#zach roddis

[notcooldiy]

Hello to all you late night scrollers! Not Cool DIY is putting on it’s first gig in Yorkshire, at none other than the legendary 1 in 12 Club in Bradford. Check out the event for more info!  https://www.facebook.com/events/1633285530269484/

[seeingyourscene]

Sunday Notes - 8/3/15

Greetings on International Womens Day. Last month The Punk Singerwas on Film 4 – it’s definitely an essential watch. The film highlights the problems with a male dominated scene in 90s grunge. Similar problems exist at some shows I’ve been to, and in some specific scenes. Whilst I think promoters shouldn’t book “for the sake of it”, it is useful to book regardless of gender whilst keeping in mind…

View On WordPress

[dontbeshitzine-blog]

Traffic is Romantic

by Zach Roddis

Maybe I should explain; I don't know how to drive. The only experience I have of being in a car is getting a lift from my Dad going from A to B in everyday life, and the occasional holiday. As the last five years have passed this has been less and less, as I live in a different city, have been to university and graduated. The only time I am a passenger in a car now is when I'm lucky enough to be going on tour with a band.

There's a certain nostalgia to it. As a child I used to be amazed at what seemed to be endless lights of neighborhoods distant to motorways whilst travelling through the night.

When I'm travelling from city to city doing spoken word gigs alone (on a train or a coach), I kind of switch off from it. I pretend it isn't happening... but in a car or tour van you're there on the ground with it.

Day to day I listen to songs and they are appropriate for the occasion. That's not to say that songs can't be fantastic. On a spoken word level for instance, you have stuff like Scared of Everything  - highlighting harsh emotions such as regret in the lyrics. Another great work is Lancaster Market by Shakusky – an American emo band who also use spoken word fearlessly in their songwriting. A relevant lyric being;

put my fucking organs in a vending machine at some gas station and try to convince someone to fish the correct change out of their pocket so you can afford to assemble a new me right then and there

That's just it though, when you're on the road you have more of an opportunity to really get into the guts of a piece of work. I often find myself more involved in a novel I'm reading if I'm in a traffic jam. It's like I travel through the characters. I think spoken word has the potential to do that as well. Poets Lenni Sanders and James Varney just this month released a four track EP. Often lines are said overlapping between the two of them, giving a different sense of meaning on each listen. This reflects the human condition; we are all overlapping each other, stuck in traffic, waiting for a train, listening to a phone ring... and then we all speak at the same time.

Scared of Everything https://scaredofeverything.bandcamp.com/releases Shakusky https://shakusky666.bandcamp.com/album/lancaster-market Lenni Sanders https://lennisanders.bandcamp.com/releases James Varney https://jamesvarney.bandcamp.com/

Tour staples also include: The Kermode & Mayo Film Review Podcast The Book Slam Podcast

Zach Roddis is a DIY spoken word artist who writes about human existence and takeaway food

[dontbeshitzine-blog]

Photos of Furrow, accompanied for some of their set by Zach Roddis, from the Issue 1 launch night at the Flying Duck by Megan Daly

~

[dontbeshitzine-blog]

Photos of Zach Roddis from the Issue 1 launch night at the Flying Duck by Megan Daly

[mixtapemethodology]

Made Up Culture

Essay by Zach Roddis

    The best we can think of are Radstewart, Joanna Gruesome, Elvis Depressedly, and Guantanamo Baywatch. I'm sipping coffee in a not-for-profit arts cafe in central Manchester with some of my best friends. We discuss pun-based band names, books and songs. 

It is the twenty-first of June 2014, and I’ve just finished performing at my book launch; I self-published a book of tweets and held the launch in a zine library housed in said cafe. It is National Flash Fiction Day or NFFD if you wanna be concise. NFFD is timely as my good friend and fellow writer, Fat Roland, has two great short fiction books and is supporting me at the book launch. We discuss the immediacy of pop music and the fandom surrounding Justin Bieber and One Direction (among other topics). 

The coffee leaves froth behind on the sides of the mug. Having just been involved in the literature event we will eventually go our separate ways. One of us will go and see an interactive play at an abandoned building. One of us will go and see a band called Glass Animals at a reasonably well-known venue (a band that I've already seen – a long time ago when they supported Telepathe in a smaller venue). One of us will go to an all-dayer and watch Hot Shorts, the musical project of writer Chris Killen. I end up going to a DIY show at a comic store. 

All of this is relevant because it is the culture that is in the air, rather than it being attributed to any single journey that day. The comic store will host three bands including We Came Out Like Tigers. It's on the same street as the arts cafe I am currently paused in. All of these journeys take place in the square mile that surrounds. Out of everything, it's the feeling that live music can exist anywhere that resonates the most. The Do-It-Yourself nature of any one day, any series of events in the same place, is of priority at a time when the punk scene comes under criticism from some individuals and on some blogs. 

The good things are in the moments, they aren't in the details. The good thing isn't my book, it isn't the day itself, and it isn't any one band, promoter, or performer. The following things are positive: the words spilled out of the mouths of the people reading, the noises made by the violin, drums, guitars and vocal chords of the bands, and the appearance of all of this where it has not been present before. 

