If you hung out in Chicago clubs six or seven years ago, you probably noticed that the city’s underground music scene seemed to be undergoing an invasion of weird kids from Columbia, Missouri. In broad terms they almost fit into the dance-punk thing that was the flavor du jour at the time, but the music they made was noisier than the Rapture-lite Gang of Four disco going around, and they dressed in a proudly trashy way that made electroclash fashion look weaker than it already was. They were everywhere, spinning records and playing in what seemed like dozens of bands—among them Warhammer 48k, the Waterbabies, and Mahjongg.
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Not only have Mahjongg stayed weird—Husar dressed for our interview in a gold mesh muscle tee under an unbuttoned monstrosity of a shirt that looked like something a Miami coke dealer would wear to the beach—but they’ve stayed punk, at least in spirit. I met Husar and drummer Josh Johannpeter at Johannpeter’s place in Garfield Park, a live-work space that contains a studio designed by engineer Benjamin Balcom, built by Mahjongg, and also used by other bands associated with the Columbia diaspora, like Lazer Crystal and Cave—a self-contained setup befitting a group that’s reluctant to engage too intimately with the music industry. (The other two members of the band, Mikale De Graff and Dan Quinlivin, couldn’t make the interview.) “I guess we’ve always had a shitty attitude about hype,” says Johannpeter, “and trying to really, you know, street team and, you know, ‘Hey! Check us out, man!’ I don’t know. We’re kind of bad about that.”
Early Mahjongg releases, like 2005’s Raydoncong, combine postpunk, African street music, Italo-disco, and noise. With Kontpab they began a transition to a more electronic sound, and with it came a new division of labor within the band. Guitarist, bassist, singer, and founding member Jeff Carrillo had moved to Nashville in 2007 with his fiancee, who’d found a job there; they got married in 2008, and he left the band after a European tour that fall. After that Mahjongg moved away from guitar-based styles and toward dance music, particularly house and drum ‘n’ bass. Aside from Johannpeter, the remaining members are now all multi-instrumentalists, and split sound-making duties (with the exception of drumming) more or less evenly—everybody contributes vocals, and Husar, De Graff, and Quinlivin trade off on guitar, synth, computer manipulation, and auxiliary and electronic percussion. “It was a big change to become Mahjongg without Jeff,” says Johannpeter, “because he played guitar like a motherfucker and sang like a motherfucker. We didn’t replace that. We went different instead of trying to find another guy. It didn’t really seem like an option.”
