exo made an album about bugs on some haunted tapes

Anahit Gulian, Nyle Kaliski, and Anna Cataldo are EXO, a Brooklyn band that created a tape about insects. It’s punk music with deft synth touches, equal doses tough and ethereal. The lyric sheet stuffed into the cassette was printed on translucent vellum. “That was really important to us,” Anna said. All three members of the band sat in Anahit’s bedroom reminiscing about what brought them to this point. “The guy printed it all on non-translucent vellum which I didn't even know was a thing. I was like, ‘No it's got to be translucent, we'll do it ourselves,’” Anahit said. The band had committed fully to the idea of tactility and the ethereal nature of insects. This detail was crucial.

At various points working together, a lot of decisions came into focus for EXO about bugs. It was a creative midpoint for the trio, a way to collaboratively write songs beneath the same banner. Every sound had to evoke the sound of an insect. Each member brought lyrics interpreting a title like “Butterfly” or “Ladybug.” They wrote a full-on grant proposal, digging as conceptually deep as they possibly could with this project. What an incredible thing, to find friends who commit this hard to the research, the concept, the art.

Anahit was born in Armenia, moved to the U.S. suburbs at 6, and landed in New York to go to Pratt Institute for writing. She met Nyle in the punk scene, and they formed the band Nandas, who put out two EPs on Toxic State. Multiple times over the years, they were on the same bills with Anna’s bands including Exit Order. She was living in Boston at the time. “Eventually, probably 10 years too late, I got myself out of there and moved ot New York,” Anna said.

The project started prior to the COVID-19 lockdown. “There was a period of probably a year where we couldn’t really be in the same room with each other,” Anahit said. EXO passed recordings back and forth as part of their workflow across long stretches of time. “It has the mark of several different eras in the last five years,” Anna said. Nyle added: “And it’s charged with isolation.”

As songwriters, what brought you to insects and bugs?

Nyle Kaliski: I think it happened really naturally.

Anna Cataldo: Yeah, I think it was just a silly idea at first or something. At practice one day we were like, “OK, that’s what we’re doing.” 

Nyle Kaliski: What started it? I guess a lot of the first riffs had insect themes already.

Anahit Gulian: In my mind, I was like, I don’t know what to call these songs we’re just throwing riffs into. I just picked bugs for them. It was “Butterfly Waltz.”

Nyle Kaliski: Yeah originally, they had dances.

Anna Cataldo. “Ladybug Samba.” 

Anahit Gulian: But I think as it evolved for me, it made it easier to write the lyrics. I don’t know if you guys felt that way too, but it was easier writing lyrics and being like, “This is about a butterfly,” and that way we could all contribute whatever to it and it would be from the point of view of this fourth being.

There’s so much about fragility in this record. Is that your experience of it? Is that intentional?

Anna Cataldo: I think we were thinking about the shortness of the lifespan of an insect and how much happens in a very small amount of time. We were thinking a lot about grief and death writing this record, the music and the lyrics. The idea of these tiny little creatures that are embodied entirely by instinct and their whole lifespan takes up the same amount of space and shines as brightly as their death, their mating season, things like this. It was kind of by accident that we started writing this record about bugs, but then once we turned that corner, we threw ourselves entirely into them. Every sound that’s on there, it had to be breathed by some sort of insect creature. We got kind of obsessed with it.

Anahit Gulian: I would say the initial pass of writing riffs and putting drum beats and stuff, I don’t know if we were thinking about the specific bugs at that time, right? But then once we started adding synth layers, I would say that’s when things got really buggy.

Nyle Kaliski: I feel like it happened in like a real cross-pollination in a certain way because we worked on it for so long, like over the course of a few years, we had like different incarnations and then like different sounds would kind of like influence the outcome of different songs. Toward the end, I feel like we just kind of loaded it up. [laughs] Especially because bugs do have this duality of being hardened and unkillable or something but then also incredibly delicate and fragile. It kind of left us a pretty wide berth for sound.

Is EXO short for exoskeleton?

All: Yeah.

Did the band name come before the bug theme or did it all happen at once?

Nyle Kaliski: We applied for a grant and we had to come up with a name. 

Anahit Gulian: Originally we called our band Linda Linda, have you ever heard that song by the Blue Hearts? We just all love that song, and I don’t know, we just called it that. 

Anna Cataldo: It was our pet name.

