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Dysgenia is Riley Holland, Brian Wilson, and Dustin Vandehey.
"How much can you you say without words?" That's the question these Portland-based musical veterans seek to explore with their boundary-dissolving instrumental psych/prog/metal outfit Dysgenia.
Dysgenia have distilled their own unique brand of controlled musical chaos, equal parts head, heart, and gut.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host, Ken Valente. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer.
Meet Disgenia: Band Introduction
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is Ken Volante with Something Rather Than Nothing, and we have Portland-based band, Disgenia, here on the podcast, and really excited to bump into their music out here in Oregon, and just wanted to let you know a little bit, they have an album called Intentionally Blank,
00:00:37
Speaker
They're on band camp and I've really enjoyed a lot of their music. I actually look forward to seeing them live because I haven't seen them live yet. Band members Riley Holland, Brian Wilson, and Dustin VandeHei. Welcome to the show, guys. Thank you. Glad to be here.
Band Members Discuss Their Roles
00:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, and I wanted to start just individually, I asked you to introduce yourself, tell your role in the band, and just in general about the band and about music. I wanted to ask you first, Riley. Riley, tell us about yourself and your role in this genia.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, I'm Riley. I play bass. Used to play guitar more, but we wanted a three-piece happening here, so I'm kind of one of the typical former guitar player, current bass player. So that kind of plays with how we write. But yeah, so it's kind of a full collaboration between us, but I'm just straight up. But we're actually working on somewhere I play some guitar, but mostly just sticking with straight-up bass.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks so much. And, um, and Dustin Van Hey, tell us about, um, Dustin, tell us about what you do. Uh, yeah. I'm the guitar player of this. Jenny, uh, um, you've been doing this, I want to say 10 years.
00:02:04
Speaker
And yeah, I just enjoy coming here. We practice every Thursday and play live probably once a month or so. And yeah, just enjoy the creative process. We all kind of think the same creatively. And so, you know, we just are able to come together and kind of create this cool music. And that's kind of why I show up every Thursday. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice to have that scheduled there.
00:02:33
Speaker
You know, have that partnership over time. Brian, what do you do in the band and what's your background?
Journey to Instrumental Music
00:02:40
Speaker
Hey, I'm Brian. I play drums. And my background is a little more formal than these guys. I took lessons starting at the age of 10. Did that for about 10 years and actually majored in music for a while.
00:02:56
Speaker
I'm coming into it with a little more formal experience than the other two. I also do write music because I studied formally. I know some theory and composition. So I do actually write some of the music too, other than just rhythm. And I guess we became a full band after I met Riley and
00:03:20
Speaker
just started as a conversation he was having with somebody about music. And they mentioned Rush, which was one of my favorite bands. So I joined in the conversation and it led to, do you play music? Yeah, I play drums. Oh, we're looking for a drummer. And so what do you guys wanna do? And he said, what was it?
00:03:42
Speaker
instrumental progressive metal. I wasn't even looking to join a band at that point but when he said that that piqued my interest so yeah almost 10 years later here we are. I love it yeah like we need these words I mean it's like when we talk about we talk about music sometimes there's these words or something you're gonna hear and be like okay I'm down.
00:04:04
Speaker
I'm done with that. One of the things I was just kind of in description of your music is I saw the kind of question or phrases, you know, how much can you say without words? And just just just really kind of easing in into your sound and
00:04:25
Speaker
you know, the prominence of the instrumentation and, I don't know, journey and aspects. It feels very, to me, like a sound, a rock sound that I adore that's
00:04:37
Speaker
Pacific Northwest and it feels really good. Tell us about you've been doing this for a while. You committed to it.
Band Formation & Evolution
00:04:50
Speaker
You practice regularly, you get out there and play live. You've been playing for a while. Tell us about this Genia and how it's evolved and what you try to do when you play your music in crowds and live.
00:05:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, Dustin and I have been in bands together since like college. 2003. Yeah, long time ago. I mean, with breaks and stuff, we played in my cover bands, and just like goofing off writing stuff. We always had vocalists, we were always writing.
00:05:28
Speaker
relatively traditional type stuff in that sense. And then we got back together, just you had some people you were jamming with, just doing some covers. It had been a while. They wanted someone on bass. I was like, yeah, I'll play some Faith no more songs on bass. That sounds funny. And then it was such a blast.
00:05:48
Speaker
but and so we decided to do something more serious and originally we were gonna try to find a singer and a drummer and Brian told you how we met him which was after a long period of being pretty discouraged like are we ever going to find a drummer that fits what we want to do and we had already given up on singers we had thought we are definitely not going to find a singer I mean maybe one was out there but um
00:06:17
Speaker
after just trying people out, being disappointed. We were just like, well, we love a lot of instrumental music. Why don't we just kind of focus on those influences? It's more interesting for us. So we kind of tried that out, wrote a couple songs together, and it worked. So we just kind of kept going with that formula. Yeah, and I think
00:06:40
Speaker
Cause yeah, I was, I was jamming with those guys. And I think I wrote Riley attacks jokingly saying, Hey, do you want to play? We care a lot, but I think it's no more at base because it's just like one note, I think.
