Turf 'N' Turf (Nov. 2020)

 

RRX: Give us some background on your stage name; I know you go by Snail and that your very unique setup is called “the noise machine.”

KV: That’s from my friends up in Greenwich, I’m good friends with the band Eastbound Jesus, I was their roadie for about five years. My last name is Vail so they just call me Vail the Snail, or just Snail and that’s really all there is to it. Turf ‘N’ Turf is also kind of dumb (laughs). The main thing is, when I was a kid, I saw the Christmas movie “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” have you ever seen it?

RRX: no actually.

KV: It’s about a guy in California and he’s trying to get back to New York; he’s been in college and hasn’t been home very often and his father bribes him by saying he can have a car if he comes back. It’s a whole zany journey, and there’s a scene where he goes into a steakhouse that’s called Turf ‘N’ Turf and I remember being a kid and not getting it but my uncle bursting into laughter, and it just stuck with me. There’s a band that I really like from Australia that made weird grungy punk in the 80’s called Grong Grong; I was like: “They have a stupid name, I should have a name like that with the same word repeated.”

RRX: So tell me a bit about the inception of the box, or the “Noise Machine” as you’ve branded it.

KV: It was a gradual thing. I tried for years, upwards of ten years, to put a band together. I would jam with people and it was cool, but I never had something where we could play live. I came here to Albany, I was near Utica before, and I put flyers up about a band but apparently it was just too bonkers for anyone to respond to. And all I wanted then was to get a band together. I don’t know when it was, but I watched the Blue Brothers and saw the scene where they’re in the chicken cage and I always thought it was great; and I had the thought about how cool it would be to have a band whose schtick is playing behind a collapsible chicken wire wall in the front of the stage. I was thinking about how cool it’d be to have this noisy, bluesy band and just look ridiculous behind this chicken wire cage. And I just never really got anything with the band, so I just said: “Well dammit fine, I’ll just be in a cage by myself!”

RRX: (laughs) Yeah, Albany can be tough with finding like-minded people sometimes.

KV: It was probably just too niche. But anyway, the cage was originally just going to be a prop but I mentioned it to my friend who’s a drummer and he was saying: “Dude that chicken wire idea is awesome, you should hang crazy shit from it and make the floor a stomp box, dude you can do anything with that!” So I had input from friends all over the place, and it hasn’t all been me. It’s been mostly me building it, and me conceptualizing but also a lot of taking ideas that people throw at me after each show. 

RRX: And thinking back to Blues Brothers, it even comes with a built in defense against stuff getting thrown at you. I’m hoping you’ve never had beer bottles thrown at you though (laughs).

KV: Oh, no I have. The thing is that it seems like it would protect me, but it just sort encourages some people to throw shit at me. Inside any venue it’s been pretty cool, but I’ve played with my friends in Eastbound Jesus at their festival for like, three years now. There’s this one guy who’s come the last two years, who recognized what movie I got the idea from and he started it: He crushed up a can and chucked it at the cage, and it turned into this little game of a bunch of people throwing cans at the cage. At first I was like “Well that’s pretty annoying,” but I also thought “I kind of asked for this, so it’s fine.” But then the next year it got a little worse. I was the second to last band on, everyone was hammered and they started throwing things; it wasn’t just empty cans now, it was a lot of half-full cans and cups of beer. At one point an entire freaking cooler got thrown. 

RXX: That sounds like it would also destroy your equipment!

KV: I was kind of worried about that. When the cooler came up, and I think it still had ice in it, I was kind of like: “Guys I know this looks like a piece of shit, but it’s my piece of shit! Cut it out! I worked really hard on this terrible looking thing.” I didn’t say that, but my mic got knocked over and all I said when I got it back was: “Don’t be a fucking asshole,” and I just kept playing. It sucked, but I rolled with it. 

RRX: The setup looks really good from the two times I’ve seen it, what was the building process like?

KV: My friends in Greenwich have been kind enough to let me use their wood-working set up where they build a bunch of nice furniture during the day. I had a bunch of scrap wood at my disposal and all their tools as well; they asked me for a 12-pack of soda a month for like, rent, so it was cool. It was a lot of brainstorming what was gonna work and wouldn’t. In the beginning I was only playing that festival which was one show a year, so it was an idea of: “What am I gonna do this year?” But now that I’ve been playing other shows out it was more like: “I gotta make this more efficient.” 

RRX: I was curious about how the setup actually works. I know you have your stacks, do you just run all the wires through a port in the back of the box?

KV: The cage is actually just three-sided, there’s no back. I just have that banner that disguises that. But yeah, I run the wires through the back and the sides and I have a toolbox with one pedal mounted on the side and that’s where all the wires and stuff run to. I found that had to be done, I had two pedals on the floor before and I was tripping over everything the whole time.

RRX: Let’s talk about the music a bit too. Earlier you said “bluesy” and I was picking that up as well, your stuff comes across as an intense mix of blues and metal and maybe a touch of stoner metal, would you say that’s accurate?

KV: Well, I would say that there’s a lot of stoner metal that I love and there’s a ton of bands that have influenced me but I mostly listen to that genre for fun and not necessarily as an influence. When I’m coming up with stuff, I’m not usually trying to sound like some sludge band or any of that. Some people maybe think of it as very stoner influenced, but I think I’m just influenced by the same stuff the stoner bands are influenced by. 

