Crushed By Capitalist Cordyceps with Water Gun Water Gun Sky Attack
“Maybe landlords are a different species, maybe it's all an actual horror movie.” Enjoy some “cruel useless music” with Tim de Reuse.
No one can afford to live in my hometown except for millionaires. And of course, millionaires don't actually want to live in my hometown - they want to host Airbnbs and rent out condos. Renting is your only real option if you want to live there year-round, and even that's barely viable. I couldn't afford it, so I moved to a different smaller town - but my rent's nearly doubled here, too...
It is so frustrating and feels so hopeless. I'm obviously not alone - I mean, I know people who live in cities where this shit is even worse, and by now there are (rightfully) a million punk songs about gentrification and capitalist nightmares like the rental economy. But I've still had a hard time finding music that truly captures the helplessness and anger I've felt while searching for an affordable place to live.
That is, until I found Six Tenants Killing One Homeowner Six Times Over by Water Gun Water Gun Sky Attack, the solo act of Quebec-based musician Tim de Reuse. The album bellows and gurgles, contorting its sounds into a cosmic horror befitting of the hell we've found ourselves in. Six Tenants… describes how truly fucked we are by landlordism (literally - there's a scene where an eldritch realtor fistfucks a tenant), but it's not content to merely yell about how much the system sucks. By imagining landlordism as a sort of brainwashing fungus or invasive hivemind, the album explores the insidiousness of the entire system and the ways it leaves everyone (renters and homeowners alike) miserable and wretched.
Tim's vocals can be anything from a commanding swarm, a villainous plea, or a pathetic lament; telling the story from every side but morphing into something rotten in every one of them. These righteous deliveries give the lyrics the nuance (and the menace) it needs to pull off such ambitious storytelling. Add to this an intentionally overstimulating mix of guitar, theremin, various samples, and the distinctive kanjira - a South Indian frame drum that he says adds an "obnoxious" quality to his album.
Tim did a video call with me to talk about his maximalist approach to songwriting, rising rents' effect on the Montreal music scene, and cordyceps.
Hello! Thank you for sitting down to do this interview with me!
Yeah, no problem! I've never given an interview before. Isn't that weird? I don't know, I didn't think I was the type of artist who gives interviews. I just put stuff out there and then go back into a hermit cave.
I found this album…I think via RateYourMusic and immediately the title grabbed me. I mean, I’m currently living in an apartment where the rent has gone up 75% since I moved in, and everything has 70 layers of white paint so it looks gummy…
Ah, the landlord special.
Exactly. I was wondering… there's a lot of reasons to write an album about how landlords are scummy, but what pushed you to make an album about it?
Well, a couple of things. I think the biggest thing that stuck in my head and rattled around in there for years was…so Montreal was known for being a really good music city, right? And then the pandemic hit, and all of the venues that I like - they're all dead now. Landlordism is in Montreal, and it's fucking our music scene completely.
During this fall from grace, an acquaintance of mine was going on to a whole bunch of Facebook groups for Quebec landlords. We were reading all of these comments from landlords who were trying to get around Quebec's (surprisingly strong) tenant laws. Just casually asking each other for advice on how to do heinous shit. Like, “hey, can I do a renovation, say I have to temporarily kick tenants out, and then ‘lose’ the paperwork?” But I also noticed that all these landlords sounded fucking miserable. It's like…you people are making fucktons of money off of little to no labor. You're hoarding capital, and you don't even enjoy it? You don't even feel good doing it?
That, and there was another thing that I kept noticing. When our ol’ Justin Trudeau talked about Canadians, he never said “person.” He never said “citizen” or “Canadian.” He always said “homeowner.” Everything politically came down to the homeowner. As if the homeowner is this different species, this different class of human. It all just drove me insane. So I was like, “hmm, what if being a landlord's a condition caused by a bug or corcordyceps? Maybe landlords are a different species, maybe it's all an actual horror movie.”
There's a lyric on the opener that's like, “you don't even know what has been taken from you.” Like, all this is an almost cosmic level of fuckery, incomprehensible in a Lovecraftian horror way.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that is because this separation between Landlord and Not-Landlord has become so entrenched that us mere renters are unable to think up the tools to get out of it. It’s these two groups of people who are both miserable and unable to see any way out. It's so helpless. And by virtue of being renters in this renter class, we have so little power over our own destiny that we don't realize how little power we have.
I really like that the album digs into how even the people who “have it” don't really “have it,” and so they’re both the oppressed and the oppressor.
That's why I have this insect motif. Any good Marxist will talk about capitalism having its own desires and its own powers and own whims, that it goes where it pleases and power acts on its own basis, regardless of who the people wielding the power are.
I feel like that angle is more true to life. I mean, it's fantastical, but I feel like it's more true on an emotional level than the straightforward concept that all landlords are just these bad evil people, right? This is a fungus, this is an infection, this is a parasite that is compelling them to act in this way. And they're miserable!
This mind control, fungus bodysnatcher theme comes up in your other work, too, right? Like, there’s Total Swarm for Young Men…
Oh, that one’s a crowd pleaser. That art for the album is so fucking good. I just asked the artist, “hey, I want you to make a horrible monster, but make him really buff and make it look like a Grindr picture.” And then he came up with that design. I was like, “oh my God” - and it's awakened so many people to some weird fetishes.
Love that. I mean, all art should awaken a fetish or two. That’s what it’s all about.
Exactlyyyyy. I mean, you gotta swing big, right?
Six Tenants as a whole feels very grimy. By the first song, I was like… “this shit sounds evil.”
