed mood, and when you’re aiming for eerie, you’ve got to go full measure. - I Guess I am Floating

I think Jane Jane Pollock takes the cake for the most inventive, dynamic, weird, collage-minded, groove-minded group in Tallahassee. They recently released a self-titled record, and it’s outlandishly original; lots of sampled beats, sampled keys topped with ethereal, layered vocals. It can be spooky, but it’s spooky in that way comfortable way, like in the way you come to love the monster under your bed. You need him after a while, like you need this kind of spooky groove. Besides, it’s not that spooky anyway. It’s just like Michael Arcos and the rest of Jane Jane know things you don’t know about the world. Like maybe they’ve witnessed something you haven’t. Maybe this something was scary, maybe it was something that would strip a lay person of their innocence.

Jane Jane’s members are grand educators. They’ve seen it, but they won’t frighten you or burden you with the whole story. They’re gonna blot out the hard parts and go around the scary stuff, but the whole time you see them live or listen to their music, you know that they really could just overwhelm you and take you to places you’re not ready to go. Jane Jane Pollock wants you to grow up and be a happy person though. And because of that, they’ll wait, just for now, to drop some knowledge on you. - CMJ

Jane Jane Pollock @ the Caledonia Lounge 10 13 11
Posted on October 13, 2011 by Daniel
Did Cinderella lose her shoe? This band really moved me. I couldn’t stop filming them and I was trying to save disc space for Bob Mould. Holy Cow! Between the girls in Supercluster and this band I think I fell in love tonight, maybe it was the music, maybe it was the red dresses or the voices or maybe it was Athens PopFest 2011. Please help me out with the names of these songs.

They do a crazy cover of Creedence Clearwater Revivals ‘Gloomy’
- Athens Rock Show

Jane Jane Pollock: At first, it seems weird that Jane Jane Pollock is using the same visual effects as the mighty Supercluster, who played right before them. Then they break out the trumpet, melodica and rigged toy hamburger to make some of the heaviest tunes we’ve heard in ages, and it doesn’t seem weird at all. And when all five band members play drums and percussion on “Gloomy,” it sounds oh so right. - Philadelphia City Paper

Hello!

Be sure to listen to the show this week, when we hear a live session from Tallahassee/Thomasville's trailer-pop quintet Jane Jane Pollock. They stopped into the Mike Eisenstadt Live Music Studio when they were in town to play a show last weekend. For those who missed it, I hope this session will convince you not to let that happen again, should the opportunity arise. They are a delightful and talented bunch. Don't take my word for it, though. Listen on Wednesday.

http://gncsessions.bandcamp.com/album/9282011 - Grand National Championships WMNF

Radio 1190’s CD of the Month for October is Jane Jane Pollock's self-titled debut release on Flea Ridden Kitten Records.

Out on Flea Ridden Kitten Records, Jane Jane Pollock's self-titled album was released in limited quantity and is a quirky nightmare. It's spooky and weird, reminiscent of Mountain Man, Faun Fables, bits of 90's era Beck and a hint of The Specials. Likening themselves to a "Halloween folk dance", they use a haunting mix of harmoniums and horns to immerse you in their unique sound.

This release isn't all doom and gloom though. Hailing from Florida and Georgia, a 90s sunshine sound shines through. They incorporate more cheerful instruments like ukelele, banjo and even pots and pans to highlight their knack for building upon their genre-bending sound. It's a creepy and kooky funhouse of sound that's perfect for the month of October.

Radio 1190 would like to thank Twist and Shout for their continued support of the CD of the Month Club. - KVCU Boulder Radio 1190

One of the acts I wanted to see and managed to miss at this year’s AntiWarpt Fest (and also one that everyone shit their pants over), is Jane Jane Pollock, a quintet from Tallahassee and Thomasville, Ga. Their music jumps from dark and brooding trip hop to dreamy electro island-hued psychedelia to heavy washes of fizzy bumpin’ experimental pop. The players build their sound with a kitchen sink full of instruments and devices – pianos and toy keyboards, trumpet, cooking pots, banjo, samplers, acoustic guitar, drums, ukulele, lap harp, whistling, harmonium, melodica, tambourine, bass and organ. Also with Hear Hums and Mini Prophets.
— Leilani Polk - Creative Loafing