Any band can play a bar or venue, but not every band has played in a comic store or at a house show. I feel like similar things are true of the current attitudes in poetry and live literature in the UK at the moment. So many poets I know complain that not enough people care about poetry. They say this in conversation, online, and whilst performing on stage. I often feel like replying by saying something like; “if you want to take poetry to more people, stop performing at poetry nights and in places where you know half of the audience already – seriously, where is the fun in that?”

I don't say that, of course, I just agree and continue to write. All of this becomes unnecessary as the notes play, as the words are spoken, as the coffee cools, as the atmosphere gathers, as the pressure is released from a can of beer, as the pages are turned, as the rooms occupy genuine and heartfelt art. I only hope this kind of thing can happen more often. 

☊

Zach Roddis is a 23 year old human person and poetry guy based in Manchester, UK.

[timeofasking]

i forgot tumblr existed. and maybe felt better for it. but anyway i am trying to use it as a scrapbook and so here is poster for the next show im putting on

rfts has been a really great place to put on show over the last 6 months or so(?) and this is the last one i am putting on here i guess before moving away

[irregularzine]

LIVE REVIEW: GUERRILLA MONSOON IN HUDDERSFIELD.

I live in Huddersfield, which is a medium-sized town nestled between a handful of the UK's biggest cities. I've lived here for almost six years now, which is a fairly shocking thought, and in that time it's never really had the greatest scene. Bands trickle through every now and then, with a couple of venues occasionally brining in a big name, and there's a handful of popular locals, but generally speaking Huddersfield shows tend to be a fairly lacklustre affair. People just go elsewhere – it's not a long train ride to get to much better places – and there's genuinely just not the interest in the town about ninety percent of the time.

It can suck, but it brings its own unique charm at times. When shows really go off, they're amazing, due in part to how unexpected it is, like when Gnarwolves came through and destroyed the place last year. I've seen some of the greatest and most intimate shows of my life here too: Jonah Matranga playing to only about thirty people, but absolutely stoked to be getting such a warm reception on a rainy week night in a town he'd never heard of; The Survival Tour creating that real sense of community that folk punk should have but often lacks; Chrik playing on the floor to old friends and newly converted fans. But mostly? Yeah, it's shit ska or metal bands playing to crowds plagued by embarrassing drunk dancing or, when good but largely unknown acts actually come through town, those awkward shows where a band plays to a room not even a quarter full and hardly anyone really seems to give much of a shit.

So yeah. This felt like it was going to be one of those, despite being put on by Cats? Aye!, one of our better local promoters. Everyone involved in D.I.Y. shows always try so fucking hard, and it's honestly disheartening to see so few people wander in to watch a free gig on a Saturday night - I guess the fact that this was the same night as England's first World Cup game had something to do with a different crowd, less inclined to come to shows, being out and about.

But what else can you do, except keep trying? And what can we do, except keep on coming out? I feel guilty every time I miss a good local show, but I'm glad I caught this one at the Parish, not least for the relatively bizarre spectacle (in H-Field, anyway, where anything that could be perceived as 'arty shit' enjoys a curious relationship with the people who live there) of a spoken word poet opening up a punk show. Zach Roddis seems like a weird dude, sort of like a middle ground between internet alt-lit poets like Steve Roggenbuck, and slightly more 'traditional' but still, y'know, fairly alt poets like Ross Sutherland (who Roddis covers in his set. By which I mean he reads one of his poems). Awkward but funny, once he was warmed up and we knew how to take him, he was fantastic. Very cool to see people open to booking, watching, and performing stuff like this, and its presence in the scene is really welcome.

But still. Odd as shit way to open a punk show. Fortunately, Isaac are as standard a way to continue a punk show as humanly possible. Three piece Lookout!-style pop punk like early Green Day and Crimpshine, fronted by Shankland of, uh, Shankland fame – you've heard it all before, but it's great. I'm gonna have to admit that I wasn't looking forward to them because I could barely get through the opening track of their EP without turning it off, but they actually kill it live, coming off like a passionate homage to those influences rather than a lazy rip. I also got my first preview of the Parish's ridiculous LED strip lights. Yeah, that's a thing now.

See, The Parish is a weird venue. I don't know for sure that it's the biggest in town, but it's definitely the one with the best reputation, that puts on the most shows. I loved it when I first moved up here but have been increasingly disinterested in recent years – part of this is down to them booking stuff I'm not so in to quite as often, but other parts include most of the staff I knew there leaving, and its popularity with students making me feel increasingly old as first years get increasingly younger than me. Y'know, personal stuff. But on a night like this, I feel like its biggest failings are its aspirations – it's a decent venue with a decent reputation in a decent town and, while I know that venue, reputation and town will only expand by dreaming bigger, ridiculous rockstar lights and various other gimmicks only really feel embarrassing when they're blaring in to the eyes of a dozen people, tops. I'd rather they just, y'know, saved it for the metal shows.

And it's this weird lineup, weird venue, weird night, that Guerrilla Monsoon are to finish. And, man, you know what? I have so much fucking respect for these guys after watching them. They weren't put off by a damn thing – well, if they were, you'd never have known it – and played a much better set than could be expected from a band in their position. Their take on orgcorey melodic punk rock is nothing new, but they're good enough at it, and their live show impressed enough, that I'm seriously backing these guys now. It's a rare feeling to come out of shows like this in Huddersfield genuinely excited about what I've seen, rather than just disappointed that the band didn't have a better crowd to bounce off. I can't wait to see more from them, in some other town, on some other night.