Adam Sierzputowski, Ben Petrisor, Sergio Falvo, and Jacob Saxton are the Brooklyn-based band CS Cleaners; Gage Allison and Noel Mateus are the also-NYC-based band Lathe of Heaven. The new CS Cleaners record, What’s This?, is out tomorrow on Wharf Cat, so to celebrate, the two bands got together to chat about album art, DIY touring, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Adam Sierzputowski: I guess we'll start off talking about art, and one of the best artists in the room… Gage.
Gage Allison: I wouldn't go that far.
Ben Petrisor: Well, we’re just talking about the room. You probably are the best. And then Noel second?
Noel Mateus: I don't do art. Just music.
Adam: Music's art, man.
Jacob Saxton: Are you an artist?
Gage: For lack of a better term, I guess so. Sure, I'm an artist, I suppose. It feels very corny saying that. I think art is mostly stupid, but I can't help but do it, so…
Adam: I mean, your album covers are so sick.
Gage: I do almost all of our art. We've had two shirts that friends have done, and then there's one other one in the works that someone else is doing.
Ben: Do you feel like you do your own art because you want to get it right, versus commissioning that kind of stuff?
Gage: Yeah. I mean, this is the first band that I've been in where we have a theme, and we don't really want to break too far away from that theme. We're named after a sci-fi novel; all of our songs are, for the most part, about science fiction. And I like sci-fi art and I want it to all be this cohesive thing. So, yeah, I usually try to explore a science fiction trope in a different way, but also make it a little punk.
Ben: That's thoughtful.
Noel: Yeah. What do you write songs about, Ben?
Ben: Well, if we're talking themes, I feel like our theme is we just do dumb shit and see what sticks to the wall.
Sergio Falvo: That is not our theme.
Noel: [Laughs.]
Gage: Wait, so who does the art for y'all's records then?
Adam: Well, the EP, we were scanning a bunch of—
Jacob: I had one of my grandpa's old French porn magazines
Ben: And there was a horse racing segment in that.
Adam: Which was better than any of the French porn, apparently.
Jacob: Is that where that was from?
Adam: That's what it was from, yeah. And then on this new record, one of Jacob's friends, Lahat [Diongue] is a painter.
Jacob: I think he’s all over the place. He does mostly illustration and painting, but does a lot of different mediums. He did a cool leopard that you sent me because you saw it on Instagram and were like, “We should use this.”
Adam: I was like, “This speaks to me.”
Gage: That actually answers the question I was about to ask, which is: do you approach album art with a specific theme that you want to draw attention to? Or do you just have someone make something, or you find something and see if it sticks?
Sergio: I think it kind of goes back to Ben's thing about seeing if it sticks. [Laughs.] I think we all had a bunch of ideas that we were throwing out to each other in a text thread, just images and drawings and stuff like that. And then I think you guys talked about Lahat and then sent it to us and we were like, “Yep, that's it.”
Jacob: Yeah, we didn't have to do much with it.
Sergio: Ben asked if we could add things to it.
Adam: Ben was asking to add horns or a halo and we were like, “We're not touching it.” [Laughs.] It was funny too, because we bought the art from Lahat, and Jacob gave it to me to scan it, and it's on a cereal box or something.
Jacob: It's on the back of, if you bought a ream of lined paper and the front piece that says “College Ruled…” It's literally the reverse side of that, and it's a completely different color than the Instagram post. We had to do Photoshop magic.
Adam: I did, like, two hours of like color correcting to match what he posted on Instagram.
Gage: Sometimes the best art happens on accident, you know? Sometimes I'll just be doodling in class or something, and this stupid little line drawing that I did…
Sergio: Yeah, I feel like Lahat didn't know that his cardboard drawing was gonna end up being on an album cover.
Adam: Let's talk tour.
Jacob: Are you guys planning a tour right now?
Gage: We just got back. We've done a lot of touring this year, and we just got back from a UK tour. We did I think five or six shows in the UK, and then we did one show in Netherlands for Roadburn. And we just got back from that — how long ago?
Noel: Maybe three weeks.
Adam: How was it?
Gage: It was a really good run of shows. It was really short. We've never been on an international tour with Lathe of Heaven, and this was just one week and it was so chill. The drives were all so short.
Sergio: I feel like with our last two tours, the drives haven't been bad, but this one is about to be, every drive is at least six hours almost.
Noel: How long is the tour?
Jacob: Two-and-a-half weeks, something like 17 shows.
Gage: Is this a DIY tour? Did you book it yourself?
Ben: Yeah, it sucks. Shout out to Adam.
Adam: It's a total nightmare. It's really tough booking shows. Luckily we have so many friends—
Ben: We're cool, we have a lot of friends.
Adam: We're doing a lot of same cities we've done in the past couple tours, and then also we've been playing a lot of shows with touring bands that are coming in here. So we're playing Wichita and Des Moines because we have friends out there, like TFBUNDY and Mr. Softheart who are helping us book these shows. Otherwise, there's no way we could figure this out. It's just tough, too — New York is such a hard city to book, and then you get in that mentality of booking New York shows where you're sending DMs and texting your buddies and you're getting answers right away. But then you're in New Orleans, like, six months in advance being like, “You wanna play with us?” And you don't hear back for two months. It's just a different world.
This tour was really hard to book, but all the shows we’re playing, I'm so excited. We're playing Memphis for the first time, three Texas shows — and Sergio's from Texas.
