UNSANE – Survival Music
Words by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Monday 12th December 2022
Photos by: Cody Cowan
“They put me up against a wall and held a knife to my throat…”
Harsh music forged in the crucible of violence and decay that was New York in the 80s, UNSANE’s acidic noise-rock is not for the faint of heart. Neither is their album art, for that matter. Combining blues-tinged riffs with vocals that sound like a guy having a nervous breakdown in a wind tunnel, they are an absolute force of nature, and were a crucial part of the soundtrack for this writer during the darkest years of my life. Dark, harsh and bloody, this is music for the soul. The rejuvenated three-piece has been touring a special set of their earliest material, and with an Australian tour planned for the back half of 2023, frontman Chris Spencer spoke to SENSE from his home in California about crime scene cover art and surviving street violence.
I was just tipped off that you are working on returning to Australia. What can you tell me about that?
Yeah, it’s looking like in September we’re flying [in], and then Melbourne, Frankston – where I’ve never been – Sydney and Brisbane, and then Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. So we’ll see!
I became a huge fan of yours about four years ago … It’s good to have you back. Can you see yourselves recording new music?
Yeah. Right now I’m doing it with my friend John and Cooper, who are super old friends of mine. I’ve known Cooper from New York since he was a teenager and I think I was twenty-one, twenty-two. We’ve been doing the early shit, because our manager, Todd, got all the rights to all the shit that the band has ever done back to me, so we’ve been reissuing the early stuff chronologically, one record at a time. We did this one record that never came out. We had a test pressing, but then the guy who was going to put it out had a huge coke habit and disappeared right after the test pressing showed up. So that never came out, but then we found it and re-released and put it out, and just a few months ago did the self-titled. So me and my friend John and Coop have been doing all the earliest shit. But we’re looking at doing … the way shit is released these days, a lot of stuff is done on the internet with just singles, so what we’re thinking about doing is doing sort of a boxed set of 7”, and that way there will be more artwork. Every 7” gets a different cover and will get a different treatment, and then eventually, once the whole package is done, then maybe possibly it would come out on a 12” as a new record. But we would approach it in a different way, where we sort of do A-side/B-side for everything, and then just build those up until we have ten, twelve songs.
The infamous cover art of the guy on the train tracks …
Yeah, that was … [The photographer] was a police photographer. He was a friend of Pete’s, our bass player at the time … Pete would just get these old school 4x6 prints of crazy crap that the guy shot, so when we got the chance to do our own artwork … [laughs] we just picked the one that we thought was one of the craziest. And that guy was pushed on the tracks by a kid, by the way.
Pictured: The cover art for UNSANE’s debut album / The new lineup onstage
Fuck … did you get much pushback from that cover?
At the time, no. Now, social media totally censors us. [Laughs] We actually had to put a little block over the guy’s head and neck that says “CENSORED” … because every time we would try and advertise anything, they would just block it out, you know. Things have really changed, you know? The internet has really homogenised a lot of art, you know?
I wonder if NAILBOMB’s Point Blank … if that cover would even be allowed these days.
[Laughs] Oh yeah! I know, I know. Well, ours isn’t! They’ll let it sort of skate by with a blurry image that says “unviewable media” or something like that. They just censor it.
The band’s sound is utterly unique … I realised that what I love about your sound is also what I love about grindcore, and it hit me that some of UNSANE’s songs sound like grindcore played at quarter-speed …
Wow. I’ve never thought of it that way! [Laughs]
What are some of the influences that shaped it? You guys came out of New York in the 80s.
Yeah, New York in like ’88. I mean, for me, a lot of it was just reflective of my neighbourhood. I grew up, my mother was in a bluegrass band, so I learned guitar from bluegrass and blues and stuff like that, but also noise stuff. There were influences like FLIPPER or STOOGES or noisy crap, but a lot of it, really, was that claustrophobic place I lived with hyper-violence everywhere and burnt-out cars on our block. Just crazy. It was really a reflection of the place, and our lifestyle, more than any sort “Oh, we’re going to be like this band.” We don’t really care about that … If we write something and it reminds us of someone else, we immediately trash it. We don’t use it. [Laughs]
What neighbourhood did you grow up in in New York?
I didn’t grow up there. I grew up upstate in Rochester, and then San Francisco for a period of time, but I was living, when I was a teenager until I was much older, in the lower-east side of Manhattan.
The impression that I get is that New York was an exceptionally violent place in the 70s and 80s. Apparently it improved a lot throughout the 90s.
Yeah, Giuliani really cleaned it up. Giuliani really enforced the iron fist on the neighbourhood, and there were suddenly cops everywhere, and you could no longer drink beer out of a paper bag, with a paper bag covering the bottle. Yeah, in the 80s and part of the early 90s there was, like, heroin and cocaine being sold on the street all over the place, people getting robbed, crazy crap going on all the time. It was really super lawless in the late 80s.
Did you get mugged often?
I think like, four, five times? [Laughs] One time, me and my girlfriend were coming home after she got off work, and we were walking down Avenue B, and these three guys, I could see them coming towards us from across the street, and I told her, “Run!” We were half-a-block from our apartment. But I had just gotten off a tour in Canada, and all I had was loonies – all I had was Canadian dollars on me. They put me up against a wall and held a knife to my throat, and said “Give me all your money!” And I said, “Go ahead, you can have it … but it’s Canadian dollars and that’s all I have.” It was pretty violent. You had to kind of be ready for whatever, you know?
Your singing is incredibly intense and emotive. To what extent do you think music has been a form of therapy for you?
Oh completely. Catharsis … it’s just like a catharsis, especially playing live consistently. I just got off a five-week tour, that was like thirty-five shows in five-and-a-half weeks … by the end … I’m pretty good at conserving my voice, but it’s a very good thing, especially early on, I think. So much sort of existential frustration, especially being in a super-violent neighbourhood in New York, and I was a total drug addict when I was much younger and stuff like that … life frustration … It is completely cathartic, and a release of a lot of the crap that is going on inside. So it’s really helped. I mean, I think now, it’s made me a much less frustrated person, you know? To be able to express myself that way regularly.
UNSANE tour Australia in 2023. Dates to be announced soon.