Later was another crowded, high-quality free show (Will's Pub). Didn't I tell you there was promise in this model? Anyway, it's where the left-field sensibilities of Florida-Georgia border-hoppers Jane Jane Pollock finally gelled for me. With a cornucopia of sounds beyond the basic rock setup (vibey keys, horns, electronic dance beats, junkyard percussion and what the fuck ever), they throw odd pop, art rock, spaghetti western and surf into a blender with a big dash of daring. When you mash that disparate of a rainbow together, it's not all gonna land in the right places. But with JJP, they do more often than not, especially ?in their impressive rhythmic passages involving anywhere from two to four percussionists. - Orlando Weekly

Not-so-plain Jane Jane Pollock
Popular local band talks to the 'FSView' in their Thomasville, Ga., playhouse
J. Michael Osborne • Managing Editor • February 28, 2011

We at the FSView & Florida Flambeau have hardly done much to hide our crush on Jane Jane Pollock, the four-turned-five-piece we invited to co-headline our first-ever local music and art showcase at The Engine Room last October.


Check out an exclusive sneak peek of their new song, 'Stuck on a Highway Island'


Podcast Powered By Podbean
The group--which includes vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Michael Arcos switching between guitar, keys, trumpet and any amount of percussion, Courtney Asztalos on vocals, organ and keys, Danny Clifton on guitar, Ryan O'Malley on drums and Heather Lee Smith on vocals and bass--has been awfully busy since then, and, with a growing live presence in nearly every venue in Tallahassee, they're rapidly becoming a local favorite.
Besides finding a drummer in O'Malley toward the beginning of this year, they're currently booking a tour to stretch throughout March (with plans to hit Gainesville, Orlando, Seaside, New Orleans and Athens, Ga.) with the St. Augustine band Lighthouse Music, who Jane Jane described as having "taken [them] under their wing," all while prepping their new, self-titled album for release at their show this Thursday, March 3, opening for Thee Oh Sees, at which time they'll also kick off their tour.

The local band has a bit of a poorly kept secret, though: They're not actually local, per se--they commute.
For the past four years, founder and frontman Arcos has lived in a wooden trailer in the rural Thomasville, Ga., nearly an hour's drive from Tallahassee. An artist and filmmaker as well as musician, Arcos moved to northern Florida from Miami and, after spending two years in Tallahassee, decided to move to Thomasville to have more freedom to do his work, whatever that ended up being. That freedom would eventually give way to Jane Jane Pollock.
"I moved here definitely to just kind of have the peace-of-mind to just create, at all hours of the night," said Arcos. "And I think, little by little, it just grew and we needed more people."
Check out a photo gallery of the day spent with Jane Jane Pollock in Thomasville, Ga., and at their show opening for Quintron at The Engine Room

Arcos first joined up with Smith, an actress and fellow musician recording her own songs on 4-track tapes. The duo soon added Arcos' girlfriend Asztalos, now a recent graduate from the FSU BFA studio art program in photography, along with then-drummer Ian Weir (who mastered the new record). As Weir took his exit, they brought in guitarist Clifton (also the founder and designer for local screen-printing company American Waste Apparel), having met Arcos and Asztalos outside the FSU Circus when the pair were putting on a freak show and giving out "experimental popcorn" (whatever that is), bringing Jane Jane to an even four-piece.
"I definitely felt like we had kindred spirits," said Clifton of the first time they played as a quartet. "We just got together and there was a really good energy, and we really had a lot of fun doing that."
That four-piece produced four releases together in various forms, primarily using a drum machine, which they still maintain a fondness for, before inviting O'Malley to their Thomasville trailer to practice with them--an experience they compared to a strange sort of group dating session.
"When I came into this band, I kind of knew immediately--I have the least amount of background in, if you want to broadly say, creativity or art," O'Malley said. "And so I knew that I couldn't just come into this band and be, like, a drummer, like a rock 'n' roll drummer. I had to look at my instrument as not a drum set, and something where I'm just kind of creating, kind of using it not in the way it's supposed to be used, or how people normally see it."

Last, Saturday, Feb. 14, before playing a show at The Farside that night, Jane Jane Pollock agreed to let me drive up with a photographer to spend the afternoon with them and explore their secluded Xanadu-meets-Pee-wee's Playhouse for myself. (Not coincidentally, the soon-to-be-released album opens, on "Mousehole," with a sample from Pee-wee's Playhouse.) The tour of the trailer itself was predictably short, since it primarily consisted of two vaguely claustrophobia-inducing rooms. But that hasn't stopped Arcos and Asztalos from packing the place to the brim with their combined collection of musical and recording equipment, found photographs and odds-and-ends they've amassed, alphabetized vinyl, costume accessories and masks hung on the wall, almost like a really, really interesting episode of Hoarders.
After Arcos made us what everyone referred to as "experiment pizza," a craft he's been perfecting along with his music for the past four years, we started our interview, which we agreed to do in segments, giving us a chance to take in as much of the grounds as we could. As it turned out, the walks in between our interview segments wound up being more interesting than anything else we discussed. Here they would tell me stories about people who may or may not have been murdered and buried somewhere on the grounds long ago, and of how the gender-scale-tipping addition of O'Malley has opened up Arcos and Clifton to their "bro-ness," while Arcos did cartwheels past abandoned trucks puzzlingly strewn across the field and Asztalos talked shop with my photographer Joe.
“
We're really lucky to have this like breeding ground for what we do. And I think it is a goal to take it, and remember where we came from, and always kind of make it from this place.

— Courtney Asztalos
”

"Hopefully [our music] always comes from the most genuine place," said Asztalos. "We're really lucky to have this kind of like breeding ground for what we do. And I think it is a goal to take it, and remember where we came from, and always kind of make it from this place."
Having listened to an unmastered CD of Jane Jane's new album, which was entirely self-recorded and mixed and produced by Arcos, the band's eclectic trailer has a recognizable presence in the recordings. Or, rather, the album sounds like an old horror-movie, carnival-ride, cartoon version of Arcos and Asztalos' Thomasville home--odd, charming, disparate at times and interested in doing seemingly just about everything.
"This our fifth release under the name Jane Jane Pollock," Arcos said. "And I think we've come to terms with just calling it 'Jane Jane Pollock.' I feel like it's finally come to a place where it sounds like it should. I'm really happy with the recording, and I feel like it's a really good representation of what we do live [....] To be honest, our second-to-last release, Potluck, was just a learning experience for us, because we kind of put the recording into somebody else's hands, and it just came a little more crisp and cleaner than we actually sound and what we kind of like. So I think this is--it's got dirty, scratchy elements, and--ghoulish sounds."
Smith elaborated on the album's ghoulish mood.
"There's a lot of maniacal laughter throughout the album," said Smith, laughing. "There's a lot of samples of little ghouls laughing and stuff, so there's that sort of creepy element. I think it was at our Athens show last summer, the sound guy afterward, he was like, 'Yeah, we don't really get very many goth bands.' [Laughs.]"
Jane Jane has built much of their local reputation around their affection for strange instrumentation, particularly for the large bins of assorted pots and pans they have to make multiple trips to carry in for their live shows. Their new record finds them continuing to explore weird sounds, including an extended pots-and-pans breakdown in "Gloomy," vibraphones, toy pianos, film samples and recurring appearances from their cats, who roamed the grounds while we did our interview. ("We like cats," said Smith.) As we toured the area around his home, Arcos would periodically point out guest sounds on the album, like a ghostly, out-of-tune piano sitting in a barn, or a toy wooden carving of a face that produces a strangely unsettling laugh.
"All of the recording, we did here in the trailer for this album," Smith said. "So the trailer is almost like its own band member, you know? The spirit of the trailer is definitely in the album."

