Cult and Culture

David Scott Stone (Melvins, Unwound, LCD Soundsystem) guests on new 'Cult & Culture' podcast (listen)

Justin Pearson (The Locust, Retox, Dead Cross, Head Wound City, etc) and his Planet B bandmate Luke Henshaw‘s Cult & Culture podcast is back with a new episode, this time featuring David Scott Stone. The highly prolific Stone (aka Sir DSS) has worked with Justin Pearson in The Locust, and he’s also done a lot of work both live and in studio with the Melvins (Dale Crover has called him “the Eno of our band”), was a live member of LCD Soundsystem for the This Is Happening tour, and has also worked with Unwound, Jello Biafra, Mike Patton, Joe Lally (Fugazi), No Age, and more. If you’re unfamiliar, this 2008 LA Weekly article is a good primer:

A master of musical cross-pollination, Stone’s longest tenure thus far has been with Northwest-bred masters of density the Melvins, with whom he started working in the 1990s doing “noise and soundscape things with bowed cymbals, contact mikes, wire, oscillators and circuit bent stuff” on their albums Stag, Honky, Hostile Ambient Takeover and Pigs of the Roman Empire, a collaboration with veteran noise artist Lustmord. He was asked to tour with the L.A. band by lead singer Buzz Osborne on a ferry back from Alcatraz on New Year’s Day 2000. Stone agreed, and traveled with them for a few years. He then played bass with the group from 2004 to 2006.

While touring with the Melvins, Stone began creating his own instruments. “Buzz would have me play before the rest of the guys, to get the audience riled up for the big drop “D” string,” he explains. “It was a three-month tour, so every night I would try to find different things around the club or in the town to play. Since I used contact mikes with a huge amp, I could ‘play’ and get to feedback, everything from paper cups and tennis shoes to beer bottles. One Easter in Ohio, I played an unused toilet bowl cleaner. From there, I got an idea of what did and didn’t work.”

Upon returning from Unwound’s last tour in 2001, Stone set up a series of solo shows in order to “break free from the bands I’d played with. This was before I got really into electronics. I had this giant PA, and I featured all homemade, electro-acoustic instruments.

[…] Stone credits Jim Smith, captain of the Smell (“a magical place”) as the man with “the only place in L.A. that would do performances like [mine]. The thanks I have for Jim — an Aries, of course — for allowing the kids to experiment, and to learn how to connect with people while experimenting … if it weren’t for Jim, it’d be the Silversun Pickups representing L.A. music.”

For this podcast, Stone, Pearson, and Henshaw “discuss anything from old memories of Southern California punk scenes to expanding musical futures and searching for sincerity in art.” The episode premieres right here: