Kilynn Lunsford: "I'm a Perfectionist and That Can Definitely Hinder Projects if You Let It Spiral; I Do Less of That Now That I Don't Feel Obligated to Take Anyone Else's Input Into Account"

Kilynn Lunsford has been defying categorizations since her earlier days of rock 'n' roll from The Dark Places to Little Claw. When the pandemic caused her previous group Taiwan Housing Project to come to a halt, Lunsford focused on her own music, weaving in the sharp-cutting and otherworldly militant pop art that would become her debut LP Custodians Of Human Succession (Ever/Never Records). Fast forward to now, Lunsford returns with the debut's exhortatory follow-up — Promiscuous Genes. Out on Feel It Records in May, the album deconstructs new wave and the truth with its non-conformist expressionism and audio sorcery that punches upwards and never falls through the cracks.

Hot Sounds: Where did you grow up and what was the local scene like? What sort of records or books/magazines would we find if we would travel back in time in your teenage room?

Kilynn Lunsford: I moved three times by the time I was in third grade: West Virginia, Tennessee, then Virginia. My dad was a coal miner and was still studying mining engineering when I was born, but once he graduated we moved. Additionally, he had issues with drugs and drinking, so part of it was moving to chase employment. We were in Virginia until I graduated in 2000; then I moved to Tacoma/Seattle the month after high school. I was a pretty unhappy child and then an angry teen, so moving close to DC, where the ethos supported young people going to shows and being in bands, was liberating for me as it allowed me to escape my chaotic and depressing homelife. It was a fertile time and place: WHFS would have festivals and all-ages concerts, Teenbeat would have shows in VA, and DC being a Kill Rock Stars and K satellite largely informed my tastes in the early and mid 90s as most of my favorite music was made by women or fronted by them: Bikini Kill, Babes in Toyland, PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, Hole, Lydia Lunch, Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Diamanda Galas,.... I don’t know if I would have survived as a teen without the access I had to bookstores, record stores, movie theaters and shows. My first meaningful boyfriend was about 7 years older than me, so that allowed me more freedom than most people in their teens because he had a real job and a car and he was a nice responsible guy my mom really liked. Thanks to him, I was out at shows multiple nights a week and was never home on the weekends. We would drive to DC, Baltimore, Richmond and even NYC for shows, films and horror conventions. My family had supported my love of music since I was a toddler. My great-grandfather and his old coal mining buddy who was like a second grandparent for me bought my first boombox and cassettes of my favorites like Purple Rain, Thriller, and She’s so Unusual. I was lucky because I come from a long line of musicians and artists, so my family never really censored what I listened to or watched. I had a lot of shit for several reasons: I was an adroit shoplifter in middle school, the boyfriend I mentioned above was very generous, I got a decent job at 14 and went to thrift stores and used record/book/tape stores religiously. Books: Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, all the standard existential novels, A Clockwork Orange, Frankenstein; film books: Jack Smith, Cronenberg, Lynch, John Waters, Argento, Fulci, HG Lewis, William Castle, Cinema of Transgression; numerous V Vale/ REsearch, Rollerderby, Spin, Ben is Dead, Forced Exposure, Omni, Skin Two, ArtForum, lots of mail order lists/catalogs, old photography mags/random old magazines for collage, The Communist Manifesto, Lolita, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Mary Gaitskill, lots of Fantagraphics, Gary Panter, Harry Crews, Bukowski; music related books: Bangs, Meltzer, Marcus, Please Kill Me, We Got the Neutron Bomb; serial killer/true crime, psychology and Freud, art books: Richard Kern, Robert Frank, Duchamp, Man Ray, Niagara, Destroy All Monsters, Robert Mapplethorpe, Crispin Glover, HR Giger…Music: Hasil Adkins, Neubauten, Wax Trax box set, Divine, Pere Ubu, The Stranglers, Wire, The Only Ones, Bowie, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Otis Redding, various Roir Tapes, all the Rhino punk and power pop comps, Roky Erickson, Devo, Lil’ Kim, Danzig, L7, Crass, The Dream Syndicate, Aussie garage/punk, Wu Tang, Public Enemy, X-Ray Spex, VU, The Raincoats, The Slits, Nina Hagen, Plasmatics, The Fall, Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, Fleetwood Mac, The Cure, Sonic Youth, Royal Trux, The Cramps, various goth and death rock comps, X, Richard Hell, Mars…

HS: How exactly did you get into playing music? Were you in any groups prior to The Dark Places and Little Claw? How do you remember those earlier days? 

