Princess Army Wedding Combat interviewed by WTC
Extremely delighted to present a discussion with Kelly Donovan and his longstanding otaku noise project Princess Army Wedding Combat, mashing breakbeats, anime samples and electrifying noise into pure overdriven carnage.
Can you give a bit of a background on yourself and your work? What also got you into listening to and making noise? Considering you've been active for over 20+ years(!), I wonder how you managed to learn about and get into this sort of music as I imagine it would've been through a totally different approach compared to today.
I'd guess a lot of people who got into noise in the mid-late '90s have Relapse Records to thank, maybe? That's how it was for me at least. I remember the mailorder catalogs would have ads for their sub-label, Release, that pitched noise as the most extreme music ever, like, "Hey, you think grindcore is wild? Wait 'til you try noise!"
I think the two things that really blew my hair back and piqued my interest though was getting Gore Beyond Necropsy's "Noise A-Go-Go!!!" album, and the one track in the middle of the Melt-Banana album "Charlie" that was basically a blast of noise. I am pretty sure after that I ordered a few Merzbow albums from Relapse along with whatever goregrind or whatever I was already getting from them.
Princess Army Wedding Combat kind of started out as a joke, or an afterthought though. My friends' and I had a crap-metal / noisecore band, but we got it into our heads that we also needed to form our own side projects. This mostly amounted to us switching instruments, coming up with a new band name for the afternoon, and jamming for an hour. On my own though, I ended up coming up with two solo projects: Circle Cat or Fish, an extremely short-lived noise project, and PAWC, which was intended to be just no-frills grind. Not long after Circle Cat or Fish was dropped, Princess Army became a vain attempt to emulate Gore Beyond Necropsy while channeling a pinch of Atari Teenage Riot.
I probably learned the most from people I corresponded with though. A dude named Lord Vacuum contacted me to interview my friends' and my band for his zine. I ended up emailing and AOL instant messaging him a bunch and we would gab about metal and noise and stuff. He knew a ton of bands, ended up sending me copies of his project along with some other awesome tapes, and gave me some pointers on how he produced noise on his computer and stuff. It kind of all expanded out from there.
Aside from Lord Vaccuum, who were the other people you got in touch with when you started out?
It kind of feels like there was a successive series of characters that I corresponded with over the years. Though I have to admit I was probably pretty bad at staying in touch a lot of the time. I was playing in other unrelated bands all during this time, and I think IRL stuff came up that got in the way too. Thinking back, I released PAWC stuff really infrequently, like only once a year or so for a while. Still, I definitely regret losing touch with some people, even sleeping on potential splits and trades and stuff. Not a good look for me.
Up until the end of the 2000s, the people I corresponded with the most after Lord Vacuum were The Reverend Ogre Snot Gurgle who ran Fecal-Matter Discorporated, Ucchy who runs Shit-Eye Cassettes, and No.305 who ran the netlabel UGU. in 2010, I moved to Austin, Texas and kind of fell off the Internet for several years. Though I'm really grateful to Johnny Cash of Breakdancing Ronald Reagan for welcoming me into the Austin noise scene and letting me jump onto a ton of shows and cut my teeth on doing live noise during that time. I'd consider the beginning of the modern era of PAWC after Himeko Katagiri of Tsundere Violence and I started emailing around 2016.
I see you've mentioned playing live sets in your answer - were these efforts that you devoted a lot of attention to? Or were they just about having fun and messing around with friends? Do you have any performances you've done that you would consider to be your favourite, or the most memorable?
Most of the shows I went to when I lived in Texas were pretty informal house shows or took place in small dive bars, which created the perfect vibe of it feeling like a party or hangout which just happened to be punctuated by 10 minute long noise sets here and there. Those kind of shows are the most fun. I probably took it for granted that stuff was always happening and the Austin scene was so active though. Even if I was not taking it super seriously, it still provided awesome experience by just being an iterative process of playing, seeing what setups worked, trying again next week, etc. I still have a handful of cheat-sheets of the setups I'd used for shows drawn onto post-it notes. I certainly started learning my gear better through playing so much, but I kind of forgot about the other side of things like recording at home and releasing stuff during that time though.
I think I played it pretty safe with my sets, going for harsh feedback loop style setups for the majority of them. I think the sets I did were good for the time, but individual shows themselves were always enhanced by the vibe of the space, the energy of the people there, and also seeing the other acts play. That was peak gear-hound days for me too, so I'd be eyeballing somebody else's setup like, "Ooh, they have the DOD-whatever and the Boss-whatsit pedals! Wow!!"
I do have one performance that stands out though. Buckle up, 'cuz it's a bit of a ramble. Around 2008 or '09, I was still living in Colorado and was able to jump on as one of the opening acts for a show at an art space / venue in Denver called Rhinoceropolis. I had acquired a big electric piano at some point recently. I think I got it at a garage sale or something. The thing was huge and seemed to only work sporadically. I had the scheme to put a strap onto it and turn it into a keytar kind of situation, Edgar Winter style! For the set, I had the keyboard running through a few effects and intended to kind of bang on the keys and noodle around with it. Right before I started, I cracked a few packages of those thin glowstick bracelets and tossed them into the crowd. The piano decided to stop working within a minute or two, so with help from some audience members, we ending up smashing it apart. While this was taking place, a bunch of the glowsticks broke open (either deliberately or by accident) and the glowing goo was getting spattered all over the floor and audience members. The people at Rhino had turned off all the lights, so the floor around where I was playing turned into this multicolored starfield of glowing globs while we smashed up this malfunctioning instrument. Sonically, it was kind of a disaster, but this one stands out to me since it was just such a weird and trippy kind of tableau. Also, as far as I know, no evidence of the show exists, like video or photos or anything.
