My full-length interview with They Are Gutting A Body Of Water

An interview with Doug Dulgarian uncut for Ratpie Friends, with my friends, Logan Bennett and Reece Herberg.

L: I just finished this anime.. and I’m like, shaking from how epic it was.

B: Hey *laughs*

D: Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo!

B: *laughs* How are you?

D: I’m good, I’m good. How many people are in this call?

B: There’s three of us. I’m Brittany. If you guys just wanna say your names just so you can know our voices. I’m Brittany, and then Logan and Reece are on the call too.

R: Hi, I’m Reece.

D: What’s up!

L: I’m Logan, hi.

B: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

D: Of course, no worries. Sorry for sending you a stressed out email like I gotta go! I don’t mean to be like that, I’m just a stressed out fucking person.

B: No, you’re totally fine. If we go too long at any point we can cut it short too. Just let us know.

L: Yeah, just cut us off because we have a lot of questions.

D: For sure, for sure, for sure. No worries.

B: Okay, I’m gonna start off, and then we’re all going to read some questions. So, to start off, can you talk a little bit about moving to Philly and how you were impacted by becoming such an essential piece of the Philly and the scene? I'd love for you to just like walk us through your personal experience in the scene up til now.

D: You know what's really weird? I don't ever think about myself as a centerpiece. Like, that's never the intent. That's not what I want— do you know what I mean? But… I mean, you know, probably like 2014… 2013… or something, the first time I ever heard Alex G— I was like, this is weird! And then you did it over time, and it makes sense and it becomes something really personal to you.

2015 or 2016, I got here and it was so cold. Like, nobody cares. They’re like, oh you’re just another person who plays in a band. Like, that’s cool. There’s a billion of us here. Who cares. I think once I started getting involved in the community, being in a bunch of shows and starting to put on shows, only then did it start to matter. Then people were like, oh okay, I know this person because he’s a friend of mine doing things. I don’t like to think of myself as a centerpiece whatsoever. I think this place is too big for there to be any center pieces and I think that’s kind of the beauty of it in general. It’s super humbling, dude. There’s just so much to it.

B: How you’re describing you coming in and people not caring— do you feel like it’s different than other experiences you’ve had in other places?

D: Yeah! The only other place I’ve lived besides Philly is Albany, NY. Well, that I moved to and shit. In Albany, there’s like five bands. So you really care. You’re concerned with every movement your friends are making. There just wasn’t that vast ocean of shit like there is here. Don’t get me wrong either, I grew up right near New York City, Albany wasn’t super far from New York, so I knew what the vibe of vast ocean felt like. It wasn’t like an alien thing when I moved to Philly. I grew up in basically New York City, so it was easy for me to understand what it felt like to be a small piece of this massive fucking thing, you know?

B: I know you said in another interview how starting Julia’s War made you feel like you were doing more for the community— I’d love to hear you talk about that and your experience in starting it. How has it been impactful to Philly DIY and TAGABOW itself?

D: The whole thing is, all I do is put out tapes. With all these other labels what you’ll get are these press releases. You being apart of this community of friends who are all releasing things is going to be more important in the long-run than any Pitchfork writeup or something. All I do is just put out tapes, it’s pretty low-key. I don’t really do too much. Often times, I get through artists receipts pretty late because I’m just busy. So, I’m just a total fuck-up is what I’m trying to tell you. *laughs*

B: *laughs* Well, it definitely brings people together in a certain way even if that isn’t what you intended for.

D: Yeah, for sure, you’re completely right.

B: Do you have a favorite thing about the Philly music scene?

D: Oh man, not one. Not one. There’s a lot. There’s so much sincere magic. When I first started coming here and going to shows, The Bear Dancing Atrium, The VMA, or like, Everybody Hits. There’s this magic at these shows that I really haven’t seen anywhere else. I wanna say that the first show I played in Philly was in a North-Philly basement that was really carved out of the ground. It was really small. Everybody had to duck down. It was really funny. But there’s just some magic here that doesn’t really exist anywhere else. I don’t really know what it is. There’s just magic here.

