Black Market Translation Is the Gritty, Improv Punk Band of Your Dreams

Black Market Translation has a way with words. The edgy and chaotic punk band paints a fantastical origin story on its website and describes the three bandmates' "electric instruments for hands, lighters as eyeballs, and a head of firewood for brains" in detail. Even the group's tuxedo cat carries the curse of creative owners: Her name is Bjorknado.

Despite the humor and lyricism, no one in Black Market Translation writes songs. In fact, it doesn't even have a singer. It's a completely improvisatory band, with a sound it calls "improv punk psychedelic junk wave sufi doom surf."

The three members — Matt Clifford on bass, Chris Eason on guitar and Justin Anderson on drums — have incredibly different musical stylings, but through hours of practicing improv, they managed to form a creative system that produces a cohesive sound.

"[Musical improv] is kind of similar to comedy improv. ... Chris throws down a key or a chord and we are doing that, there's no question," Clifford says, adding that he looks at all the elements of the piece — the pitch, harmony, melody, rhythm — and uses them to find a way into the music.

"It's not necessarily emphasizing something that somebody is already doing," he explains. "It's finding something that will complement what they are doing."

Time slows down while they create, and a lick the band thought was too lengthy might only be four seconds long. "It's a microcosm of the entire universe," Anderson says.

The bandmembers compare the feeling they get while improvising to the strange, quiet mindfulness others achieve while meditating. Improv is chaos, then bliss, and then chaos again. "There's nothing in the center holding [the music]," Anderson says. "So once you realize there is no center, then there's nothing that can be lost."

This notion provides Black Market Translation with the courage to take risks and create music that lacks the typical stable pattern of other genres. But its songs still carry energy, with twisting, sometimes startling elements of surprise. "We either do things completely silently or completely absurdly," Clifford says.
Black Market Translation's songs are snapshots of the moment the music was created, even in performance. Many of the band's shows and parties function as open jam sessions and often include different members of the audience, from musicians to poets. "Poets are always poor and can't afford therapy, so we like to think we have provided a therapeutic service to Denver's literary class," Clifford says.

Black Market Translation is one of the rare bands that knows there is an ethereal beauty in the choice to let a musical moment die, never to be exactly re-created. And it does just that, without looking back. Anderson explains that the band believes that its completely improvisational style acts as a sort of time machine, taking the listener back to an era before recorded, mass-produced music.

The act's most recent album, Triogenes, was produced in about a day and dropped on May 18; the band will play an album-release show at Mutiny Information Cafe on Sunday, May 21. The album is lengthy — Black Market Translation admits to that — with the longest song, "There Ought to Be Gods," coming in at a little over fifteen minutes. The band didn't trim the songs and left a lot of open space between different musical sections.

Triogenes is named after Diogenes, a Greek cynic philosopher from the fourth century B.C. "He would talk shit to the kings and go around barking like a dog at people," Clifford says. "But his main philosophy was that the spirit of what you do and the material, the alley of how you live it, should have as little distance as possible in between, which we think goes really well with the improv spirit. That the process and the product are basically the spirit and the material and are pretty much happening simultaneously."

Black Market Translation plays an album-release party at 5 p.m. Sunday, May 21, at Mutiny Information Cafe, 2 South Broadway.