Adam Gnade + Planet B via No Echo

“With a title like “Life is the Meatgrinder That Sucks in All Things," you know the collaboration between musician/author Adam Gnade and Planet B is going to be on some head-trip kind of shit. Well, as you'll hear in our exclusive stream below, the 23-minute track does not disappoint.”

–No Echo

“Adam Gnade writes with the kind of passion and empathy that most writers take decades to achieve. His writing is somehow both youthful and wise, funny and sad.”  

–Bart Schaneman, author of Someplace Else

“Among other themes, he explores scene members’ changing relationships to music and community as life advances, viscerally nailing that discrete, unrepeatable, life-altering thrill one gets when the right music hits the right young brain at the right time. It’s a feeling I’d love to have again, and reading Gnade’s words persuasively re-immersed me in that experience.”

–Dangerous Minds

Listen to the track, “Life is the Meatgrinder That Sucks in All Things,” via No Echo here: http://www.noecho.net/features/adam-gnade-feat-planet-b-life-is-the-meatgrinder-that-sucks-in-all-things

In the spirit of his other works such as “AMERICANS,” “Greater Mythology Blues,” and “Locust House” (of which this piece is a prequel to), Adam Gnade’s latest collaboration with Planet B offers some sense of hope in the face of a shitstorm. Peppered with minimalist jazz percussion and landscapes of sweeping, windy Eraserhead-esque ambience, Gabe Serbian (The Locust, Head Wound City, Zu), Luke Henshaw (Sonido de la Frontera, First Power Crew), and Justin Pearson (The Locust, Retox, Dead Cross, Head Wound City) use instrumentation to punctuate this single-track suite of talking songs in a synergistic way that feels intuitive and natural. If the story is the heart of this piece, Planet B is its ribcage, providing structure while allowing for the fluid ebb and flow of Adam’s words. Gnade is a master of conjurings, reanimating ghosts and emotions and imagery of San Diego streets at the turn of the millennium with vivid, pinpoint accuracy down to the street intersections. And despite this specificity-- this very personal time and place and group of people-- there is at once a broadness, a scope larger than any one city or state. Though the narrative is framed in the context of the days leading up to September 11th, 2001, one can’t help but identify with it today. We are in it, but we are not alone, and Gnade is determined to remind us of this.

Life is the Meatgrinder That Sucks In All Things will be made available through Three One G Records digitally on March 17th.