B: Yeah, I feel like all of us on this call, being apart of the scene— we definitely agree with that and feel that.

D: It’s just a magic place. I don’t know what it is. It’s just cool.

B: After being a little bit more on the outskirts and functioning in a smaller scene, and maybe having to earn your place a little bit, how does it feel to be expanding outwards? And how does that jump feel after a lot of that hard work? Are you aware at all of how much of an impact TAGABOW has had on this scene and how much your work has inspired others?

D: It’s cool, I mean, I don’t know. Do you wanna know the truth? I think always, because I’m just a person— I always think that my impact is next to nothing. So to hear you say something like that to me is really cool. I don’t ever think about it like that. I’m always looking at it like oh, you know— in my head I’m stuck in 2017 and, like, nobody cares, you know? So it’s interesting when we go play a show in LA and it’s a 1,500 cap and it’s sold out. It’s just crazy. I don’t know when it changed. It’s weird. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think my own self image is so disjointed, or unrealistic that like, I don’t know. I don’t really see it like that. I guess it’s cool. It’s cool that it’s impacting people!

B: No, it definitely is impacting people, at least in Philly, like, every other word out of people’s mouth is TAGABOW. At least from people I know, and it’s cool. But, what you mentioned about self-image— do you feel like playing music and being such a public figure even if it might not feel like it, has impacted your self image even more?

D: I don’t know. I don’t ever wanna be like, yo, what other people think about me is the truth about me. My truth is my truth, always. I think it’s really hard to pull those two things apart sometimes. That’s why I don’t necessarily pay a whole lot of attention to those other perceptions. Don’t get it twisted. That’s why anyone gets involved in playing music. Why does anybody get a tattoo? Because it looks cool, dude. Why does anybody start smoking cigarettes? Because it looks cool. You’re not like, I wanna be addicted to cigarettes. You start fucking playing music because it’s cool and it gives you some kind of self worth. So don’t get it twisted, I think I am easily swayed by other people’s perceptions but I don’t want that to be the crux of the way that I feel about myself. So, as much as I try, I try really hard to kind-of stay in my own world. I do not read Reddit threads. Because I can’t. It’ll gas me up and I’ll be like, I rock! And then I’m back to being a human again. I can’t be like that.

I have to kind-of stay in my lane and be like, these are my friends and I spend a lot of time with them, and that’s really important. But in the end, I’m just a fucking person just like everybody else. There’s something that happens with ego that makes you more than a person. I think I’m really trying to avoid that misstep. I don’t wanna feel that way ever. I don’t ever wanna feel like I’m better than anybody else, or worse than anybody else for that matter. I just kinda wanna be just a person who plays music and if you fuck with the music that’s cool.

B: Definitely, I feel like the intention is often loss when people find success in what they’re doing— so that’s really nice to hear.

D: I think in a lot of ways, we’ve avoided that shit. We’ve spoken to big, big labels and then been like, actually now, that’s not the vibe. I don’t really wanna be on billboards. That’s not the vibe. I don’t wanna do that at all. We just wanna be fucking human beings.

B: What you were saying, how for some people, more or less, going into music can be motivated by what other people are perceiving— do you feel like you had a specific motivation for getting into music and starting TAGABOW in general?

D: Hell yeah dude! Absolutely! I went to my first house show when I was like, 24, 25, and I was like, yo, these are good people who are not trying to shiesty on a bag of gold. These are good people who care about whatever. So I was so concerned with how people interpreted me. I believed myself to be this horrible drug addict, you know? So I hard to put forth a lot of intent, and be like, just so you know, I’m a really good fucking person!

I’m a good person because of my actions now. I show people love and I try to be there, and remain humble and help other people out. When I first got involved, it was my first foray into progressive liberalism. My whole life I wanted to be a cool person in Brooklyn, like a cool indie hipster. When I finally got clean and I was like okay, I don’t have to shoot dope anymore. I really digged being a fucking hipster. Then I realized maybe 7 years ago when I moved to Philly, that isn’t really who I am either. I should just be who I am. For the past 7 or 8 years, I’ve really just been trying to give love and power to that, and still just trying to help people.