00:06:53
Speaker
And Riley was like, yeah, man, let's do it. And then I think we had some girl jam covers too we were trying to do. And yeah, so we just started jamming with these guys and just didn't over time feel like it was a good fit. And I know at the time I was listening to a lot of dream theater and animals as leaders and a bunch of like progressive stuff.
00:07:16
Speaker
and I just kind of felt like I had done about five years of flamenco guitar too and I just felt like you know why don't we like take our talents that the two of us have and you know create something out of it then as Brian said we met him and he was fantastic and has been great for 10 years and
00:07:33
Speaker
uh it's just it's nice to kind of challenge ourselves i always find it to be a huge challenge like no singer means that we actually have to really the three of us play really well so i have to practice like almost daily just to keep the chops up so
00:07:50
Speaker
But I think that's why we keep going is because this is music that we like to play. We're not trying to please a mass audience of people. We're just trying to play the music that we want to play, the stuff that we are inspired by. If three of us bring our own stuff to it and we write our own music and we collaborate on all of it, it just comes out to be this really crazy stuff.
00:08:13
Speaker
So I think as far as just Jenny, it just kind of keeping going. I think that's kind of what's keeping us going. It's just constantly challenging ourselves and just playing all this weird stuff that I think people like. Who knows? Well, yeah, I mean, one of the things one of the things I could say for myself is I've had somebody who's very influential on my music listening, a really brilliant guy, a friend of mine, Todd, and
00:08:40
Speaker
Prior to that, I had different type of tastes in music, but I never was patient with the instrumentals or ranging rock or anything like that. He was so reactionary towards lyrics sometimes that he'd just turn something off when he heard somebody singing. He could be extreme with that, but he really taught me a lot about
Appreciation for Instrumental Music
00:09:08
Speaker
just listening carefully and just really experiencing music in a completely new way. I was thinking about him when I was listening to your music and how we helped train my ears towards that. I listen to a lot of different types of music, but now I would say, whereas before, I wouldn't just sit back and just groove to things for a long time. Now I do that most of the time. It's a nice thing.
00:09:39
Speaker
Sure. Where do you guys, where do you guys play? You're based in the Pacific Northwest up in Portland. What type of shows you play? I mean, gosh, we've been doing this for a long time and we played at all the bars in Portland, even the ones that have shut down. Before they shut down. We actually play there and then they shut down shortly there out there.
00:10:08
Speaker
uh where else like we played in an airplane hangar up in down in Salem. You know we were kind of taking every gig we could at first but um that one of the cool things about our style of music is like that we learned is in one way it's really specific like you think it's for a really specific type of listener
Performances and Collaborations
00:10:26
Speaker
but also because it's instrumental it it fits with a lot of different bills and
00:10:32
Speaker
So we've played with all sorts of different bands and that makes it really liberating. Whereas if you have like harsh metal vocals, you're not gonna be necessarily fitting in on a lot of more eclectic bills. So we've played with like heavy blues bands and intense metal bands, punk bands. We're playing at a post-rock festival on the 24th of this month.
00:10:59
Speaker
post rock and friends or kind of and friends. So we kind of we kind of are able to slip in there a lot of different contexts. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, go ahead.
00:11:14
Speaker
I was gonna say to Riley's point like we went up to Seattle in October and played with kind of a psychedelic hip-hop band and we've become good friends with them and so we'll probably we actually played another show with them what was it three weeks ago? Yeah this big big Lebowski themed bar so they came down from Seattle and played with us and so you know that's that's another reason I just love this music it's just it can just kind of go anywhere really
00:11:42
Speaker
I got to see that, I saw the video from that show. I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. I love that. So you played with that other band recently together? Yeah, like Brian said a couple of weeks ago, they came down from Seattle and we played right before them. But yeah, it's been good doing it that way. Meet a lot of people for sure.
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, you both both rock in the house. That was nice. Yeah. Yeah. Might be collaborating with them too. They were saying they wanted to do a collaboration, write a song together. Yeah. Yeah. Cause the one guy does like hip hop vocals. So we'll see if that is a good fit or not. But, uh, you know, so it'll be, it'll be cool.
00:12:31
Speaker
I could only say go in and give it as good a shot as you can because it was just so noticeable how that came together, at least with the video. I was like, man, it fit right there, so see if you can work it because I love that. In the name of the band from up north, who were they?
