I (Kasrael) recently sat down 100 miles away from Paul and Jennifer Maher Coleman of Architrave and instant messaged an interview to/with them on the heels of the release of their recent powerhouse recording that has made the Quarantine much easier to get through for all of those fortunate enough to have a copy of the album. ‘This Perfect Day’ has been receiving rave reviews from both local and national zines, blogs, and even old fashioned newspapers. In fact, there’s been so much praise that there would be nothing I could write that hasn’t been written way better by a dozen other professionals unlike myself. And it’s so fucking hip the beautiful cover of the album is a photograph by famous local scenester Gary Ziroli of Mr. Cancelled, Thinner Friends, and honestly, the best photos I’ve ever seen that he just posts on Facebook for free (he even said I could use some for my band Fucking Christ’s album covers)!
Suffice it to say, this album fucking rules. And there’s nothing profound or even well written I could say about it that hasn’t already been said. However, given my personal relationship with the Colemans due to my previous employment as their gardener (before they found out that giving me 20$ to mow their lawn would only make me go to Stewarts and buy tall boys and scratchers — i don’t even have hedge clippers much less a lawn mower!), I was able, unlike those ‘professionals’, to score an interview. And here it is (and I really think I should mention what terrific sports they were no matter how dickish I got);
Kasrael Sonin (TB): does architrave wanna do an interview for times Boredom
Paul: Sure! But Jen is our authorized media representative (I shouldn’t be allowed to talk). You can put that in your article.
TB: I’m sorry are you the funny guy? no, I am. And I think TB’s 7 readers might agree with me there. I decide what goes in.
Paul: See. I shouldn’t be allowed to talk.
TB: Ok before we get started I should warn you that this is my first interview for Times Boredom or, ever. I’ve been told that I’m surly, sarcastic, off topic, and I personally offend everyone I’ve ever spoken with. Unfortunately you’re stuck with me because the entire remainder of the Times Boredom staff is sick with genital warts. Especially Scott. His bleeding warts are the size of cockroaches. It’s disgusting and I wish he hadn’t described it to me in great detail. If you want to know more about it please ask.
Jennifer: no paul no!
TB: Ok then! First off, I hear that you’ve recently released a new album that’s getting rave reviews in the local press. Why?
Paul: Please note that I was typing, but Jen stopped me.
TB: It will be noted. That and that you’re both taking twenty minutes to answer this question because you’re trying very hard to come up with a clever answer.
Paul: Nah. I’m just sitting here eating carrots.
Jennifer: Honestly I think people are looking for content right now, looking for things to write about if they’re writers. I happened to send them the album with the suggestion that they check it out and I bet they had time to do so. (but it’s also a pretty good album)
TB: I also understand that you recently did a covid-19 alonecast from somewhere inside your house.
Jennifer: If only we had thought to call it that
Paul: Alone together….we are what they call a “pod”
TB: Did that raise the troops spirits or did they just yell at you to get off the podcast and bring on the barenaked ladies?
Paul: We did have a lot of confusion about who was “Shane” in our comment stream. Also Barenaked Ladies suck.
TB: Are you referring to Super Dark fudge pirate Shane?
Paul: YES!
TB: Also you like shitty music so you have no right to judge the super ground breaking Canadian powerhouse that STILL IS BNL.
Jen: I thought you were referring to our kids… when I realized that they weren’t willing to dance in the background we just made sure they wouldn’t be home. They did a killer kid’s album
TB: Speaking of dancing, do you consider yourself a dance group or a ‘white dance group’?
Paul: I don’t really dance…that’s Jen’s territory
Jen: guilty of being white and dancing I guess!
Paul: I’m playing Candy Crush right now and I know that makes me something.
(Note: Paul sucks at Candy Crush. I am several hundred levels above him even though I keep giving him free lives and chocolate bombs and stuff)
TB: Well then are you electro-clash or dark wave?
Jen: A 10 year old girl
TB: Trip hop or jungle?
JEn: we’re using dark-wave this week
TB: Proto sludge or powerviolence?
Jen: oooh!
TB: Ambient disco or smooth urban jazz? Quit stalling and answer the question!
Paul: Black Twee
Jen: vaporstep
TB: I’m gonna go with vaporstep, because ive heard of dubstep. People at work used to call me idub because i hated dubstep so much.
