Portraits Of Past

At the start of the Nineties, American post-hardcore seemed to have hit a breaking point. After a decade built on speed, militancy and iconoclastic fury, many bands began to sense the limits of a language that had by now stiffened into its own conventions. It was precisely at that moment of crisis that the genre became something far more unstable, emotional and unpredictable, setting off an underground mutation from which, within a few years, screamo (or skramz) would also be born.
It probably all began in the Washington, D.C. scene, where Fugazi had dragged hardcore far from its original form, leaning on broken rhythms, sudden suspensions and tension held back until it exploded. Aggression alone no longer mattered: now a sense of permanent unease took centre stage too (and, perhaps, above all). From a destructive feeling, rage was converted into control, momentum and searing emotion. And there it is, emotion. Because at the roots of screamo there's also that already-evolved strand of hardcore, later dubbed "emo", which had injected itself with more or less massive doses of mal de vivre, finding its pioneers, once again in the Washington D.C. area, in bands such as Rites Of Spring and Embrace, in which, not by chance, some members of Fugazi themselves had also played.

Around that revolution, a new underground sensibility began to take shape. It was no coincidence, then, that the true glue of that era was the DIY ethic inherited from punk. No music business, no official circuit, just photocopied fanzines, hand-duplicated cassettes, basement shows, squats, makeshift community centres. Screamo was born there, in an underground network of micro-scenes that communicated through letters, split 7"s and tours organised with just a few dollars in their pockets. Before it was even a musical genre, it was a way of living music as a total, physical and communal experience.
By the middle of the decade, when names like Portraits Of Past, Orchid, Saetia and Pg. 99 began to emerge, the process was already complete. That music brought together the violence of hardcore's origins, the confessional sensibility of emo and the destructured chaos of the most radical post-hardcore. The songs alternated furious explosions, melancholy-laden digressions and inhuman screams. Everything seemed to live constantly on the edge of the precipice.

Paradoxically, though, the term "screamo" was met with suspicion by many of the scene's own protagonists, who saw it as just another gimmick cooked up for the convenience of the music press. Rob Pettersen was no exception: he was the excellent singer of Portraits Of Past, one of the fundamental bands in codifying screamo. "Back then, we're talking 1993 to 1995, screamo didn't exist: that term was invented years later. We played in the DIY hardcore punk scene and considered ourselves a hardcore band. In the early '90s, the term 'emo' was sometimes used derogatorily to describe bands that didn't sound as hard or aggressive as others, so I wasn't too fond of that term either. We were part of the Bay Area underground scene, and we were lucky enough to see and play with so many incredible bands from that period. I went to shows almost obsessively — sometimes as many as six a month. DIY shows cost between three and five dollars, gas was cheap, and seeing live music was my main outlet and interest at that time. I'd also say that seeing so many great bands live, and letting ourselves be carried away by new sounds, pushed us to want to make music that was the best it could possibly be, and also somehow new or different. It was our way of giving something back to a scene that had given us so much."

Formed in 1993 by a group of childhood friends not yet out of their teens, raised in the coastal town of Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, Portraits Of Past took their first steps while still in high school, united by a shared passion for music capable of giving shape to adolescent alienation. Guitarist Rex John Shelverton and singer Rob Pettersen spent their days between skateboarding, Metallica tapes and impromptu shows, growing up within the Bay Area's underground scene of the early 1990s.
A crucial role in their formation was played by 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, a genuine epicenter of the punk revival and DIY ethos, where the band's future members regularly gathered and learned that this music wasn't something to be observed from a distance, but something to be lived firsthand. "It just seemed like what you did if you loved that music," Rex would recall years later. "You made it yourself too." Rob, for his part, remembers how important it was to see ordinary people get up on a stage and play punk: an experience that erased any doubt, pushing them to form a band.
Their influences were as varied as they were representative of the spirit of the times: Fugazi, obviously, but also Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, Born Against, Drive Like Jehu, Unwound, Econochrist, Swing Kids, Heroin, a bit of metal, of powerviolence (an even more extreme and chaotic variant of hardcore), as well as bleak post-punk: all filtered through the independent ethic of the Californian underground. Even the chosen name, Portraits Of Past, reflected that strange combination of emotional sensitivity and abrasive noise that was taking shape in the Gilman scene: it almost sounded like the title of a Joy Division or Rites of Spring song, so much so that it initially left some band members puzzled, given the sonic violence they had in mind to develop.

As per hardcore tradition, Portraits Of Past (whose original lineup was rounded out by second guitarist Jonah G. Buffa, bassist Daniel Fenton and drummer Aaron Lee Schlieve) started out cutting their teeth wherever they could play, between small DIY spaces, garages and impromptu shows. They rehearsed on weekends, until midnight. In practice, they did nothing else, convinced that was the only way not to remain just another band among many. In 1994, they finally took their first step into recording, with a split EP shared with Bleed — a release that went almost unnoticed, but helped define the coordinates of an already personal, emotional and convulsive sound, destined to become a fundamental building block in the evolution of screamo.

Having replaced Fenton and Schlieve with, respectively, Jeremy Andrew Bringetto and Matthew Martin Bajda, Portraits Of Past recorded their debut LP between September and October 1995, right after a short tour that Rob had booked thanks to "Book Your Own Fucking Life," a subzine of "Maximumrocknroll" packed with contacts for promoters who organized DIY shows in houses or alternative spaces across the States.
As Rob recalls, "during the recording sessions Rex was really inspired and interested in learning how to record music, so he spent a ton of time in the control room with the gear, trying to figure out how to get the best possible sound, given that we had a limited budget and very little time. The record was recorded onto ADAT [Alesis Digital Audio Tape], one of the early digital machines, so even though we used fully analog amps and so on, the recording itself was inherently digital. Back then there was a lot of negativity around that kind of recording, and I'm not saying ADAT was great, but the record came out with a pretty cool, somewhat unique sound, so… who cares?"
"We've always been fascinated by the Fugazi idea of what you can do with just a guitar plugged into an amp," Rex notes. "Even though we wanted to create real soundscapes, we didn't use alternate tunings — at most we'd tune down to C sharp. A lot of things happened by accident, but the final sound was still the result of precise and intentional choices. We also double-tracked all the guitars, being extremely careful to keep them tight, so as to avoid what's called 'flamming,' which happens when two slightly offset performances create an unwanted effect. We'd just gotten back from a tour, so we were playing really tight together. But that kind of wavering between tuning and pitch created a natural chorus effect, something odd, almost Sonic Youth-like. Actually, we were trying to get closer to Unwound: they were our favorite band. People have asked me more than once what chorus pedals we used, which is funny, since there's no effect at all on the guitars, apart from the reverb of the amps and the room."

Once the recording sessions wrapped, the band broke up — but not before playing one last show at Gilman, in front of something like a dozen people, some of whom amused themselves by pelting them with objects and jeering, unable to grasp what that music, so desperate and aggressive, actually meant. Over the years, each member of the band has developed their own version of what led to the split. Rex recalls a period of constant attempts: new songs kept taking shape, but none of them ever seemed to have quite the right identity. Rob, on the other hand, looks mainly at himself, convinced he wasn't able to keep pace with the others' artistic growth. The exhaustion built up from touring also weighed heavily, having by then lost the appeal it once had at the start.

Portraits Of Past's debut was released in the spring of 1996 by Ebullition Records, a small label started in the early '90s by Kent McClard, a former "Maximumrocknroll" columnist, together with Brent Stephens (guitarist of Downcast) and Sonia Skindrud, author of the fanzine Exedra.
"At the time," Rob recalls, "Rex was working at an offset print shop, and he printed the 7" vinyl covers for another band's record in exchange for three days of recording at a studio on the Stanford University campus, where one of that band's members was a student and also recorded other musicians. So we tracked the album there in two days and mixed it in one, basically for free. Originally, the album was actually untitled, or 'self-titled.' Later on, though, our label and other people started calling it by the binary code ['01010101'] printed on the cover, but that was never my intention as the album's title."
At first, "01010101" (or "Portraits Of Past," take your pick) sold, to put it mildly, terribly. Only years later — and especially thanks to the rise of screamo's "second wave" in the early 2000s — were those eight tracks finally recognized as pioneering. The rage, pain, suffering and shattered hope of five young Californians, elevated to an almost epic dimension, became a reference point for anyone who wasn't just looking for comfort in music, but for a genuine cathartic experience. A catharsis that is the outcome of a dialectical process, in which fragility and sonic violence, poetic drive and destructive impulse, are locked in constant tension.

"I think all those emotions flow into our music, both in the lyrics I write and, perhaps, in the sound of the riffs and the dynamics of the song structures," Rob explains. "As for the epic quality, we listened to and saw live a lot of intense, melancholic bands, but for some reason we ended up writing a number of long songs, with highs and lows, different riffs and varying levels of intensity. I'm not really sure how we arrived at that style, given that most of the bands we listened to played shorter, more direct songs. I guess part of it came from a 'kitchen sink' approach: we threw everything we had into the songs — tons of riffs and melodies, most of which didn't repeat, very intense moments alongside quieter ones, a ton of words in the lyrics, maybe even too many. We were simply giving everything we had and we were extremely inspired, so that's how the songs and the record came out. I hesitate to name such a direct reference, but before we discovered punk and hardcore, when we were around 10 to 12 years old, most of the band listened to '80s metal bands like Metallica and Iron Maiden, along with other kinds of music. So maybe part of the songs' length, their epic quality and the melodic component came from metal."

Opening with some twenty seconds of limp, distorted strings, "KQED Equals Volvo" is a concentrate of violence still essentially rooted in the classic hardcore era, even if the pathos here says that, in the meantime, existence has become a serious problem and not just the dregs at the bottom of a spittoon. The uncontrolled detonation of the instruments is met head-on by Rob's screams, which turn his own image into something degraded, almost pathological, as if he recognized himself in the reflection of a long history of alienation and exclusion.

A little closer to home
One who’s distant
A sick look glazed over my repression
Humbly I’m dismissed with no warning
Momentary this bliss
You can see the look on my face
Say, nothing’s said
I wish you’d fight me ‘til the last teardrop’s bled
Momentary this bliss
I can see the look on your face

"Bang Yer Head" is probably the most dramatic moment on the entire record and, if nothing else, the most incisive in capturing the ultimate essence of the Portraits Of Past sound. Aiming to evoke a sense of boiling emotion, of a personality shattered into pieces and locked in a downright conflictual confrontation with an increasingly radicalized and rotten society, this track (introduced by a guitar figure reminiscent of the one that opens "Do You Compute" by Drive Like Jehu) runs through adrenaline surges, brooding passages with Slint in the rearview mirror, and flashes of self-destructive disgust that not even its offering itself as an inevitable shared possibility can make any less devastating. In the end, being messed up and being young can only go hand in hand. It's a shared fate. All that's left are "desperate attempts to hold on to something," to avoid putting an end to it all, in the awareness that “Ci sono poche verità/ E una è che/ Sono incasinato/ Più o meno quanto lo sei tu”.

There are a few truths
And here’s just one:
I’m as fucked up
About as much as you’re fucked up
But, beyond that, there are only grasped straws
And our own private perceived flaws
Where’s that gun?
We should both use it

A profound sense of loneliness and isolation dominates "The Control Freak." The dissonances, the overtones, the guitars sketching landscapes of crystalline pathos, and the convulsive accelerations: everything here aims to convey a sense of icy self-awareness, the disarming realization that there are limits that cannot be crossed, and that "the metal door is locked from the inside." Despite everything, we remain alone in the face of a world that rejects us, and for this reason our supposed freedom takes on an inherently perverse character. This is the absurd: the inevitable clash between humanity's innate desire to find meaning in the world and the unfathomable silence of an otherness that remains indifferent to its questions. In the end, the music of Portraits Of Past is deeply "romantic," because it's precisely the rift between individual consciousness and objective reality that stood as one of the defining traits of Romanticism.

"Implications Of A Sinkhole Personality," on the other hand, is one of those songs that carries the taste of your youth when you draw on it from an extreme distance, trapped within the perimeter of everyday silent horror, aware that the past is always and only memory driven into the present like a rusty nail. Seeing yourself in others, being yourself through others, to the point of killing yourself in others. Desperation, in the end, is made real in the lucid perception that it's precisely in others that our own hell is made manifest.

See yourself in others
Be yourself through others
Hate yourself in others
Just kill yourself in others
In others
In others

In "The Outlook Is Bleak" as well — a track that seems to struggle forward under the weight of its own despair ("the outlook is bleak," the title warns!) — the guitars weave sharp, melodic lines in a taut, compact style reminiscent of Drive Like Jehu. Providing counterpoint are Bringetto's deep bass — "a Peter Hook-style bassist: very melodic and guitar-like; he plays with a pick using delay, reverb and overdrive," explains Rex — and Bajda's dynamic drumming, dragging the music ever deeper into the territories of the psyche, where it becomes clear that "cold minds never perceive the breadth of separation."

"Snicker Snicker," for its part, is the sound of agony. A lesson in tension and release, where the two poles are so intertwined that any real absolute becomes impossible. The sonic material remains raw and feverish throughout, at times deliberately lopsided, yet at the same time held together by a dense web of details and nuances. It's driven by a constant tension between impulse and control, between expressive urgency and internal architecture.
Then again, who knows: perhaps behind the horizon of the words lies the ghost of Rodney Glen King, the African-American cab driver who, on March 3, 1991, was violently beaten by a group of Los Angeles police officers ("Bullets in control – watch out for your uniform in control – watch out for those stray bullets. Tongue tied – those outside define everything. High beams – my dark side is everything. No wonder high use of black plastic eye shields. No one leaves the house without a Kevlar skin suit"). Or perhaps, above all, there's an invitation to shake off the eyes of the Impersonal ("Whose eyes are glued to your head?"). What's certain is that, reading between the lines, one can sense the acrid smell of a melancholy that, precisely because it is by now devoid of hope, has dissolved into fury. In the corners of the mind, it no longer sits in silence, but has begun to claw at the walls.

Condensing and, in some ways, pushing to the extreme all the elements of the record (the slow progressions that carve chasms into the dark, the instrumental landslides that unleash urges and invite you to smash through the wall of incommunicability, the screams that spurt out of the mix like jets of magma held down for far too long, because the screamer's scream is born not of rage, but of what words can no longer contain), "Something Less Than Intended" returns to the drama of what has been and can never be again. The "sinkhole personality" has drained the emotional energy of others, propped up by a phony sense of moral integrity. In its wake, it leaves the ruins of ideals, of youth, and of the carefree friendship that once filled the days, the hours, the minutes. This is the time of a decision not yet made truthfully, because, as Rob confesses, "it's like I'm living someone else's life." What remains are memories, true portraits of the past.

Remember those ideals?
Remember mom and dad? We’re them
Remember carefree friendship?
Oh, those great times
Living like the stars
Just playing with our hearts, how cute
Predestined
Predestined, I’m predestined

Let’s play scapegoat
Let’s play martyr
Pretty intention, pretty intention
Let’s be the living dead

Okay, I’m going to fuck you over now
It’s like I’m living someone else’s life
Okay, I’m going to fuck you over now
But I know, I’m just not "them"

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14/06/2026