B: I wanna ask— how would you say you now define yourself?

D: Ahh, my god. I’m just a working class smuck. I’m getting older, I’m getting kinda ugly. That’s just what it is. I’m kinda down with it. I would also say I’m a really strong and tough person. I don’t feel like that all the time. But when adversity comes my way, I’m good at getting over it. Another thing I realized is that I grew up as a complete hood-rat and that is very much just who I am as a person. I think that for a long time I think I was really fighting that. That’s just who I am. I’m not trying to play into this greater, like, indie rock….. I love indie rock! That’s the thing! I love indie rock! That’s what I realized— I could be whoever I wanted to be without trying to fit some kind of mold. Like, okay, this is the weird guy with, like, the half shaved, who listens to Pixies or something. Then I realized, I could be exactly who I am and still love all the things that I love. When you’re young, there’s a lot of effort put into trying to fit in. Recently, I’ve been giving power to the fact that I am who I am and I am what I am, and that’s just a hood-rat who lives in Philadelphia. And that’s it.

B: Everything that you just said— the whole idea of being who you are is so important. So, thank you for saying that.

D: Yeah! You spend your whole life trying to be somebody else and just constantly disappoint yourself, and just not feeling alright in your own skin. Eventually, you’re just like, actually, I’m pretty cool.

B: I wanna backtrack real quick to what you had mentioned about addiction. How has your struggle with addiction affected your life and what have you taken from the experience of addiction/recovery? I think our struggles help us understand each other a lot better— so yeah, anything you feel comfortable sharing about it. We’d love to hear.

D: For sure! So, here’s the thing. It’s really weird to think about it in the scope of my life, in total. When I was 17 years old I sold this laptop from a party, and I caught a charge for it, and I got on probation. Probation brought me to Albany, NY. I went to this therapeutic community, which was like ‘anon.’ It was absolutely wild— I was there for a year and a week. It was like, you stand on stage, wear signs around your neck, get yelled at. It was absolutely insane. But it also got me out of my hometown, and it got me to Albany, which was the first place that I ever saw a house show— which was not something that was occurring in my hometown, in Orange County.

It’s super weird, but without addiction I don’t think I would have found music, and specifically DIY music. Living in Albany, touring through Philly, I was like this rocks I fucking love this place. I kinda grew up kinda close to it too, since a lot of my family is from Jersey. I was like okay, this is where I want to be. So without the trials and tribulations of addiction, I don’t think I would have made it to Philadelphia. There’s also so much of that too. The first time I ever got clean and stayed, I was 23, 24, and I stayed clean for five years, and in that time, moved to Philadelphia and everything, started TAGABOW, but I chased that shit like I chased drugs. I don’t mean chased recovery, or chased humility, or chased intergrity, or whatever. I just mean, like, being in a band, and just touring and playing awful fucking shows. *laughs* And playing to nobody, and just driving around and doing that. It was chill. I really honestly had a good time and I wouldn’t have fucking done it any other way. But I chased it the way I chased dope. I really love the feeling of friends.

The whole friends piece is so important to me. That’s really all it is. I never had friends, I never had friends. I feel like I had people in my life who were trying to get one over on me, get me in ways that were not cool. When I finally got clean, I realized you can have friends who really care about you, and you can really learn to care about people. You can care about them. That was a big, important thing for me. For what it’s worth, that is the power of music. That is the shit that really made me hype. All I wanna do is see my fucking homies. We’re about to leave for tour tomorrow, and in every city that we’re going to, I’m going to see kids that I know. That’s dope as fuck. That’s all I could ever want. That’s the hit about this whole thing— it’s just genuine connection with other people.

B: That’s amazing. I think it is actually insane, like, I feel like I relate to what you’re saying a lot, in the context of not having a lot of love in your life, in a friendship sense or in any sense— you don’t realize how important it is until you find that. And how important it is to our survival.

D: Yeah, and the way you think about yourself, you know? My whole life I believed I wasn’t worthy of love. That’s what I was told as a kid through people’s actions and shit like that. That’s what I was told through the court system. In every which way, it was reinforced that I was never gonna be shit, I wasn’t shit, and then you kind-of learn, I'm actually worth a lot dude. You learn everything from mirrors of other people. You learn everything through other people. Just having friends is dope, it's a blessing truly. A lot of people are born into shit where they never have real friends.

B: Do you feel like there’s any important lessons—

D: Oh one sec, you’re breaking up. One moment.

B: Oh, you’re good!

D: Can you hear me?

B: Yeah! I can hear you. Can you hear me?

D: Yes. I can, I can. Sorry.

B: I was just asking if there are any important lessons you’ve taken outside of what you just said, from just having genuine connection in your life. What have you learned from other people?

D: The way that it ties into music is kinda wild. The music industry in itself really wants to take what you’ve created it and resell it back to these people who are now interested in it. There’s no humanness in that. There’s no humanness in corporate greed. There’s no humanness how the tech companies move into San Francisco, raise the rent, quadruple the rent, everybody’s homeless now, and then all the tech companies left. Now San Francisco is this place where the homeless population has doubled over the pandemic, there’s people fucking dying in the streets because of fentanyl addiction— it’s a really, really tough place to be. And what about the people who grew up there? Corporate greed is this really, really ugly fucking thing. Those people don’t have to worry about anything.

I feel really similarly about major labels. There’s no humanity to that, dude. They’re just like, we’re gonna get you mad fans! That’s such bullshit to be like, yo, we’re gonna make you famous. You get stars in your eyes, like, that’s all I ever wanted, to be famous! But the hit is really not in fame. The hit is really just chilling with your fucking friends.

I know it sounds wack, but I mean that. Where your heart feels the best is not in fame, and shit like that. That’s why I try to keep it up front about where I stand within the world. Like I said, I’m just some hood-rat smuck from Philly, and that’s really important to me. I’m not trying to be some famous bighead. Fame just ruins people.

B: Absolutely. Thank you for saying that— that was so well said. I think we’re going to shift gears a little bit to live shows and touring, stuff like that.

D: For sure! Thank you.

L: Okay, I’m gonna try to condense some of these so we can speed-run it a little bit.

D: No, it’s really my fault, man. I talked a lot.

B: Everything you had to say was awesome. Don’t worry.

D: Cool, okay. Thanks.

L: So, the first time I saw you guys was at The Pouch and I didn’t really have a good view. I kept trying to go on my tippy toes trying to see what is going on. I kept being like, okay, there’s two of them, no, there’s four of them. The setup you guys have of all facing each other with your backs to the audience— is there a reason for that or did it just naturally happen?

D: Kinda both honestly. I’ve seen a lot bands do a lot of that. Mainly, Blue Smiley used to do that a lot. I was always like, dude, that’s so sick! They don’t even care! They don’t even give a shit about the audience! That’s crazy, you know. At the dawn of TAGABOW we were doing that— I was always trying to look at Ben. We weren’t that talented, we kinda sucked. So we were like, we kinda gotta look at each other. Then it just became the thing.

L: No, it works really well. I had the same reaction with a few of my friends when we saw it where we were like, that’s so fucking cool! Just like what you said with Blue Smiley, it translated really well.

D: Yeah, exactly.

L: Has the feeling of playing shows in general changed for you? Are you more nervous or more excited?

D: That’s a really good question. I’m always a little bit more nervous the first show, like fuck, this is what I chose to do with my life? My butt is really facing these people? Then I do, and I get it over with, and I talk to people. It hasn’t changed much. You never lose those butterflies. There are some deep-seeded beliefs I have in myself where I’m like, dude, you’re not good enough for this shit. Then you tell yourself that kinda shit, then you do it, and you’re like, I think I am. I need to stop worrying. It’s kind life-confirming in a lot of ways. There’s like two things in the world I’m good at, and one of them is making music. So I might as well just believe that, and just be like, yeah, I’m actually really good at this!

L: Yeah, I know that feeling of, oh yeah, this is fine! But then you forget.

D: Exactly! You forget. You forget. In the end, that belief in yourself is really reinforced from just doing it. So doing it all the time is kinda cool. Plus I just love playing music. It hasn’t changed much.

L: What city would you say has the best DIY, well, not the best DIY scene because I know Philly has the best DIY scene— but a scene you can really rock with like Philly?

D: That’s hard. Birmingham, Alabama. Salt Lake City has one of the best scenes in the country! I mean that.

L: That’s so random.

D: You mean strictly, like DIY scenes, like house show, right?

L: Yeah.

D: Sorry….. calculating. *laughs*

L: It’s alright, it’s a hard question.

D: Salt Lake City is fucking fire. I love that spot. San Francisco, or just The Bay in general. Everything that Smoking Room and Sam Cruz are doing out there is everything I look up to and have looked up to forever. The love they’ve got for each other out there is so fucking crazy. When you become about of it, it’s really special. The Bay is crazy. Playing a show in Oakland is special the same way that playing a show in Philly is.

L: That’s affirming. I went to a rave in Chicago once, earlier this year. I was looking around, and I was like, oh, it’s just like Philly— everyone’s just smiling. *laughs*

D: Exactly, exactly! Chicago too, they have an amazing fucking DIY scene.

L: Okay, I think Reece is going to ask more questions about your specific works, just more in-depth. I’ll pass it on.

D: Absolutely.

R: Yeah, we wanna give you some time to talk about the full shit you guys have been putting out. If you could talk a little bit about your latest release "Expansion Pak"— what inspired it, why you felt a visual album was the best medium for this work, anything else along those lines apart of the whole process creating that?

D: Okay, I’ve always been a huge, big, massive movie head. I love visual elements and the way that they tie in with sounds. Eraserhead would not be half as cool fi it didn’t have all the sounds associated with it. There’s so many other examples of that, even like, Dawn of the Dead. The original Dawn of the Dead, that soundtrack by Goblin is phenomenal. It paints the whole picture of the whole movie. I’ve always been in love with the way those two things interact and making visual shit. We started writing this last record and I really got down on myself about it. I realized I didn’t wanna go out like a sucker. I spoke to my friend recently, and he was like, listen, you can dock anybody, but if you’re truly a G, you will always shine through, if you’re doing your own thing even if you’re docking somebody else. I was like, that might be true, but I don’t wanna actively do that.

Then, as soon as that happened, my really close friend died. It was this big thing where I really just wanted to not at all glorify his death, but kinda for me to be able to process it. I wanted to add symbolize that is people coming in and out of our lives, and everybody can relate to that. I think that’s a really important thing. I was trying to create this visual element of characters that you visually connect with, and take them in and out of this abstract story where this whole time you’re consistently seeing these people but they’re just in and out of the story. Kind-of to mimic what friendships feel like or connections with other people feel like. They’re kinda fleeting. You can love somebody forever and very, very deep, but will they be present in your life forever? No. There’s no way for that to happen. But the amount of time you do spend with them often leaves a lasting impact.

R: Firstly, I wanna say that I’m really sorry for your loss. I didn’t wanna cut you off when you were talking.

D: Oh, it’s super chill.

R: That was a super engaging answer, I was falling onto every word.

D: No, no, no, for sure. Everybody has people in their life who leave or die. Nobody is fucking immune to that.

R: When you were talking too, not even in a death sense, but in a relationship sense in your early 20’s when your relationships are just constantly shifting form, falling apart and coming back together. I feel like that’s a common theme in a lot of TAGABOW’s work. These really personal and intimate lyrics, even visual elements that become so cyclical. I think that’s why so many people are mesmerized by your sound. You’re evoking really personal sentiments and memories. A lot of that is sensory language and kind-of abstract. That brings me to my next question— the song “french,” when I first heard it, is so heavy and immeasurable, then I looked up the lyrics, and I was like, holy fuck. I read them over so many times and they were just so heartbreaking to me, and poetic. I was thinking about the production of that song which you kind of touched on in your answer earlier. I was just wondering what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Do the lyrics come first or does the visual come first? The lyrics, production, visual all just seem so fluid in your entire discography.

D: I will constantly be taking notes in my notes app. I will often just compile out of them ones that are about the same subject. If I’m writing down all these lines pertaining to life experiences, or thoughts that I’m having— I’ll specifically remember, like, walking past this laundry mat and smelling the rift of a recent ex. That hyper-specific feeling and all the lyrics in that song are things that I had just written down over time in relation to that person. It’s often a bigger collection of experience. I never sit down and write a song. It’s always a whole collection of thoughts and phrases regarding that situation. I never sit down, jaw-breaker style, front-to-back, here’s the song. I never found it easy to write that way. I used to do that with my first band and I realized that’s really not the way that I like to.

It give credence to the weight of some of those experiences. That’s the thing— sometimes it takes time to really process how you’re feeling about shit. Half the time when something is happening to me, I can’t really fully understand how I’m reacting. I’m just there reacting.

R: I like the idea of art being this mosaic process, and it just forming itself over time. You just putting the pieces together makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t come off mechanical. I relate to that, I feel like we all do as artists ourselves. My other question— this one is kinda sillier, but I’ll just give you a break from talking about heavy shit this entire time. Your titles are so fucking awesome, just even going through spotify and seeing "kmart amen break," and "texas instruments"— where do your titles come from? They don’t feel related to the lyrics, but are they secretly? Like, a hidden secret between you and the band?

D: *laughs* I’ve been telling people it’s a hidden secret between me and Nate. When I was a kid, where I’m from, everyone had wild nicknames. There were these two kids that came around that were Bust Down and Curfew. It was because the one kid always asked you for a Bust Down and a cigarette. The other kid— his mom always came around and was like where the hell is my son?

Names in general have always been this really important thing for me, or houses who host the party at, whatever. Sometimes it’s just what does this song evoke? "kmart amen break"— that title in itself is kind of like a thesis. It’s about corporate America dying and the birth of art through that. I know that sounds kinda heavy, overtly heavy. Most of the time the titles are not that heavy, there’s just kinda stupid. It’s easier to slap a name on something and think, that’s just how it makes me feel.

Even with the very first TAGABOW release, I was kind of naming things how they were making me feel. That’s the whole thing about art in general. It’s about making you feel something. That’s all it is. You’re trying to convey a message and a feeling. I think that the title of that is really important as well.

R: I’ve never felt so inspired after an interview, I’m just like, jaw-dropped right now. Thank you so much for spending so much time, but not just time, thought and intention.

D: I appreciate that, but also just, the truth is anyone is capable of doing what I do. It’s not out of reach. You just fucking do it.

R: Is there anything you want to promote or talk about? I just want to make sure we’re fitting it all in before we log off.

D: This new null record that is going to come out this year, is the coolest fucking thing. null is one of the greatest bands. They don’t even have anything online, it’s not something that you can check out. You have to go out to a show. The full body 2 EP is insane. Everything that Toner, Smoking Room, and Sam does. The new Hotline TNT record. There’s just so much.

R: Thank you so much again. That was more than we could’ve expected.

D: Hell yeah, thanks for asking me. This shit is cool. I think, like, press outlets that are created with DIY ethos are the heart and the blood of the whole thing. Talking about shit that excites you guys— that gets other people pumped. It’s a big deal.

R: Thank you so much. This is probably my favorite interview that we’ve done, just you being so genuine.

D: Yeah, the only thing is, to be honest though. I mean it. Don’t gas me up so much. I’m just a smuck.

R: *laughs* Okay, okay. Thanks so much again.

D: Thank you so much for inviting me!

B: We appreciate the genuine answers so much, it’s really nice to just hear people talk as humans.

D: Yeah, absolutely. I wish more people did. Don’t get me wrong, putting out the product— I want to be as mysterious as possible. But if you’re just going to talk to me as a person, I hope it always comes off as, oh, this is just a fucking person. That’s all I ever want to be. I don’t know. Yeah, thank you for giving me the opportunity.

L: Thank you!

D: Thank you! Definitely like, if I see you in public, be like, yo, this is Ratpie.

R: *laughs* Yeah, put a face to the obscure voices.

D: Please do. Alright, thank you so much.