We left as the sun was setting, after Jane Jane played us a song ("Rebecca," which you can see in part in the above video) and began to get their equipment together for the night's show. I met them again at The Farside a few hours later, where they were to be the sixth(!) and final band of the night. For some inexplicable reason, the band had decided to all adopt blonde wigs for the occasion, except O'Malley, who made a lovely brunette.
It was a small and silly gesture, but it seems to sum up so much of Jane Jane Pollock. As they played that night, switching instruments between them for half the night's setlist while looking like a '60s all-girl beach-party band (a friend of mine described them after the show as "Monster Mash surf-rock"), it started to be obvious how this particular group of people--from so many different areas of the arts--came together. Jane Jane isn't so much a five-piece rock band as they are a tight group of creators having fun together, creating for the sake of the creation and doing for the sake of doing.
"We're all sort of--even if we're approaching things from different angles--all of us are interested in each other's work, regardless of whether we're not all musicians, or visual artists, or photographers or whatever," said Smith. "I feel like we kind of influence each other, in a way. And, if anything, for me, coming from a place of motivation: knowing that your friends and the people who are in your community, that you're constantly all working on projects and--what's the next thing, and the next deadline? It sort of collectively pushes all of us to be making art all the time, you know?"
There's a good reason for why the eccentric quintet has started to turn heads around Tallahassee the way they have. Whether they're at Club Downunder or an hour outside of town, in Arcos and Asztalos' Thomasville trailer--even if one of their songs should have reached the tipping point of weirdness for many folks, or they've broken blood capsules in their mouths onstage--there's a sense of earnestness to their music and performances that can instantly bring you back in. Jane Jane Pollock may be unmistakably individualistic, but they're always inviting the rest of us to do the same.
Arcos, Asztalos, Clifton, O'Malley and Smith will be performing at The Engine Room Thursday, March 3, with Black Cloud and Thee Oh Sees (the latter of whom Jane Jane cited as "heroes"). Jane Jane will be giving free copies of their new album to everyone who attends--though they will accept donations, obviously--as well as a download code for their fourth release, Yard Sale, with a merch purchase. The show will also feature the premiere of the band's video for "Mousehole" and an installation art piece by Asztalos: a felt confessional booth with a typewriter for written, anonymous confessions. For more information, visit janejanepollock.wordpress.com or janejanepollock.bandcamp.com.
Be sure to check out the photo gallery and video from our Saturday in Thomasville, and also an exclusive stream of one of their album highlights, "Stuck on a Highway Island." - FSVIEW and Florida Flambeau

It is a sound that haunts woodland trails and serpentine roads like an old ghost or a lingering memory – Jane Jane Pollock is as daring and thoughtful as musicians as they are human beings. Their roots run through southern Georgia and northern Florida – but the highway guides them and, like nomads armed with paint brushes and reverb pedals, they are making their name and mythos known throughout Florida and beyond, with sights and ambitions that flee the conventional with spectral ease.
They had been one of many to play the 2011 Antiwarpt festival of St. Petersburg and the scene that ensued during their presence was familiar, yet another notion to confirm that Jane Jane Pollock is on to something – the bar was packed from backdoor to stage and there thrived a triumphant intimacy between the cacophonous drum hits, intertwined vocals, and the audience that had come in waves to adore and praise both melody and oddity. A few spirited souls couldn’t help but to dance and gesture; the girls behind me were sharing joints as they mouthed lyrics in a wavering stupor with everyone else whilst the cross-state five-piece treated the set list like the rites to a tribal ritual, rather than a rock show.
It is that spirit, alive with independence and ipseity, which sets the fire for Jane Jane Pollock and reveals the light to even the darkest eyes.
Only hours after the revival they brought through Antiwarpt, I spent time with two of the five: Courtney Asztalos, artist and player of a Wandering Genie organ that is rumored to be as haunted as it is enchanting in tone, and Michael Arcos, multi-instrumentalist and the seed that, some years ago, spawned what they have become.
The weather of the evening would be unforgiving – we would find ourselves sitting, cross-legged under the awning of a nearby bank not too far from the band’s trailer, talking and sharing stories as thunder boomed, rain poured, and tires screeched from far off streets.

Artwork for Jane Jane Pollock's self-titled debut LP.
With 2011 comes Jane Jane Pollock, the self-titled album released via their autonomous label, Flea Ridden Kitten – it is thirteen tracks of experimentation and enigma that is known to bewitch, haunt, thrill, and unnerve. The music is yours to discover – Courtney and Michael went track by track, ruminating on the dynamics and ideas behind each.
“Mousehole”
Michael Arcos of Jane Jane Pollock: A song I wrote in the comfort of our trailer in Thomasville, Georgia. We are fans of Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
Courtney Asztalos of Jane Jane Pollock: And we watched an episode, it was an episode with Pee Wee’s little friends – his little kid friends that come over, and he was showing them the dinosaur hole.
MA: Yeah, Pee Wee Herman, in his house, he has a mouse hole, which basically turns into stop motion animation Claymation and it’s this dinosaur family who do really strange things.
CA: I feel like it was a metaphor for looking into a small place and seeing something really beautiful.
MA: Courtney’s mom heard the song and was like, “is that an ear hole into Michael’s brain?” But I wasn’t really that conceptual about it.
“Gloomy”
MA: Maybe we’ll get in trouble because we got a UPC code and said otherwise, but it’s a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover.
CA: But it’s not exactly a cover.
MA: I’d have to admit that the lyrics are extracted from…but not all of them. It was a really inspiring song for me at one time.
SubAp!: Why inspiring?
MA: Lyrically. It was really daring and almost, in a sense, mysterious. If someone were to ask me, “What is that song exactly about?” I wouldn’t know how to verbalize it. To me, some of the lyrics really make sense.
SubAp! There’s a foreboding feel in them – but people really like it.
MA: Strange enough. I’ve been doing that song for maybe four years.
“Stuck On A Highway Island”
CA: It’s the result of a road trip Michael and I took to Miami with our very dear friends who have a Eurovan. We had a strange, like, we drove from Tallahassee to Miami and to me, it was basically Florida. It’s a metaphor in some sense. I’m very conscious of it now because we’ve been driving all around Florida but Florida basically is being stuck on a highway island to some extent. It was just, also, the song is about control within relationships, to some degree.
MA: We were traveling with a dog, which was in a cage, and there was a time when I felt kinda bad for the dog in the cage, traveling – we were all un-caged and enjoying the trip and I was looking at it and the dog looked extremely sad and the dog began to whimper and…
CA: The owner of the dog basically, was like, “Do not look at the dog, do not stare at her, do not engage the dog.” It’s also kind of a metaphor for the relationship as well.
MA: And maybe a dark area we could go is we saw this – on a highway island rest stop – a cat with broken limbs, kind of stuck there.
CA: On the same road trip and the couple we were with, they were like, “There’s nothing we can do about this cat.”
MA: It was the same road trip that the song was born out of.
SubAp!: How did you end up with this couple?
CA: They’re like our other parents – we love them.
MA: They take care of us, feed us really well.
CA: They inspire us – they’re muses. They both have inspired multiple projects, like over decades. Pretty famous photographers, pretty famous writers – this couple inspires.
MA: They know cinema, art in general, and have turned us onto a lot.
CA: We love them.
MA: But then they have problems like everybody else.
“Mystic Lurch”
MA: Let’s skip it, let’s leave it mystic!

Jane Jane Pollock play Fubar as a part of the Antiwarpt Music Festival on July 30, 2011./Photo via: Zachary Tomlinson
“Punching Jackie”
MA: Ah, Punching Jackie.
SubAp: It seems to be the most recognizable, Pixies-like track.
MA: Punching Jackie? That’s a compliment, actually – I’m a huge fan of The Pixies. I had a chance to meet Frank Black and talk with him for a bit.
CA: Michael just went up to his trailer.
MA: Yeah, I walked up to his trailer when he was on a Frank Black and the Catholics tour.
SubAp!: How many years ago?
MA: I’d have to say that was 2007 or 2008. It was incredible.
CA: About the song, we can’t really get into the story about it because it could get sticky. But I think the words really ring true and if you relate to them…
MA: Fuck it, it’s –
CA: No.
MA: No?
CA: Let’s leave it. It’s just a mystery. We’ve told other stories that we wouldn’t want to get mixed up with how we’ve told the story.
SubAp! Leave it a mystery?
CA: Yeah.
MA: This is kind of ambiguous – I’ll leave it ambiguous.
CA: I’ll just have to say that this song, above all other songs, was one of the best forms of therapy I’ve ever had in writing a song and every time I sing it, it makes me feel a really wonderful sense of release about the situation it was written about.
MA: It’s friends growing apart from each other, friends growing indifferent, and I feel like it was spawned from that.
“Spooky Hand Saloon”
MA: Danny (guitarist) wrote that song and that’s his thing, man. He belongs in a saloon, playing the piano in a smoky bar in the 1920s
“Sore Throat”
MA: I’m an asthmatic baby and I get sick often. A sore throat is something I’ve grown to despise, I guess. It’s something I made and recorded solely by myself while I was sick and I think that it hopefully sounds like that.
“Fleas”
CA: We have a lot of cats at our trailer.
MA: We have a lot of feral cats. Currently, we have…
CA: Ishtar, Krycek, Garfield, Booth, Nick, Tuft, Ginger.
SubAp!: Did you go out and get them or did they come to you?
MA: No, it was something that was happening to the place. Cats were there. Even one of the deciding factors of moving there.
CA: They were just waiting outside our trailer for us.
MA: It’s kind of a chant for the cats that have been infested with fleas, have chewed them out of their body, digested them, and which turn into heartworms, tapeworms – I’m not even too sure how to exactly say that. But it’s a song for them, in a strange sense. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that.
“Blister”
MA: It stemmed from a bass line that Heather Lee Smith, the bass player-vocalist… I love her, man. She was the first member of this project before it started spawning. She wrote this bass line when she was learning bass guitar and I fell in love with it – it’s something we worked around that. I’m not even too sure why it’s called blister – I think we have sections within the song that sound like a blister.
“Rusty Test Tube”
CA: My mom gave Michael a Stylophone for some holiday. We were messing around with it and made loops. We had just gotten a really dusty, weird amplifier – we were playing with it and it was an experiment loop.
MA: Yeah, experiment loop.


(Video via YouTube user Jiblitdupree)
“Poor Pretty Jane”
MA: Lyrically, a true story and also, inspired by Skip James who is, duh, you know. The lyrics I stole from him were, “never missed my water till my well run dry – didn’t miss Crow Jane till the day she died.” We live in a trailer that’s run on well water and, for some reason or another; the well ran dry – literally. And we didn’t have water for a week and a half. And it wasn’t that big of a deal. I mean, it was terrible – we couldn’t take showers and we ended up having to buy gallons of water.
CA: And we used our kiddy pool to collect rainwater.
MA: To flush the toilet we had to fill the commode up with water every time we did it. The song is spawned from that experience.
CA: And also, working with what you have. We live there because we’re dedicated to our art and it’s the best place to just be creatively free and the best environment and, sometimes, when all other things fail you have what you’ve built.
MA: I’m kind of a city boy, born in New York, raised in Miami. It was a place for solitude. It’s in Thomasville, Georgia, the southernmost place in Georgia.
SubAp!: Is it in a field?
MA: Yeah, it’s on an old… I’m at a loss for words.
CA: Pine trees, cornfields, blackberry bushes, and our landlord is mystic.
MA: I found it in a really obscure listing in a local ad. I was driving through Georgia and I was like, “I could do this, I could live here.” And the ad was, “cheap rent in the woods.” There were misspellings in the ad.
SubAp!: That’s probably the only time that kind of ad hasn’t ended in a horror film.
MA: It totally could have – I think he thought I was strange at first.
CA: I don’t think Michael would mind that though – he loves horror movies.
SubAp! I guess having Leatherface as a landlord could be pretty cool.
MA: (laughter) Totally.
“Pig and Spider”
CA: When I was seven years old I was in a theatre camp and I was in a VHS, I have a VHS of the performance – I was Charlotte and I performed with this older woman who had Down syndrome; we just recently watched it.
MA: It was spawned off of that.
CA: It was a special video. I had totally forgotten about it.
MA: And for me, in the cheesiest, most campy way possible, it was also a love letter to Courtney. It’s that too.
“Of Holy Colors”
MA: One of the most collective pieces of work on this album. We rarely kind of get together. Usually, someone has a pretty structured song and builds off of it from there – or has parts. Of Holy Colors was something that was completely made with the whole group. And The Church of Holy Colors is an amazing venue in Gainesville, Florida. It’s an amazing collective of artists, incredible inspiring collective – we played a couple shows there.
CA: It was actually the first show we played with me, Heather, Michael, and Danny.
MA: It’s an homage to that – as well as other things.
CA: And Danny wrote music for it – the guitar part, the beautiful composition. Heather and I basically worked out the words and Michael added the amazing other stuff.
The artwork of this release – depicting three gargoyle-like toys looming atop a white piano – as is the music of Jane Jane Pollock, is both starkly intimate and alluding. Michael and Courtney would elaborate:
CA: The front cover, basically, this is in our house. This is really just how it is.
MA: This is a corner in our house and this piano is definitely on the album, this toy keyboard that I’ve had for awhile. And these Boglins (the toys atop the piano) are this strange, puppet, latex toy that was distributed within the early eighties. It was something I wasn’t allowed to buy as a kid but I found them at yard sales and shops throughout the years, because I’m kind of a thrift junkie – we all are.
CA: We thought this was fitting because this is in our house and this is how the album is to me, at least.
The album insert features the five artists posed together, wearing ghoulish masks.
CA: This speaks for itself.
MA: On a funny note – this might piss some people off – it was taken in Wal-Mart.
CA: But then Michael water colored it.
MA: I scanned it black and white and I painted it.
On the backside of the album, above the track list, is Jane Jane Pollock, spelled out in a strange, eclectic text. Courtney would delve into its becoming:
CA: I found these old typography magazines from the 70s, and this was some student’s design, then I scanned them and we water colored them. I feel like taking things from the past and putting new life into them.
SubAp!: Hauntology?
MA: Absolutely – I think that’s the music we make, too. - Suburban Apologist