Space Camp discuss grimy trombone tones, becoming a two drummer band, and inscrutable noise

Space Camp’s how could i not be your girl feels urgent. Oftentimes, the instruments are so heavily distorted and shrill, they sound like emergency sirens. The vocals are harsh and demanding, pummeling the listener as industrial mayhem clangs in the background. Then, suddenly, the sludgiest trombone you’ll ever hear will start to ooze into the song, or a cartoonish piano lick will twinkle into the mix. Everything feels unpredictable and jarring - in the best possible way.

But the thing that stands out most is the frenetic, impossible drumming. Dizzying percussion pounds under each track, pushing an already noisy song into a full-on frenzy. And the drumming on here really is kind of impossible for one person - Space Camp has two drummers, allowing the band to channel the kind of frantic energy that bands like Black Eyes or (the) Melvins bring.

Space Camp have been puzzling unsuspecting audiences and sound guys for over a decade. By 2020's Overjoyed in This World, Daisy Josefa and June Violet Aino were the band’s two remaining members. But for how could i not be your girl?, the duo recruited percussionist Max Goldstein, and Space Camp hopes to remain a two-drummer band going forward. “I think it's hard to move away from it live show-wise,” June tells me via video chat, “because it’s so intoxicating.”

Earlier in the year, June, Daisy, and Max chatted with me about how they became a two drummer band, the joys of performing with toys and junk, and the secret to getting a grimy trombone tone.

How does it feel now that how could i not be your girl has been out for a while?

DAISY: It feels good. I really like to put stuff out into the world and I'm always excited to add another thing to our discography and mark the progression of our sounds and the vibe. This is our first record doing the two drummers, which was the marked difference.

JUNE: And also our first full length where we wrote the songs with Max! I mean, we've always had people on, like, cello or bass or bass clarinet on some of our previous records. But we wrote the songs with Max, so that was also a fun little first for us - having someone else come into the Space Camp world.

MAX: Space Camp is one of my favorite bands. I can't believe I got tapped to be brought on to the Cool Kids club.

How did you get to be part of the band?

MAX: Well, I mean, I feel like we've known each other…probably since I moved to the Valley. Space Camp played in the basement of my first house.

DAISY: I think June and I always really admired bands with two drummers. We always wanted to do it, but we were waiting for someone who was the right fit.

Have you been able to play a lot of shows with both of you on the drums?

JUNE: Oh, yeah. Basically since our last album, Gold Star, so we've been doing it for about a year pretty consistently. Some of it was more Max learning our old songs. Or writing new parts for old existing songs, and then writing new songs together from there.

MAX: I feel like the album project was, “we're gonna do an album with two drummers,” but then the shows came up, it was like, “well, why don't you come play the show too and learn some old songs?”

DAISY: I feel like we're always trying to change up the set list, so it's also cool to rework the old songs and add more layers to them.

MAX: Yeah, they feel really different now. I even feel like the two drummer songs have changed since we've recorded and released the album, because now we can goof around with them a bit.

DAISY: Definitely.

MAX: And I love a good project. I've actually been spending some of this month writing, you know, unnecessarily challenging drum parts for old Space Camp songs.

When you go to play a venue and tell them you have two drummers, are they like, weird about it?

DAISY: Oh, we're no stranger to pulling up to the venue and them getting mad at us when we explain what the setup is. We've always had a lot of elements that were like, offensive to sound people. We're just used to it. It's always better to play a DIY show with this iteration, because then people don't really care how you set up.

DAISY: We've always had a lot of elements that were like, offensive to sound people. We're just used to it. It's always better to play a DIY show with this iteration, because then people don't really care how you set up.

MAX: I do also think we set up our stuff faster than a lot of other bands with a normal configuration.

DAISY: We played some bigger venue shows where half of the stage was already taken up, so we would just have like, a broom closet's worth of space for us to set up two drum kits and then all the keyboards and stuff.

JUNE: And we make it work! Almost always. And because we've gone down this path for so long, we try to not rely on anyone for anything. So we're like, “well, we have all our own stuff - we just need two microphones from you.”

When I listened to how could i not be your girl, I wrote down in my notes that the trombone sounded hellish. Are you putting a bunch of filters on it afterwards? Are you running it through a pedal?

JUNE: So for live shows, I run it through my pedal board and through my keyboard. So it's going through a bass amp and a contact mic. So that's why it sounds so feedback-y and kind of dirty. And then when we record, I will usually do that too, but maybe also layer in a “normal” recording of the trombone. 

JUNE: For “THE FIRE CATCHES AND LOGS BEGIN TO BURN”, we had a specific amount of pedals on to get this really tinny, echo-y sound. And we even put it on the drums because when we play it live, Daisy's drums will usually get picked up by my trombone. We set the trombone on the ground and used it to record the drums in addition to the trombone. So the trombones has this metallic sound all over the track.

I always like hearing about experimental DIY live show setups, like bands who play with children’s drum sets or sing with Rock Band microphones. Have you ever done anything like that?

MAX: Well, I bring like, an actual box of toys to all of our shows.

