INTERVIEW: FISH NARC

THE SOUNDCLOUD LEGEND’S NEW LP IS OUT NOW ON K RECS

From rap to rock, fish narc connects the DIY dots. His career is a study in the tissue that binds various organs of American underground music; it marks secret histories and subcultural continuums. What brings together a cardigan-clad twee OG with a face-tatted SoundCloud rapper? More than you might think.

The artist whose government name is Ben Funkhouser spent his youth playing music in the 2010s Pacific Northwest DIY scene before entering the world of alternative rap via the Seattle collective Thraxxhouse. The story after that is one you might know. Some of Funkhouser’s most celebrated work has been made as part of the SoundCloud rap collective GothBoiClique, whose members include Wicca Phase Springs Eternal and the late Lil Peep. One of Peep’s final projects, the ultimately unfinished Goth Angel Sinner, was produced entirely by fish narc.

Over the past five years, Funkhouser has been taking a focus on making solo work that encroaches back into the world of indie rock. His newest one, frog song, came out last week on K Records, an indie label started by Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson in 1982. It’s a bit of a full-circle moment. It's also a statement of purpose—a testament to a longer lineage of American music, to the indie rock influences that inform fish narc’s production discography, and to the sustained vitality of bedroom music in its many forms.

I'm curious if you think frog song is the most traditional rock record you've made under the name fish narc. 

It's the only traditional rock record I’ve made under fish narc, I would say. I realized that the two rock records in my solo music canon, those are actually SoundCloud rap records, and the beats are just rock. Everything about them structurally is rap—the style is kind of alt rock in some places, and punk here or indie there or pop there, but the way that it happened was very SoundCloud rap. I think this is maybe my first rock record, actually. 

Did you record it with a full band? 

Not quite, and for that reason it still has its tail in the old era. There's MIDI drums throughout it, not entirely MIDI drums, but it was done kind of take for take, piece for piece, a little bit less so than the other ones where we were really making rap-style beats. Camouflage actually is mostly real drums that were produced in a way that made them sound pretty computery. 

It’s funny, because the way that some people make records nowadays, they track drums in a studio and then the mixer layers a bunch of sounds on them. Fake MIDI drums can sometimes sound as “real” as drums tracked traditionally. 

During WiLDFIRE, I was apologizing for my production techniques, in 2020. Showing it to rockers, they were like, Eh, needs a drummer. Now, I watched Portrayal Of Guilt recently and they have backing track elements. Only a new zeitgeist of how to perform or do rock music would allow for this kind of thing.

I think that for a long time if you were a rock band that played live with elaborate backing tracks, you were maybe associated with more commercial-leaning alternative or indie music. 

Phoenix was the first band I ever detected doing that, low-key, and I was like, Oh, they're so corporate—and so good, too. 

Some combination of economic realities and aesthetic choices has put a lot of guitar music in a kind of blurry space.

I agree. 

But that's exciting, right? Do you feel like there’s a way to make music that's sort of traditional but can still feel contemporary?

Totally, and I'll never extract myself from being an Ableton, DAW user. I really want all of my records to reflect me being a rap producer, too, so it's not just refreshing, it's sick, because I feel a strong imperative to show that side of stuff in music like frog song, where it is more traditionally rock. Finding ways that I can still refer to that was really cool and also economically, realistically, that was how we could afford to do it. The producer of that record is my friend Ava Smith, she's a new gen kind of indie producer. She doesn't really listen to canonical music, she kind of listens to new music, I think she likes the Beatles. It was really interesting working with her because there was no other way in her mind, we were not gonna track fancy style.

We had like five different MIDI drum versions for the songs and they got filtered and redone or re-amped until they sounded real. She really has these techniques that I sort of started to understand. She’s a real rocker, that's her shit. She can make beats that are amazing, but she’s a real computer rock producer. 

So you're saying that maybe she doesn't have that background in a continuum of underground rock that is maybe connected to stuff like K Records. Either you know that history or you don't—it's forgotten to a lot of younger people. 

That's definitely true. The Smoking Room scene that she grew up in, it’s a contemporary scene that has its toes in the very end of the DIY era that I'm from. My timeline is my own, and I may just be totally subjective, and I definitely think there is more continuity than maybe on the surface level, but she definitely isn't—I was like, we can refer to this Built To Spill song, and she was like, Never heard that. I was like, You know about Beat Happening, right, like so sick we're doing this on K? I played it for her and she really liked it and she has really good taste but she’s not like me—a nerd for that shit. So it was really exciting to work with her because I could somewhat steer. I'm not a details nitpicker, I really want the person I'm working with to stamp it. So it was cool, because I could feed her a little bit of input but it was coming from her lens which is very contemporary. 

Yeah.

I think that’s why that record sounds the way it does, because it wasn't me or YAWNS from GothBoiClique producing it. YAWNS is an old head, maybe a half generation older than me from West Coast DIY, so we kind of have these similar ways of looking at shit. 

