Cut Worms via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Cut Worms:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Cut Worms
- City: Brooklyn, NY
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Strongsville, Ohio
Current News
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What's Up?
“The cut worm forgives the plough.”
– William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Cut Worms is the nom de plume of Max Clarke, assumed while studying illustration at Chicago's Columbia College.
Despite a .300 batting average and a 63 mph curveball from the mound, Cut Worms' Max Clarke was the black sheep of his baseball-centric, Midwestern family. He was drawn to the creative shadows, drawn to the basement 4-track and late nights in the art studio as much as he was the dugout. He had a born knack for conjuring warm sounds and fine images. His songs in particular crackle with the heat of a love-struck nostalgia: golden threads of storytelling, like visceral memories, woven together with a palpable Everly Brothers' influence and 50s/60s naiveté. But the kid still has a pretty mean curve. Like one of his creative pillars David Lynch, Clarke's songs and artwork are also curveballs with a curious underbelly.
A Cut Worms song may impress an innocent summer stroll across fields of tall grass and lavender, but there's undoubtedly a severed ear out in there in the grass. Some unseen dark forces are always lurking at the edges of songs' sunbursts. Bright, beautiful lap steel or a cheery harmonica accompaniment often belie an impending doom or crestfallen narrator.
Clarke didn't necessarily seek out a life as full time musician. Before releasing music under the moniker of Cut Worms, Clarke went to school for illustration with the idea of a sensible career in graphic design, then took on a string of handy-man type odd jobs. Still, songwriting - that semi-secret practice Clarke had been cultivating since the age of 12 - kept gnawing at him. It was the only sort of work that didn't feel like work. Plus, if there's ever a time to do something as unreliable, unrealistic, and imprudent as throwing yourself wholly into music, might as well be done when you're in your twenties.
A number of songs that make up his LP, Hollow Ground, bloomed from his time in Chicago during period of driven creativity. In particular, "Like Going Down Sideways" and "Don't Want To Say Good-Bye" find new life on Hollow Ground, polished from their initial appearances on Cut Worms' 2017 introductory Alien Sunset EP. Both still fizzle with a lo-fi 60s sound, but cleaned up, they gleam.
The remainder of Hollow Ground was written in Clarke's current home in Brooklyn, where he still home-demos songs. The record was recorded partially in Los Angeles at the home studio of Foxygen's Jonathan Rado, and partially in New York with Jason Finkel at Gary's Electric. Clarke, who plays keyboards, bass, and lap steel in addition to his main guitar, handled most of the instrumentation across the set. He explains he's always strove toward a specific musical aesthetic, and Hollow Ground marks the closest he's gotten to hitting it thus far.
Hollow Ground is imbued with a sharp, self-aware lyricism; as strong as the music is here, Clarke shows an affinity for evocative storytelling, striking the balance between cerebral and simplicity. Look no further than the chiming, rollicking standout "Cash For Gold." For a song with so much sock hop energy, it's actually about being trapped in one's introvert head — stuck on the couch or against the wall at the edges of the dance floor.
Sometimes, on Hollow Ground, we find characters impossibly lustful, sometimes brooding, while in other parts they fumble along, hopeful and painfully self-aware. If the music can be said to have any sort of through-line, it revolves around Clarke's obvious delight in singing his heart out through varying degrees of agony. His songwriting both evokes and explores the raw realm of youth, its weightlessness and possibilities, but channels it through the lens of someone more restrained, who's been through it all before. Someone who's old enough to know better but still gets drawn back in to the romanticism of teenage feelings - and knows how to take the listener along, too.
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://cutworms.bandcamp.com/
- ▶ Twitter: cut_worms
- ▶ Instagram: cutworms
- ▶ Website: http://www.cut-worms.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz5hJCVnP3Ncst-wbeni7gw
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/5DjGD8R6AQvAWvH1MapfKK
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/1S8gajzgABaeR8H97cEYi5
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/1VVWKqYxHbbSMujAfHjECQ
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/4KT0AeT5CkE4vt3B9udfo2
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/3ZmKoFGptmMcYODWwlsqws
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/1EPukiudJ8qDehmB6sQjGR
Clips (more may be added)
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Cut Worms - Castle In The Clouds
122 views
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Cut Worms - Like Going Down Sideways (Official Video)
51 views
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Cut Worms - Cash For Gold (Official Video)
50 views
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Cut Worms - "Song of The Highest Tower" | A Do512 Lounge Session
79 views
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Cut Worms - Don’t Want to Say Good-bye (Official Video)
41 views
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Cut Worms - "Till Tomorrow Goes Away"
70 views
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