Anahit Gulian: But then this other band from L.A. of teenage girls, they’re all in middle school and very talented, they started a band called the Linda Lindas and they blew up. We were like, “Shit, now we have to change our name.”

Nyle Kaliski: We had to give it to them.

So wait you didn’t get the grant, what the fuck?

Anna Cataldo: It’s very competitive. I think we were just feeling ambitious and like we had so much conceptual drive. 

Nyle Kaliski: I’m thankful, though! I feel like if we hadn’t applied for it, we wouldn’t have gotten our shit together. It was a little bit of a galvanizing moment.

Anahit Gulian: It forced us to write a bit of a manifesto for ourselves.

Anna Cataldo: Which felt really good at the time. I think maybe we just had some shit to say.

It’s hard not to hear a decent amount of allegory. How much of it is reflective of the experience of being a fragile person existing in the world?

Anahit Gulian: It’s kind of interesting because I feel like there’s this political weight to it, for me at least. Whenever you pity other humans, you compare them to insects. It’s a way of saying, “Oh these poor wretched creatures, let’s zoom out on them crawling like ants. I also watched this Japanese movie called The Insect Woman once that really freaked me out because the allegory was that she would do anything to survive. That’s why she was an insect woman. She was not a good character. She did shitty things, like, “Oh I don’t want to root for her.” But she’s trying to survive! So there’s a double meaning to it for me, I guess. Fragility and hardness.

I feel like it’s hard for punk records to convey those two things concurrently. For a lot of bands there’s rage or there’s not; this rides the line.

Nyle Kaliski: I don’t wanna be like, “Nah, it’s not hard.” But because we’re close friends, we have a shared ideology as far as our own capacity to be fragile in a not-so-fragile environment. We’re coming up in scenes where there is a lot of aggression and we exist straddling a performative line of having to be on one side or the other as far as strength. Not to put us in a box, maybe they don’t feel that way, but maybe there’s an element of play for us in there. It’s maybe not so much the point of the record, I don’t know if we had it at the forefront of our mind, but it’s projected in the experience of making it or something.

Anna Cataldo: I feel that.

Anahit Gulian: All three of us, we love punk, but we also love synth-pop and ambient music and things that are pretty and vulnerable. And I think when we started this band, we were hoping to be able to do something a little bit less just in the punk box and be able to record the kind of music that we love and didn’t know how to make yet.

Conceptually it comes from such a fascinating place, but since it spanned years, I’m really curious about the process of making something like this.

Anahit Gulian: It was a process. I learned how to play bass so I could play bass on this recording, and then subsequently unlearned it. The way we did it was Anna and Nyle mostly wrote the riffs together then taught them to me on bass. Once we got to a good place with the heavy instruments, then we did the stage of “now we’ve got to figure out the synth,” and then we recorded all that.

Anna Cataldo: I think the most important secret to the EXO recordings is that we had a little help from a few very haunted old cassettes. It offered a voice from somewhere outside ourselves that we would not have been able to create without them. The first time we were graced by our haunted cassette was when we were recording the loud instruments—the bass, guitar, and drums—and our friend Kevin was recording us on an 8-track on cassette, and we got to the very last song that we were recording that day. We finally got a good tape and listened back and realized the tape had started warbling.

Nyle Kaliski: I bought Tascam tapes from an electronic store in the city, and I looked at them and I was like, “These look like original Tascam tapes from the ’70s,” and they were sealed. I was like, “Oh that’s funny, they look like old vintage-style tapes.” And then we were recording and I was like, “Oh shit, no, these are like melted Tascam tapes.” But in a kind of magical way! Whatever warped and distortion things that were happening happened in a way that nestled our song in it perfectly. 

Anahit Gulian: Basically the entire side B of that tape, we just indulged that ghost. We decided to play weird shit over it and scream weird shit onto this broken tape. And that was just one stage of the process! Because then after that we had to figure out how to sing. At least I had never sang. I sang in a punk band and that was very different. We had to write the lyrics, figure out how to score them, and who should sing what. That was, for me, the mindbreaker. That was the newest, weirdest thing.

Do you think you’ll play shows as EXO?

Anahit Gulian: It’s sort of impossible now.

Nyle Kaliski: We would need the ghost.

Is there a next move?

Nyle Kaliski: We were talking about maybe making one where all the songs were about underwater animals.