Oh, good! I'm glad! I don’t want to do subtlety. I want it to feel big and evil. There's a whole lot of music about being crushed by capitalism right now. And I mean, I love a lot of it, but also a lot of it…doesn’t feel enough like being crushed. It's not enough to just play a punk song and talk about how bad shit is - I want you to really feel the crush, let it seep in.
Oh yeah, that vibe came across. And when I re-listened and went back to read along with the lyrics, I realized there was all this horrible gory eroticism, too. There’s a lot to dig into.
If my music makes you look up the lyrics, then I've done my job. That's the only thing I hope. I write so much of them, and sometimes I’ll release it and it’s like, “ugh, no one even paid attention to the fucking lyrics!” So like I said, I always got to swing for the fences. That's my ethos. Let's not be too subtle. You only got one chance for people to listen to you, right? As much as I would like to say that I only make music for myself, I, unfortunately, do care if people listen. I do care if I have their attention, which is why a lot of it is the way it is.
In terms of the music production, are you making your music in your room?
Yeah, I have the instruments all right here. There's the mandolin, there's the theremin, this is the drum…all in my room. I had some old music friends online that I get help from. My friend Matti, they did the drums on “SO ALIVE!!”, which was super cool. Other than that, it's all just me.
It's a very tedious plotting process, trying to make it sound like more than one person. I use a lot of VSTs, especially on the denser tracks - there's a fuck ton of layers. I have a bunch of space and I want to fill it up like a jigsaw in the mix - like okay, here are some chopped up samples. Here is some warbling synthesizer. Here is some other sample nonsense. I just kind of pack it into a nice fat sausage of sound. There's no part you can listen to where there isn't a distinct element going on. And if it sounds really artificial or synthetic, that's totally fine. I never programmed something to try to make it sound like a real person is playing it when it's not, because I don't think that usually works.
For the first time ever, I programmed piano on “You Ungrateful Losers,” and I'd never used actual piano samples before. And I was mortified that people would think that I programmed piano samples and wanted them to sound real. So I ended up processing them in a way that made it obvious that it was mechanical, because I didn't want it to sound cheap, right? I wanted it to sound deliberate.
I did want to ask you a little bit more about the percussion - specifically your use of the kanjira.
Oh, this guy! I love this drum, as you can tell because I keep it on my desk at all times. So, I'm half-Indian on my mom's side, I grew up with a lot of South Indian music. I got this while visiting India. It's a really simple frame drum. It's just a goat skin - traditionally iguana skin but those are endangered - over a ring of wood with a little tambourine jangle on the back. You hold it with your thumb in the back of the drum and your four fingers pressing on the face of the drum, and you push into it to change the pitch as you're playing it, so it sounds like three people playing drums.
I was determined to cram it into this album - it's on like, five of the tracks - because it sounds so obnoxious. This thing has bass, it's got the jangle, and it's the hardest thing to mix that I’ve ever dealt with in my fucking life. It's impossible to mic, it's impossible to record. This thing is made to be heard across a concert hall. But I was like - I want this janky weird thing in there, because it's gonna force the rest of my mix around it to get twisted up and shaped in a strange way, and that'll be distinctive. And it was really difficult, but I'm going to keep doing it. I wanted to step outside my comfort zone of machines and drum samples. I wanted it to dazzle the senses, right?
That's what I'm always trying to do. I'm a one-man band, but I want it to sound like I'm not a one-man band…but I never want to sound like I'm trying not to be a one-man band, because that's how you sound like a “bedroom musician”, right?
Right. Like, you don’t want it to sound small.
Yeah. I want it to be really unique, something you wouldn’t ever mistake for AI. It’s like - if something is 100% AI generated, nobody's impressed by it, right? I don't want to give that impression. I want to give the impression that you should be very impressed. Because that's art, and art in some sense is ego. And I want to show off!
As you should. Man, I forgot that AI was a thing for a blissful moment there. And then you had to remind me.
Haha, I'm sorry!
It sucks, because I browse random new releases a lot, and sometimes I’ll stumble upon AI albums. And it’s like, for what? It can’t feel good to make that.
Yeah, that's another reason I'm trying to make this really noisy weird shit. I just want to make sure AI stays away from it and make music that’s as useless as possible to train AI on.
The AI music drives me crazy for so many reasons. You're not having fun making the “art” and nobody likes it. Kinda like how landlords are miserable and everyone hates them. It’s like, what is this for?
Yeah, there is this sense where everybody's like, “why are these companies forcing this down our throats? Why is this being implemented in everything?” And every company's like, “We have to do it because it has to be done, because everybody else is doing it because it is expected!” So it does feel like the machinations of some otherworldly force, some greater flow of capital getting desperate and flailing around and trying to find some other way to keep lines going up.
We feel a kind of helplessness - a very similar helplessness when we feel against landlords. Because the true cause of both landordism and generative AI is a force larger than any one CEO.They are being compelled again, by some other kind of insect. It feels like shit, and we're all hopeless, and I want to capture that in my music.
Not to be super corny, but I guess that makes the big swinging passionate art that much cooler and powerful and radical, right?
Yeah, maybe as long as we all have the ability to make commercial-resistant art about it. I guess that’s the reason it doesn't feel hopeless or pointless to put out an album like this.
Any last words about the album to send readers off with?
I hope people like it. And if anybody in Montreal wants to play bass for me and can handle an incredibly weird hermit dictating what you play on stage, hit me up!
Support Six Tenants Killing One Homeowner Six Times Over on Bandcamp, and follow Water Gun Water Gun Sky Attack over on Bluesky and Tumblr.