KL: I took guitar and piano lessons as a kid, but I was never very disciplined when it came to practicing. Recently I found an old notebook from my teen guitar lessons that reminded me I was trying to learn songs by Johnny Thunders, Chuck Berry, and The Sonics. I think there were a couple failed attempts at playing music with some of my school friends; we tried to cover a Tuscadero song at our middle school talent show (they rejected us). It wasn’t until I met my friend Gary (he went on to play with Long Legged Woman) at a Dirty Three show in 11th grade that I allowed myself to get free with my guitar playing and basically play “noise” guitar. He was really encouraging when it came to dropping the pretense of playing "correctly" and finding my own style with vocals and guitar. When I first moved out on my own to Tacoma in 2000 I knew I wanted to start a band, so I put an ad in The Stranger that said something like “female punk singer looking to start a band influences: The Pagans, 13th Floor Elevators, The Gun Club and The Lewd.” That is how Dark Places started and how I met Heath who I started Little Claw with after we moved to Detroit in 2003. Dark Places went through a lot of lineups, and too many competing opinions, people with ingrained attitudes about what bands "had to be like", etc. Heath and I moved to Detroit in 2003, and soon after started working on songs in a more stripped down manner. The Northeast blackout was essentially the start of the band due to our captivity. Once we had a handful of songs, Jamie Easter joined on drums. The Detroit environment was a much more fertile freak scene than Seattle. Heath, Jamie and I were  on the same page, and it was exciting to be doing what we wanted without naysayers. They were both very supportive of anything I wanted to try artistically and creatively. Detroit was also the perfect place for Heath and I to play with and see some of our favorite bands. Our first show happened due to an invitation from Nick Nicholis of the Bizarros, and we played several shows with them in Akron, Cleveland, Detroit, and Columbus. We got to play with the Weirdos, Mike Rep and the Quotas, and Michael Yonkers in those early years. 

kilynn lunsford at age sixteen / photo provided

HS: How did your previous group Taiwan Housing Project come about and what are your thoughts looking back on those releases you did together?

KL: I moved to Philly in 2011 or so and Tom Lax introduced me to Mark Feehan almost right away. Even before Mark and I met, Tom was evangelizing on behalf of a collaboration between the two of us. He’s a visionary, so he has an intuition about things and of course he was right. We met at a show we played together as solo acts opening for my friends’ band Sad Horse and we just hit it off instantly. Within days we were sitting on his decrepit futon recording songs for hours and then uploading them to Soundcloud without pretense or fanfair. We are both nocturnal, so it was the perfect schedule. This was before rents exploded in Philly, so I had a lot of time on my hands, as I was only working part time while trying to recuperate from a major immuno meltdown I had while living in Thailand.

It was a prolific time for us and especially liberating for me coming from how fraught the situation had become in Little Claw with band members in various states and Heath taking the Amtrak back and forth between Detroit and Portland to play with Tyvek. It was nice to put music out without much effort, without needing to labor over the artwork and without record labels, fairly under the radar. We decided to play live, so we wanted a drummer. That’s when Tom recommended Pat Ganley who had played in Dan Melchior’s band. There were many iterations of the band because we didn’t like turning down decent shows, so we would take whoever was available from the lineup and play. Eventually it developed into a many-headed hydra, where 8 members could be seen on stage at one time. It’s a struggle to contain and steer a band like that. There was always a part of me that wanted to go back to the beginning: Mark and I recording songs on the couch while stripping the lineup down to a three piece to translate those songs live. Sometimes you want all your favorite people around you, but it becomes more of a party and less of a band. I have ADHD and I struggle with concentration, so having that many people around is not conducive to songwriting. Even bringing in a mostly completed song is hard to work on when the volume gets to a certain level. I can’t say I’ll never be in a band again that bashes songs out in a practice space. Looking back, it started out in the vein of what I am trying to accomplish with my solo work, having it be a more meditative and quiet tinkering process. For all these reasons, I think my favorite recordings are the ones from those first couple “couch” years that only came out as a self-released CD-R. I should mention three of my current collaborators, Donald Bruno, Thomas Storck and Shawn Kilroy all played drums in versions of the band. I am extremely grateful to have them working with me still.

HS: I also found you performed on this cassette tape labeled "Back Egg - Camo Animal Autism." What can you tell me about that? 