Jen: were people playing alot of dubstep at your workplace? that’s harrassment
TB: I’ll ask the questions here m’am. Which brings me to my next question, which is meant more for Paul. How do you make such decent music when you like indie landfill such as Kurt Vile and um, that other girl I hate that did an album with her… what’s her name??
Paul: MAGIC
TB: Parquet courts?
Paul: Yep. I do like them. I definitely have a thing for repetitive.
Jen: in the case of Architrave, because I’m bossing him around
TB: That does answer a lot Jen, but honestly, when you’re the head of the Vampire Weekend fan club as Paul has been for three non-consecutive terms, it’s a wonder he knows what a guitar is at all… Real estate?
Paul: Eh. On Real Estate
TB: Thank god. at least you have some boundaries, as far into the landfill as they are.
Paul: I like the first Vampire Weekend a bunch, but mostly because the production is crisp and not terribly “produced”. Beyond that… eh.
TB: Paul, please stop admitting to liking terrible, awful, garbage music. It’s not helping.
Jen: We’re both Genesis superfans since childhood, how do you feel about that
TB: Well, I thought that you couldn’t embarass yourself more than Paul already has, but admitting to that…
Jen: When you get to be my age it’s pretty hard to embarrass
TB: Yeah, well, you should be embarassed. I mean I love Jethro Tull but I’d never tell anyone. EVER.
Jen: Oops…
TB: And it’s not like Ian Anderson became a popstar. Goddamn gimme some of that classic rock and roll on one leg with a flute in both hands pointed upward!
Paul: My cousin is named Ian Anderson
TB: No photos please. I’ll have to upload that and name it and it’ll be a whole thing.
Paul: FACEBOOK: EXCISE PHOTO
TB: So how white are you two? Do you have any ethnicity among you?
Jen: Is Dutch or Irish ethnic?
Paul: DUTCH/POLISH/IRISH
Jen: Just… white
TB: Wow. That’s about as ethnic as white bread with the crusts cut off.
Paul: The dutch like to cut off their crusts
TB: Do you think it’s wrong for white people to make dance music? Let me rephrase: do you think it’s wrong for me to dance to your music?
Paul: Wait for it
Jen: my 23 and me revealed a touch of Ashkenazi jewish I guess
TB: Well that makes a lot of sense. We all know how famous Jewish people are for their ability to dance. Maybe we could hold you up in a chair or something.
Jen: Will you dance in the background of our next livestream please? Our kids won’t do it.
TB: Only if you think I can dance. Because, you know, I don’t think I can dance, being an Ashkenazi Jew and all. Can my dog dance instead? She can high five and roll over.
Jen: that counts, she’s in
TB: Speaking of white bread, you’re currently based out of Ballston Spa. Why the fuck would you live there?
Jen: I have no idea how i got here
Paul: I do for me, but it involves my ex and Skidmore College.
TB: Are either of you originally from someplace even remotely interesting?
Jen: Chicago, New Jersey, Minnesota
Paul: Latham! ! ! The original Capital District Circle!!!!
TB: I’m gonna go with Jersey, because it’s the most interesting thing you’ve said all night.
Jen: I came to albany for grad school
TB: So why on earth did you stay? If you had any interest in making music that is…
Jen: I started DJing here and got entrenched. There was a great scene back then for dance music
Paul: Well…I left and lived in Boston for years…came back because of family stuff.
TB: The only electronic dance group I can think of from here that ‘made it’, as in, they do interviews where they constantly name drop ‘miley cyrus’, and they’re pretentious twats is Charlie Everyone. Why do you hate Phantogram so much?
Paul: They refuse to introduce us to Miley.
TB: Can I have some of your apple bread?
Jen: All mine (because coronavirus)
Paul: This is slowly turning into an Narduwar interview
Jen: do you have presents for us??
TB: Would you like to mention your sponsor?
Paul: Superdark? My day job?
Jen: Rebel Reserve
Paul: Jen likes this shitty bourbon I once got. It burns.
TB: I was told you had a 30 second spot about something you were getting paid to promote.
Paul: Haha. We just got “commissioned” to sing happy birthday to someone’s mom.
TB: Please don’t tell people about what I paid you to do to my mom. You’re crossing the line of journalistic integrity…
Paul: Judgment free zone here
TB: Yeah well Robert Smith called and he wants his early recordings back. And, um, New Order called and said, cheer up!
