Interview from Spew, #87 February 2015 (originally published in abridged form) 2014’s triple disc behemoth Harshest Realm is the self-titled debut release of a musical project spearheaded by one Garret Kriston, a Chicago based musician whose formative years were split between formal studies and basement recording before toiling within the city’s DIY/punk scene. Now he has emerged with a sprawling document of what surely is a vast arsenal of artistic capabilities. Harshest Realm is now available via Coolatta Lounge CDs, along with fellow traveler Marshall Stacks’s latest jammers Lost in Sim City and the Snake Eyes/Point Blank single. ___________________________________________ Let’s start by giving the folks at home some background information. I’m particularly interested in learning how your relationship with music has developed over the years, so as to better understand where the music on the Harshest Realm album came from. No problem. I’m going to not hold back from rattling off influences and favorites, if that’s okay. Totally. The more the merrier. I was born at home on March 3rd, 1990 in Oak Park, down the street from Chicago’s west side, near Harlem between Harrison and Roosevelt. My earliest memory of music was seeing archival footage of The Beatles playing on the Ed Sullivan Show, which made playing guitar in a band and singing original songs seem like the most appealing activity in existence. I might have been two going on three, and I don’t remember much else from then besides puking in my crib and seeing carrots in it (the puke.) My older brother was discovering “classic rock,” so there were rock related bootleg VHS tapes in the house that would get played over and over. 1 One was an Ed Sullivan retrospective that had the Beatles plus the Stones, the Doors, small tastes of Motown, the Rascals, a still photo of Bob Dylan since they didn’t let him perform. This was the early ‘90s so the tape also had the episode of Get A Life where Chris Elliott housesits and has nightmarish hallucinations about the pizza delivery man trying to kill him, which scared the shit out of me. I would also watch Stop Making Sense and even liked this New Kids On The Block VHS that my older girl cousin had, plus musical sequences in kids movies like The Gumby Movie, Kermit the Frog singing “Rainbow Connection, and Disney stuff like The Aristocats and Mary Poppins. Dick Van Dyke’s turn in the latter as a “one-man band” surely split my mind open a bit. We had a tape of a Saturday Night Live musical retrospective hosted by Wayne and Garth, too, so I got to see Prince, Devo, Eddie Murphy as James Brown singing about getting in a hot tub, Andy Kaufman, Squeeze, Whitney Houston…sort of a crash course in what music became after the ‘60s. As a kid in the ‘90s I thought a lot of contemporary music sounded too weird. Moving beyond the Beatles meant getting into Wings...also the Kinks and Buffalo Springfield. Neil Young was huge for me since he bounced between bands and always contributed their best songs, in addition to ruling it on his own. Obviously, I found any of his newer albums to be lightyears beyond the contemporaneous Crosby, Stills & Nash output. My parents had sophisticated boomer taste so I’d hear Richard Thompson, Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Suzanne Vega...if jazz records were getting play they didn’t sound like anything to me. My brother was getting into cooler classic rock bands like Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Aerosmith…I liked some songs but wasn’t ready. The James Gang and the Guess Who were more my speed. Steve Miller Band. I might have been five when I saw a band playing at a street festival on Oak Park Avenue near the old Second Hand Tunes and they rocked the shit out of “Swingtown.” To this day I’ll defend just about anything on classic rock radio. My older girl cousin lived with my family for a bit and she had a weird “alternative” CD collection with Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers…lots of gross, creepy cover art with babies and shit. I do remember the booklet for Without A Sound by Dinosaur Jr. being in her CD wallet. I guess Candlebox was a thing for her, too. My brother’s friend was into Bush and Silverchair…13 certainly seemed like a ways off, let’s just say. Kids at school took longer to care about music. This is the mid ‘90s, by the way. In summer school before second grade I met some kid who I thought seemed like a cool music guy but he disapproved of my old person taste and proudly stated that he only listened to songs featured on VH1’s Top 10 Countdown. I didn’t have cable so I wasn’t familiar with the brilliance of Fastball and Marcy Playground. Kids my age then started getting into music for real. Before that I’d only get to talk about music with the occasional kid whose dad might have been into the Police. A couple years later that same kid was all about Third Eye Blind. I started noticing that my peers’ CD collections mainly consisted of Eiffel 65’s Euro Pop, Smash Mouth’s Astro Lounge, and Sugar Ray’s 14:59. The edgier kids had Blink-182’s Enema of the State and the Offspring’s Americana. Some dude slept over at my house once and he had both CDs with him, so I asked if I could tape them and this asshole said no, so I just did it while he was asleep. Later my mom told me to tape over both sides because the artists used foul language (90% of the appeal, duh.) Long story short, I didn’t. Cursing was one of the main draws of contemporary music back then, even with sunnier sounding acts like New Radicals, whose songs stood out from others on the radio due to sounding like early ‘80s Stones. Their CD could have been deemed “parental advisory” but wasn’t. Same with some Everclear CDs and Incubus and this terrible band I liked called Stroke 9. What a completely hilarious time in hindsight. Finally 2 downloading the “extreme version” of the South Park album song by song off some fan site felt like a major victory after repeatedly marveling at the 30 second RealAudio clips offered on CDnow.com. I had a Mac and had to jump through some hoops before getting the music piracy thing figured out. When did you start trying your hand at learning and playing music? Okay, I should backtrack a bit here. I played toy instruments as a kid, and dicked around on an electric upright piano that had no more than five presets including sexy harpsichord, vibraphone, and “EPIANO” sounds. I started taking piano lessons at six years old. In my own time I’d try to pick out melodies of songs I knew like “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” which helped develop my ear. For the lessons I practiced as little as possible but still did it every day. Sheet music books with fun pictures kept me engaged, so I wasn’t exactly diving headfirst into classical repertoire. Playing from memory during recitals was always terrifying, and I screwed up during my first one ever playing “Fluffy the Puppy,” although I did recover in a manner that was in all likelihood swifter than it seemed at the time. The whole time I’m of course thirsty as fuck to be a real musical artist, writing songs and playing in a band. “Recorder club” was very much my type of extracurricular activity. In fourth grade we got to pick out instruments to learn during school and I somewhat inexplicably thought clarinet might be a good choice, but my lungs were too weak because of asthma. Similar story to Sonny Sharrock, I should note. The orchestra director suggested violin, so I learned that for four years before quitting since it was physically uncomfortable and just pretty lame overall. Meanwhile I was upping my game in piano a bit, playing more challenging pieces in a signature style that was often as fast, frantic, and intense as possible. When I was 10 years old, I attended a brief jazz-oriented summer program in New Orleans, staying with family friends in a suburb that I only recently learned was the shooting location for the ‘80s low- budget horror classic The Last Slumber Party. I learned some basic bop heads and blues improvisation tactics but was admittedly clueless. My parents thought it was a good idea; I was just really into Foo Fighters and Weird Al by then. I remember “The Real Slim Shady” was massive that summer and black girls loved the Janet Jackson song from the Klumps soundtrack. I played in “jazz band” at school, which was a joke. We wore matching t-shirts that said “JAZZ” in big letters over a cityscape. The “J” was shaped like a saxophone. We played “Birdland” and the James Bond theme. Playing in the basement of the Music Mart was alright because they had Crow’s Nest and Sbarro and that candy store. The best thing that came of that was seeing Paul Wertico play in some high school auditorium at some band competition event somewhere further out in the ‘burbs. He wasn’t competing, I don’t think. It was a power trio with an electric guitarist and kind of slayed.