Personally, I would say a very big part of your music is the influence of anime, in stuff like your samples, your album covers and of course the alias you use! Would you be able to explain this influence? Are you interested in other aspects of Japanese culture?
Ha, I am inclined to agree! I had been getting more into anime stuff for a few years before starting PAWC, but I think the influence and inspiration to include it as a theme came from a few different places. C.S.S.O.'s flirtations with anime samples was probably my biggest initial inspiration. The song "Zombie Fuck" on their album Nagro Lauxes VIII was a huge eureka moment for me. Similarly, bands like Discordance Axis and Carcass Grinder also ended up being touchstones early on. Lord Vacuum's noisecore project used a bunch of intros taken from the Simpsons and Futurama, which I thought was great and really sealed the deal on doing something similar with anime. My awareness of there being any other anime-related projects was pretty limited when I started out. I have to admit I only had rudimentary knowledge of The Earwigs, so I wasn't quite aware of how groundbreaking they were until a couple years later. They are really the OG anime noise freak as far as I am concerned though.
The name Princess Army Wedding Combat came from a two-episode show I'd seen at a small local convention in high school. It's not really a great show, but the name always stuck with me as being emblematic of that cute-and-tough beautiful fighting girl thing you see in anime from time to time. Even among oddball names for shows, it always stood out to me.
The only idea I had for PAWC at first was following or parodying the trope of other bands rigidly sticking to thematic threads (gore, porn, horror movies, etc.) but leaning into funny and cute anime stuff instead. I like when genres like noise and stuff are used as a scaffold to support some kind of niche hobby or interest. How my interest in anime has been expressed in PAWC over the years has changed along with personal tastes in specific genres/shows, other types of music I am enjoying at that moment, or how close or far I have been from the current online zeitgeist. I've already been into anime long enough, and it's so varied and vast, that I don’t anticipate losing interest in it anytime soon. As PAWC persists, it will no doubt continue to change along with me, at least thematically, with how my interests (in anime) present themselves.
I realise that earlier on, you touched on the topic of the gear you use very briefly, and I noticed you have demos of home built equipment on your YouTube channel - I'd be curious to ask if you would be able to provide any information on your DIY creations such as pedals and noise synths? Were you inspired by the circuit bending scene?
I did try to do some circuit bending! I am pretty sure I was inspired by seeing the stuff Tim Drage of Cementimental had on their old website. I scoured local thrift stores for a while, and managed to get a hold of both a Speak and Spell and a Speak and Math for super cheap. I had found Reed Ghazala's website that had all of the concepts laid out, plus some awesome interpretative images of circuit boards and connections rendered as psychedelic 3D blobs with lightning bolts going between them. I didn't have very good soldering equipment or really any knowledge on how to properly do it, so it's amazing I was able to get any of the bends to work on those.
I only really got more serious about building gear in the last couple years or so. Before that I'd tried with varying success to build a few things, but was mostly thwarted by impatience. For a long time I didn't stray beyond just making contact mic shaker boxes, which was okay. I tried to build an Atari Punk Console, which I think is considered a beginner circuit for noise-making gizmos, and I honestly couldn't wrap my head around the schematic. I did end up figuring it out eventually, but not before I made a video of me spitting on the breadboarded circuit to take out my frustrations and possibly get some chance circuit bending along the way.
I'm still a beginner, so I'm just sticking to building guitar pedals and simple tone generators. Nothing too complex or that requires a ton of exotic parts. People out there have done all the leg-work of reverse engineering tons of commercially made gear and provided the diagrams for free, so I'm just following along. At the time I'm writing this, the next thing I want to try to build is one of the rare DOD pedals I don't have, like the Corrosion or Bass Grunge. I suppose people have different tastes and creative processes, but I feel like constructing gear can be kind of a right of passage in noise, even if it is something as simple as building a contact microphone. There's an extra element of ownership and personalization that I get from integrating gear I've built, even if I'm just recreating existing designs.
Considering you've been involved with noise scenes both in real life and online, where do you find it easier to collaborate? Has the shift to the more internet side of things increased your creativity? Could you also give a bit more information on your recent output?
Personally I'm into it both ways. I haven't had a chance to play live or jam with anyone in a long time, so I do miss that. There's a magic to the spontaneity one can get from jamming live with someone. Getting lost in the flow and all that. At least that's how I remember it at least! It isn't so bad trading audio tracks back and forth though. Maybe it's easier to do simultaneous jamming online now? The potential of far-flung people being able to communicate and collaborate on projects is still novel to me even after all these years.
I release things pretty slowly it seems. Apart from a few comp appearances and a short split, I just had a tape come out on Handmade Birds. It was released as part of the final batch of what had been an ongoing series. I'm pretty happy with how it came out. The tapes from my series even come in little velvet pouches! I've finished some material for a couple of splits and maybe a couple other things too. We'll see!
Thank you so much for the engaging responses! Do you have anything else you want to say? Are there any future plans?
No worries! Thanks for inviting me! It's been fun to revisit some of the days of yore. Take it easy!