You and a lot of your contemporaries came up in DIY and then swerved into this whole different world that had its own surreal ascent—one that you weren't necessarily prepared for. What were things like back in that SoundCloud rap era? And did getting back into making rock music, was that a way to almost protect yourself from how fucking crazy that whole thing was?

You know, 2016, the Ghost Ship fire happened. I was already out of that rock, underground, electronic, post-riot grrrl, whatever you want to call it, Seattle DIY scene. I was in a band called Hausu. Honestly, listening back to the record from 2013, it sounds really good, but we broke up acrimoniously and I just sort of felt that the writing was on the wall for the underground scene I had grown up in. It was really at the end of the first Pitchfork era where—obviously no shade at all—but it was just the real commodification of underground music and culture and the, intentional or not, creation of a hierarchy of value for that kind of stuff. I think that also coincides with home recording technology being more available so people could make much more advanced and nuanced works of music. 

I joined Thraxxhouse in 2014 because I was just listening to so much rap music, underground and historical, and I was like, Oh, I'll be a booker, you know, I do DIY booking. I was a big fan of Raider Klan, so I met them and MACKNED and they were like, Okay, we're doing these DIY tours, we got Wicca Phase in our crew, he was in Tiger's Jaw. We have Horse Head—you Know Horse head. I was like, Yeah I used to play shows with Horse Head’s old band in the Smell scene. They were like, We want rockers in our crew, we're different! We have rockers in our crew, we have graffiti writers. It was every type of person, it was a 200 person group. 

I just remember thinking, Oh, that's really sick. I wasn't thinking I was gonna make music with them because I just did noise, I was doing table noise, listening to Container and Psychic TV. But Thraxxhouse was the real DIY, and the rock house, electronic shit was pretty dead—people got gentrified out of the neighborhoods, there's no house venues or warehouses, but we were able to pull it off with Thraxxhouse. I mean, not in Seattle, we were virtually banned from most venues for no reason, but in LA it worked. That underground rap, pre-SoundCloud shit, I was like, This is so familiar to me—except for people aren't scared and people are actually different from each other. 

Yeah. 

People were so fucking different, coming at it from so many different angles, and there was legitimate capital to being different, like how far can you push it. It does sound corny—yeah I'm in my early, mid-30s at this point, and talking about your youth or whatever, I understand it's very subjective. But for me, coming out of where I was coming out of, the wasteland of Northwest underground rock that had been squeezed by the police and squeezed by the landlords and by institutions that were busy projecting the image of the old days and not really focused on the new—it was really exciting. 

So the context of GothBoiClique is from Thraxxhouse, and Thraxxhouse was just post-Raider Klan, freeform shit. So GothBoiClique was kind of us going a little bit product mode, but at the same time, it was kind of jokes. Putting a kind of emo sample… It’s traditional, you take a sample and you throw the drums on it and you rap on it—that's hip hop. But the choice of samples that we were making was kind of jokes. It made sense, but it wasn't conventional at all. 

It’s so hard to look back at it because it became so popular, but we weren't aiming it towards a lot of people, it was just kind of this small thing. In a weird way, Peep was the ultimate GBC fan. He knew everybody’s stuff, he knew all the styles, and he could synthesize it. He understood something different, and just him being amazing at music and having this look, and everything about him—he was a real superstar—that was what blew it up.

For sure.

I actually started making solo records again because I was so frustrated with not getting paid for my, I would say, 60 percent role in the composition of what I was doing with most people. I was just over it, I was writing so much music for other people that's not even credited, it's just me being there feeding melodies. I was like, I need to write my own shit, which was cool, and it also kind of protected me. I mean, I was just going through it, man, like I said that stuff about XXXTentacion and Lil Peep that was true, I was reflecting what I thought my friend’s wishes would have been regarding his music and the choices made about it after his death, but I was getting death threats and I was just kind of over it, really. 

I was working with Peep and we were making what I thought of as my best producer music. I think Goth Angel Sinner is insane shit and I wish that we could have finished that album. I realized that, shit, I don't really have it in me to do this for anyone else right now. The line got cut. I made good beats afterwards and did things that I don't regret doing—I still love making beats and I still will produce for rappers, but it was important to kind of put my feet under me again because it had just gotten so crazy. 

A lot of the internet-native music that precedes that moment—witch house, crunk screamo—was ridiculed, but it had a long tail. I think your generation refined some of that stuff and took it to a place where it transcended novelty for a lot of people.

I mean, I hear what you're saying, but I also, genuinely, as somebody who was young during that era and listening to that stuff, it didn't seem novel or jokey to me. Like, I thought it was dope.

At the time, I remember there was the final gasp of a certain era of indie rock. There was an infrastructure of people who were very skeptical of kids coming from a DIY, underground rock position, but were trying to fuck with rap or pop or dance music. 