00:12:49
Speaker
Kuma Te. Kuma Te, okay. We're gonna have those folks in the show notes. Thanks so much for laying that out. This is an art and philosophy show. I wanted to ask you in general, and anybody can chime in here just talking about art. One of the questions I ask is, what is art? Anybody have any thoughts on just like that general question? What is art?
00:13:19
Speaker
Wow. Yeah, that can be entered a lot of ways. Yeah. Riley was a philosophy major, so he might be the best person to ask. Riley's got to start off if he has that major. I'm sorry, Riley. You had the one or you lost. I don't know. I'm such a dork that I did think right away of William Blake. There we go. Yeah.
00:13:38
Speaker
talking about I forget exactly how he put it but then it's a it's sort of just like an overflowing of life force. It's like you've got there a human being you've got life force to get you through the day and survive but then there's just extra and that extra just wants to express itself somehow and it just
00:13:58
Speaker
overflows basically. That's how I experience music. It just kind of overflows. It's not to get something from the world. Although I think that you can be a legitimate artist for sure and be making plenty of money and having it be your career. That's definitely there. But
00:14:17
Speaker
something that is just overflowing into the world and it just kind of comes out the way it wants to come out is how I tend to think of it and then that's what gives it the quality when other people are doing it and the art that I resonate with I'm like oh yeah that I don't know what that is or where it came from but it came from somewhere that wasn't just the person's rational mind like oh this would be cool it's like something came from somewhere deep or something other you know
00:14:45
Speaker
I've also heard it said not just that it wants to come out, but that it has to somehow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had so many ideas for, for songs before this band that I was like, it was painful to have these ideas and not be able to express, but actually like really bugged me. Yeah. Huge relief early on. Like fucking finally we can just do this stuff and get it out of our system. Yeah.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I tend to just get stuff in my head, like a part of a song, I'll just think about it. And yeah, like Riley said, just kind of comes out and, you know.
00:15:27
Speaker
just kind of start playing it and then bring it to the practice space and work on it together. And people bring stuff as well, bring their own parts to the songs as well. And then it kind of comes together in a way that we definitely love.
00:15:44
Speaker
comes greater than the syllabus parts. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's like, what does this song want to be? Like, where does this want to go? Which is, it's great that we all kind of have that attitude, because we've never like, we've all thrown in ideas for all different kinds of stuff. And we've never gotten into like a Bob Lawrence type situation where, no, it's about my idea. Because usually it's just like, oh yeah, a particular way is better. If we try them all, we'll find the one that's the best.
00:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes we'll try things out. It's about feel and you say, Oh, that sounded great. You know, they crank the amps up and, you know, certain space and, uh, just experiment with things. It's kind of that scientific process where you're experimenting with things, you know, seems to work so far, you know? Yeah. Um, well, and thanks, thanks for your comments. And I, there's, there's so much power in that with, um,
00:16:41
Speaker
with Blake or just like this outpouring of energy, you know, like something that has to be done and just, just hearing like, like there's discomfort in not like expressing things at times, right? It might be like, I'm a writer, so my hand needs to move on. I'm a singer, I need to sing or you need to play. It's like, I'm going to be unhealthy unless the overflowing gets, gets out. And I think there's something
00:17:06
Speaker
pretty profound now with that. It feels good, right? It feels right, I think maybe. Even if you're just singing in the shower, yeah. There's also this funny, I don't know if you guys can relate to this, but there's also this funny sense of
Recording vs. Live Performance
00:17:24
Speaker
especially recording the album, once we started playing more shows and stuff like, Oh, okay. I'm finally like paying back the rock gods a little bit of just being like I played music a lot, but just mostly being a consumer of, of music and just like taking more than I put back in was another feeling of like that needs to be balanced out a little bit too. Yeah.
00:17:52
Speaker
And there's definitely like a growth that you have over time as you keep writing this kind of music, you just get better over time. Like when Brian mentioned, hey, I've got a song for you guys to learn. It was super difficult. It's the one perceptual dichotomy. I mean, it took a long time to kind of learn that. And I know I had to like climb up to the summit of Everest to meet Brian up there who had
00:18:16
Speaker
already climbed it a long time ago you know to kind of meet that skill level and so as we've been a band for a long time our songs just get you know more complicated and just more uh i guess kind of juicy as we've got more experience playing live or just getting better over time and so what's your relationship i'm always wondering this because uh
00:18:37
Speaker
I go to a lot of live shows. What's your experience as far as doing the tracks in a studio format given the way that you play and the way that you flow? Does that feel like an okay process or does it feel like a snapshot of where you are? What's the studio recording feel like for you? Snapshot of where we were seems like a good description. Yeah, it was
00:19:03
Speaker
It was a learning experience. We had a couple of songs that we probably didn't put enough thought into what exact tempo it was going to be. So when we were done recording, we were kind of thinking, oh, we should have done that a little faster. We should have done that a little slower. So hopefully that's a learning experience and do any more recording.