Sergio: Yeah, I grew up between Dallas and Austin and we're doing Austin to Denton. I have friends that are caravanning down from Dallas and then driving back up behind us to the Denton show. So it'll be a super fun time.
Adam: I'm really excited to go to New Orleans. My favorite part about touring is just, I can't afford to travel so I'm like, Oh, cool, I can travel.
Gage: The trick is always, we'll use band funds or whatever to buy our flights, but then I'm always like, “I'm gonna stay an extra week.” Because I'm in the same boat.
Sergio: If you're there, you might as well make the most of it.
Jacob: If we do the UK, I'm spending a week there.
Noel: I was curious: What does CS Cleaners stand for?
Adam: The C stands for “Cleaners,” and then the S stands for the S at the end of “Cleaners.”
Gage: So, Cleaners Cleaners.
Adam: Yeah… No, we literally had the worst names ever when we were creating the band name. Because we had a show and we were like, “We need a fucking name.” Ben was coming up with the worst band names.
Sergio: What was Ben's contribution?
Jacob: Shit Shit.
Adam: In hindsight, we should have gone by Shit Shit. [Laughs.] We played Detroit at Outer Limits, and they write their own bios. I was looking at them recently, because we're going back to play Outer Limits, and they're so funny. They're always, like, one sentence, and the sentence was, “CS Cleaners. The C stands for ‘Cleaners,’ the S stands for the S at the end of ‘Cleaners.’” We were like, “Alright, that's it.”
What's your favorite, most busted show?
Gage: Does it have to be about Lathe of Heaven? A past band that Noel and I were in got invited to tour Mexico, and a lot of weird shit went down.
Ben: Cartel?
Gage: Kind of. Perhaps. [Laughs.] Our flights got changed last minute because of a, quote-unquote, “cartel law.” So presumably it had something to do with the cartel. And then our driver — I don't want to get into a lot of the details, but our driver was really just bad at driving. He was this old boxer, and I think he got into three different accidents. He hit a speed bump full speed at one point. He backed into a pole. They put us up in this weird hotel, and then we played this show at probably 3:00 AM — it was the only venue open that late, and it was in this derelict building. It was insanely packed. It was really fun. But it was an absolute shit show. The green room smelled like dog piss, and there was just one man sitting in our green room dressed as the devil, because it was Day of the Dead. He was just staring at us and he didn't speak any English.
Adam: That’s so scary… We played a crust squat in Philly, and we had no idea it was a squat. And it's across from a police station, which is even crazier. They threw shows, like, seven nights a week. We played a show there with Drunks With Guns — which, if you don't know them, they were drunks and probably had guns. I remember I left my toothbrush at home and I was like, Fuck, I gotta find that 7-Eleven. And there was this 50-year-old dude yammering on the porch like, “I never shot heroin, but I sniffed the fuck out of it!!!” I was like, “Um, do you know where the 7-Eleven is?” And he was like, “No fucking idea!!!”
Ben: And he was in the band.
Adam: Yeah, it was the singer. So we were playing this total just fucking busted show, and it was semi-flooded. The rain was pouring and a poop pipe was leaking. But everyone was like, “It's not the poop pipe.” And like, it was certainly the poop pipe.
Gage: It's always the poop pipe.
Adam: There was a dude selling nitrous the whole show. So the entire time we were playing, you just hear, [imitates a nitrous tank hissing]. And the dude who was selling nitrous — who was mostly doing it himself — was just yelling, “One for $5, two for $10!” And we're like, “That's not a deal, but OK.”
Jacob: The sound person was in a k-hole, crying about his childhood drum set or something.
Adam: Drunks With Guns went on, and the guitarist puked mid-set — like, ran away, threw up — and the singer was trying to fight all the kids in the crowd, and he kept going, “No one can kick my ass more than I could kick my own ass.” I was like, Man, this show is so unhinged. We're fucking getting poop water drained on us, this dude's trying to fight children, that dude's ripping nitrous and pissed that no one's buying nitrous. He had a Grand Theft Auto t-shirt on. So I walk up to Jacob and I'm like, “Yo, go get our money. We gotta go.” And then Jacob walks up to the booker, who was super cool — they know who they are and they’re awesome — and right as he walks up, the sound dude just punches some dude in the face. Apparently there was this huge situation at the show the night before, and they just started punching each other in the face. We're in the porch area just like, “Let's give him 10.”
The sound guy comes out and he's like, “I'm heated. Shit's all fucked up.” And then the dude walks back in and he's like, “No violence, I'm here to grab my hat. I dropped my hat. No violence, no violence.” And then grabs his hat and he's like, “Fuck you!!!” Just screaming, “fuck you!!!” as he runs out of the door.
Jacob: That was a deranged show.
You can catch CS Cleaners on the rest of their tour this week and next:
6/25: Wichita, KS — Kirby's Beer Store w/ TFBUNDY
6/26: Des Moines, IA — Locals w/ Mr. Softheart, Toon Smokes, Value of Human Life, Early Girl
6/27: Chicago, IL — Lowdown w/ Cel Ray (Exploding in Sound), Babe Report (Exploding in Sound), Groceries
6/28: Detroit, MI — Outer Limits Lounge w/ Trucker Hat, MRKT
6/29: Cincinnati, OH — Northside Tavern w/ Liaam, Mop
6/30: Pittsburgh, PA — DIY basement spot (Venue may change)*
7/01: Washington, DC — Rhizome
7/02: Ridgewood, NY — TV Eye w/ Pippy, Jean Mignon, Badger Hunt