KL: Oh, wow, where to begin? It's a live cassette of a performance that happened in London; that night was the extent of my involvement. I've actually never heard it. I was in a pretty bad place the night it was recorded; I think I was probably in a bad place for most of the tour. The tour coincided with my bandmate Taylor (Infinity Window) playing All Tomorrow’s Parties 2006 with Sunburned Hand of the Man. We headed out on our own after their shows and picked up additional players along the way. For the London gig Luke Younger sat in, but I can't remember what he played that night. I met Taylor in Boston when Little Claw played Twisted Village and we became fast friends. He came to visit me in Portland and we recorded several songs with both of us playing guitar, me on vocals and Nick Bindeman (Jackie-O Motherfucker and Tunnels) on drums. I had the name Black Egg (inspired by The Nightcrawlers song) for many years. When we decided to release handmade CD-Rs of that session they let me come up with the name and the song titles. I thought the name fit the music well. I really loved the CD, but I haven't heard it in years. At one point Byron Coley had offered to put it out, but unfortunately he put out a really poorly selling Little Claw CD first. 

little claw / photo provided

HS: What has it been like focusing on your own music and art over the past few years and not playing in groups? Has it been freeing for you in any way? 

KL: Very freeing. The pandemic made it impossible for Taiwan Housing Project to continue in the casual way we had been and it was time for a change anyway. Custodians Of Human Succession was basically done at that point and the new songs THP was working on in the studio were frustrating me, so it made sense to shift to the work I was inspired by. I love those guys, but the approach was not working for me anymore. There’s increasingly too much static in my head as I get older which forces a more intentional way of working. I needed to compose in a way that wasn’t overly reliant on spontaneous meandering and muscular tonality. Once it got past the point of just being Mark and I on a couch, I struggled with trying to harness the visceral and chaotic nature of the band, and to sculpt the sound into something that wasn’t bloated and cluttered. Little Claw was different; there was an inherent economy in that we were limited by our skill level. There was no danger in someone trying to be Mozart playing too many notes when two of us were learning to play on the job.  

I’ve always had some challenges communicating my musical and artistic vision to other players and it can be depressing when you feel you're compromising. I’m a perfectionist and that can definitely hinder projects if you let it spiral; I do less of that now that I don’t feel obligated to take anyone else’s input into account. I appreciate my collaborator Donald Bruno’s input because he is a musical polymath and artist, but he accepts my quirks and doesn’t push when I’m not feeling something or I’m obsessing. He has been an important creative ally in my life. We both have our eccentricities and sometimes we clash, but he has a way of understanding my patter that makes the process flow. I still like working in groups; I don’t think I am the stereotype of the loner which is why I love having my live band. Ultimately, they defer to me, but they also have great ideas about how to maximize the live experience of the songs and occasionally we write songs together. I’ve always been inspired by solo artists with a singular vision who seem to have ultimate flexibility over the landscape of an album and in the trajectory of their careers. 

HS: What can you tell me about your upcoming second album Promiscuous Genes and what insight can you share about how and where these 15 tracks were recorded? What were some of the highlights putting it together? 

KL: I’ll talk about some of the themes of the album, then the recording and engineering:

We are at a historical inflection point right now. The gates of barbarism are before us: our future is bleak and where we go from here no longer has even the illusion of being manifold for most of us. Stephen J Gould laid out the terrain when he said, "Resurgences of biological determinism correlate with periods of political retrenchment and destruction of social generosity." We’ve had decades of pop evolutionary psychology aiding and abetting rightwing social and economic policy by making any and every facet of behavior and identity genetically coded i.e., inheritable. Thus, creating a world where the economic political order, as inequal and exploitative as it is, is understood as a “natural” hierarchy. Along with the academy, pop culture and public media have been pumping this ideological toxin into the mainstream where we now have mass acceptance of racial and societal determinism theories. When we have an administration murdering people and ruining lives with policies undergirded by claims that gender and race are biological realities, we are steps away from eugenics being touted as an official policy goal. Pop culture and public media adopting these reductive moral tales and myths of deep immutable behavioral origins has been disastrous for everyone except the most elect because it becomes “common sense” to naturalize the division between individuals. And if it’s natural, it’s always been this way and it’s never going to be any different. It's a ruling class anti-solidaristic ideological campaign to upwardly redistribute wealth and privatize everything under the sun. Sadly, the process has been bipartisan, which has been one of the most successful aspects allowing these kinds of pseudoscientific theories to flourish everywhere from the pages of peer reviewed journals to the New York Times to white power message boards. The most deleterious effect for society is these myths around identity and behavior and the spurious research linking all of it is used as evidence, cover, and inspiration for the most revanchist policies this country has ever had. When we started recording what would become Custodians in my Drexel Hill apartment, Don and I had no terminus envisioned. We explored various recording setups, microphones and acoustic areas, using this transitory approach to layer disparate fidelities. This presented a challenge when my friend Alex Nagle had to master the album. It set up mastering to be almost a secondary collaborative process because we needed to do some tweaking and remixing based on Alex's initial notes. The album took much longer than I had anticipated even after we got to the point I thought it was done. I think this time we were able to incorporate all the advice and feedback we received from Alex during the mastering of Custodians, which made the process much smoother. Even with all the improvements made with this go, we mixed most of the songs on PG multiple times because I did the initial mixing in Don's basement before taking everything to Dan Smith at Familyre and mixing it in his professional sound booth to make sure the album would play consistently across devices and stereo setups. Dan Smith is an artist and human who I admire, so I am always grateful for his feedback. 

photo by rich wexler

HS: How would you compare this new album to 2022's Custodians Of Human Succession?

KL: Custodians was done over a longer period of time and much more intermittently, due to living in Philadelphia, moving three times and recording in different settings with various setups. Promiscuous Genes was all done within 1-2 years at Don’s house, except the two tracks recorded with the full band in Dan Smith’s studio. This gave the material a different momentum, a focused and deliberate, concentrated quality that differs from Custodians. I would say each one possesses an openness to experimentation in the process and approach to both composing and recording. 

HS: Today you shared with us the lead single and album opener "Nice Quiet Horror Show." What's the story behind that cut? 

KL: The album has a number of themes and they all cross pollinate over the course of the album. The genocide in Gaza, and US perpetrated war crimes more generally, take center stage in this track. In addition, this one and the title track are more generally about the destruction and death the ruling class visits upon those it views as expendable in this country and across the globe. We have Republicans in this country fighting to do away with not just labor law but with child labor law. We already have migrant children who, instead of getting a public education, are working the most dangerous jobs in existence: roofing on luxury condos and warehouses, cleaning slaughterhouses, operating equipment at industrial meatpacking plants and agriculture in the fields. Children are dying and being maimed in unspeakably horrific ways. This goes on almost tacitly in these communities (primarily the South) despite some well-researched exposés by mainstream media because those in power benefit from this cheap labor and they have managed to dehumanize migrants to the point of making their suffering not just invisible but excusable. In some corners they've managed to spin it into beneficence that we give these impoverished kids a wage to care for themselves and their families. If it weren't for countries like the US constantly meddling in the global south's political and economic structures, much of the desperation impelling mass migration to the US wouldn't even exist. But this is our legacy: bombing, couping, saddling countries with rapacious debt deals, and now fucking fascists implementing state-sponsored crypto schemes. The list goes on, which is why the song runs through a lot of imagery and ideas in a short span. I wrote this song because it's one of the only ways for me to approach this topic in public without screaming or sobbing. Nancy is Nancy Reagan and Tina is T.I.N.A. = there is no alternative aka Margaret Thatcher who both get reimagined as school shooting victims. We need a "School's Out" for all these deleterious neoliberal authoritarian ideas and their harbingers and a return to the public good for everyone else, including all undocumented children who deserve a proper childhood thriving with their loved ones.

HS: How did the cut "My Amphibian Face" come about? 

KL: Gaza looms large over the entirety of the album, including this track. I had these lyrics about the myth of a small creature transcending and walking out of the fire unscathed: the salamander as a less magnificent phoenix, as something that harkens back to our collective evolution out of the slime. The vocal line can be traced to Can’s vocalists and their use of repetition and shifting patterns for its inherent poetic trance effect. I wanted to start the song with an unhinged version of a breathing exercise to birth it into existence. Musically, I was striving for a go-go garage feel like The Monks in a nest of vipers, a kind of hissing blues minimalism. I started playing with the beats and speed on an Acetone Rhythm Ace until I got it dialed in and then we built it around the beat. We had the thought that it would be interesting to base a whole song on a certain riff that has frequently been used in the blues canon and by bands like Big Star. I like descending/ascending riffs; for me they are evocative of soundtrack or incidental music devices used to increase or decrease tension and anxiety. Nick Drake’s Parasite could also be thought of as a kindred antecedent. 

