A Need To Be Shot - Inside Texas's most dire nightmares

For enthusiasts it's common knowledge, but it's worth repeating: Texas is the birthplace of some of the most important and extreme bands in the history of rock. If you need a refresher, just mention Red Crayola, Butthole Surfers, Big Boys, Scratch Acid, D.R.I, Jesus Lizard, At The Drive-In, Mars Volta, and so on.

It's both astonishing and thought-provoking that such bands emerged in one of the relatively more traditionalist American states, where even today anything eccentric is viewed with suspicion — let alone when it's championed by someone Black... Who knows: maybe needling the bluenoses is a favorite pastime for many outsiders of the so-called Lone Star State, who, through rock that's more or less noisy and more or less unconventional, have found a way out of everyday drabness, as well as a way to shout to the world their rage and their passion for everything anti-conventional, crooked, not easily pigeonholed. Certainly, this is what pushed Alex Osman to move to those parts, specifically to Austin, hometown of the legendary 13th Floor Elevators, widely regarded as the pioneers of a long tradition of rock-format rebellion.

One of the reasons why, at twenty-seven, I moved from Albion, Pennsylvania, to Texas is that I love all those bands, which were hugely important to my adolescence and made me who I am today. I wouldn't say I'm on their level, but I felt at home especially with that late-80s and 90s scene, so it made sense for me to move here

Of course, today's Austin (a city of about a million inhabitants, which is also the capital of the second-largest state in the US) is very different from what it used to be:

Austin is pretty crowded, very congested, gentrified beyond belief — I'd call it "IKEA-fied", as a friend of mine put it. Today's vibe is much more corporate, superficial and trendy, not as cool as it was in the 80s and 90s. I prefer the rural Midwest, but there's a lot more going on here in terms of events, neighborhood parties and things like that, and the Texans who were born and raised here are all fantastic people

Osman's passion for rock music dates back to his childhood:

I got my first guitar at the age of four, when my father, who was a guitarist in local nu-metal bands, started teaching me some chords, and from there I learned to play. As a kid I spent a lot of my free time writing and recording songs on a cheap tape recorder, and making mixtapes of demo songs, skits, recordings from TV and my parents' arguments. Then, at seven, I got a drum kit and a used four-track recorder, and that's where it all started. Today I play guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers and samplers

After cutting his teeth as a drummer in bands within the no-wave/noise-rock/post-hardcore scene, such as Stutter Frog and Ghost Embryo, experiences dating back to his time in Albion, and having developed a passion for bands and artists such as Arab On Radar, Mike Patton, Jesus Lizard, Nico, IRM, Pharmakon, Diamanda Galás, Brighter Death Now, Leonard Cohen, Melvins, as well as for film scores ("I'd really love to make one for a movie someday!") and for imagery in general, Osman found the decisive spark for his musical path when, purely by chance, he stumbled upon an old tape of a noise project of his from his high school days:

I wanted to go back to that place, setting up a table in my room with a pile of pedals, loopers, microphones, and listening to the loops for hours in an almost meditative state. Most of my experience as a musician has come from solo projects, such as White Pony (shoegaze/noise-rock), Elephant Pill (trip-hop/film scores), Thinner (instrumental post-rock), Acute Obtuse (grindcore/powerviolence) and Grandma M (IDM/electronic), the latter extremely short-lived

That's how the project A Need To Be Shot was born, a name that came to him in a dream: "One night I dreamed I was dating a girl, who at one point told me: 'I have needs you can't understand. Like the need to be shot.'"

Straddling noise, powerviolence, death-industrial and traces of dark-ambient, with A Need To Be Shot Osman carries out his intent to transfigure into music his confrontation with a reality that is, to say the least, disheartening:

What I mostly try to do is evoke whatever's going through my head every day, what I see, what interests me, what makes me uncomfortable. I'm a huge lover of everything surreal or that deals with taboo subjects, of everything that challenges common sentiment and raises questions, because that leads to genuine conversation. I have absolutely no interest in a world that excludes these things, censors them and pretends they don't exist. Some people have labeled me as a pessimist or a misanthrope, but that's not true at all. I feel a lot of love for the world and the people who inhabit it, even though, like anyone else, there are things that bother me. But I certainly don't have a misanthropic view of the world

As for his modus operandi when it comes to composing, Osman usually starts "from an image, a texture or a feeling."

Most of the time, I try to create a vocal sound using processors and a looper pedal, then I listen back to it several times and experiment with different vocal sounds, effects, instruments or samples, building on them. The material I'm most satisfied with comes when I have no idea what the final result will be, or I have no intention of recording anything at all. It's a bit like what the Residents were doing with N. Senada's 'Theory of Obscurity': your purest work happens when there's no intention of ever releasing it

If, in some ways, the reference to the Residents comes as no surprise, it's momentarily puzzling to find, among his musical passions (as we've just seen), a nod to Leonard Cohen. On this point, Osman explains his love for the Canadian artist, reminding us, between the lines, that the paths of inspiration and influence are endless and not always easy to decipher:

Cohen is one of the greatest songwriters ever. I was strongly influenced by his themes of loss, isolation, romantic love, and by the way he managed to convey his emotions so intensely, putting his whole self into his recordings. That's also why I mostly record in the dark, in an isolated room with my phone switched off, trying to put every part of myself into whatever I happen to be recording at the time

The first fruit bearing the A Need To Be Shot name dates back to last November and consists of four tracks, barely five minutes of music in all, gathered under the title Heart Of Shemp (As Acute Obtuse). "Pancakes" opens the show ("It's breakfast time!") with a punk-noise bloodbath that "Al Lewis" pushes to an even higher level of maximalism. The impact seems to recall the most extreme grindcore records, but the underlying matrix is a thoroughly abrasive power-electronics, as confirmed by the relatively more measured "Some Smug Asshole WearingA Dickey" and by the breakneck finale of "Ding Dong Ditch".

