Efron Danzig and Kade Holt on Making Art and Being Best AMIs

Efron: We play music together.
Kade: We were in a band called Eat when Efron was living in Philly, with my friend Will [McGoran].

Efron: It was just like no-wavey punk. Noisy punk.
Kade: Noisy, with all this punk influence. Dance punk. We used to make songs, silly songs not connected to a band that were just me and Efron together. Some of the songs might still be on her YouTube, though a lot of the songs got lost to the ether. Outside of that, we’d make some cool stuff: We used to do all the patches on Efron’s clothes. I would help you with clothes, Efron, all the time.
Efron: Oh, yeah. We used to do some clothing stuff: making patches, printing them and selling them. It was just a little pastime. It wasn’t like we were doing it doing it, you know?
Kade: It was more of a fun thing, really.
Efron: We would just be high around the house, thinking, “Oh, let’s make this.” And as far as the music went, we had a band together, we would write songs, I would usually sing, Kade would write a bass line or the drummer would write something. And we would get together as a band; practice and play shows. We used to play a lot of shows.

Kade: We met through starting Eat. That was how we started hanging out—so definitely a little bit.

Kade: I play music as my main artistic hobby, or outlet—it’s mostly that. And the way I make a living—I find odd jobs here and there, nothing that’s career-bound. It’s making money to survive, because I’m not making that much off my artistic endeavors. I play bass for my other band, Primal Rat Screw, and do a lot of my own music, just making songs. Lately it’s been mostly the band; my energy is going towards that.
Efron: For work I mostly live off modeling, and then creatively, it’s skateboarding. I like to write poetry and take photos, make clothes and stuff—just random art hoe shit [laughs].

Efron: The main thing I focus on is skating. Poetry and photography are just hobbies; they’re just fun to do.

Efron: I met this person before I dropped out of college and they wrote a lot of poetry, and taught me about writing poetry and showed me good poets. This was in 2019. These days I like reading Kathy Acker, Jack Spicer, and this one guy, Kaveh Akbar. I read his book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, recently, which was really good. That one’s a sad one.

Efron: Oh, for sure. But. . .it doesn’t have to be sad. A lot of the poetry I read isn’t necessarily sad. It could be funny or ironic.

Efron: When I skate I feel like I don’t have to do shit the rest of the day. I can just fuck off and hang out after, since I have that release. Poetry doesn’t make me feel good about myself in the same way, though. It doesn’t make me feel as comfortable. Whereas with skating I feel super comfortable—with life. It’s a good release, I guess—I don’t know.

Efron: It’s all the same shit. It’s cooler if the camera’s not around, honestly.

Efron: It depends. Some days I’ll go out in the morning and skate an hour or two and then have a normal day afterwards. And some days it’s like, go out at noon, be out until 8 or 9 at night. It depends. That’s the fun of it—you can go anywhere.

Efron: Maybe hang out at the park? Every day is different in New York. I feel like in Philly I had a routine. We’d sit on your stoop for hours.
Kade: Chill and smoke cigarettes. There you are. I would just kind of do it inside.

Kade: Yes, dude.

Kade: Definitely. I feel like there’s a lot of self-improvement—just getting better at playing in general. It’s a never-ending quest, all the time, even if it’s just practicing an instrument. Even if I’m not in a band in the future, I’d still try to get better at playing guitar.

Kade: I don’t like labeling things with genre. I make an idea, and a sound, and whatever comes to my head, I do, without trying to put a title to what sound it is, which can trap it. Even though it’s easier to classify it, in some ways. It also feels like if you stick to a genre, someone might say, “Oh, you’re making this kind of music.” Then you get yourself stuck in that bottle. Like, “This is what I do.” Instead of just making something.

Kade: Being around my friends who are doing the same thing as me, or who are doing their own thing. It’s inspiring being with someone else who’s going for their shit. And when it’s not, it still can be inspiring to watch that. I think it’s hard to say, music-wise, what inspires me because I’m always changing what I’m listening to. As far as music goes, I don’t know. I’ll find a weird new album and listen to that exclusively for a month straight. Then I’ll hate it, and then I’ll come back to it a year later and think, “Well, I feel differently.” I realize that I like it again after hating it, since I listened to it nonstop for months. I did that with this Mr. Bungle album, the one with the clown for the cover art. I listened to it so much. If I’d listen to it now, it would just kind of piss me off.
Efron: I feel the same thing as Kade. Just my friends. It’s fun to see what my friends are making and doing.

Kade: Yeah, it definitely can. It depends on how I’m feeling already.
Efron: Oh, for sure. I only started making clothes because I wanted to write poems on them. But then I started doing other shit because it didn’t really look good. Everything feeds everything. I feel like if you make art it influences everything in your life. Or it can—it doesn’t have to.

Efron: Oh, yeah. The way you see the world. Through skating you look at the world differently. The way you see angles. And with photography, too, you look at light differently. With poetry, you look at words differently.

Efron: I usually just shoot film, I take a lot of self-portraits. But I also like taking photos of my friends and people I love. It’s a fun thing.

Kade: Was it probably last year’s Primal Rat Screw show?
Efron: Shit, yeah, then. The one at Trans-Pecos.

Efron: I don’t know. It’d be cool to play music, but I don’t really play anymore. It’s definitely harder in New York, because people don’t have spaces to practice. But for me, I only just sang when I was in bands. I never really played music. So once I wasn’t singing in a band, I was like, “Oh, whatever.” Now I don’t really care; I’d rather do the other things that I’m doing. Music takes a lot of energy, and when I did it, we put a lot of time into it. So, I don’t think I could do that now.

Kade: We had a lot of fun going on tour back in the day with Eat. I think about that. The longest tour was probably a little over three weeks.
Efron: It was so fun. It just felt like—oh, it’s so fun—get to hang out with your friends and play music.
Kade: We’d just party all the time. It was fun. I never really did anything like that before, going on these long tours with friends.