HS: What can you tell me about "Lillibilly"? 

KL: Lillibilly is an effort to create a new kind of folk music that's for the "little people"; not for the foundation grant funders of the world. It's a play on the word Lilliputia/Lilliputian from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to connote a certain quality that combines rebelliousness and an overthrowing of the status quo by those in the jaws of the exploiters. The sounds are inspired by Appalachian field recordings, bluegrass, library music and the intercultural genre play inherent in Henry Flynt’s Novabilly. As a backstory, it is partly inspired by my family tree, being born in Appalachia and forming the core of my personality in that environment. Living by people who didn't have indoor plumbing and going to visit them and giving them hand-me-downs and things to help. At the time it didn’t feel like charity because they were our neighbors and you simply helped your neighbors. My great granddad, who will always be one of my most beloved people, as a young man was a union coal miner out on the picket line fighting the cops. He was collecting money and driving hours to get a firetruck to start a volunteer fire company in a place with no resources. I come from a long line of not just men, but women who were fighting for the dignity, safety and economic security of working people. If I live to soundtrack anything, I hope it’s the class war. 

HS: What do you recall putting together the closer "Saddest of Dreams"?

KL: I wanted this song to have a tongue in cheek shimmering tropical quality partially influenced by New Zealand pop like Tall Dwarfs, The Chills etc…also The Cleaners From Venus loom large. I think even if I wanted to I could never escape those influences and my love for them. I generally try to keep it less obvious because I'm probably most influenced by the darker freak side of the island, bands like This Kind of Punishment, Bill Direen and anything on Xpressway. It wasn't necessarily meant to be the final song, but once the album started filling out I thought it would be interesting to end all the various degradation with the most deceivingly sweet sounding song. 

photo by rich wexler

HS: What do you like most about playing these songs live?

KL: When I record songs, I don’t limit myself by thinking of how they can be performed by a full band. I have been surprised consistently that we don’t seem to have many barriers in communicating the songs in a compelling way as a band. Shawn Kilroy, who played drums in THP and plays bass with me now, heard the Custodians songs before the album was complete and convinced me to put a band together. I didn’t really think it would be possible to find people who would both be able to give them a proper life onstage and be interested in putting in the work to learn these bizarre songs they hadn’t composed. I am extremely lucky I have a group of people who believe in what I’m doing enough to follow me into the cleansing fire of obscurity. 

HS: Aside from the new album, what are some future plans for you? 

KL: I started working on new songs before this album was finished. The plan is to put out another album in the next couple years. I don’t want to rush, but it’s probably best if I give myself a deadline otherwise I will get bogged down in the editing and mixing process. My long term goal is to pick up more skills in engineering, production, and technology that will inform the compositional process. I thought about taking classes, but in the end it’s always a fight between the passion I have for this work and what makes money to live. 

Beyond music, this project has given me the opportunity to work with collaborators to explore how visual media (photography, animation and film) interact and coalesce with the themes and sonics in the songs. I have had some pieces published in collections in the past and one of those imprints has offered to do a RISO print chapbook of my lyrics, so that’s in the works. I self-published a photography zine a few years ago; I have scads of new work since then and plan to do a second one eventually. I am hoping to do more collaborations in film, writing and multimedia. I wrote a song for a series called Damp Squid that's in development. I would love to do more work in film and streaming.

HS: Who are some of your favorite groups in Philly right now? 

KL: Ecology: HomeStones are great. Dylan from that band is the one who did the video for "Nice Quiet Horror Show." Some others: Morgan Garrett, Eraser, Evil Sword, Annie Achron, Luna Honey, Pissed Jeans, Emily Robb, Tierra Whack, Soft Torture, Blank Spell, Writhing Squares, My Wife’s An Angel, Heavenly Bodies, Cartoon, Bill Nace, Strapping Fieldhands, M Ax Noi Mach, Northern Liberties, Plastic Ivy, Lay Bankz, Blues Ambush and always whatever Mark Feehan and Cameron Healy get up to…

HS: Any advice or last words you'd like to share with our readers?

KL: If you’ve read all this, my profuse thanks. We are currently booking a European tour. Get in touch if you’d like to set up a show. 

Promiscuous Genes is out May 16th on Feel It Records.