This winter writing project went through a lot of different incarnations in my head before ending up as what it is. The question as to what this thing even is is already a ticklish one. I don’t add very many links or photos because the only way I can bring myself to write this stuff is by believing it will end up as a physically published book but the current reality is that it is almost certainly a blog. Similarly I like to refer to these pieces as an ethnography, travelogue, rock journalism, picaresque novel or anything else other than the thing that it almost certainly is: a memoir.
The earliest seed of what you are now reading came about through a desire to correct a perceived injustice in 2016 and was almost entirely unrelated to telling my own story: I wanted to tell Occasional Detroit’s story. I think the trigger was LaPorsha being offered a role she declined in a music video for the rapper Antwon. I may as well mention that the role was to do some standard “video ho” shit that she wouldn’t have accepted in a million years and the dude turned out to be a straight up rapist but the incident took on importance for completely different reasons: it made me realize that the noise-rap trend had become ubiquitous.
I’m not sure if it would have made a difference but I probably came to this realization on the tail end of the trend as opposed to whatever you would call the other end, I guess the head end? Kanye West had released his experimental influenced album Yeezus three years earlier in 2013 and both Death Grips and clipping. had been around since the turn of the decade. I had even shared a bill at The Smell with clipping. way back in 2009 but it wasn’t until this declined video offer in 2016 that I began to view things in the form of an injustice that I might be able to help correct:
I felt like the music and culture outlets of the day were presenting noise-rap as a phenomenon that had suddenly materialized out of thin air and nobody was talking about the group that had actually pioneered the genre: Occasional Detroit
I can’t pretend like I even know how to get a piece published in an art and culture outlet now but I’m pretty sure I was going about things in the wrong way then. I sent e-mail proposals to Vice, SPIN and every author that had written articles about the more popular noise-rap artists but I never heard anything back. It probably would have made more sense to just write the piece up, I had gotten in touch with Towondo and Demetrisa, and then shop it around in at least first draft form.
When I started writing these pieces back in October I had decided that I could revisit the idea of a profile or interview once I had gotten a book published or otherwise established myself as a voice on the intersection of art, music and DIY culture I have been referring to as the American Underground. I felt like we had all the time in the world. In our last messages from April of 2020 Towondo was talking about having a huge archive in his mother’s basement ranging from VHS tapes from an early tour with Wolf Eyes to Master DVDs from a public access television show they’d done in Albuquerque.
I don’t know how to copy and paste text from Facebook messages so I’m just going to drop in an image of the last message here:
I found out today that Towondo “Beyababa” Clayborn passed away in December of 2021. I must have somehow missed the news around the time it happened. I’m not including this information to satisfy anyone’s morbid curiosity but to prevent any unsavory assumptions: Towondo was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer that ultimately killed him. Deme is going by AkashaG and doing well in Phoenix, Arizona. It looks like the interview I had planned won’t be happening and the piece I had always envisioned as a profile will now be more accurately described as a tribute.
In the first decade of the 2000s a lot of different artists in the American Underground were exploring a thing I referred to as “extreme noise tour lifestyle”. The artistic values of our community were centered on experimentation, iconoclasm and transgression. People were pursuing these ideas with what they presented as music, how the members of a group were composed, their stage performances, the presentation of recordings and other merchandise as physical objects and eventually in the unconventional methods of traveling between shows.
Some examples would be Friends Forever playing outside of the actual venues in a Volkswagen Type 2, John Benson creating a bus as mobile concert venue and a band from Boise, Idaho called Monster Dudes where a father toured with his young son on drums from the time he was three years old. Occasional Detroit approached this in a way that consistently blurred the lines behind life and art and kept their contemporaries guessing how much of what they were watching was an “act”.
The American Noise scene that developed in the wake of the Seattle Grunge Explosion is generally thought of as a white and culturally middle class phenomenon but Occasional Detroit rank among the earliest artists of the movement. It’s hard to think of a more successful name in noise than Wolf Eyes whose 2004 Burned Mind album brought critical acclaim, reviews in main stream music publications and a national tour with Sonic Youth. O-D and Wolf Eyes actually started in the same town, Ypsilanti, and frequently performed and even toured together.
I don’t know a lot about the earliest days of the group and figured that instead of repeating second hand information I should just write about the incarnation I was actually familiar with: the duo of Towondo and Demetrisa. I first met and performed with them at a 2005 Festival called the Che Cafe Super Pizza Party. I was in an actual band for the first time in my life but had finagled a way to perform all three days of the Festival under different project names.
That’s another piece of the conceptual envelope pushing that everybody was concerned with in those days.
Anyway I was freestyle rapping as Gypsy Feelings and instead of an electronic beat I had a live drummer behind me, kind of doing a vaudeville comedy style thing. I’m trying to figure out who this would have been but it’s nearly impossible: nearly every band there had a drummer and I was friends with almost all of them. I was doing a piece called What’s Your Name? that centered on asking audience members this question then ad-libbing rhyming insults based on their answer. When I came to Towondo he answered with “Occasional Detroit” and kind of threw me for a loop because that’s a lot of syllables but I must have come up with something.
