If you don’t follow folk punk, you probably don’t even have these guys on yer radar. But you should- you need to listen to them. Arroyo Deathmatch play the most fearsome but uplifting brand of acoustic hardcore and folk punk music you have ever experienced. They bring people together to protest in the face of injustice, and enact positive change in the world with a heady dose of social and political critique. The all-acoustic sextet played a bombastic show at Bridgetown DIY on August 11th, 2014 and we had a chance to sit down and talk for a while about how they met, their homemade instruments, the Goathead Collective and being from one of the rising hotbeds of DIY music: Albuquerque, New Mexico. This interview is quite long so I split it into three parts. A live video taken of them at the Bridgetown show will also be posted with the 2nd part of the interview so stay tuned!

So how did you guys meet? Cause I heard that within the last one or two years the line up has changed since the first albums?

Alex: Ok, I will tell the story. So maybe 5 ½ or 6 years ago, it was a long time ago I lose count, I started this as a solo project. I was playing for a while and on my first tour Beth came with me. Beth plays flute- she and I had been friends since early high school. I was like “oh Beth you should play flute with us”, and she was like “well I’ve never written music before, so I’m not sure about that. But I want to..” That was cool but we hadn’t done it yet.

So the winter after our first tour Beth sat down with us at practice and started playing. It was awesome and people started joining until we were about a 5 piece. Went through a band-pacalypse where like a lot of other people decided that they didn’t want to be in the band and it was just Beth and I for a while- until we started building the current incarnation we’re in now. Beth started dating Leon, and they met at a RVIVR show at my house. Is that true?

Leon: Yeah.

Alex: Sweet. Leon’s like a really great guy and we could tell right away that he wanted to be helpful and wanted to get to know us. We became friends and he played drums. I knew that he was kind of hesitant to play in a folk punk band at first. Is that true?

Leon: Yeah, I had only ever played full kit before and I didn’t know how I was gonna make that work.

Alex: I think you said to me at one point “I would play in yer band but I will never play with brushes. If you make m play with brushes I will quit.” So brushes were out from the beginning, so we didn’t know what to do. We had to build a different kind of kit that’s suited to the kind of music we wanna play. We had been playing kinda folky stuff up to that point and Leon’s like a guy who likes hardcore and likes experimental music. He was like “I wanna bring that [to the group]”. And that was something I was very interested in as well, and we were like “let’s do it!”

So Leon designed and built a kit that was suited to the kind of music we were gonna play which was acoustic- so it had to be quiet but at the same time it needed to take a beating and be able to tolerate strange drumming patterns that you wouldn’t find in full kits. It was the three of us for a while, and we had a different washboard player for a while named Twig- he became a truck driver and quit the band.

Then these two [Jett and Matt] moved to Albuquerque (ABQ) from Oklahoma shortly after getting married. They met us at a Spoonboy show. [Beth and Leon] were like “this is a cool couple we should be friends with”, and they were couple friends for a while. Eventually they were like “we wanna play music with you guys” and we did that. They eventually joined like two months later.

Jett: Yeah, I just kept going to practices cause I was like, “these are my friends, this is my husband and I wanna go”. So Alex just like handed me a washboard and I was like , “I never played music but okay…” Then it just happened.

Alex: I think she’s an iconic washboard player now.

Matt: I played guitar for three shows.

Alex: But then, like with the drum kit, we had to build our way out of this problem: We had to find a way to solve this [the problem of not wanting to have guitars in the band] creatively and we did. I really like the Bejota. [ed: The bejota is a custom built guitar-banjo hybrid. It will be explained later]. Cameron do you wanna talk about yer experience?

Cameron: Yeah sure, I had moved to waashingotn for a really log time. And while I was gone, Alex and the guys decided they wanted to be a band again. So when I came back, I’m in it now. I’m really happy about that.

A similar thing happened with the guitar and me. I started playing marimba for a hot minute and it was really cool but then we were like “this isn’t gonna work out ever..”

Jett: Cause its huge.

Cameron: and you cant take it around ever.

Alex: its like half of a car!

Jett: It had it own wheel but we were like “maybe we can drag is behind the truck” [laughs].

Cameron: From there we kind built our way out of that one as well with the Grandjo. [Bass-banjo hybrid]

Alex: By the way, Leon does a lot of design for those..

Yeah I heard he was the engineer who built everything?

Leon: is that a question?

[awkward pause]

What did it take to build these kind of instruments? The guitar necks were obvious repurposed.

Leon: Well for my drum kit I used bits and pieces from an old Pearl drum kit that my friend had that was left out in the rain for a long time. So that seemed like a good candidate for hacking and sawing. Still had pieces left over when it came time to build the bejota, so we used the drums and an extra guitar neck Matt had. We still had the kick drum left lying around so we used the head from that and a bass neck to build the Grandjo.

Jett: We also welded the neck pieces and the tailpieces. We fabricated those, which I think is important to mention.

So was there any concerns with making sure the tunings would work right?

Leon: yeah I made sure that the scale length would be the same from the donor instrument.

Cameron: Leon’s a math magician.

Yeah I heard there were lots of calculations, like pages and pages.

[Everyone laughs]

Leon: That’s not true.

Cameron: There were some calculations!

Leon: There were a few.

Alex: And when you say if there were concerns, I was concerned the whole time. I was concerned it wasn’t gonna work. I was like “what about this factor?” and Leon was like, “I already thought of that” and he would simply explain it. And then I’d be like “what about this thing? That could go wrong” and he was like “No I got that under control.”

Leon: Since we were using all trash parts there wasn’t very much risk in doing it wrong except wasted time which was fun anyway.

So did you guys use those instruments for the most recent recording?

Alex: Yes, but the Granjo hasnt been in the band long enough to be on a recording but Through The Fear of It includes all the other instruments in the current incarnations and All of Them Witches includes them as well except Jett was not playing washboard. She was playing with us at that point but she wasn’t quite ready to record.

Jett: Like we said, he had just handed it to me and I wasn’t ready. I was like “oh god.. oh god.. nope that’s not happening”.

So when you guys are writing songs, do you write in a group or do people bring in little parts that kind of become songs?

Leon: Typically it starts with Alex. He’ll bring us something that he’s been playing with for awhile that he likes and we’ll use that as the foundation. And then we all write our own parts

And like breakdowns?

Jett: sometimes the rhythms parts and sometimes the chords and lyrics.

Alex: I just come in with very raw materials and then at some point we flesh them out. Then the band as a whole kind of organizes them in order to try to create and interesting song progression that tells an emotional story.

Matt: Usually he comes up to us with “hey look at this crazy thing I figured out!”

Jett: and we’re all like “What the fuck? No.” and then it turns into something cool.

Alex: It general starts with “What the fuck? No”

Jett: and then he’s like “guys I promise [it’ll be cool]” and he’s always right.

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Stick around for parts 2 (read here!) and 3. In the meantime check out their latest album Through The Fear of It.