I still got ridiculed in the mid-10s. I had noise people, mostly noise people, and certain DIY heads from half a generation above me who were kind of like, Oh, seems like this could be cultural appropriation, you know? These are people with zero exposure or context to the culture that they are claiming to defend, no stake or knowledge of it. It wasn't anything I took seriously or really listened to. It was the end of the “I like everything but country and rap” era, that kind of attitude. It cemented me as being done with that shit, done with those people. It’s funny because now, even in 2020, I moved back to Olympia, and a couple of punks my age were like, Yo, dude, it's so crazy you're a punk—like, I didn't know you from back then. And I was at shows with these people. Over the last five years, it's almost like there was never that issue. 

Indie rock and DIY kids who would have ridiculed Auto-Tune years ago, they're all using Auto-Tune. In a way, I feel like you won, because whether consciously or not, a lot of people are inspired by your ideas. 

I think so. I feel really proud of my career. In many ways, I feel like I'm over-credited and somewhat under-credited, but I'm really proud of getting to apply the Pacific Northwest guitar style to this new wave. Like, I never made emo rap at all. I only made post-hardcore, post-punk sampling type shit. I would occasionally do pop punk if it was demanded of me, but if you really listen to core fish narc production from the SoundCloud era—Peep, Horse Head, Tracy, Brennan Savage, stuff like that—none of it sounds emo, unless you're thinking of like Sunny Day Real Estate, and then it kind of does. 

I wanted to connect those dots, and that's still really important to me. We're about to announce a tour with Gag this year and those guys are my friends and I was a big fan of them when I was younger. We've talked about doing a tour together for five years and it just didn't seem culturally like it would work the first three years we were talking about it. And then all of a sudden we just knew it was going to work. With younger rocker fools, even spiky punks or cruster fools who literally only have obscure Japanese ‘80s bands on their jackets, they grew up on Peep and shit. That's the foundation for a lot of these kids to jump off and do other shit.

Certain dividing lines between genres, I don't see them existing the same way anymore. 

It's one of the only good things about streaming. If you look at kids at punk shows in Olympia, the shirts they wear—there’s just no entry level stuff. Like, people just can access this, you don't need to know the nerdy guy at the record store to get it. 

It’s complicated, but it can have its benefits.

Honestly, I was ready for this back then. That drove me towards SoundCloud. I had been in punk and I had been in indie and DIY and folk and shit like the K Records stuff, and I just never really fit any of the molds for that. Not that everybody fits a mold, but it all seemed valid and it all seemed equally worth being my first level personality trait, you know, in relation to music. It for me personally clicked into something that I already felt like I knew. And many of my friends who were making this kind of shit already knew that. 

MACKNED, he’s one of the founders of Thraxxhouse, and I don't think rock music was really big in his milieu, except for on the radio. If you listen to his song “North Star,” it’s him figuring out guitar—he would record one note and then place it using the MIDI arranger. It could be a Phil Elvrum instrumental in some ways, it just has that weirdness to it. He’s not listening to The Microphones, it's just instinct for him. It's basically a folk song, but the format is SoundCloud rap. 

This is all bedroom music, it's this long history of bedroom pop. Going full circle, maybe that's the beautiful thing about you putting out a record on K.

That is the fucking thesis! That is exactly it. I told the fucking guy at Rough Trade, who was asking me—he was like, Tell Calvin to reissue the Karp records, and then he was kind of like, What is a guy like you doing on K? And I was like, GothBoiClique, you have to think about us as home recording bedroom artists. We didn't make that for mass appeal. Calvin called us folk-minded rappers. SoundCloud rap is a folk music. It comes partially from Lil B, the original meaning of based. You get on a beat and then you're an artist, and any instrumental is a beat. You don't actually have to be an artist to be an artist. 

I think in a different era, maybe that scene would have incubated for a longer period of time, but technology just sped it up.

All those platforms were less regulated. Peep was doing coke on Instagram Live. Insane shit, you know, just seems unfathomable now. But it was part of the appeal, too, he was younger, Tracy was younger. Those guys especially were really good at working social media, and that was kind of how the whole thing blew up. Honestly, they redesigned social media after that shit happened because too many people made money without going through the gates. Pump, XXXTentacion, all examples of that as well. I feel like the algorithm is a reaction to people having free reign to make money and shit. 

There's a lot of driving and highway imagery in your music. What are some of your favorite songs about driving or songs about the highway? 

God, it's so hard to think of them on the spot, but it's true. I'm always talking about driving, and this album is just so much driving and car stuff. And I have so many songs in the cut that are like that. But “Portland” by The Replacements comes to mind. “Can't Hardly Wait.” I'm in a big ‘Mats phase right now. I can't hide the fact that somehow I missed it. I knew about them when I was growing up, but I never connected until 2023 and now I'm just absolutely obsessed.

frog song is out now. fish narc on Instagram, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud