Here’s an interesting find on Soundcloud. 14 songs by this obscure but fine sounding shoegaze band from Washington D.C.
Razor 18 was Sarah Azzarah on vocals, Ivan Pongracic on guitars, Bill Fantegrossi on bass, Rob Monn on guitars and a revolving door of drummers including Tim Soller, Ben Azzara, Greg (no last name) and someone that it seems the name has been forgotten.
It is Rob Monn who uploaded the tracks 7 years ago. He tells a little bit about the band…
He mentions that he moved to D.C. and less than a year since moving there he was already in the band. Where did he come from? Doesn’t say.
He does say that he played a few venues including the legendary The Black Cat and also the 9:30 Club. He also says that the band may have burned down a place called ArtsLab. How did that happen?
The recordings that are available here come from tapes. They are from sessions at the American University and Evil Genius Studios and most of these were recorded by Rob Christensen.
The songs available are “P Street Beach (version 2)”, “La Llarona”, “Queen Bee”, “Wake”, “Carrying Hostile (version 1)”, “Temple (version 2)”, “Chroma”, “Flowers on the Lawn”, “Carrying Hostile (version 2)”, “P Street Beach (version 3)”, “P Street Beach (version 1)”, “Temple (version 1)” and “Flowers on the Lawn (instrumental)”.
On his Soundcloud account he has tons of other recordings, solo recordings, and also with his mates.
Looking for more information I see that the band shared a gig with Chisel and The Ropers (!), a favourite band of mine, at The Black Cat on May 26, 1995. There’s a scan of the flyer here.
That was not the only time they played there. I find another flyer of them playing there on July 28 (not sure of the year) with Your Majesty.
That’s what I could find. I hope we can find more details, wondering why they didn’t get to release any records at all!
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Listen
Razor 18 – P Street Beach (American University version)
One Response to “:: Razor 18”
Hey it’s me, Robb. Guitarist for Razor18. I’m so intruiged to find your post.
Here’s all the details I think I can come up with.
When I was 19 and going to George Washington University in Washington DC in 1992 I met a girl named Sarah Kinney (now Sarah Azzarah.) We wrote poetry together and fell in love. She was an amazing singer that could call up a wide array of personae when singing, from Sylvia Plath back from the grave to pure innocence. We started playing covers at a coffee shop gig at the school, mostly Pixies and PJ Harvey stuff.
Meanwhile my good friend from my home town was attending American University a few miles away and moved into a group house that included Smart-punk Bill Fantegrossi. Bill had played with a couple of cassette-release only groups previously and wanted to start a rock band. He found Ivan Pongrassic and Greg who were post-progressive-rock players that had played in bands in Indiana.
We all loved My Bloody Valentine and Lush and Ride. We loved Velocity Girl. We loved the Lilys and Ultra Cherry Violet. Big sounding, emotive, guitar-forward bands that were finding new sounds using new tech to make sounds it wasn’t designed to make. At one point I was playing live with 9 pedals, and Ivan and Bill had 8-9 each, too. We all would hit our little boxes and the sound would get very, very big.
Anyway, my friend told me that there was a shoegaze band forming in his basement and I showed up one day with Sarah and that was Razor 18. We practiced 1-2 times a week consistently for a couple of years in that basement and then later, when we changed drummers in Arlington. Ivan and I played guitars, Sarah sang, Bill was on bass and we had several drummers: Tim Soller, Ben Azzarah, John Weiss, Greg… I think that’s it.
We wrote a batch of pretty great songs. P Street Beach really shows Ivan’s and my love for Stereolab with a double homage to two different songs at the same time. La Llarona is a showcase for Sarah’s singing and writing… I think it is beautiful, and it tells a classic Mexican ghost story about dead children. Wake is a minor math rock/shoegaze fusion masterpiece if you ask me and the lyrics relate the story of one of Egon Shielle’s lovers.
We played the old 930 club downtown three times, the Black Cat three times, 15 Minute club once, a couple of other shows and, yes, a gig at a performance space in Dupont Circle area DC called Artslab that ended in a pretty bad fire after a raucous set of ours apparently shook loose a light that fell into a curtain.
We were easily the loudest band in DC at the time (take that Velocity Girl, it’s true) and this was noted in a few write ups in the Washington City paper that we got.
I thought that we were good — better live than on our records because we practiced like crazy. By the end we were very, very tight. Ivan was an exceptional guitarist, and the rest of the band were all way ahead of the curve on sonics and emotionality. Our live shows were powerful and we drew a crowd. We’d finish with a 10+ minute version of p street beach where Sarah would hold the “do do do do do” chant through an utter sonic assault in our homage to MBV’s You Made Me Realize and when we’d finish everyone would have sweat through their clothes.
We had one 7″ and two more in the works, but Sarah and I broke up, Ivan started a surf band (The Space Cossacks, look them up) Bill had to go to grad school and I started a Miles Davis/ Bitches Brew style jazz trio and things just kind of fell off. No hard feelings but it ended like that.
DC music had changed in the 3 years we played together. What would become the hipster scene had started up and things went from powerful sonics and emotions to twee and indie. Our time had come and gone. I think the fact that we were all broke was a factor, too — had any of us been able to throw a thousand bucks into a van we would have toured, or paid for a real demo… or something.
John Peel apparently played two of our songs, though… so that’s something.
I loved the band. I’ve been in one band or project or another most of the last 30 years, but playing live with Razor 18 was a real high point. I loved the songs, I loved playing that loud, I loved how even though no one had heard of us people would make their way up to the stage during our sets and seemed transfixed.