“This is all so fleeting”: Chat Pile talk Empathy, Success, and Upcoming Projects

When Stin (bass) spoke with Soundsphere in June 2024, the band were preparing for a highly-anticipated set at Outbreak Festival. Now, in the run-up to a 3 month tour spanning North America and Europe, Soundsphere is joined by Luther Manhole (guitar) and Raygun Busch (vocals).  Contrary to his name, Manhole joins the Zoom call in what looks like a cozy home studio. Then comes Busch, right on time, adjusting his vertical iPhone frame as he moves from one room to another.

While Cap’n Ron (drums) remains MIA, Stin is busy mixing and mastering the band’s upcoming collaborative project. As anticipated, there’s a stark contrast between band and sound. Both Manhole and Busch emanate a conversation-between-friends dynamic that, if I were to stereotype, speaks to a Midwestern friendliness.  Based in Oklahoma City, the band formed out of a “bad movie night.” The quartet had previously played in separate bands across OKC’s small independent scene, but Chat Pile is the first to gain major success. The band’s relationship with Oklahoma is a complicated one; over the decades, it has grounded and grinded them in simultaneity.  Manhole: “Some people have to stay, right? A lot of people relate to this. You live in a place that sucks but you also kinda love it.” For a band whose identity is centred around Oklahoma, particularly the things about it which “suck”, love manifests in curious ways. Take, for example, their striking record sleeves; signifiers of authority - detention centres obscured by pylons, a colossal Christian cross overlooking a retail park - provide psychogeographical insights into America’s ‘Bible Belt’.

Chat Pile’s music seeks to unearth the darker histories beneath these conservative landscapes, scoring ideological resistance under a brutal concoction of noise rock and sludge metal.  Lyrically, Busch explores the breakdown of the social contract, its trickle-down effects on the average citizen. Systemic failures are often elaborated through gruesome depictions of the human body, packaging the quotidian violence of American life  - both symbolic and physical - into microscopic case studies.  It’s impossible to talk about the band’s style and purpose without referring to cinema, Busch being a devout cinephile. One of his ‘truth about life’ films, Killer of Sheep (1979), expresses a similar sentiment in relation to Black life and its fungibility. Systems of racism, exploitation, and cultural displacement, as inherent to America as cowboys and milkshakes, are laid bare in relation to burgeoning Black fatalism.  Prominent cinematic influences also include Mike Leigh, forgotten B-Movies, and of course, horror cinema. With Killer of Sheep, it’s clear how, exactly, Chat Pile has transposed similar ideas into sonic form. The role of social masking is one such idea, all mainline projects - excluding This Dungeon Earth (2019) - including a mask-related song. “It’s a word I like,” Busch confirms, “a motif I enjoy, and it has many meanings - societal masks, literal masks, horror masks.”

More here: https://www.soundspheremag.com/spotlight/this-is-all-so-fleeting-chat-pile-talk-empathy-success-and-upcoming-projects/