Aki McCullough is known as one of the most talented and colorful musicians and engineers in the extreme and experimental punk/metal underground. Having played with acts like Dreamwell, A Constant Knowledge Of Death, Necroplanet and guesting on multiple acclaimed albums (including Jisei, Victory Over The Sun and more) to running East Coast cult and very pro lgbtq studio Nu House, McCullough is often a blur of activity, determination and inventiveness.
Ameokama is McCullough’s latest project, a “solo” album of sorts with some of her various friends helping on certain tracks. Dark, Dream-Pop infused industrial tinged music that seeps into your soul abounds, like wave after wave of serotonin, personal world-building, and catharsis. As is fitting in the Year Of The Snake, a lot of purging and skin shedding is going on here. Genres combine like a cyberpunk lucid pop rain falling on the heads and into the hearts of many types of travelers with their own worries and hopes. It fits emptiness like a glove, so to speak.
I Will Be Clouds In The Morning And Rain In The Evening is one of the years must hear releases and it is only February. Good art is good art!
Morgan Y Evans for Ghost Cult: I have admired your style and musical talent, integrity and work ethic since I learned of you. Also, your intense and fearless artistry. What does it mean to you to be diving head-on into the Ameokama project? I have been making lots of popdustrial weird music lately and so loved the “Phantom Cock” vibes. Was it fun to do a dancier yet still culturally transgressive single? Were you nervous making the video at all? After I saw it I was like “Aki needs to be the star of a trans reboot of the Species movies.” Haha.
Aki: I know I’m making what I’m supposed to musically when I feel I’m losing control over what i’m creating. If I tunnel vision a song for 12 hours and forego eating and sleeping, as if I am channeling the voice of creation itself, then I know I’m doing something right. If I feel any other way about writing music for this project, I throw it out. Listening back to most of these songs or even thinking about them brings me to tears, it feels like it was someone else who created them.
I dabbled in electronic production back when I was living in Miami in the early 2010s, the heyday of Brostep. A lot of artists were flirting with incorporating metal and heavy music into electronic genres but it was all so painfully straight and corporate. This is the first time I’ve produced an entire electronic-ish song since then. The fun part of making any style of music for me is making it off-putting and dissonant and distorted, so yeah I had a blast making “Phantom Cock”. I won’t pretend I hold a candle to the cybergrind girls whose production chops are 1000x times better than mine, but I still had a great time making this.
I’m nervous when making any music video. I’m always confident to a fault that my music will come out how it needs to, but I have less experience with video so I’m less prepared for pitfalls. It felt really vulnerable being mostly nude on set, that was a new first. But being around a crew of all queer people who were so good about being respectful and honoring my consent helped so much and I ended up having so much fun. The fucking cornstarch goop was gross but it was worth it.
GCM: Ha! Ok, so let’s take a page out of the Ethel playbook. How can we offend everyone and get you on Fox News today to boost this album (haha)? No, but in all seriousness…it is a dire time. Thankfully some people are waking up to real inequality needs and class war and aren’t hoodwinked into blaming marginalized groups. I am so sick as a nonbinary person of being a fucking scapegoat for other people’s small-mindedness, jealousy, and inner fears. I know you posted recently you even felt like their was fake allyship in the Skramz scene at times. While I was sad to see you leave Dreamwell, I also know you have so much talent and power to create in whatever you do. How are you feeling about everything right now?
Aki: Okay, but for real I don’t think saying [redacted] the CEOs and politicians will get much pushback from my target audience. It means more coming from someone like Ethel Cain who has a much more mainstream audience. What might get pushback is the notion that revolution starts with self-reflection and dismantling your biases. Everyone on the left is united around hating fascism, so why are we so ineffectual? Spending time in the diy/screamo scene painted a pretty clear picture, of people who are more concerned about ladder climbing and clout and drama than actually taking care of & boosting the most vulnerable.
