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Vice Blog

DETROIT - WHERE GENDERS HAS BEEN ALL THIS TIME


We hadn't heard from Genders in a while, and then bam! Out of nowhere they have a huge party releasing something called 13 Moons. What? Hadn't they broken up? We talked to them about this madness…

Vice: I thought you broke up! Like times were getting too rough or something?
Jeffrey Thomas: We never broke up the knot, so those are just rumors. We don't think we'll ever break up. Even if we don't play for 40 years and we get together when we are 60-70 and jam some songs, ha.

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What made me think such crazy thoughts?
Well, in 2006, 2007, our activity was still happening but started to slow down. Then I traveled for a bit and was trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to do in life. We started playing with some other people. Evan was playing with Saffron Bloods and some other things at home; I did some solo stuff and jammed with other people. I started some new projects, one of which was called Common Families with Matt Z from Tyvek. After that I moved those songs and new ones to a current project I'm heavily doing now called Gardens. But we never gave up on Genders.

Yeah, so you just played a release show for some insane project. Tell me more.
All throughout I had been working on transferring all the Genders practice and jam tapes onto my computer. It took me a year to sort through them, edit them, all that. I wanted to just make a big release that sums up what we are about better then just six rushed songs on some EP on a label that doesn't respond to my emails and a bunch of other things I could rant about, but whatever. So I have finally finished it and we are launching our new label releasing it called Holographic Resonance. The release is called 13 Moons. It's roughly 14 hours of music on 13 discs, narrowed down from 24 hours of stuff I sifted through. The last (13th) disc is actually the precursor band to Genders called Via Employee. Each box comes with a booklet with all the track titles and it is all completely hand assembled and painted by me. It costs only $30 and is a total deal. I probably won't keep it for that price for too long.

Wow. So I'm guessing you haven't had time for much else, not that there's much to do in Detroit anymore, right?
No, I've been studying permaculture and appropriate technology and plan on implementing some serious farming and building projects in new Detroit. Detroit is wide open for all kinds of things, a big open playing ground for anyone who has some willpower and creative ideas. We do a website company called trees and started a new project to be better then MySpace and Facebook, starting with this message board. The name will change, but it's something better for artists/musicians and just people in general, that isn't corporately polluted, isn't used to spy on us, technically has rights to our songs, loads big flashy advertisements first, etc. bullshit etc.

I was actually kidding!

Here's video from their show a couple nights ago…