Breaking off from a supergiant, into my own bubble

When I first joined up Tobia Elverum's project, I was 19 years old, with twitchy fingers, twitchier ideas and not a single clue of what I wanted to do with my life except playing some guitar. As the son of Filipino immigrants, I was pressured a whole lot into striving for great things, working hard for them... Even if it wasn't really what I wanted to do in life. My teenage years were confusing and difficult. Half of me wanted to run away and hide somewhere far off. My other half got its shit together when Elverum entered my life.

Antigone was absolutely nothing special at first. A bunch of guys meeting up in a recording room every Wednesday and Thursday to noodle around on tape. I don't think any of us ever thought of going further, but man, when Etude on Pride (somehow) got received well and made sales, we just started churning things out. Pumping out our own flavors into this thing we barely had a grasp on beyond what mood we were in when we stepped through that door. We turned from a jam band to a legitimate staple in a scene I wasn't particularly crazy about. But it got me playing guitar, the band wasn't fussy about how I played, and surprisingly, it got my parents off my back. So I kept playing for Antigone.

I didn't think much of the first EPs we dropped. It was something we often just churned out in an afternoon. One thing about Antigone is that it never takes too long to create a record, because what you see is what you get. You'll probably hear Take 2 or 3 of one song on the lineup, but otherwise, the rehearsals are few and far between and we play it by ear. I'm surprised still that it works that well for them. Still, I never thought about my skills or my chops much during my time with the group. It got to a point where playing live felt just the same as in a studio, and everything became... Boring.

No offense to the team, they're incredible, and I owe a lot to Elverum and Garamond for putting this together for us. But I'd often think back to what I'd dream about all those nights and measure it up to what I considered a slog, each and every day. I thought: "I could write something insane right now but the band would never keep it". It's that old adage in Jazz. "It's all about the notes you don't play, and there is such a thing as overplaying". Only I had other ideas, and they were pretty far from the ballpark I was hustling in.

Shortly after Pole Position, a project I spearheaded with Elverum's blessing, I genuinely gave my own ideas a try, and gave them a stage to try them on. The real challenge was about trying to fit everyone's parts along with mine. I had to direct people, my improv-addicted bandmates, my old teachers, into playing more or less what I wanted. The sound we made was great, but doing so felt terrible, and I could tell that after a while, it got a bit grating for them. That recording experience, which took two weeks longer than usual, felt like the seal to it all. I announced shortly after that I just couldn't do it anymore. I grabbed my stuff and flew all the way back to California where I met up with my high school friends, now my bandmates, and got to working on things. One shaky springboard of a single and a loose mixtape later, we got into pulling out all the stops to invent the sound I've been searching for all my life. That's how Hurricanes came about. In a similar way to how Antigone operates, we wrote our songs together, set them up, then let inspiration take us away. Chester Warwick, my best friend, is absolutely crazy for old racing planes. He said Hurricanes reminded him of those badass hunks of junk and so, letting him go apeshit with a photo editing software, he came up with the cover art. He always was pretty good at conjuring striking imagery.

Now that it's dropped and that we also have Vivid out and about, I often think about my run with the jazz cats. I got to have a taste of world touring, of endless musicality, and I got to learn a lot about myself. I guess it goes to show that even when we're a million miles away from the university, Tobia had so much still to teach me. I'll never forget that, and never be thankful enough for his guidance.

Jazz isn't exactly my forte, but I can't think of a better deep end to start any musician's career.

U-Decks is nowhere near the size or importance of my old running crew, but I kind of enjoy it that way? We get to play for ourselves still, We have a pretty cozy record deal and I can spend my nights writing chops I know my guys will go crazy over, knowing they'll do just the same. I guess the point of this story is this: To be true to yourself, you've got to learn who you are first. Once you do, go down the path you know you need in life. That's the one thing you can never regret.

—Desmond Navarro Wilkes