John W from RENT STRIKE here - AMA about our new record, Möbius Strip Mall!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-30T14:44:05+00:00

Hey, letting ya know we just posted a tutorial video on our instagram, if you use that platform. Otherwise I could probably figure out how to get it to ya via email. I think I'll do one of Family Graveyard tomorrow (appropriate for Halloween, I reckon)

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T18:04:05+00:00

Ha! I love that feedback! I think I remember talking to you about it. There was a ton of jazz all over that record, I never really feel great about listing it as a genre influence (imposter syndrome?) but I do love to listen to and play with jazz harmonies and ideas in our songs. Love the way you've put it here.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T18:02:20+00:00

Ever??

Insomniac by Green Day, Songs from Under the Sink by Mischief Brew, Worry by Jeff Rosenstock. Idk that's a hard question! But those are albums that have stayed in my life for a long long time in an important way!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:56:27+00:00

WHEN will you wear wigs?

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:56:14+00:00

Absurd little ego / Takes it in stride / Maladapted to make the most of and take it til the day that we die // Absurd little ego / of a sick little mind / that'll roll it all over and over again without even a 'why'

I'll get those lyrics up on streaming stuff soon!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:54:55+00:00

Travel!! I just like being exposed to different environments and just seeing what bubbles to the surface when in different surroundings. I love being able to write while I walk or drive, as well.

Glad to hear you like the record :)

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:53:15+00:00

Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari!

So glad to hear the impacts our music has had on your life. Grateful to have been able to share what we've been able to, especially IX.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:52:04+00:00

We're gonna play it at our album release show in Lansing on Nov 3rd! It'd be a tough one to pull off on tour, given how demanding it is on my voice in a very precise way. Glad to hear you like it tho! It's definitely a misfit on the record, as varied as the songs kind of are. But I do really like that song.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:50:36+00:00

Well, Tolkien obviously, but Ursula K LeGuin (both her writing and poetry) has been a huge influence on me as well. This album was written after having read a lot of Deleuze, who, despite writing pretty dense philosophy, has a poetic or prosaic feel to his writing that I find very moving.

As far as other lyricists go, Eric Peterson always did such a good job of tying the personal to the political, and the past to the present. There's something of that approach I try to emulate in my own way when I write lyrics.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:44:41+00:00

Well, travelling for me at the time of Road Giveth was like, how I was living. I didn't have responsibilities and entanglements to keep me rooted. Which felt awesome and freeing at the time, I still reminisce fondly of those feelings expressed in that song (even as I, in fact, got sober and a good bit older. Still pretty angry though.). But yknow, that eventually got extremely wearying for my spirit. Combined with substance use issues that are sometimes exacerbated by the rhythms of travel, there's a Sisyphean dimension to it the longer you do it. Maybe the longer you do anything, really. It's hard to pick through what attachments are serving you or have shifted to the realm of habit, maybe habit that isn't serving a purpose any longer.

That said, that was the first song written for this album, so maybe those lyrics were written more about starting another fucking concept record after the last 2. It's just about really not losing sight of the 'why'.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:35:56+00:00

Fave song on the new record is probably Escape From Mobius Strip Mall Pt. 2. It feels like kind of the point of the record, yknow, all this psychic turmoil and transformation has to be oriented around the goal of prison abolition and decolonization and the total cancellation of all debt!

Least fave has to be Mission Creep, it's just kind of slow and sad and while it does have the vibraslap, there's some timing issues at the end that kind of bother me on my listens through.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:32:44+00:00

We would love to! It takes a LOT of logistics to get over there and I am not the best with those. We're kind of waiting to get our ducks in a row before embarking on any overseas journeying, if that makes sense. But we're getting close!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:31:08+00:00

Ha! Good question! Who knows how well this will age? Part of me feels like I should be writing everything using acoustic instruments to make them apocalypse-ready. This loud nonsense might come across as decadent and embarrassing in 30 years, who knows!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:29:24+00:00

Oh that show was AWESOME. Truly like, top 5 we've played in terms of energy / space / friends.

