INTERVIEW: DEATHBYSHEEP RECORDS
PUSHING ALL KNOWN FORMS OF NEW YORK HARDCORE
I can’t remember where I was when first I met Sheep, but chances are it was either in or directly adjacent to a mosh pit.
Though I have been coming to New York to play shows since I was a teenager, it wasn’t until a decade ago that I actually moved to the city. By that point, the DIY scene I “came up” in, the one marked by venues like 285 Kent and Death By Audio, was crawling to an end. Around the same time, I was starting to see the Bronx-raised Sheep and their friends getting rowdy at gigs for a newer group of bands—among them, Show Me The Body and Machine Girl—that represented, at least to me, the next wave of damaged, genre-pushing music in New York. Over the past 10 years, it has been exciting to interface with this extended crew in my own little way. I can’t help it, it’s true: I love music…
Now it’s 2024, and Sheep has a mini-empire with their label Deathbysheep Records. The operation encompasses everything from tapes to shirts to novelty items like whoopee cushions and baseball bats; they release music that represents many forms of hardcore—hardcore punk, hardcore rave, digital hardcore—alongside more unexpected plays, like their cumbia mix series 100% CHINGON and the BLUNTED POSSE SAMPLER MIX, an inspired piece of sound collage that lays found Funkmaster Flex samples over music from the label’s artists. For anyone looking to figure out what’s happening in the “New York City underground,” Deathbysheep is a serious piece of the puzzle.
I feel like I first met you, it must’ve been a decade ago, right? At a Show Me The Body gig.
Yeah, maybe 2014.
You grew up in New York?
Yeah, I'm from here.
How did you find out about Show Me The Body? How did you start going to shows?
I had a cousin who was like, Hey, I know a couple people, you might be into this music, and they took me to Palisades.
Oh, wow. That was a very short lived New York venue.
Yeah, I went to Palisades and I was like, Oh, it's kind of weird over here, it’s like goofy white people just hanging out with who already was in the neighborhood. Coming from the Bronx, I'm like, Yeah, that's cool, I guess there's music in between random delis and shit. I don't know, it just started happening and then I got out of high school. I was already going to concerts and shit, but for big bands.
Yeah.
And there were a few bands that would play smaller spots. I was telling someone about how I went to that place Europa, which is now The Good Room, to see a bootleg version of Black Flag. I was already in Williamsburg all the time, just goofing off, doing some graffiti and shit, I think that's how I ended up at Glasslands and all those little spots on Kent.
That was a transitional era. That was kind of the end of a certain wave of Brooklyn DIY.
Yeah, I just got there at the end. I was sneaking into those places. And then I think my cousin took me to a death rock show, I think that's how weird it was, at Palisades. You know, I met some people, I met some other people and then…
At what point did you want to start to participate in a more active way?
I don't know. I think it truly just started happening, where people I was meeting that were playing shows would hit me up and be like, Hey, I'll put you on the list, but can you start to mosh pit a little bit so my shit can look cool? I was like, Yeah, sure, I don't know, throw me and my friend on the list, we’ll come from the city and we'll hang out for a bit. It was always the challenge going back.
Yeah, those shows can go late. Sometimes you're on the train and it's four, five in the morning or something.
Yeah, I would always try to leave around two, three, because I might have had work the next day. If by two I'm not on the train, I know it's gonna take me definitely two more hours. But there was a point where I was filming a bunch of shit.
Yeah, I remember that.
And I would edit on the train. I didn't care that I was coming from Bushwick all the way back up to the Bronx, I would just take out my laptop.
The upload process is such a big part of the edit.
Yeah, I would look at all the footage. I'm like, Okay I still remember the night, so I don't really have to watch all the footage. Like, I know after this point, this is the part I want to use.
When did you move to Brooklyn?
I worked for a company in Williamsburg that did some fun stuff, and it was every morning, take the trip to Williamsburg, then hang out, then go back. All my friends were living around here, so it was, let me figure out a spot within this area. The weekend that venue Heck got shut down, a bunch of people from that house had to find a spot, so I ended up living with a few people over there.
That was 2016?
2016 or so, I lived off of Putnam next to the art store.
And then when did the label start?
The label started in 2019 or something.
Deathbysheep was more of a concept for a while.
Yeah, it was a joke. It wasn't really a thing. I had friends that were doing stuff, they’re not really putting out their music anywhere. But it was more like, how can I sell a t-shirt? You know, streetwear was very popular at the time, I was working in some form of streetwear, and I just thought it was corny to be another streetwear label. So a record label is the other thing, because as a designer, I don't want to be like, Sheep Design Agency—as a 19-year-old, nobody wants to buy a design from Sheep Design Agency.
Yeah.
But the record label was the funnier way to sell shit.
