Interview: Gazelle Amber Valentine of Jucifer

No value assignedIn 1993, Jucifer stepped onto its first stages in the midst of Athens' artistic hotbed music scene, setting in motion a journey that spans decades and defies genres. Nearly a quarter century later, the husband-and-wife duo of Gazelle Amber Valentine and Edgar Livengood are still pummeling audiences with their ever-evolving blend of furious sludge metal delivered through a towering wall of amps known as the “White Wall Ov Death.” The duo has long since abandoned the comforts of home life for a nomadic existence spent touring the world. Tonight (Wed., Feb. 1), Jucifer plays a show at the Basement, supported by opening acts Canopy and Day Old Man. Ahead of their Atlanta stop, guitarist and vocalist Gazelle Amber Valentine took a few minutes to talk about Jucifer's upcoming biopic, achieving longevity, and Athens in the early '90s. Your upcoming music video biopic, NOMADS: Build To Destroy, depicts the reality of living on the road. What was the creative process for telling this story? It began as sort of an organizing project: "Hey, we have hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of video from the road, and equally unwieldy amounts of photographs. We should try to compile what's best. Then it grew into a documentary. Weaving a concept together with music to enhance its story is something we've always done, so to let our music narrate parts of the film seemed inevitable. As the editor, I've loved creating tension and suspense with how the visuals and sounds interact. It has also been just incredibly satisfying to make a repository for some of Edgar's amazing photography. He's been diligent about recording our life in this band, so it's awesome to share parts of what he's captured along the way. Our goal is to give the watcher a visceral sense of what has made us tour constantly for the past couple of decades, revealing both the struggle and the reward. Does the "White Wall Ov Death" vary from tour to tour? Yeah, the Wall is an ever-morphing creature. Even from night to night it changes, because of different sizes and heights of stages and different electricity available. One of the things that keeps touring super interesting for us is the constant need to rethink how things are placed, while making sure the cables I have will reach between amps and cabs and the power is divided so that it won't trip. Sometimes, it trips no matter what we do. But we try to avoid that, even though crowds kinda love the drama of blown power. For us it's stressful because we want to give them a full set! We don't have separate tours, except in the sense that we change countries and continents, so it's hard to track the evolution of the Wall until we start looking backwards at older live photos of ourselves. Until the mid 2000's, all our gear had the original grilles and typical enclosure colors, black with metal accents.  Then we decided to paint everything white. Right around that time we tried to downsize. We told each other we could be happy using only 10 speaker cabinets, so we put a bunch of stuff in storage. Then we hated ourselves for several months until our tour looped back around to where the stuff was stored. From then on we realized restraint was just not our personality, and have accepted the Wall's continual growth over the years since. Before that downsizing attempt, we'd held steady around 17 speaker cabinets. The last few years we've been at 30-34 cabs in the trailer, though when we play small stages we can only use about half. We do get to set up all of it often, I'd say more often than not, so it feels worthwhile to us. The Wall is kinda our habitat at this point. Jucifer is entering its 25th year as a band.  What is the key to longevity? Perseverance above all. After that, truly loving what you do, and luck.  When you play music you'll never have a secure life: you'll be pressured either by poverty, by fame, or a little of both. Sometimes you'll work hard only to fall backwards or inspire strangers to hate you. But the flip side, now and then you achieve things you wouldn't have thought possible and sometimes you inspire strangers to love you. With all of that, none of it matters if you love making music. It's like breathing. You do it when nobody's watching, too. Its been two years since the release of District of Dystopia. The album feels even more relevant in 2017. How do we as a country begin to improve?Right? I've almost been feeling guilty about that record, in context of the turmoil we're going through now. As if it was a little too on the button. But also it's like, we've been trying to tell y'all! Haha. Art is always giving society warnings that it doesn't heed. Alas.  As a volunteer student of history, I can't say I foresee a lot of improvement. Humans seem incredibly adept at causing damage — to selves, others, animals, and our own habitat — but we're not nearly as good at avoiding it.   We might improve if people would stop fearing and blaming those different from them; recognize that social hierarchies we have today are not fair; and desire to fix that instead of preying on those less fortunate. But I don't hold out hope. Your last few albums have dealt heavily with themes.  Should we expect a similar concept-based approach on the next album? For sure. Although our first few records didn't come with liner notes, all of our albums and EPs have had a grand unifying theme. We like to work that way because we like storytelling and we like using different aspects of music to advance a story and provoke emotional responses to it.  You got your start in Athens in the early '90s. Was there something in the drinking water? That was a good time and place to start a band! Especially, at least for us, because it wasn't a cutthroat corporate music scene like you'd find in a lot of bigger cities. Athens at that time was still a pretty small, slow-paced community. The university gave it more traffic than it would've had otherwise. I remember at one time hearing the local population was 30,000 and expanded to 90,000 when school was in, but it hadn't yet modernized the town. What that meant was a bunch of young people around, having ideas, but simultaneously costs of living were low. For people like us, those factors made Athens a viable place to move to. We worked minimum wage jobs and did creative stuff in whatever spare time we could get. And there wasn't pressure like there would've been in New York or L.A. or Seattle, even Atlanta — that 70 miles between us could've been 200 for the difference in scenes. Even though Athens music existed in the psychological wake of R.E.M. and B-52s, we didn't have a big record industry presence. That made for a lot of freedom and oddity. Bands were mostly not formed with the goal of making it. We just wanted to make the music we wanted to hear.  How does it feel when you return to Georgia?I grew up in Georgia since I was two, but I've now lived on the road for longer than I lived there.  Edgar lived in Georgia for about 7 years. So it's kind of like going back to your kindergarten desk or something, a feeling that this place is warm and familiar emotionally but also that you've come so, so very far.  Nostalgia is the word I guess, haha.  We usually see some friends we've known forever, and try to catch up on lifetimes in a few swapped stories.   Other than that It feels like being everywhere else that we tour, in that we're traveling and arriving at the shows and doing what we do.  Stoked to see old friends and fans and to make new ones.  Looking at the scenery in between.  Since we've been touring so much for so long, we've grown roots all over the world. We have little reunions and favorite spots in so many places! And we're more the type of people to look ahead than back. We're always excited for the moment we're in and for what we can do next. But each time we return to Georgia, we're kind of marking our distance from how we began, I guess. It's almost like a birthday. You place yourself at the point where you are, and realize what you've accomplished. And how much more you want to do. So it's always gonna be special.$10. 9 p.m. Tonight (Wed., Feb. 1). The Basement, 1245 Glenwood Ave. S.E. 404-622-8686. www.basementatl.com.