Overall, Heart Of Shemp (As Acute Obtuse) is an all-too-caustic calling card, with tracks that certainly don't stand out for originality. The impression is that, at this stage, Osman was still just warming up the engines, ahead of the two striking releases that would follow in 2023.

The first, dating back to February, is titled Apple Of My Eye, and comes wrapped in an unsettling cover drawn from a manipulated photo of Osman as a child. Opened by the obsessive spiral of "Torsion" and closed by the Throbbing Gristle-via-the-second, pivotal "report" of minimalist decay that is "Shoving The Barrel Of A Gun In The Mouth Of A Snoring Pedophile", this Ep confirms Osman's passion for backdrops loaded with pain and unease, where the vocals ("I recorded them in my car, behind a convenience store!") are so warped they sound like a toxic scream or, better still, chemical despair, as can also be heard on "The Sun & The Lung Collapsed", where spastic tribalism and a deafening drone help conjure up one of his most dizzying nightmares. From some distant outgrowth of a mind splintered into a thousand rivulets of madness comes "Antbus" instead, a storm of gurgles, screeches and rumbles that suggests a looped delirium built from a collage of samples pulled from the gallery of torments that is Gnaw Their Tongues.

The worldview that emerges from it is terrifying, and it's the same one underpinning the other Ep released this year, Sink The Swan, a title inspired by a line ("You sink my swan") from a Melvins song, "Hooch". As for the cover art, you can admire Osman enjoying a relaxing summer moment…

Recorded in his bedroom and "in various Texas parking lots", Sink The Swan (released on cassette via Summer Interlude Records) is the record in which our man shows an even firmer grip on his craft, moving from the white-noise wash punctuated by diabolical rants and shrieks of "Cure For Laughing Rabbits", to the heavily degraded electroacoustic Underground sound (Dostoevskian, naturally!) of "Father Knows Best" (creeping terror, anguish, endless despair), while also holding together the mechanical, hypnotic pulse of Suicide ("Brass Crawfish") with the out-of-control teletype of "God Is Swimming In My Balls" (with ever more bestial vocal manipulations), the industrial blues of "We Never Grew Up to Be Cowboys" and the infected dark-ambient of "Antihistamine".

Surprising, on "Brass Crawfish", is the parodic quote (imagine Chipmunks raised in an asylum) of "Everyday", one of the most famous songs by Buddy Holly, another great Texan:

'Brass Crawfish' was inspired by a nightmare in which a friend and I discovered Buddy Holly's preserved corpse under a pier, and there were five hundred pounds of shrimp crawling out of his stomach. Suddenly, a woman ran up to me and started repeatedly singing 'Everyday' in a distorted voice, while my friend stabbed me (the song is written from his perspective)

Setting aside these images loaded with surrealism, after the final groove of Sink The Swan what remains is the feeling of an even more terrible future for humanity, one that will most likely end up being "swept away by nuclear war and by artificial-intelligence-run robots that look like Robin Williams"…

Busy producing new music ("Two new records of mine are coming out soon: one is a new full-length titled 'Quadriplegic Mongrel', and the other is a split with fellow Austin power-electronics artist Infibulation. I'm also working on a 'soundtrack for a film that doesn't exist', something I haven't done since 2018"), Osman keeps cultivating another of his great passions: writing.

Much of my writing is inspired by my experiences in a small working-class rural town and the eccentrics I met and became friends with, by the underbelly of America and the darkest aspects of the human condition, by the strangest crimes, by the dreams/nightmares I've had, and by an emphasis on childhood and the early loss of innocence. In short, I'm interested in the idea of growing up too fast, and of seeing or experiencing things you shouldn't see at that age. Also fundamental to my inspiration was my struggle with depression and the suicidal thoughts I've had, as well as past addiction issues, isolation, etc. Everything I do is somehow connected and part of a bigger picture: music, writing, photography. Many of my lyrics started out as poems or photos

His most accomplished novel is certainly "Problem Child", released in 2020: "It's a work that spans ten or eleven years of my life, a period running from when I was fifteen to when I turned twenty-six. It's like a diary. At the time I was using morphine and DHC, dealing with suicidal thoughts, with isolation, and at some point I found myself with a bunch of boxes of material I hadn't touched in years and had never published. While working on 'Problem Child', a lot of emotions and memories were floating around. I was trying to make sense of my life. If for no other reason than that, it's the one closest to my heart".

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