With so much streetwear, it can feel one step removed from actual subculture, so I think it's exciting when you're making shirts, but then you're actually producing music, too.
Yeah, all my friends were doing it. There's that place tapes.com that was in Brooklyn, so it was really easy to go get the tapes.
Oh, that's cool.
Those things didn't sell, but it was just like, let me just give my friends a bunch of these, and then they'll figure it out.
I noticed that earlier releases on Deathbysheep were more guitar based, but now it seems like you've sort of moved—well, you do a little bit of everything at this point—but definitely the focus has shifted a bit to electronic music.
The focus out here changed. It was really, finding four or five people that could start a band got a little harder. You know, every couple years, there's a whole generation of high schoolers, college kids getting out, everybody wants to start a band, but everybody wants to be the singer. Everybody wants to play the guitar, nobody wants to do the drums except for the one person, but they can never match it.
If there’s one good drummer, too, they’re in ten bands.
Yeah, so the punks, they kept their shit really tight. I'm not white so they don't really fuck with me that heavy, I had a bit of respect out there to do one or two things, but for the core audience, like, the spiky jackets, they weren't fucking with it. And I was just meeting younger kids that were willing to do stuff on their computers more. Like, totally listening to noise and dance stuff, and always being punk kids—you had the digital hardcore blend already.
For sure.
The stuff already existed, so now you just kind of show it to a bunch of people and say, Hey, this is cool.
Just logistically, too, in this city it’s easier to make music on the computer then do the whole practice space thing.
The band music thing kind of died out for a minute, and it was a bunch of digital hardcore, and then that became difficult for a lot of people, so then it just became a bunch of DJs for a while.
There seems to be this real emphasis on proper rave music, that's not even in any way connected to punk at this point.
Yeah, it's so far removed, which is cool on our end because then we can do the punk references and still teach somebody a new thing.
When I was really young, I would go to Doormouse’s record store in Milwaukee, and his version of rave music always made sense to me as a kid who was into punk. And I think that spirit continues in what you do.
Yeah, it's all reference based. Again, coming from my streetwear stuff, it was like, if you know, you know, if you don't know, maybe you might learn something. If someone stops you on the street and is like, That's a cool shirt, but that's actually just referencing whatever, that's where you kind of learn something new, and some people are into that.
I think with culture, it often comes down to curiosity—if you're attracted to the energy of something, then you take the time to figure it out.
It’s the fashion first. If you can get them with the fashion, then it’s, okay, you’re going to the raves, you’re listening to the music, you want to take some of it home with you. You watch the documentaries, you figure out all the little subgenres. You know, what kind of hardcore do you want to be?
It’s very accessible for anybody now, if you have an interest in underground music, you can really get to the bottom of it pretty quickly on the internet.
YouTube is everyone's savior. If you're a DJ for the first time, you kind of just have to let your YouTube guide you, until you find the deepest cuts and you're that person. But you know, YouTube is helping everyone out here, Instagram.
Yeah—TikTok, too, but it all seems like it’s feeding events that are happening in real spaces. When I think about your crew and sort of adjacent things, there's the potential for this to be a multi-generational scene.
I recently went on tour with this band and every so often kids would run into me and be like, Hey, you're Sheep, right? We’re some kids in Florida and we see what you guys are doing, it’s amazing. Me seeing it everyday for years, I'm like, Yeah, I guess so. Touring and meeting kids that are fascinated by the New York digital hardcore, rave, mosh, whatever that we're doing right now is still pretty cool.
When you see people in real spaces and you see energy happening, that can be inspiring. I'm not 19, but that feels like something that would inspire a kid to set up a show in their own town.
In Texas, it was maybe a hundred degrees out and there's tons of kids on line at 11 in the morning, the show doesn't start until like 7 p.m. So I'm setting up, I’m doing my thing.
What tour was that?
Machine Girl and 100 Gecs.
Oh yeah, big show.
Yeah, and that's where this modern kid that's into freak shit or whatever, that's where they're meeting up. I'm like, Hey, what's up kids? I'm gonna get you some water from inside. Do you know anyone else here? And they're like, No, there's not really shows happening, if there are, it's some college kids and we can't go there yet, or it’s one band and we go check them out sometimes. But the idea was, yo, there's a hundred fucking kids right now at 1 p.m—why don't you just get everyone's contact? I mean, start a thing. Yeah, and they're like, Oh shit, I guess, but we're not going to. And I'm like, Okay, cool.
You need somebody that is kind of instigating, and putting everybody in the same room together. And New York has plenty of people like that. People come to New York because they're obsessed with music and culture.
Yeah, of course.
A lot of those people leave their hometowns.
Yeah, and I'm a hater sometimes—I’m like, don't don't come here. Yeah, we got enough for you.
