“Our sound is quite silly in a way,” says Uroceras Gigas (guitar/vocals) of Leeds-based Guttersnipe, near the end of our hour-and-a-half conversation. If the real world is folding into dystopian hellscape, silly is a wonderful way to describe the sound of the noise-nik duo (Gigas and Tipula Confusa, drums and vocals) who create cinematic soundscapes, plugging into the more extreme end of music. Beehive-like discordant guitars meet panic-screams and pitter-pattering crashing cymbal drums. It feels exploratory, peering into the unexamined recesses of the human psyche. “I thought we would have been ridiculed a lot more than we have been,” Gigas continues. Perhaps what’s stopped that is the bracingly original quality of the music – so original that the band has come up with a brand new genre (“Xenofeminist crisis-energy rock”) to describe its organic world-connecting glory. Their new album Extinction Burst! contains six hair-raising tracks that will forever change you. It’s the follow-up to 2016’s My Mother the Vent, which was praised for its brutality and abjectness. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore even told NME “they’re insane.”
“When we first came into people’s awareness we were compared to those po-faced, angry nihilistic men making power electro,” says Gigas, straightening her violet-coloured fringe. “That doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing. We’re not sitting around reading books about serial killers. We’re sitting around watching cartoons” (specifically Ren & Stimpy and Cow & Chicken).
As a child, Confusa’s (they/them) first taste of alternative culture was seeing The Offspring on Top of the Pops. “They were performing ‘Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)’ – I was enthralled and had to work my way back to find out where they came from,” they say. Gigas meanwhile grew up in North Wales and went to a school with a high percentage of alternative, hippie classmates. It was known locally as “the goth school.” At home her parents were into Hawkwind and Black Sabbath and were upholders of authoritarian values. “My dad would say, ‘Remember we’re scum,'” Gigas says, “outside of what the straights are doing. Implicitly, there was the message of ‘don’t trust the government.'”
Living with autism and ADHD, she was bullied heavily. “My behaviour was hard for others to comprehend – I used to act out.” Turning to punk but finding it ossified and one-dimensional (“the punks I met just wanted to listen to The Sex Pistols, get pissed and wear tartan trousers”), her gateway to musical escape came unexpectedly as an 11-year-old. “I was watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and there that scene where Cannibal Corpse were playing ‘Hammer Smashed Face’ in a club. I was like ‘what the hell was that?'” Despite being into metal her parents thought Cannibal Corpse’s death metal was too much. “And to a kid that’s an immediate green light.” She picked up a copy of Kerrang! with features on Grindcore and black metal and that was her musical passport for the foreseeable future.
Despite playing in a drum-less metal trio when she was 13, difficult teenage years eclipsed her musical ambitions (“I was taken out of school and put into psychiatric care”) and continued until she transitioned at 16. “I lived a very sheltered existence in Wales,” she says. Moving to Leeds as a trans woman and having a partner who was politically engaged taught her loads. “Living your life as a transexual woman you come up against all kinds of situations,” she says. “They inherently teach you about how the world works. I had an implicit political compass, from being ostracised from society and not fitting in the world.”
Gigas was a fan of Etai Keshiki, Confusa’s band. “I’d never seen anyone play drums like they did,” she says. The two bonded when Confusa played her the last album from no-wave revivalists AIDS Wolf. “It started a whole shift in my understanding of what music was at that point,” she says. The duo began collaborating through improvisation. “Coming from a metal world where everything was so predetermined, it was exciting.” It also alighted on her new, growing love of free jazz. “It was liberating to do that kind of thing with someone who was so good at playing their instrument.”
In all its unspeakable, horrific beauty, Guttersnipe’s music became an expression for their shared traumas. “We’re both very candid with each other about the psychological states we are trying to express,” explains Gigas. “We’ve both had our own relationship to mental illness and what we’re trying to express is hysterical and unwieldy.” The duo’s live shows are intense examples of their music chemistry slash telepathy. “Me and (Confusa) were a couple for a bunch of years, so we got very, very close to one another,” explains Gigas. “We got to experience each other in a way that was extremely vulnerable and intimate.” Guttersnipe’s power is about the shared vision between the two. “I’m always looking at (his) hands and facial expressions. It’s much easier when you are looking at each other,” she says. “I’m following it very directly. We are attuned to each other’s psyche.” Their songs are written from this holistic place: pieces of improvisation are repeated and refined. “We’ve never sat down and written a (song),” she says. And on the basis of orgastic Extinction Burst! long may that continue.
Guttersnipe’s Extinction Burst! is out May 8 via Night School.