00:19:25
Speaker
yeah like take a little more time with kind of the pre-production process of like doing the scratch track right at the right tempo and then you know really taking the time to kind of dial everything in and um like when I recorded the album it was at uh Brian's um uh cousin's house so he had kind of a basement recording studio and he just he said you know why don't we report an album you guys have a bunch of songs let's do it so we spent
00:19:53
Speaker
was a year or something, kind of go to that studio off and on and just recording and spending a lot of time on it. So that's kind of how you do it, you know.
00:20:06
Speaker
Yeah. Like I said, I haven't seen you live and I've seen some of the performances and bits that you have here. I really look forward to it because I just had that feeling when there's a style of music and I love that flow alive a lot more nowadays even than I used to before because my tastes have changed. I'd love to go with it. I think it's a big impact of maybe outdoor music or the groove music that you find in the Pacific Northwest, at least where I've dropped into it.
00:20:36
Speaker
So I really enjoyed that. Speaking of which, in general, about your music and what you have out there, how do folks find your music?
Accessing Disgenia's Music
00:20:53
Speaker
I had mentioned you have a band camp, but how do people experience what you do?
00:20:59
Speaker
So we get a lot of traction with our Instagram account. We have Facebook. I don't know how much of that. I mean, I don't really look at that that much, but Instagram, we tend to get a lot of followers and all that.
00:21:15
Speaker
That's kind of the way I connect with other bands to, you know, try to book shows and that sort of thing. It seems like a big networking thing. So we got a lot of stuff on Instagram. We're on Spotify, SoundCloud, like I said, Bandcamp. It's videos on YouTube. Right. Yeah, it's on YouTube. Where else?
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah, a bunch of different places. But I think the main ones are Spotify and Bandcamp. Mainly because I mean, Spotify is accessible to a lot of people. We've got to get home.
00:21:52
Speaker
pretty good amount of listens on there. But then Bandcamp as I think a lot of people know as much, it's higher quality audios. Some people only do Bandcamp and you can listen for free a few times. I forget how many before they make you buy it. So those are kind of two where there's a sort of a meaningful difference between them.
00:22:16
Speaker
the rest of the platforms are just like other places where the same thing is. Yeah, a bunch of random stuff because we had to go through a distributor and it just kind of through our tracks all over the internet. So I think it's just like Spotify SoundCloud and Bandcamp are kind of the big three that I see the most traction on at least. I was surprised how many people were listening to our stuff on Bandcamp. A lot more than I expected.
00:22:44
Speaker
Bandcamp is a nice platform. I like the access to the merchandise, but also some of that direct support through those payments. I remember one time I found a whole bunch of kind of Pink Floyd bootlegs that were really nice and cheap. I don't know, just hearing like Animals 1978. One of those performances was just super, so just a great varied material. I know I've checked out your stuff there on
00:23:14
Speaker
on Bandcamp, but really enjoy it. I want to ask, this episode will have coming out later June 2023, coming fourth for folks to be listening when the show comes out this summer. Any spot or two or things to look out for where you might be?
Upcoming Performances
00:23:38
Speaker
Yes, so far we're doing June 24th. That's the post-rock festival at the Highwater Mark in northeast Portland. So it's on a Saturday. I think we go on at seven maybe. I'd have to verify that. I think it's doors at 7.30. We're opening the second day of the festival. Yeah, and then September we have the alt. It's called the alt fest. That's September 15th at the Canton Club.
00:24:08
Speaker
And then as far as that, probably get some more gigs this summer, but nothing, nothing yet. It'll fill up, I'm sure. Yeah. It'll be a summer music. Could be a busy summer, could be a busy summer. Yeah. Cause usually the way it happens is like, I just will sit on Instagram and somebody will write us and ask us to come sit on a bill. And, um, it's a lot easier than writing bookers and having to deal with that.
00:24:40
Speaker
Usual, just crash a bill or something just from some bad we know or something. Well, yeah. Like I said, I really look forward to seeing you live. For the audience, check out this Genia and on the places that they mentioned. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, in Oregon in particular, playing in Portland there,
00:25:08
Speaker
I'm very much looking forward to hearing you play live and just listeners just so you know We'll have a bit bit of music here coming up in just a bit With this Genia just wanted to thank you Dustin Brian and Riley for popping on Popping on the podcast and letting folks know about the great music you put out. I really appreciate Chat with you and then thanks for the music. It's um
00:25:36
Speaker
It's a real treat. I feel like I know what you put into it and for the type of listeners that you're trying to reach. I just felt that. I wanted to thank you for that and thanks for the music. Thanks for having us. Thank you, ma'am. Absolutely.
00:27:06
Speaker
you
00:27:38
Speaker
so
00:30:45
Speaker
so
00:31:29
Speaker
This is something rather than nothing.