Chad Deal

Octagrape are touring in support of their 4-song cover EP, Major Mayor Maxion Marble.

No-wave garage-rock quartet Octagrape are embarking on an eight-stop West Coast tour with Portland-via-SD experimental band Trumans Water and Florida like-mindeds Permanent Makeup.

The trio of acts will be travelling on a 17-track compilation cassette, Lotions & Creams, co-released by Ghoulhouse Records & Thing Thing Thing Records and recorded by each band in San Diego, Paris, and Tampa, respectively.

In addition, Octagrape (who have ditched the hashtag in the middle of their name) will be touring in support of their new four-song album, Major Mayor Maxion Marble (Sounds Familyre).

The EP features Graped-out covers of tracks by Major Stars ("Syntoptikon"), Mayyors ("Ghost Punch"), Dymaxion ("Verfremdungseffekt"), and Marble Sheep ("Melted Moon").

“[On tour,] random shuffle became a massive brain crowbar — for our own songs, for our own noise,” Octagrape frontman Glen Galloway writes in the album notes.

“Instead of locking down on regurgitating the same songs onstage every night, we came home looking to take all that momentum and find a way to send it off the rails. One morning driving around back in San Diego, I must have been in the M’s on my song library. All of a sudden, I heard a block of a bunch of those tour song faves. Major Stars’ 'Syntoptikon,' Mayyors’ Deads EP, Marble Sheep’s 'Melted Moon.' Ahh, MAJOR MAYOR MARBLE.

“The next time we all got together to play, we started learning these songs. Soon after, [guitarist] Jason [Begin] threw in a Dymaxion number. MAJOR MAYOR MAXION MARBLE. Monolithic atonal New England monster riffs + Sacramento clobber + deconstructed guitar as sample + Tokyo flash-forward. All points of the globe caving in quadraphonically.

“Cover songs are double-edged. You don’t have to write them, but you do have to own them. All four of these tunes have some severely alien logic intrinsic to them. They’re slathered so deep in that…they initially come off as improv, but we maybe figured out otherwise in midstream. Learning these made us unlearn a lot of what we already knew to do, in terms of structure and performance, recording and mix. The same rules did not apply.

“So here we have something that doesn’t have a lot in common with much of anything we’ve recorded so far as a band, was an epically large stretch, and yet in some ways was like falling off a giant log. Tribute, homage, thrill-bent annihilation. A four-song cover EP.”

This is Octagrape's second foray into tributes, following a two-tune digital release in June titled Vertical Evasion, which featured covers of The Pretty Things' "Mr. Evasion" and Swell Maps' "Vertical Slum."

When asked about sharing the bill with Trumans Water (he and drummer Ely Moyal are former members) for the first time in over a decade, Galloway writes:

“Yeah it's been a looong while....maybe 10 or 12 years? I very much dig the recent tour footage I've seen of Trumans. This line-up is super snug & lethal, can't wait to witness it in person. The brothers Branstetter [vox and guitar] have each other's brains mapped, Mike's been on the Tru-bass for years, & Johnny Schier brings that Last-of-the-Juanita wallop on the drums like nobody else.”

The tour kicks off at The Casbah on Saturday, November 8.

All Dates:

November 8: San Diego, CA. Casbah.

November 9: Long Beach, CA. Alex's Bar.

November 10: Los Angeles, CA. Redwood Bar and Grill.

November 11: San Francisco, CA. Hemlock Tavern.

November 12: Sacramento, CA. Witch Room.

November 13: Portland, OR. Bunk Bar.

November 14: Seattle, WA. Lo-Fi Performance Space.

November 15: Olympia, WA. The Northern.