Let me start right after I released the Noise Tank (lovesyou) ep. I was living in Detroit’s Boydell building. It’s basically the first Dodge motor plant, and these skeezy people opened a pizza restaurant and a strip club on the ground floor, and rented out the other floors as cheap loft space. So I had basically half a story of a 110 year old former car plant to myself and my roommates and I fucking loved this place. We dubbed it "the Bunker". I threw a lot of great parties, recorded a lot of music, and had a lot of fun here. Check out these pictures.
But everything sort of fell apart towards the end. I decided to move to San Francisco cause the school I was going to began sucking real bad and a lot of my friends had already moved away. During the last 12 months or so in Detroit, like everything unraveled and barely got anything done other than just staying afloat. One of the major catastrophes was with the plumbing at the bunker. There were I think 5 stories above where we were, and all except for one were uninhabited and all locked up. What began happening is that somehow somewhere the sewage began backing up into the drains above us. So basically the bathtubs above us began filling up with raw untreated Detroit sewage and then began spilling over. Now of course with the age of this building, everything but the outside walls were wood, so where sewage fell, is exactly where it began dripping down from floor to floor. So me and my roommates were running around trying to cover records and my equipment and everything with plastic as its literally raining sewage everywhere. I know what you’re thinking “well shit happens lol”. Kind of sort of, but this wasn’t the first time. This would happen every few months with increasing severity. The slumlords refused to do anything about it. They wouldn’t hire a plumber, they wouldn’t clean it up, nothing. To illustrate how bad it was, we had all these ceiling fans, and when you turned them on, the shit that has dribbled down to the top of the blades would fly everywhere. The shit literally hit the fan. Like this is not the most ideal environment to write music and run a label and make art.
This is a pretty cool little documentary XLR8R did on Detroit Ghettotech (or booty). I was basically born and raised on this stuff. It’s pretty much the coolest music in the world. Every Friday and Saturday night in Detroit this is THE sound of the city, and its been like that since I can remember. Like almost every big cultural thing from Detroit, its a way of life there, but almost nobody anywhere else knows anything about it. …except I heard its getting popular in France now or something. Hey also happy 4th of July.