Paul: Hahaha….funny you say that. We’re working up a cover of Procession right now
TB: We’re getting near the end here so I must remember to ask this all important question; if you had to, how many donuts do you think you could eat in an hour withOUT throwing up or getting diarrhea? And I’m not talking like good fresh cider donuts or anything. We’re talking three day old pink frosted Dunkin Donuts here. Who btw the way is my sponsor.
AMERICA RUNS ON DUNKIN! (TM)
Paul: In my younger days, I could have managed about 17. Now…it’s more like 5.
TB: Finally, ‘Disco Girl’ was a great fucking song, probably your best IMO. How come none of the songs on the new album ‘This Perfect Day’ sound like Disco Girl?
Paul: Jen can’t answer right now because her daughter has never heard the F word.
TB: Which f word?
Paul: Finally
TB: So what are Architrave’s plans for the coming post-apocalyptic future?
Paul: Box of donuts.
TB: Jen, do you have anything to add? Like hopefully apple bread?
Jen: marketing plain identical jumpsuits. Apple bread 4 ever. we definitely have to make a song called Disco Girl now
Paul: Dedicated to Kasrael.
TB: And I will absolutely hold you to that. Thank you so much for having me in your lovely Covid19 telecommute. I must warn you that this conversation will be reworked to make it look like I made all the funny jokes and yall praised Times Boredom endlessly. If you get sick you have to tell me and then I’ll have to tell all of our readers, hopefully before this interview goes out.
Jen: thank you! We LOVE Times Boredom!
Paul: A true pleasure! You’re a hilarious guy Kasrael! I wish you were my dad, and Times Boredom was my Great Uncle!
This concludes our interview. Please stay tuned for your regular 2 or 3 bad movies that are available to stream on all 5 or 6 internet streaming platforms right now despite the fact that we need mindless entertainment now more than ever! If you’re looking for mindless entertainment, download a copy of Architrave’s new record here on bandcamp and dont forget to pay them tons of money.
Now if you both could pretend to keep chatting with me as the sound goes off and the camera begins to pan away, it would look very natural.
Paul: [LOOKING NATURAL]
Making their first appearance here on Times Boredom, we’ve long been fans of this campy 60s era sounding hip retro-rock and roll quintet from Schenectady. I mean, they’ve been making music and performing only since the 2010’s (far as we know), but if you heard them without knowing anything about them you’d be certain they were a hip underground L.A. garage band or British Invasion rockers from the 1960s. And given their traditional rock and roll vibes, surf guitar, and highly stylized vocals covered in reverb and delay, it’s obvious that’s the sound they’re going for. Husband and wife team Jarpon and Muffy Reyes makeup the most visible and essential part of this band, with all band members other than Muffy decked out in black leather and sunglasses. Muffy is a master of costumes and performance flair, almost in stark contrast to the cooler than cool stances of the rest of this rockin band.
They’ve done it again. An incredibly innovative group that sounds pretty much like no other and has yet to play much outside of Saratoga Springs has made the top ten list of original local bands. This old school indie rock (think Pell Mell meets Minutemen… if you know who either of them are or SHIT ABOUT SHIT!) band is fronted by the Capital Region’s very own punk rock poetess Karen Schoemer. No melodies interfere with this frontwoman’s evocative sing-speak style that reminds one of Patti Smith and Kim Gordon, but whose poetry is far better and more interesting than either one (in our humble opinion). Off the cuff tales of all male bands debating the first woman to “force her way into SST records” are mixed into a stream of consciousness of magical descriptions of everyday mundane appearances with what appear to perhaps be the inner intruding thoughts of Schoemer. Unfortunately, there’s nothing funny about this band, hence we haven’t written an article yet despite our admiration. They’re just overwhelmingly impressive and original, increasingly making their mark in Saratoga Springs and hopefully soon venturing much further beyond…
So the name ‘William Hale’ is one of those confusing indie-rock type names that can refer to several things. For the most part, William Hale hails from Glens Falls (an increasingly important town in the Capital District scene giving us the Mess, No More Death Stars, Pencildive, etc), and is the nom de guerre of Lucas William Hale VanScoy (of the ‘Ravacon collective’) and his backing band. Many members of his band are regular fixtures in not only his but other popular Glens Falls groups (just like all the other groups we mentioned that keep trading players and driving us nuts keeping track!). Specifically notable players are upright bass player Jade Macduff and the omnipresent scenester Alicia Macier, who plays the unusual instruments of rock violin and sometimes even the accordion all over the Glens Falls scene. William and his crew of misfits have also done several shows as ‘William Hate’, a dark and violent character that syncs up well with his more recent, grittier look. He and his crew have also gone under other names, like the Ravacon collective and, um… to be honest we can’t quite sort it out — Lucas, if someone’s told you about this article and you’re not busy, send us an e-mail and we’ll do an interview to sort all this out. Our readers desperately want to understand what all these names and collectives represent!