I think that's a fair point. I was looking at your Bandcamp, you’ve put out quite a few tapes over the past three years. And it’s mostly New York stuff.
We try to do one every month for the year. It’s not mandatory that we have to do a release every month—I’m also only doing my homies. At this point, I’m still not accepting demos from kids overseas. I get the emails, I’ll listen to it, but it's a little difficult where it's like, I don't know what you guys are up to—it’s really cool, but I want to do people within our area. Again—hook them up with tapes, get their gigs going. I'm hooked up with a lot of kids in Portland and LA, so it's like, yeah, hopefully you get some more gigs and you get paid out because playing Trans-Pecos every week is cool, but you can play other places.
Yeah, especially now that your scene has gotten a bit more dancefloor friendly, even if it’s still on the fringes of whatever Brooklyn techno superclub thing is happening.
A lot of the people that are going to the shit we're on, adjacent to us as well, they’re not clubgoers. They're barely drinkers. And it’s really that true rave thing where it's like, why would we drink if we're all hopped up on some ecstasy, right?
That sort of bigger Brooklyn techno scene, there's a huge ketamine influence.
Yeah.
And people have told me it affects the dancefloor’s energy. But whenever I go to these parties thrown in your scene, people are really dancing.
Yeah, I guess it's like a layer of a generation. Once you get to the 30 plus range you're kind of in your cool Basement scene, your all black, no phones and stuff, but the kids out here, they're just trying to find a place to smoke, drink, hang out, and if they start loving the music then they're coming next week.
Yeah.
That’s cooler to me than kids trying to sneak into the club. What the fuck do you want to go to a club for? Yeah, the clubs are cool, you can go to a lot of clubs in Brooklyn—you're not gonna discover a scene. As a young adult, you’re not really gonna find the scene unless you are on Instagram and you're like, Oh shit, some of my homies, they're doing a thing under a bridge. It's free, there's all ages. That's more intriguing than, let's go to the nightclub, pay $30 and if we're not dressed super cool, they might not let us in.
Your label seems kind of like a bridge.
Yeah, if a punk band were to send me shit and I like it, I'm still down to do that stuff. If I have friends, and if they're like, Yeah, we're gonna start a band, I'm here for it. But you know, most of my friends are like, I'm doing my own thing, I'm trying this new thing. I'm gonna do analog, computer noise. I still want to do bands. I still want to do live music. I don't know if you listened to the last thing we did, but it was pretty rad. It was like live drums.
Yeah, I listened to that on the way here, actually.
We're trying different stuff because, again, for the last couple years you could have been listening to everything we do, and then this one might not be your favorite shit, or I just showed you something new. We have that one tape series that's all just cumbia.
Yeah.
And that one's a fun blend where you hear the influences of the dance stuff, the idea of sound clash culture, a DJ talking on the mic, just a break playing. It's coming around, like they get it a little bit more. And that's a fun one that we do, for the fact that we just can. Someone uploaded the first tape onto YouTube, and there’s a funny comment that says: “I don’t understand why they released this cumbia tape,” and somebody just responded by saying “it’s not what you asked for, but it’s what we needed,” or something like that. It’s not what you guys thought we were going to release, but it’s something sick.
Then there’s the whole Funkmaster Flex tape thing. You found a bunch of Flex drops on YouTube and inserted them into a mix.
It was, how can I find all the isolated moments of him just saying shit, and how do I make him DJ my songs, without me having to DJ ever. I collect vintage Hot 97 stuff when I can. Whatever I can buy, when it’s a novelty. I don’t want to just buy a t-shirt. But a mini-basketball?
Here Sheep holds up a Hot 97-branded mini-basketball.
That gives me inspiration to make a mini-basketball!
Which leads us to the head shop component of the label.
The head shop is a way to actually sell more novelty items, that’s so separate from the music—we can sell novelty pipes and a fuckin’ whoopee cushion if we need to. We did some mini-bats last year that were really fun, it was like an 18 inch mini-bat. Probably the best thing we ever sold were box cutters. We were like, Can we make box cutters? Will we get in trouble? It’s a Bronx reference, really. Me growing up, I was always told, Halloween—watch out, you might get slashed in the face. Going to school up in The Bronx, metal detectors, watch out, kids are slashing each other. The rumors that it was an initiation to get into gangs and stuff. When I was finally able to make a box cutter, I was like, Gotta make a cool one, and I put a Jerry Garcia thing about smiling.
On the box cutter itself?
Yeah, the classic smile smile smile on the Buck 50.
It gets to the heart of the dark side of hippie culture.
That’s why we also have a baseball bat. It’s not for a baseball fan. It’s really on some, hey, you’re partying? You’re going through some crazy woods to go to a thing under a bridge? Maybe you should have this.