Why Do US Maple Sound Like That? w/ Ferruccio Quercetti from CUT - 369

This week we're talking about US Maple. Which is a bit like saying we're talking about having your teeth drilled without anaesthetic.

The Chicago quartet spent twelve years making music that deliberately disappointed every expectation you might have about rock music. They took guitars, drums, and vocals and somehow made them sound like they were arguing with each other in a language nobody understood. It was brilliant. It was infuriating. It was absolutely necessary.

This is the final part of our Anti Rock trilogy, where we've been exploring bands that knew the rules of rock music inside out and chose to break every single one of them. US Maple didn't just break the rules though. They took the rulebook, fed it through a modified guitar with quarter tone frets, and sang over it like a demented lounge singer having a breakdown.

We get into their impossible discography, their custom instruments that were designed to sound worse, their legendary tour with Pavement where they got pelted with rubbish nightly, and that infamous Oklahoma City incident involving Xanax and a cockroach. We also try to answer the eternal question: why would anyone voluntarily listen to this?

Fair warning: this episode might make you feel slightly seasick. That's entirely by design.

Featuring Ferruccio Quercetti from the brilliant Italian band Cut, who knows more about post punk and experimental music than literally anyone we know.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:58 Meet the Hosts and Anti-Rock Series Recap

05:25 Defining Anti-Rock vs. Post-Rock - The Core Question

18:51 Chicago's Noise Rock Scene and US Maple's Origins

20:32 The Band Formation and Todd Riman's Hybrid Guitar

24:00 "Snagglepuss on a Bender" - Early Recording Stories

31:47 The Commitment to Anti-Rock Philosophy

38:00 The Legendary Oklahoma City Incident

44:00 Shorty: The Band That Spawned US Maple

49:00 Album Deep Dive: Long Hair in Three Stages

59:08 Sang Fat Editor and Quarter-Tone Guitar Experiments

01:08:00 Talker and Working with Michael Gira

01:17:00 Purple on Time - The "Mainstream" Album

01:22:13 Al Johnson's Anti-Rock Manifesto

01:24:46 Why US Maple is "Weirdly Soothing"

01:29:00 Mark's Virgin Takeaway on the Band

01:33:54 Conclusion and Farewell