Most bands only care about trans people if they can put that support on a sticker or product but won’t lift a finger to protect and support the actual living trans people in the scene. Cis “allies” wear their love of transphobic bands on their sleeve but will wring their hands and cancel a trans woman over the smallest misstep, but swear they’re not transphobic. I don’t believe there’s much difference between the ethics of the average “DIY” musician and say, the average entrepreneur. Money, social capital, and controlling others is all that matters to most people, even if they make it gay.
Most cis people think supporting their trans friends ends at keeping them around despite their “imperfections”. Do the fucking work to learn that transmisogny is more than just overt bigotry. You have to confront that you have been taught to believe trans women are less intelligent, more erratic, mentally ill and can’t be trusted for their “decision” to “choose” femininity. That you talk over us and gaslight us like you do to other woman but also see us as physically threatening and abusive as if we were men. That you believe we “chose” our own tragic fate and our suffering is inevitable and our success is a threat to your ego. I’ve met some real ones throughout the years but mostly I have navigated this scene subtly being treated as a subhuman, with that treatment reinforced whenever I speak out.
If cis allies saw us as equals, you would be on the fucking streets cracking skulls for what’s happening to us right now. The fact you sit by on the sidelines, more upset at us for killing the vibe than you are at our oppressors, is proof you see us as lesser than yourself. Luigi is just one person who has already shifted the conversation and reminded us we are more powerful than we appear. It doesn’t take an entire population for a revolution, only a small percentage working in unison. But people on the left have to overcome their internal biases towards the most marginalized to see their lives as worth saving.
GCM: Agreed. Let’s talk about Nu House for a sec. I hope I get to visit your studio someday. You have been working with some of the best bands in the underground consistently. What is the most recent session you have done and can you touch on some of the highs and lows of running a studio for cutting edge stuff?
Aki: I’m actually working with the band Ruinous Time Blade from Chicago this week! They’re a really sick blend of Death Metal, Sludge, and Metalcore. It’s been a blast tracking with them and getting to hang.
I’ll start with the lows so I can end it on a positive note. First of all, it’s fucking hard making a living primarily working with musicians from a very vulnerable background, and I feel a duty to keep my rates as low as I can get away with and to go above and beyond on every project. I try to make up for that by grifting and guilting cis men into giving me some money. Secondly, I fucking hate having to be on social media to promote this shit. I won’t go full boomer mode but this shit is not good for our sanity and I hate that it has become the main way to promote art & freelance services. I’d say I was born in the wrong generation but I like cotton candy grapes so idk.
None of it’s ever easy, none of it feels sustainable. But it has been the honor of a lifetime to have been a part of so many unique musical releases by trans people. I feel like I have learned more as a musician by mixing people’s music than any ever could have hoped to teach myself any other way. While I work primarily with trans artists, I’m glad I haven’t been pigeonholed beyond that, because I’ve worked with artists on almost every possible style of music. I’ve worked on music about coming out and transitioning, about revolution, about sorrow, about fucking, about becoming a bird, or wordless ambient pieces. I’ve worked with plenty of heavy bands, but also on electronic music, classical music, and with singer-songwriters.
I’ve sat at the mix desk and laugh-cried because we’re on hour 10 of tracking and my brain is broken and someone said “that really Richard’s my cock”. and I’ve sat at the mix desk and cried tears of joy and awe at the sheer emotional weight of the music that people have entrusted me to work on. And through it all I am empowered, to say yes or no to any project or musician who approaches me, to advocate for myself, without a shitty boss to take credit from me or control me. For every sacrifice I’ve had to make it’s given back tenfold.
GCM: Was it a big leap for you to step forward and sing more often? I like your vocal register and it has this sort of vulnerable yet strong feeling and hooky but kind of otherworldly twee core quality.
Aki: It’s honestly as huge a step for me as learning to play music in the first place was. I first picked up an instrument at 13, finished my first album at 18, and didn’t sing on a track until 29. Finding my singing voice and learning its eccentricities has been as healing as starting my transition itself. I’ve hidden myself behind abstraction, behind screaming, behind reverb for most of my musical life, but for every step of this album I have had to acknowledge my essence and share it with the world and open myself up to their judgement.
GCM: Production-wise what were some of the biggest challenges of this record? It has some very unique sounds and textures, but everything sits well in conjunction despite the crescendos.
