Telomere Repair: Smash in your face

PHOTO by CARA GARCIA

Creating art is a mysterious thing. No one knows where it comes from or how it makes its way out. It just happens. Artists speak of their inspiration, what they are into at the moment or some tragedy in their life that catapulted them to move forward, but that doesn’t explain the first spark that sets fire.

Here, Telomere Repair—Matt Gierisch, Erik Bartolacci and Chris Clawson—discuss making music in Long Beach and how mistakes are part of the creative process.

The District Weekly: How did Telomere Repair come together?
Erik Bartolacci: Matt and I put this together in 2002. We played to drum tracks that Matt had recorded on a shitty four-track. I played keys, and Matt was on bass, screaming at you real scary-like. It was all a bunch of noise. Chris came along in 2004.
Matt Gierisch: After Chris joined, the arrangement of the songs made much more sense, and our sound took a new direction; we became more of a ‘band’ rather than a noise project. Now we feel our lineup cannot be replaced. It just wouldn’t be Telomere Repair without the three of us together.

Tell us about your creative process.
EB: It takes us months to put a song together. If we can play it right off the bat, then we’ll go back and truly fuck it up. A lot of practices end up in screaming—not at each other, but out of sheer frustration. Do we purposely make things harder to play? Yes—but that’s who we are and what we like.
Chris Clawson: Put the three of us together, and this is what comes out. I don’t think there is any alternative.

Does living in Long Beach affect your writing process?
EB: I think we’ve all become disenchanted with the whole LA pop-culture scene, so living on the fringe of all that—‘[on] the outside looking in’—keeps us honest.

Your posters can often be found along our city streets. Can you tell us more about them?
MG: It does in fact become an art project, with each poster being created as an original. Hopefully people notice that if we are willing to put this amount of work into a poster, then they might imagine the amount of effort put into our live performances. At times, I really just want the posters to read: ‘Don’t miss this show. Your will to live may depend on it.’

I agree. It’s important to see Telomere Repair live to get the full experience. How do you look at recording as opposed to the live show?
MG: In the studio, the songs become somewhat sterile and neatly polished. By recording to a click track, our emotions are kept in check.
EB: Live, man, the closer the kids are, the more we go off. On the floor, [with] no stage, the kids all around you—not just in front of you, but behind you, right fucking next you . . . Everywhere! The energy created from that is fucking visceral. I think that is what we strive for when it comes to playing live: real smash-in-your-face shit.

I’ve always found your music to be like a heartbeat. It feels like a part of myself when I am listening to it, especially live.
MG: It should feel like your heartbeat—pumping your blood, driving you, making you feel like a human being.
CC: I know the three of us want to make a connection with the listener, however small. If that’s what people are feeling, that’s awesome.
EB: If your heart is beating to this rhythm, you’re experiencing a stroke. You should do something about that.

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Tags: Long Beach, Music, scuda, telomere repair