(from the liner notes of the Whangbar Province EP)
There’s something to be said for a terminus, closure, for having the guts to push the button and set the self destruct active. End it on top, before the inevitable slide into self parody and hackery. Oh, how I wish I had the power to make other bands do the same.
In a sense this band could not have existed at any other time, the end of the world always seemed right around the corner, yet things just kept grinding on in increasingly goofy and scary manner. Replicator arose during the era of the iPod, the internet, and when cell phones went from a novelty to a near necessity. Mediocrity and fear held sway, usually at the same time, and when we were written about we were called paranoid, and/or chaotic.
The fact of the matter is this band was always reflective of the world around us, albeit through our warped and runaway allegorical perspective. It wasn’t so much paranoia, as a cracked mirror and if we brought the chaos, it’s because the world itself did a pretty good job of bringing it too.
We were never the kind of band to follow a trend, or do what was popular, in fact our timing seemed to always be a bit off, and we never really offered what people wanted. Every once in awhile it was what they needed though, which is different.
Stubborn as a mule and making music just about as ugly, we always did our thing with 100% enthusiasm and intensity. If you were into it, great! But it existed without outside approval or desire, a shambling, spasmodic beast that dragged itself along without outside provocation. Flawed? Perhaps, but never insincere.
I never told people I “played in a band”, I played in Replicator.
Not everybody got that, but it was an important distinction, as this band was a family and tried our hardest to be an uncompromising force of nature. I feel absolutely overjoyed to have spent every second with these fine gentlemen, my brothers of different mothers, putting together something greater than the sum of its parts.
Look: We never fit anywhere easily, and in fact, the only places we did fit in are the places that we forged ourselves with the other ones that were the last ones picked. The freaks, nerds and weirdoes that didn’t fit in with the cool kids, but didn’t much give a damn either. See, it turns out the cool kids were all insecure and really weren’t that cool anyway. Besides we outlasted most of them, and outclassed even more, so we won by default.
We had a good run; we far exceeded all our wildest expectations, and then some. We saw places we never would have seen otherwise, met people we never would have met otherwise, and had experiences that will last a lifetime, and make for some very funny anecdotes later in life. (Tragedy+Time=Comedy). We did our best to give back the ass kicking that music had given to us, and hopefully touched a few lives in the process.
Vans were broken, so were glasses. Relationships and credit wrecked, Hearing was damaged.
Good times were had.
-End Communication-
-Conan Neutron