Aki: If an album isn’t challenging me it isn’t worth making. The biggest challenge was that I had to surrender to my raw creative energy and still find a way to tie it all together coherently in the end. I’m so used to having to be the organized one when I’m mixing for someone else and the songwriting is already done. My sessions were a fucking mess on this album. It felt wrong to enforce too much order and box myself in early on. I hardly used any presets and mixed each song on its own. It wasn’t until the last week or so I started listening to the whole album as a whole to figure out how to make it work together.
The last month working on this album was insane. I set everything up to announce the album on 11/15, knowing the pressure was going to be the only thing that would push me to finish. I then realized Bandcamp didn’t allow pre-orders 90 days before release so I ended up having to choose 2/7 as the release date, instead of March as I’d originally intended. I was leaving on a tour with Dreamwell at the end of November and then visiting my parents for the holidays which left me with roughly a month to finish 40% of the album, including a lot of the final drum tracking. Oh, and I got COVID during that time too. Not really sure how I pulled it off but I made the final master change 5 hours before I left on a 3 week tour. It’s not perfect, but being so rushed on a mix you operate purely on vibes without time to question yourself has lead to some of my best mixes and I highly recommend it to others.
GCM: I guess it is supposed to be a no no question, but what does the album title mean to you? I always actually feel like it is important to ask bands why they chose any given name as the cherry on top of the sundae of a significant work.
Aki: As much as I wanna be mysterious I love talking about this stuff too much, lol. The original name for this band was “Ameonna” the Japanese Yokai Of Rain. She summons rain wherever she goes and is often seen as an omen of bad luck and an evil figure, who turns vulnerable and grieving women into creatures like herself. The album title is a quote from the Konjaku Hyaku Shui by Toriyama Sekien, a collection of Yokai pictures, which itself is quoting Gaotangfu by Song Yu, a Chinese poet. It is about a king who falls in love with Ameonna, who leaves the words when she leaves “I will be clouds in the morning, and rain in the evening, so at morning and evening, let’s meet down at the balcony”. It goes without saying my interpretation is purely sapphic. The mythology of Ameonna is ripe for metaphor, which I touch upon in the lyrics of the title track. I’ll leave the listener to take from it what they will, knowing the story it is based upon.
GCM: Can you talk about the noise rock elements in parts of “I am driving a car with a cute girl…”? Any bands that influenced that awesome, clangy bass tone? It reminded me of Steel Pole Bathtub dropped in the middle of like a dreamy Emo part.
Aki: The idea for it was literally “dream pop song that feels like it was played by metal musicians.” My mood board included bands like Slow Crush, Drab Majesty, Bleached Cross, Yeule, Circa Survive, and Static Dress. The bass tone was part of the “dream pop but metal” thing, but honestly I just love how the neural darkglass sim with the gain-dimmed sounds.
GCM: I hate the duopoly and they are all hypocrites and frauds, mostly. What do you think however is the biggest thing we need to do in our communities to get through this current fascist oligarchy? I mean, it really is all pervasive when you include the tech ghouls. Community seems the only way forward to me, y’know?
Aki: I’ve thought about this a bunch and am often at a loss. We were born into a world of car culture and suburban sprawl and 40-hour work weeks that makes isolation or nuclear family feel like the only two options. Most of our communities have been built online and those running these sites have gone full mask-off recently. I don’t think quitting IG and Twitter and Tik Tok alone is the solution. They need to be replaced with plans for safe & secure real life and online communities that are more robust than those we have currently. Isolation & fighting your friends are the default outcomes of living under capitalism. It takes constant commitment & effort to maintain community, to make time for each other, make sacrifices for our loved ones, and sort out differences within our circles. This is a big one that I need to work on. I am constantly isolating in the studio working on music and recent events have been a bit of a reckoning that this way of living is no longer viable.
Buy Ameokama music and merch here:
https://ameokama.bandcamp.com/album/i-will-be-clouds-in-the-morning-and-rain-in-the-evening
MORGAN Y. EVANS
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