The Skivies on its history and Lorem Ipsum

Tom Murphy

The Skivies.

​Since the fall of 2003, The Skivies (due Saturday, June 25th at The Meadowlark Bar) has graced stages in Denver with its alchemical brew of bizarro psychedelia and hard-edged, experimental guitar rock warped by unexpected twists and turns born of progressive structures turned on their head. Always seemingly up for theatrics, Skivies shows are often multimedia -- not with film but with the band wearing informal, often matching costumes like Devo used to do. That is, if Devo had somehow had Gibby Haynes for an artistic godfather.

The Skivies are releasing the follow-up to 2007's Between Appliance and Apparel, Lorem Ipsum. Engineered and produced by Toshi Kasai, longtime collaborator with The Melvins, Lorem Ipsum vibrantly captures the sound of the band with some of its excesses reined in, so that the songwriting -- never a problem with these guys -- can shine a little more brightly. We recently sat down and talked with the band's two remaining founding members, vocalist DJ Von Feldt and guitarist Zahari Tsigularov, and had a candid discussion about the new album and the band's history.

Westword: Tell me about the unique circumstances of your recent recording.

DJ Von Feldt and Zahari Tsigularov: We originally only had four songs. [both laugh]

DJ:Action Friend got a hold of me and Toshi Kasai wanted to record us. We only had four songs. Action Friend had been telling them about us. Pretty much, Toshi was open to record us and we thought that even if we only had four songs, we couldn't miss this opportunity, even if it's only a little EP and we don't release it, I could listen to it later on and appreciate it.

You were familiar with his work before the recording?

DJ: With the Melvins, of course. We've always been huge Melvins fans. Plus what he did with Action Friend on his last album. I called Zahari and said, "We've got to do this. I don't care what we've got to do, we've got to make this happen.

Zahari: We had planned on recording when Steve Mercer was still in the band. When Sean Boyd joined the band, we started writing new material, and we'd been preparing for the recording stage for months. So it was nice to have a point where someone came in and kicked us in the butt.

DJ: But we'd been practicing four songs and a bunch of other stuff we'd been noodling around with. We recorded those songs and the next thing you know, we had time to kill.

Did you write the other five songs in the studio?

DJ: "Wingnut" is one we'd been doing for over a year. "Watermelon" is a jam we'd been doing at shows for a year. "The Ox" is an old one.

Zahari: "Albuquerque" was a jam that turned into a song.

DJ: "Albuquerque," "Lithium Grin" and "Status Epilepticus" were the songs we really had down. Toshi was good at telling us we could do what we thought was a good take again. He's good at cracking the whip.

Zahari: The songs we wrote in the studio, we got a good take and we learned to play them the way we wrote them there.

DJ: The only one we came up with on the fly, in the studio, was "Toshi's Lament." It was, like, two in the morning, and I think we were all drunk. It was originally twenty-five minutes. With two minutes of lyrics. Toshi jumped in and made noise and he was directly involved in it. I think that's where the name came from.

Zahari: We pared it down to about twelve minutes.

Let's talk about the history of your band a little. DJ, you were in that progressive rock band Paradigm before the Skivies, right?

DJ: Yeah, the Paradigm experience was one of those things I'll have to sit on the couch over that one. Have you ever noticed how none of our songs, or none of my lyrics are ever really personal or about pain? "The Ox" is the only one I ever wrote about personal pain. It was actually written about personal experience and a girl.

You're calling the album Lorem Ipsum?

DJ: If you're designing a newspaper article and you need dummy text, just jibberish? That's what they call it. It's the language that goes into the layout and none of it makes any sense. So it's tends to pretty much be my lyrics to most people.

Zahari: A lot of our songs are written beforehand and he comes up with those lyrics out of his ass. And a lot of them stay because they're pretty cool. That's the only quality I like about them. [laughs]

DJ: Is my ass?

Zahari: He comes up with a lot of cool lyrics on the fly.

DJ: It's funny to me because my lyrics to some people are gibberish, to me they're a painting. If you're going to try to read them in any kind of coherent sentence you'd be like, "What the fuck is wrong with this guy?"

They seem more impressionistic, like you said about a painting, because they're often so vivid.

DJ: It's weird. Usually when I sing about something I see an image or painting in my head and I'm more or less describing that.

Zahari: It's usually a picture of me naked. He does sometimes come up with lyrics on purpose.

DJ: Sometimes a dog finds a bone, is what it is.

You guys started in the fall of 2003?

DJ: It was October/November of 2003. My wife and I actually hired Zahari to build a website for us and her fledgling business. I saw him on Musicmates as a guitarist available. Then he had a link to his website design business and I thought, when I listened to his guitar playing, I thought, "It's not what I'm looking for, but he does cool website design." So my wife was like, two days later, "I need a website designed for my business." So I told her, "There's this guitarist...Not the kind of guitarist I'm looking for the Skivies, but he does awesome websites."

We called him up and met him down at Gabor's and went over the designs and stuff. He was such a cool cat I invited him down and said, "Hey, a couple of guys and I have a practice space and we jam down there." He brought this tiny Crate with a ten inch speaker and his guitar. We just clicked really well. A week later we set up a jam with Zahari and BJ Serekis, and we had fun.

Zahari: Two weeks later we had our first show.

Where was it?

DJ: Whiskey Bill's. I've got it recorded. We had no material. We just got up on stage and jammed for an hour, doing the most fucked-up shit. This is where I knew I had my guys. I called them up, after the drummer from Paradigm had started a new band and asked us to play, and said, "Hey, a buddy of mine wants us to play a show? Are you down for it? I know we don't have any material, but do you just want to get up and do it?" And everyone was like, "Fuck yeah!" That's the kind of people I was looking for. We're going to ride a flaming ship down together. We had half of one song written and that was it, and we built a 45-minute set.

You had the Brain back then, right?

DJ: I had an early version of it then, it was really rough. There was hardly any singing, just crank a bunch of knobs and make as much noise as possible. Our second show, I think, was at Garageland. I still have the poster on file, but I don't remember who we played with.

I ran into BJ not long ago. He's a truck driver now. I always loved that guy, man. It's funny, I was talking about him the other night and my brother was saying, "BJ was so fun to watch with you guys because there was that dangerous aspect, you didn't know what he was going to do." He'd get done and then he would start throwing his drums and start destroying the place.

Zahari: We'd get all giddy and go, [falsetto] "What's he going to do? What's he going to do?"

DJ: I love that guy. Very creative.

Zahari: Very emotional.

DJ: He just always had demons that haunted him. I wanted him so badly to stay with this band. Amazing talent, the demons just got the better of him.