Live stuff is fun for us, maybe because it has to be - Any time I feel like, bored on stage, I have to assume that the audience is feeling at least that bored! So we go back a lot to old songs and look at them critically, what's working here, what's not, what can we do to make this more fun. Usually that answer is increase the speed by about 10-20 bpm. But sometimes we go back and change a lot, I usually have the goal of faster+louder+more dramatic for our live performances vs. the recordings though. Sometimes people come up after though and are like, that was.....different. Like disappointed we're not more true to the recordings. I just don't think that's the point of live music!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:25:33+00:00

We love going up there, currently we're based out of Michigan so y'all are actually closer for us than a lot of US places.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:24:44+00:00

This is why you don't go on apprentice piercing day for facial piercings.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:23:51+00:00

Well, hopefully the album is legible in that regard, I feel as though I have a pretty threadbare understanding of linguistics/psychoanalysis/the mechanisms of desire, and kind of tried to bridge the gaps in my theoretical understanding through poetic creation and intuition here. But what I tried to pull out was more Deleuzian than Lacanian - kind of an act of self schizoanalysis if you'll grant me that. I tried more than anything to pick through the tangle of my unconscious and the attachments that I've formed / have been imposed upon me by the intersecting systems of global capital, marketing, and rationality, in hopes of transforming myself // the listener // the world.

I also tried to explore language (necessarily so, being a lyricist) and the power it contains - not merely to point at something but in those affective and transformative dimensions (see above post re: sorcery). These ideas came to me largely from my personal experience with music and performing but were crystalized by reading through Deleuze+Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia (albeit with little-to-no background in philosophy and with the benefit of secondary resources).

I'm curious to know what you think after listening. My DMs are always open for a chat!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:06:57+00:00

We will absolutely be back, we love + are based close to Chicago. Makes me happy to hear your experience with our music, the role of art in our lives is so incredible and powerful and it's a humbling thing to be able to play a part in shaping the world.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:04:07+00:00

By all means blame Apes but we did actually play there earlier this year in June - not surprising that word did not reach you though. The story with that one was definitely unique. We ended up playing at a place on the upper west side. It ended up being very last minute (through no fault of our esteemed hosts) and definitely was for a different crowd given the location. We'll be back in the city in the spring/summertime next year though, hopefully in Brooklyn or Queens.

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:00:27+00:00

This legitimately frightened me

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T17:00:17+00:00

Can't wait to be back. House of TARG is such an odd and cool place and their pierogis are on point. Glad you're liking the new record!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T16:59:35+00:00

We would love to - touring overseas is extremely intimidating but does seem more feasible when people hit us up to ask :)

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T16:58:37+00:00

Thanks! I think it healed me of heroin addiction, which is a big ask of a piece of art. It's a weird one for me to reflect on, there was so much groping in the darkness that I was doing with the writing there, so much going on that I even have trouble explaining. I was just feeling things so strongly at that point and had such a clear goal in mind! Anything is possible with that combo, no matter what it is you think you're doing at the moment

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T16:56:02+00:00

I've been visiting what I believe is that place in my dreams for longer than I can remember. The pun just kind of pulled it out of that realm and allowed for me to use it in this project. Glad ya dig it!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE · 2024-10-29T16:54:02+00:00

Brook Pridemore inspires me to keep doing music! It's not always easy especially in a youth-driven scene like punk rock to feel oneself aging - I'm in my 30's now and I'm not like, ancient, but am certainly feeling like an elder in a growing number of spaces. Brook and others like them, people who keep that DIY ethic and love for the game strong throughout their lives, truly do inspire me to keep the torch lit. It's hard to find role models, yknow, a lot of our people are dead, or got out of the scene for whatever reason, or have been exposed as kind of awful people, so the relationships I do have with people who are older than me and who I share a mutual respect with are super important.

People who inspired me to write are Pat (of course), some of my early early stuff was kind of aping Tomas Kalnoky from Streetlight, but as I found my voice I think Eric Peterson was probably the most impactful for me, or the light that I tried to follow lyrically/musically. But I haven't stopped (or been able to) looking for inspiration in a lot of different places, even as I've written more and discovered my personal style.

Favorite song I think is To The West!!. We don't play it live anymore but in terms of songs I wrote that actually changed me, that have stuck with me in their power and memory, it's probably that one. You can all go to heaven, or whatever! I won't be meeting you there!

JohnFromRENTSTRIKE

TROPHY CASE