Photo Credit: Allysa Defatte
Many musicians marvel when their work is adapted for movie use, but few ever think about reversing that process to correlate music and film. Experimental noise-rap group Guerrilla Ghost, however, took that approach when it came to naming the tracks on their most recent effort, The Trumaine EP. Each of the release’s five songs are named for famed actor Wesley Snipes in one of his most notorious roles, and vocalist Bad Graphics Ghost has a delivery that channels the energy of the character’s presence on screen.
“When I was a kid, Wesley Snipes was one of the primary actors in a lot of the movies we watched in our household, me and my dad” recalls Bad Graphics Ghost. “As I got older, I wanted to create a concept of things that have happened to me in my life personally and try to transpose them into a Wesley Snipes film. On the flipside, I also thought it would be something kind of silly to get people to engage with the record. Nobody’s really done a Patrick Swayze EP or anything like that.”
Guerrilla Ghost have been making tracks together as early as 2017, often combining the elements of dubstep, noise, screamo and hip hop in a blend that shouldn’t fit together as well as it does. Much of their lyrical subject matter has been a reaction to a political climate that only grew to be more chaotic since their inception. It’s fitting that the sonic atmosphere of their tracks have the same dystopian, anarchic qualities of the world around them over the past four years. That ethos hasn’t changed on this record, however, and likely won’t, even with a change in political discourse in America.
“We’re actually currently writing a new full-length that should hopefully be done by the end of the year” said Bad Graphics Ghost. “We’re sitting on a wealth of material right now. As long as politicians keep politicking and celebrities keep being celebs, we’re never going to run out of material.”
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To go with the release of the EP, as has been customary with many projects on producer Tron Jovi’s label, Triple Eye Industries, Guerrilla Ghost have created a limited edition 12-inch lathe cut of the EP. A limited number of the 27 total copies produced remain up for sale. It’s a process that has made a band with an already unique sound stand out even more throughout their releases.
“We went to Little Elephant for the lathe cut, and they’re the only place I’ve found that can do cuts in stereo” said Tron Jovi. “With this record, it was timed out to be just over 21 minutes, so we could max out the entire side of a record. Francisco (Ramirez) who runs Triple Eye with Mark (Sheppard) and I is a screen printer, so we have that in our arsenal. I took a stab at designing it, but I told him to do his thing. He came up with this Black Sabbath-esque vertigo pattern that glows in the dark.”
You can order a physical copy of The Trumaine EP on Guerrilla Ghost’s Bandcamp page while supplies last.
