Three-Layer Cake - Stove Top - “free rock” trio of Mike Watt, Mike Pride, and Brandon Seabrook (RareNoise)
The past year’s lockdown has proved undeniably challenging to improvising musicians who typically thrive on face-to-face interaction. But bassist Mike Watt, drummer/percussionist Mike Pride, and guitarist/banjoist Brandon Seabrook have all built their careers on kicking down the barriers between genres, so why would they let a little pandemic-induced isolation and geographic distance stand in their way? Convening for the first time as Three-Layer Cake, these three dizzyingly inventive artists bake up a long-distance set of singular, boundary-defying collaborations on their combustible debut, Stove Top. Stove Top is uncategorizable in the best sense of the word, patching together elements of punk, free jazz, new music, no wave, doom metal, dub, avant-funk, and various subsectors of the experimental in such freewheeling and raucous fashion that the very idea of divvying them up into disparate inspirations seems laughable. The basic idea for the project is embodied in the name, which came to Watt fully-formed along with the concept itself: Pride would record drum tracks and send them to Watt, who would respond on the bass. As Watt summarizes, “There's a lot of fucked up things about the Internet, but this is one of the good things: instead of spreading lies you can trade files.” Watt then tasked Pride with finding the third layer for this improvisational concoction. “I knew Brandon was a big fan of Watt’s and kind of carries a lot of that ethos that Watt carries around in his own work,” Pride continues. “And Brandon is amazing, so I thought it would be musically cool and karmically cool to connect those two guys.” The guitarist was immediately on board. “I was excited,” Seabrook says. “I discovered the Minutemen in high school, and they were my break from the jazz and classic rock that I had always listened to. They were a big influence that broke open the world of the punk rock movement. They also taught me words like ‘malleable’ and ‘foist’ and ‘fascist’ that I wasn’t used to hearing in Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath songs.”