Once again Ballston Spa’s Haley Moley have blanketed the Capital district in many performances and new songs that we’re told will soon be released as a new album. Their members have also been involved in several other projects, including Sinkcharmer, Che Guevara T-Shirt (huh?), and Architrave. And of course, that’s what earns you points when it comes to this survey. You gotta make yourself known, see? Get yourself out there. Join a hundred bands! Make friends with cool people! Play synthesizers and indie rock and dance and disco and darkwave and never play the same place twice! That’s how Haley Moley keeps doing it, and that’s how you can too! That and they’re incredibly talented, write really cool unique songs, and are constantly active artistically (yeah, sorry, the whole ‘learn 3 chords and go out and rock’ does not incredible bands often make). Must never be a dull moment when you’re in this band. And as soon as there is, chances are a new song that features diverse genres and the defining in-depth, soft and dark alto vocals of lead singer Jennifer Coleman as well as often 2 or 3 other members of the band will soon emerge to challenge and bemuse you!
A stripped down version of Haley Moley or an additive version of Sinkcharmer? One can’t help but be reminded of those two acts considering that Architrave is composed of husband and wife superlative musical team Paul and Jen Coleman. Yup. More scene points! These kids and the super dark kids take them all, I swear. Building on the sounds that made Sinkcharmer a huge local star within a year of his bursting on the scene, Architrave continues in the less band is more electronic noise and danceable vibe of an inimitable stable of vocals with depth and mystique and electronic devices. The setup is intimidating, the electronics on time and ultra clear, the sounds entrancing and mesmerizing… and this is just a recently inspired collaborative project from these prolific writer/performers still in development!
(Photo by Tessia Bekelja)
Anyone who saw White Devil (aka E.S. Cormac of the Hill Haints) 
And that is where Scum Couch, for the past year in particular, has outshined those of us that thought we were the coolest underground noise makers. Mark O’Brien, the talented genius behind Scum Couch, has a way of blending the most effective parts of the past 40 years of noise rock, experimentalism, improvisation, straight noise music and most likely a bunch of really intellectual academic John Cage type stuff (that we really don’t know that much about and have never honestly listened to ourselves b/c we really like to listen to stuff like the Beatles and Nirvana too much and come on, we’re just being honest here…) into something that is often transcendent, always entertaining, and unique as fuck.
And yet the talent behind the project is unmistakeable. So many artist/musicians try to achieve a similar sound or record like, say, 2016’s ‘Weak Existence’ without anything near the level of success. This is noise. This is music. This is dreadful. Unlistenable. Brilliant.
And if there were any question of O’Brien’s self awareness as a talented anti-artist, anti-musician, which is often the highest definition of high art and pretention, his 2018 recording is titled ‘Contrived’, and the previous release of 2017 was titled ‘Ignorant Bore’. Both brilliant pieces of noise collages and challenging instrumentation that titles itself in a self-deprecating manner, knowing that all art and whatsoever be it called ‘serendipitous’, ‘improvizational’, back to Surrealist ‘escritures automatique’, dada’s ‘Exquisite Corpse’, Impressionism’s ‘En Plein Air’..
Scott Koenig: We love you! Stay cool! Stay cool forever!
DJ THINK NOISE: Nobody else knows shit about shit! You make us old timers and our deep, torturous, forgettable local history proud!
For some time now Eternal Crimes has been uncomfortable with their ‘post-punk’ genre label. Benefits of the label of course include its all encompassing nature, covering everything from Joy Division to the Fall and even onto the Birthday Party (i.e. early goth, early lo-fi, early noise rock, etc.).
So in order to let people that were too lazy to look them up on bandcamp or facebook but might want to see them play a live show know what they were like, Eternal Crimes recently began the process to transfer their genre to something more appropriate.
“I am Bobby C from Dryer! You will eat
“Hello, I am a stinky frenchman stereotype from somewhere in ze France. I love the
“Jorge Ninos here. What, why are you looking at me? Just because
Times Boredom 