RRX: Let’s talk about your stacks and how you get your sound. I’ve seen some Orange stacks in pictures before, what goes into getting your sound?

KV: So the setup now, they’re two 3x15 custom bass cabinets, and then I have a Univox head on one as like, a tube amp and then a custom head on the other with built in reverb. So the one head is the reverb sound and the other is for the distortion. When I first started I just had an Orange amp, and it wasn’t extremely expensive. Before the Orange amp I just had a little crate amp that I broke playing a bass through. So I played guitar through a broken amp and thought it sounded great! I was trying to find a new amp at the store, and I thought everything else sounded awful and the people there were like: “You broke your amp, idiot, that’s why it sounds like that.” But anyway, Orange was the only thing that came close to that sound. Are you familiar with Love of Fuzz over in Troy? 

RRX: I’m not.

KV: Oh, it’s great, my buddy TJ runs it and he just sells vintage amps, guitars and it’s awesome. He was really helpful with me when I was trying to build my sound up from the Orange amp; he knew which directions to go in, and sort of steered me towards the less expensive side of things while maintaining a distinct sound. The stuff TJ helped me find also sort of looked like junk, which was great, because that is the sort of aesthetic I’m going for. 

RRX: I was also going to ask if you rely mostly on the amps, or if you use a lot of pedals but it seems you’ve answered that to an extent. 

KV: Yeah, I had two pedals at one time when I first got the Univox because it didn’t have reverb and I didn’t have the other head yet. But yeah I don’t really use pedals, I just have one that I use to split the signal between the two stacks. I like to let the amps do the work. I feel like a lot of punk bands never really used a lot of pedals. Angus Young from AC/DC kind of influenced me in that way, how he would always just kind of plug-in and play right through a Marshall amp; I read an interview with him where he said: “The more things you have plugged in the more stuff can go wrong!” and that always kind of stuck with me. I also play an SG because of Angus Young. 

RRX: Tell me about the percussive elements of the Noise Machine, I know you mentioned the stomp boxes already. 

KV: Yeah so my friend helped me come up with the wiring for it. There are two separate stomp boxes that are just slightly different in how they’re wired, and they each have a mic mounted on them and they run to a ¼ jack with a potentiometer so I can adjust the volume for a show. The snare side stomp box has a treble-boost element, and then I have two hi-hats lying on the stomp boxes. 

RRX: Do you mic any of the cymbals too?

KV: I just let them fly, at the last show I did the cymbals got picked up by a mic and it sounded like an explosion.

RRX: (laughs) I can’t tell if that’s good or bad for your sound.

KV: I’m not usually too particular when it comes to the sound, as long as it’s loud and people can hear what’s going on; so if it’s like: “Oh, it sounds like an explosion today. Cool!” Or, I also have a bucket filled with parts and I had a mic on that one show and that was absolutely unnecessary. The bucket was also like an explosion, because I didn’t kick it once, it was three times with steel toe boots and it was like (imitates explosion) but also louder with the reverb. My friend after that show was like: “I liked the bucket.” (laughs). 

RRX: Did you design the banner in the back and the art on the front as well? 

KV: Yup.

RRX: Nice, it all looks great and professionally done. 

KV: Thank you.

RRX: Do people ever see you bringing the box into the venue and say: “Wait what the fuck is this?”

KV: What you just described has happened at literally every show where I don’t know the person who booked me. Everyone else in the crowd is so confused. I played the Hollow once with Slaughterhouse Chorus and someone told me the owner came in and said 1. “What the fuck is this” and 2. “I love it!” I like that I get that impression, I want to be as over-top and Mad Max as possible. 

RRX: What is it like playing with other bands who don’t know you?

KV: It’s been pleasant. Most of the time, I just get booked with bands I’ve never met before; and that’s been all three times I’ve played at Pauly’s Hotel. I’d get on these bills that don’t make any sense because there would be a jam band, a surf-rock band and then me. But yeah, I also played for Super Dark Collective as my last show before Covid.

RRX: I was gonna ask about that, the dudes from Safety Meeting in Saratoga actually mentioned you! 

KV: That’s very cool. Yeah, I don’t mind playing with different bands, I think it’s funny. I was just thankful to play shows. I played with Slaughterhouse Chorus and we’re still in touch and have been talking about doing more stuff together down the line; although I guess they have a different band now called Girth Control (laughs). 

RXX: What is your plan in terms of recording? Are you working on anything?

KV: I’m just not entirely how to approach that, this project to me is as much of a visual art project as it is a music project. A big thing is how it looks, down to the amplifiers matching the aesthetic. 

RRX: Before I close things out, is there anything you want to put out there.

KV: I think I wanna name drop some of my favorite influences that I’m still getting a lot out of. I think my top five would be AC/DC, Voivod, Feedtime, Grong Grong and the Stooges. I’m really happy to have all this music right now because I miss my friends a lot and I miss shows a lot, and it’s kind of like the old days where I wasn’t going to shows. But this is also a shout out to all my friends, they know who they are.