That quickly created some rapport, no pun intended, between us because there weren’t a lot of rappers in the scene at the time. When it was time for O-D to perform they went into a medley of rap duets, rambling freestyles and abstract sound collages. Suddenly Deme dropped to the ground and started violently convulsing while foaming at the mouth. Towondo dropped down next to her and started shaking her and calling out in what looked and sounded like genuine panic and concern. There might have been somebody in the audience that had been touring with them and knew the score but all of us locals fell for it completely – jaws on the floor as they say.
The old Alka-Seltzer tablet in the mouth trick…
I remember them disappearing for almost the entirety of the next day of the Festival and then emerging from the spacious woods behind the venue near night fall. I asked Deme where they’d been:
“I just needed some nature in my life.”
I want to shy away from any racial stereotypes, be they negative or positive ones, but I think we can all agree that when the term “free spirit” is applied to people from a broadly White American cultural background it inevitably sounds like some degree of privilege is involved but when applied to people from a broadly Black American cultural background the connotations are different. Like the difference between trying on a “freak” persona as a brief and interesting diversion on the way to a comfortable life versus fully embracing the “freak” identity with the instinctual knowledge that you will be bearing the full weight of that freak-dom.
This brings us to the next piece of the story. The main volunteers at the Che Cafe in those years lived in a Hillcrest house that also hosted parties and shows. A few of the groups from the Festival had been crashing there including Occasional Detroit but they disappeared after a week or so most likely at the first intimation of a “worn out welcome”. The kids at the house were pretty certain that they hadn’t left town completely because they had left a keyboard behind but didn’t think too much about it.
Several months later they showed back up for the keyboard and casually mentioned they’d been living between Tijuana and the Saint Vincent DePaul Homeless Shelter. At this point in my life I’ve been through a nearly identical lifestyle but in 2005 it was pretty mind blowing. When I talked to my friends about it the general sentiment was that while most noise artists aspired toward reckless abandon in their art Occasional Detroit were on a whole other level – actually living it.
I know that we kept in touch to some degree after this Festival but my next clear memories are from 2010. I can’t remember if I had hit them up before the 2010 Generation tour or if it had just been a chance encounter in Denver and unfortunately all the MySpace era messages are lost. Deme was performing solo at an all women’s festival called Tit Wrench in Rhinoceropolos and Towondo was a little salty that he wouldn’t be allowed to play. It probably didn’t help that I was invited to play the same event as an “honorary woman” due to having just had a bad show at the punk house personification of toxic masculinity.
Me and Deme played right next to each other in a loading bay. I noticed that we both used the same drum machine.
I asked Deme about her timeline and experiences in the group today so I am adding her response in order for her to be represented in her own words:
“I started playing with Occasional Detroit in 2001 & our last show was Parkview Riverside CA we tour the United State from the east coast to the west and south we still played local shows and and did lots of fundraisers I definitely feel bad about the situation told Towondo told me that he had a rare type of cancer and it was spreading through his body after he worked for the Cruise line he traveled all over the world we as Occasional Detroit will always be the best hip hop rock duo group ever to hit the noise generation I still make music and put out our old music”
We found out that they had just moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico and ended up needing a date in that general area for the return leg of our U.S. Tour. Towondo had just started working as a videographer, mostly weddings and stuff, and they were living in one of those generic apartment complexes with carpeted floors and stair cases made of cement and metal. They had just gotten an orange kitten, probably a boy.
We played in a local bar or cafe, I forget which it was, and it was one of those sparsely attended indifferent crowd situations that pop up on every national tour. Their set escalated into an argument that seemed like a performance and totally real at the exact same time. Towondo shut off the electronics and grabbed the microphone:
“Thank you, we’re Occasional Detroit. This was our last show. We just broke up.”
Now that I’ve been married for ten years I completely understand the energy. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve “broken up” and I’m sure we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. Towondo had told me that they separated in 2013 when I first hit him up about this writing project in 2016. I’m talking to Deme now and she tells me their last show was in 2006 and I’m not sure if that’s a typo but I guess it doesn’t really matter.
This piece can’t really be the thing that I conceived it as and unfortunately the interview will never happen now and this isn’t the best platform but I think the best move was to just write it. Maybe the platform will grow or it will end up on a larger one. Ultimately the noise-rap thing was a trend and what Occasional Detroit was about was always so much bigger than that. I hope that this gets to people who are interested in the genre and it’s history but you can’t make people care about things.
I never knew Towondo’s family but I hope that this gets to them and they know that what he did with Occasional Detroit mattered to people. The Noise community has gotten a lot more diverse in recent years but around the turn of the Millenium you could have counted the number of Black Women in Experimental Music on a single hand and it is absolutely overdue for Demeat, now AkashaG, to be recognized as a trailblazer and icon. I’m not sure if that box of tapes, DVDs and videos still exists in a basement somewhere but if it does whoever is taking care of it should know that there are people who are interested and want to see it.
I’ll help in any way I can.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 