Oh, hell yes. This is what I like to hear.

MAX: Everybody whips out their phone when I use this thing - it's called an impact train horn. It's basically an air compressor that has been put into a drill casing. But it's like, 120 decibels loud. Extremely loud. Actual train conductors use it for trains, but I'm using it for art. I also bring a whole bunch of weird bells. It's truly a box of crap, like random pieces of metal and stuff like that.

DAISY: We have had a long history of bringing shit to shows. I mean, we used to buy toy pianos at thrift stores and would just, like, destroy them live by smashing them on the ground and stuff. And I used to have a clarinet that I would blow really hard into like a bugle at the end of the set. So we've always incorporated weird trashy stuff, mostly from thrift stores.

JUNE: Whenever we're in a very small space, it seems even more funny when we have so much stuff. I have a whole extra keyboard case and an 88 key keyboard that has a janky DIY feel to it already. I had a violin at one point.

“TOUCAN PLAY AT THAT GAME” is a really interesting track. When I first listened to the album, I was not expecting any avant-garde jazz hybrid noise tracks. How did that song come to be?

DAISY: That song is actually a song that we had recorded previously in like, 2016 or 2017. I don't really remember what the original idea around it was, but we've been playing it for a really long time. I think even after we stopped having our old iteration of the four piece band setup, June and I just really liked playing it with the two of us because it was so spacious and weird. We would play shows at bars and stuff and it would make people feel uncomfortable. And like, I like to try and make people laugh, too, so we would play that song and it would  sort of devolve into antics of like, me throwing stuff. So I think that was definitely something with Max where it was like, “you have to do this song with us.” And then we had so much fun doing weird shit on it that it was like, we have to actually re-record this. Because the old recording is not a proud moment.

JUNE: Yeah, the old recording and the old song was a simple song structure, but I was like, “oh, let's get all of our friends from high school to play strings on it and other little instruments.” And of course, because we were in high school, the recording of that didn't go very well, but I ended up using that song in that state to apply to music school. What’s on the current album is the most mature free jazz improv version. But still, I'm really proud of that song for the big part in the middle. When we're not fucking around, it hits hard, and I think it hits harder because we did so much fucking around.

Is the first recording accessible?

JUNE: It's not right now. We have been talking about having [our Bandcamp page] be more archival and have all our old recordings up there. We just haven't pulled the trigger yet. 

DAISY: Before I was like, “all this old stuff sounds bad and I feel embarrassed about it.” And now I think June and I have reached a point where we like looking at the progression of everything. I want people to be able to listen to it, even if some of it is, like, embarrassing.

MAX: There are some bands that I really love where their early music is like, cringe or even just, like, utterly inscrutable noise. And then it becomes really cool to be like, “damn, they came up with a cool idea out of this?”

And like, sometimes some inscrutable noise is good.

MAX: I straight up love it.

DAISY: I want to be less scrutable in the future.

I really like the album art for this, it’s really attention grabbing. Who made the head?

DAISY: That was all us. It feels like the last couple records have all had a really defining color palette. And for this, I was like, “this one needs to be blue.”  I initially wanted to do something with prosthetics, but it seemed too difficult, honestly. So I was like, “we should build a giant head.” 

JUNE: I watched a handful of videos from old ladies who made crazy crocodiles and stuff, all out of papier-mâché. It was fun getting our hands covered in glue.

DAISY: There's a lot of really great outtakes from that, too.

MAX: I really liked the one that was the “DEADNAME ME ALL NIGHT” single artwork, too.

JUNE: Oh, yes. That one's kind of scary.

DAISY: Somebody said that it looked like Black Sabbath’s Paranoid.

Is there anything about this album that you want the world to know and haven’t had the chance to put out there?

MAX: I'm just very proud of it. It was truly an honor and a great come up in my life to be brought on to play with Space Camp. And listening to the album brings me a ton of joy. It's like, I can't believe that we did this.

DAISY: Yeah, it's been huge for us. I wasn't sure what it was going to sound like, honestly, mixing the two drums together. But, you know, Seth at Machines with Magnets did a really good job of panning it all in a really unique way. So it almost sounds like one big crazy drum set that someone is playing impossibly with eight limbs. I'm really proud of the way that it sounds.

JUNE: I also think it was a cool timeline for us. Before, we had just released an album the weekend before the pandemic started, and then didn't get to play a lot of shows with that album. And then we wrote a whole new album, Gold Star, and it was a longer process for that one. It felt nice to kind of have a quick turnaround and really chase ideas down rather than having having to wait on them for a while.

MAX: Honestly, to that end, it was one of the only albums I've ever worked on that had a deadline from the jump. Like, we had no material and we knew we were recording it on that week in May. That has had a positive influence on my workflow since.

DAISY: Yeah, I think we have always liked having really finite endpoints. I think that stuff can kind of get overworked if you sit on it for too long. I want there to be a lot of Space Camp works and albums, and I want them to reflect the moment that we're in.

Support how could i not be your girl? on Bandcamp, and follow Space Camp on Twitter and Instagram. You can also check out their Spotify playlist of songs/musicians that influenced the album.