Not every road goes as expected. Just ask Paul Dunne of garage rock act Dinoczar.
Dunne left Boston to stay at home in Los Angeles with the intention of working on his battles with alcohol and depression. While doing this, he’s started Garbage Boys, a new solo project. Unlike Dinoczar, the three piece sludge punks who we miss very much, this new band is strictly Paul. He has written and recorded all of the instruments, and mixed and mastered the songs all himself. It makes for an incredible listening experience as you can take a look and listen into Paul’s progress with these issues.
To get a better look at the new project, Dunne spoke to DigBoston about where the name comes from, why he recorded in the desert, and how things are going solo.
DIG: I’ve seen a lot of photos on Facebook of you recording songs in very strange places. Can you run me through some of the methods you’ve used to record these new songs? And where exactly are you?
DUNNE: Most of my recordings have been done in the middle of the desert or in the trunk of my car. My family has a tiny shack-like house in Joshua Tree; for some reason there’s a functioning electrical outlet in the middle of the property so I hook up my amp and recording gear to it and play as loud as I can. I keep blowing the fuse so I may have to invest in a generator. I record half-analog half-digital, meaning I run everything I record into two different channels. I’ll have one direct channel from my guitar into Pro Tools and another channel that records my amp through a mixing board and into a cassette deck. Melding the two together gives me some room to make an organized chaos of crunch and clarity.
My amps, mixing board, cassette deck and keyboard all stay in the back of my car’s trunk, so if I can’t make it to the desert I can back into my driveway, open the garage door and plug in to record. I get most of my demos done that way. It’s a huge mess but it gets the job done.
Drums are a whole other deal. For my first EP I just used a drum machine, for the second I played onto pizza boxes as drum triggers and replaced the sounds. I’m not a good drummer. For this new album I’m starting to record, I’m finally working on a real drum kit but I record the cymbals separately. Partially to give me more control when mixing the song but mostly because I’m still too uncoordinated to play the songs how I want them to sound.
DIG: What does the name Garbage Boys mean to you?
DUNNE: I just finished six months at a psych treatment facility and one of the groups I had was about setting goals; mine were always about making new music but if anybody asked what kind of music I made my response was normally “garbage”. Self-deprecating humor keeps me afloat. So Garbage Boys is a constant reminder that I don’t really care how my music sounds as long as I’m having fun. I also tend to think that most men are just large children with hard opinions on things and I like to remind myself that we’re probably the weaker gender and can be garbage sometimes.
Listen to Garbage Boys’ new single, “Rust,” below:
