Chat Pile "Cool World Tour West"
Great American Music Hall
∙
San Francisco
Sunday, February 23 at 7:30 pm PST
Serves Food
Rock
Nightclub
Concert Venue
Sunday, February 23 at 7:30 pm PST
Serves Food
Rock
Nightclub
Concert Venue
Entry Options
Details
Artists
Description
On sale Friday, 9/27 at 10am !
$25 ADV | $29 DOOR
Doors 6:30 pm | Show 7:30 pm
CHAT PILE
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Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music ofOklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift – a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.
Besides being the name of a largely forgotten (and panned) 90s film, Cool World makes for an apt title of Chat Pile’s sophomore full-length record. In the context of a Chat Pile record, the words are steeped in a grim double entendre that not only evokes imagery of a dying planet but a progression from the band’s previous work, moving the scope of its depiction of modern malaise from just “God’s country” to the entirety of humankind. “Cool World covers similar themes to our last album, except now exploded from a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another,”says vocalist Raygun Busch.
Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks. “While we wanted our follow-up to God’s Country to still capture the immediate, uncompromising essence of Chat Pile, we also knew that with Cool World, we’d want to stretch the definition of our “sound” to reflect our tastes beyond just noise rock territory,” reflects bassist Stin. “Now that we had some form of creative comfort zones in place after hitting that milestone of putting out a full-length record, album #2 felt like the perfect opportunity to challenge those limits.” Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg of Uniform(Algiers, Drab Majesty, Metz) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.
The proverbial thread tying all of the experimentation on Cool World together is the depth to which Chat Pile dissects the album’s theme of violence. Whether it be the cycle of creating and passively consuming literal and figurative violence on sister tracks “Camcorder” and“Tape”, the diminishment of crimes against humanity by way of foreign policy and colonialism on “Shame”, or the mental anguish of hopelessness on “The New World”, CoolWorld is an apocalyptically bleak record. Sure, Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”; what Chat Pile depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In
film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.
“If I had to describe the album in one sentence,” explains Busch, “It’s hard not to borrow fromVoltaire, so I won’t resist – Cool World is about the price at which we eat sugar in America.”
Cool World will be released via The Flenser on October 11, 2024
Chat Pile is:
Raygun Busch - VocalsLuther Manhole - GuitarStin - Bass
Cap’n Ron - Drums
NIGHTOSPHERE
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“Like a nocturnal highway stretched out between Midwest cities, Nightosphere exists in an expansive, open realm marked by subtle changes in landscape and punctuated by sudden bursts of noisy, explosive urgency. This vitality is powered by Brittany and Claire, who exchange guitar/vocal and bass duties throughout live performance, and Hop, who looms powerfully over the drumkit. Through hypnotic compositions, the Kansas City-based trio weaves together the structures and sounds of slowcore, post-hardcore, and shoegaze into a vast emotional tapestry. With their dynamic range and meter changes, Nightosphere has drawn comparisons to a diverse range of acts, including Big Brave, Unwound, Portishead, Wednesday, and Emma Ruth Rundle.
Nightosphere formed in early 2022 and quickly got to work contributing to the lively Kansas City scene. They toured the Midwest twice that same year, in August and October, strings of performances they prepared for by releasing the singles Foxfire and Faim Dévorante. Together with Flooding and Abandoncy, Nightosphere put out a 3-Way Split EP in February of 2023. This year also marked the group’s full-length debut, Katabasis, which came out in April. The album was recently featured on Destroy//Exist’s 2023 Albums of the Year List and cited by Chat Pile as one of their 10 Favorite Albums of 2023. In September, they headlined an East Coast tour and subsequently supported Chat Pile and Nerver on their 2023 US tour. Nightosphere has also shared stages with the likes of They are Gutting a Body of Water, Explosions in the Sky, Stuck, Knifeplay, and Horse Jumper of Love.” - Nathaniel Perkins
Gouge Away
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