Kunal Prakash and Jake Orrall are two-thirds of the band Vorhex Angel; Charles Moothart and Bert Hoover are two-thirds of the band Primitive Ring. Vorhex Angel’s latest record, Drain, came out on CD/LP last month, and will be out digitally tomorrow (via Soul Selects). To celebrate the release, Kunal and Jake got on a call with Charles and Bert to catch up about it, and much more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Charles Moothart: How are y'all?
Kunal Prakash: Good. How are you doing?
Charles: Good. Where are you guys right now?
Kunal: We're in Jersey — this is actually where we made the record.
Bert Hoover: Oh, nice. The record that came out today?
Kunal: Yeah, it's in stores today. We're trying something where it goes into stores first and then it comes out digitally in a month. So people have to go to stores if they want to hear the whole record.
Charles: Cool. So whose zone is this?
Kunal: This is our buddy Chris Harford’s [studio]. He started this label with his friend Jon [March], and then they bought this building and built out a studio in it. So Chris has one studio in it, and Joe Russo, a drummer, has the other studio in here. He’s in a lot of jam world stuff—
Jake Orrall: He has all this handmade metal percussion, metallophones, and hanging sheets of metal and timpanis and shit. Pretty sweet. He let us bang around in there.
Charles: Does any of that show up on the [record]?
Jake: It does.
Kunal: The first track on the record, the big fat drone with a bunch of percussion is all in Joe's room. I think we did two or three passes of the three of us just—
Jake: Smoking weed.
Kunal: [Laughs.]
Charles: Congrats on the record. It sounds incredible. Stoked for the world to hear it.
Kunal: Likewise.
Jake: Yeah, we've been jamming yours a bunch over here, and it's heavy AF. [Primitive Ring released a self-titled record in May.]
Bert: [Laughs.] Yeah, that was the goal.
Charles: That's sick that you guys are pushing the physical thing first. I feel like that's the opposite of how we just had to do our thing, because our records got lost in the mail.
Kunal: Oh, fuck.
Charles: Not really. They got pushed back. But we had to do digital first, physical second, which is a confusing version of release.
Kunal: We'll see how it goes. I've never done this before, but I thought it was a good idea.
Jake: We're not doing Spotify either.
Charles: Awesome.
Jake: Fuck them. You don't make any money off Spotify anyways.
Kunal: Yeah, we figured that what we're doing is not commercial anyway.
Jake: [Laughs.] It’s a bit of a challenging listen.
Kunal: It's already a pretty [niche] market that is going to find their way to us, and I don't think it's going to be through, like, a brunch playlist. May as well just focus on being in cool record stores and trying to play shows.
Bert: Yeah. And this record, I feel like it's a nice other side of the coin from the last one you guys did.
Kunal: Yeah, that one was pretty balls to the wall.
Jake: I remember we cut songs from that record that were too easy to listen to. Not punishing enough.
Kunal: There was one that had a, like, Zeppelin descending riff thing, and we were like, “Nah, that's too catchy. It needs to be more fucked up.”
Jake: Yeah. And then swinging back the other direction. We got a bona fide pop rock single on this one.
Charles: Yeah, you guys are going full pop… You guys have been doing this project for a few years now.
Jake: Yeah. [We’re on] three different coasts.
Kunal: We'[ll be] very on for, like, 10 days, and then kind of switched off for a while.
Jake: We haven't played since we recorded this record last spring, and we have two days to rehearse for this release show. And then we'll have two days to rehearse before our tour, play seven shows in a row, and then who knows what's after that. We do leave a lot of it up to improv, I guess.
Kunal: We were just talking about your record and we were like, “Damn, all those riffs seem super fucking fun.” Writing and constructing that kind of stuff seems super fun.
Jake: But we wouldn't be able to do it.
Kunal: You guys live in the same place, and it takes work to be able to do that.
Jake: We just have to make a weird improv album.
Kunal: Like, “Alright, let's run in this direction and see what happens.”
Jake: I think we wrote and recorded Drain in, what, five days or something?
Kunal: Something like that.
Charles: That's amazing.
Kunal: But it's been fun, too — this is our second studio album, but the first release we did was a live cassette from our second show that we played at the Blue Room in Nashville. Jake set up a tape deck in the back with two mics just juiced totally in the red. We were really going for the Les Rallizes vibe, just blown out, live, the tape sounds like it's eating itself kind of thing. That first record was already done, but we just didn't know what we were doing with it yet.
Bert: Live first, and then physical media first. I love that.
Kunal: Yeah, I remember talking about it at the time — it seems like with labels in the last few years, there's a process of, “Alright, you’ll have three singles that come out,” and there's a YouTube video that no one watches, and you spend all this time on your music video and they spend money on it. No one gives a shit about it, and then whatever. And then when I see some bands start to get traction, oftentimes they're doing shit backwards or not according to that system that most indie labels abide by.
Jake: Soul Selects has been super generous and supportive letting us do really whatever we want.
Kunal: But, yeah, we have two live releases now and two studio releases now. So it's productive for a band that doesn't live in the same place. [Laughs.]
Charles: I'm curious, who did the artwork for you guys?
Jake: I was going to ask the same question of y'all. This person Wilder Smith out of Nashville who doesn't have social media [did our artwork]. They work with Electric Outlet, Snooper’s home label, on a lot of their graphic design stuff. We met them through doing Heavenly, the first studio record, and then when we made the second one, we were like, “Let's have them do it.” Both album packages, they sent it to us done and we had no changes.
Kunal: Yeah, zero notes. And for this one, because this one's a double LP, in the gatefold they added this section that for you to jot down “quick comments on the record if found.”
Bert: That's amazing.
Jake: Who did y’all’s? I especially really like the red single with the crazy Lava Man or whatever.
Bert: Callum Rooney from New Zealand. He's done a bunch of albums, a ton of bands. He's been the homie for a while, and he had just done a record for my other band and it was really affordable and he was really easy to work with.
Jake: That makes a huge difference, dude.
Bert: For real, and he gets it.
Charles: Who's playing the wind instrument on the front?
Jake: I'm the designated recorder [player]. And then Chris Harford is watching over us.
Kunal: Yeah, Chris, the guardian angel. And then it's kind of hard to see, but this thing is an instrument called the phin. It's from Thailand and Laos and stuff, but one of them was kicking around the apartment we were staying in, and I just started noodling with it and then we were like, “Oh, this has to be a jam.” So that's the last song on the record. It’s a lute-sounding instrument, which was a gift to Chris from Dean Ween for helping him move.
Jake: The board that we recorded the record on is also the board they used for Chocolate and Cheese. It was in someone's garage and they refurbed it.
Kunal: There's a lot of Ween juju in the record. Hard to escape them in this area of the US.
Jake: We should rip some shows together, y'all. That would be lit.
Charles: Lit.
Jake: That'd be “wicked,” as we say out in Western Mass. [Laughs.]
Charles: Good to see your guys’ faces.
Jake: Likewise.
