An Interview with: AIDS Wolf

When interviewing Chloe Lum from AIDS Wolf, I refused to ask the probably all-too-common (and very stupid) question about how they decided on the band's name. It seemed just too obvious and a pure distraction from the interesting music and amazingly creative visual art this band is producing.

Last year AIDS Wolf released Cities of Glass on Skingraft. You did a bunch of touring. But what are you up to now? What are the plans for 09?
[W]e just got home from tour and are resting up. Myles is on tour with his solo project, Blue Lions...once [he's] back from Europe the plan is to hunker down in the bunker, work on new material, and record our sides for some split 7"s and a split 12" with our buddies from Vancouver, Shearing Pinx.

You guys played shows in Israel last year! That doesn't seem a common tour stop for most bands; how did those shows come about?
Our Israeli hookup was Monotonix. After we toured together they kept insisting we travel to Israel; we kind of dismissed it as pure fantasy, 'cause who the hell tours Israel? Then once our European tour started coming together their booking agent, Juval, got in touch with us, and before we knew it we were booking flights from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv.

What's the reception to a band like AIDS Wolf over there?
The shows in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were pretty much normal shows, not unlike what we'd get anywhere on the east coast. Haifa was strange with pretty much no one there in a giant club, and playing on a kibbutz was totally bizarre.

I know the live shows I've seen a lot of wild audiences at your shows here in New York. Have you ever been in a situation where the crowd (or one member in particular) gets a little TOO out of control? Please feel free to go into detail about it.
There was a Brooklyn show where I had to dole out a little kick to the gentleman who was pulling at my legs. I like a lil' rowdy, but woe is he who lacks manners.

Of course, you also have the haters. I remember a message that you posted to your website from someone who called the band "a fucked up, garbled mess of shit" and "the musical equivalent of someone jabbing sharp rocks into my ears." I know it was meant as an insult, but the description also made the band sound really appealing in an odd sort of way. I'm not even sure if I have a question here. I guess, do you ever wonder what these people are expecting? I'd like to think there should be enough clues that suggest what AIDS Wolf sound like even before listening (like being signed to Skingraft or, heck, even just having a name like AIDS Wolf).
Of course I wonder what they are expecting, right before I wonder how little they must have to do in a day if they are going to get into a huff to write a band they don't like an aggressive email. To me, it's just plain pathetic to let music you don't like, that is incidentally pretty easy to avoid, get that under your skin. Why these delicate flowers even listen to us in the first place is beyond my understanding.

On that note, was anything ever resolved with that whole BARR incident?
Funny you should mention that. I was actually just contacted by some of my New York crew telling me he had done another "art project" about our band name and his inner demons about it.

Providing moisture for other people's dried up fountains of creativity since '04.

This band has been attracting various cranks and insaniacs, who wish (for whatever reason) to drag us into their bizarre one sided psychodramas, since day one. I'm not willing to engage or enter in their drama, especially not when it's passive aggressive.

Your day job (if you want to call it that) is a design studio (that's probably not the correct term for that either) called Seripop. I know in the past you've said it's not a "real" job, but tell us about it anyway. For a long time, the only thing hanging up on my wall was a show poster you guys designed.
With Seripop we've done design, illustration, printmaking, teaching, murals and book art. These days we've been working on modular sculptural installation art that takes elements of our design and printmaking processes and turns them into large scale utopian cityscapes (we've done some that were 14 feet high and 55 feet wide). We have a few gallery shows of this working coming up this summer and fall in Canada and the UK, so we are knee deep in production right now.

We're also working on a book of drawings for Soundscreen design as well as two new series of art prints. We have a new print that we did on our recent residency in Aberdeen being presented at the Glasgow art fair this weekend and the shirts we did for Soundscreen are now up for pre-order.

Oh, and tell me a bit about Thee Outernet!
Thee Outernet is a blog loosely about noise rock that I recently started with some friends. It came about during a visit from my buddy Mark. We nerded out on records for several days straight, and too often came to the conclusion that much of the music we liked didn't really get covered much and when it did it would often be by people who didn't understand the context. Thus Thee Outernet, a blog by hardcore record nerds who like weird sounds.