Interview: Michael Berdan (Uniform, York Factory Complaint, Drunkdriver)

"This is not digestible music."
(Photo by Caroline Harrison.)

Drunkdriver was awesome. They were a band worth celebrating. Just as their momentum was picking up they disbanded. But that hasn't stopped Michael Berdan from torturing our hearing.

Since then he's fronted Veins and Believer/Law but neither are currently active. What's active is his involvement in York Factory Complaint and Uniform. Although the two don't sound alike, if you like one you'd probably like the other as well. What I'm saying is if you have good taste then there's zero chance you won't like both.

I called Michael Berdan and we chatted about his involvement in both York Factory Complaint and Uniform. He had a lot to say about everything so let's get to it.

"Our Blood" off of the Uniform twelve inch that can be ordered via Beggar's Tomb Records.


Listen to York Factory Complaint's Lost In The Spectacle via bandcamp.
Listen to the rest of York Factory Complaint's music via bandcamp.

Michael Berdan:
You are punctual.

Painful Burning:
It's 6:30?

Michael Berdan:
It's literally 6:30 on the dot, the clock just turned 6:30.

Painful Burning:
I know you were in a time crunch situation so I wanted to call you right when you were ready.

Michael Berdan:
You hit it perfectly. I literally just got home, I peed and now I'm laying in bed for a second. I got to walk the dog in a half hour. Then I got to go to practice. So for the next half hour or so it's me and you or until the interview is done.

Painful Burning:
Perfect. I'm going to jump into the first question, if you don't mind. You're all prepped, you're all comfortable?

Michael Berdan:
Hold up, I'm going to take my shoes off. I don't know why I'm taking my shoes off, I just kind of feel like it. Yeah, go for it.

Painful Burning:
How do you separate your songwriting between the two active bands you're in, Uniform and York Factory Complaint?

Michael Berdan:
They both take on separate mindsets. The bands both have similarities but in Uniform I don't play anything, I just sing. Where in York Factory I sing and work with sequencers and such. So my relationship to the actual music becomes different and with that the content does. My relationship with my two bandmates are different. York Factory Complaint very much nears the relationship I have with Ryan Martin, where Uniform nears the relationship I have with Ben Greenberg. The things that I write about in both bands come from conversations and feelings that I have with my bandmates, for the most part. York Factory is a little bit more theoretical, about where I think society stands in terms of consumerism and matters of taste... Taste being co-opted and taste being this fashionable thing and living in this disposable culture. Where Uniform is about things that are personal to my life and things that are continually happening to the people around me, happening to me, and things that are a part of my past. York Factory is my idea of the world at large and Uniform is more of my idea of me.

Painful Burning:
That's how you would define the mindset of those two groups but you also mentioned that it's based off of the chemistry you have with Ryan Martin and Ben Greenberg. How would you define your chemistry with them?

Michael Berdan:
I'm in a really fucking fortunate place right now where I'm getting to work with two of my best friends on a regular basis. They're two of the best minded, most talented guys that I know. I couldn't ask for anything more. When it comes down to it, Ben and I have a long history, we've worked together with recording stuff and just hanging out. He was very tight with my old band, Drunkdriver, he was the unofficial fourth member in some ways. He recorded all of our stuff. When that band broke up, we went separate ways for a while. Then a little bit of time passed and we started running into each other and talked more and more. We realized we were both completely different people then we were when my old band and his old band were going on. We wanted to work something else out. We wanted to see if we could make anything interesting. We always wanted to work together. He's one of the best musicians that I've ever met. It's unbelievable the things that I see him come up with. He mixes things on the fly. He has a musical mind unlike anything I know. He's a great, kind, blunt, good person. We had a lot of history. Uniform started out with us trying to work out things through our past, just making something. Neither of us wanted to stop playing in aggressive, noisy rock bands. He started playing with The Men. I started doing a lot of synth and noise stuff. We both wanted to do something harsh, the way we used to do harsh stuff. What Uniform has turned into is an amalgam of our old bands and the more synth oriented stuff that we've both been working on. It's great, it's thrilling. That's where that stands.

Painful Burning:
What's funny about that to me is that you both knew each other when you were in these harsh bands. You guys met up again at a latter point and realized you had changed or grown. Subsequently you returned to that older sound that both of you were making prior to growing and changing.

Michael Berdan:
Yeah.

Painful Burning:
That's not a criticism, just an observation.

Michael Berdan:
Part of that is Ben and I are very different people than we were then. Now we're not nearly as damaged, not nearly as critical, not nearly as nihilistic... I'd say not nihilistic at all anymore. But we're still drawn to that kind of sound. Part of healing is pain. We're still expressing confusion and pain and abject loss sometimes. The whole thing is just an avenue for working shit out and dealing with the people we are today. While we're not these crazy guys anymore we still have rough thoughts and rough emotions that come with living. It's about figuring that all out.

Painful Burning:
You were saying York Factory Complaint is about looking at the world at large, how is that influenced by your chemistry with Ryan Martin?

Michael Berdan:
Ryan and I have been friends for about ten years. We've always had our doubts about the way that punk operated, and experimental music operated. Kind of like the emperor has no clothes thing where people will say that something is worth a level of emotional or creative currency that it's really not. And that's because Person A, B or C says that Product D is worth it. And that's usually artificially propped up. Ryan and I have been spending the past ten years going, "Why the fuck does anybody care about this record, this book, this art, this movie?" and not really getting it. So York Factory Complaint is our way of being honest with that. I feel like with the new record, Lost In The Spectacle, we've started to actually verbalize that which is nice.

Painful Burning:
Do you guys get annoyed when you get good press?

Michael Berdan:
It's entirely intentional.

Painful Burning:
When you get good press that's someone telling other people that what you're doing is good. Then people are influenced by that and liking your record. And isn't that what you're rallying against?

Michael Berdan:
But that's the whole point. The whole point is that we're making indigestible, unlikable music. We're playing harsh industrial with some rudimentary rhythms. People who are into that stuff seem to really like it and I'm extremely pleased about that. But the people who are just going to buy it because NPR tells them to? We would like to be on NPR saying, "Why are you buying this?" That's the whole point of this. The record got good press. We love the record. We're very proud of it, I think it's the best thing we've done so far. But at the end of the day, it's still an industrial record. There's no reason why my mom or your average NYU kid hanging out at whatever bar that would've played Barenaked Ladies ten years ago should be listening to York Factory Complaint. It's not for you. The whole point is to ask people, "Why are you listening to this?"

Michael Berdan performing in York Factory Complaint.
(Photo by Caroline Harrison.)

Painful Burning:
It's weird how certain subgenres of abrasive sounds will get popular because of a feature on a prominent website. You see these people talking about liking those groups in that genre and it makes me wonder if they actually like the sound, or really listen to them.

Michael Berdan:
Absolutely.

Painful Burning:
It's like when black metal was popular for a short time and now it seems like everybody disowned it. Why did you stop listening to it if you genuinely liked it before?

Michael Berdan:
Yeah, people stopped covering it because people started saying Person A, B and C might be fucked up. But you loved that they were fucked up during short time but following that short time? Maybe not so much. Everybody is hanging up their Burzum shirts and their Death In June shirts pretending they weren't wearing those. It's weird when emotions are the flavor of the month.

Painful Burning:
Where is this harsh emotion that you never conveyed a month ago before hearing of this new genre of music? And why are you so prominently wearing it on your chest as a t-shirt?

Michael Berdan:
Yeah, absolutely. That's the thing, the whole culture is disposable. All that you have to do to pretend that your uncle brought you up on Broken Flag tapes is go on the internet and look at Discogs for five minutes, go on YouTube, and click on a bunch of songs. All of a sudden you're an expert. These are things that people base their whole lives on. You couldn't have a disposable culture before, but now any asshole can afford a fucking fad.

Painful Burning:
Because it's free.

Michael Berdan:
It's free. It's like, "My friends will all like me and respect me if I'm into DJ Pierre this month or next month if I'm listening to Rush. Or Captain Beyond." I don't fucking know. Anything. You can become an expert on all of these things within a matter of minutes. It kind of fucking sucks.

Painful Burning:
Right now this seems to be happening with techno, deep house, or even industrial. They're all becoming these in genres right now.

Michael Berdan:
They're definitely things right now. The weird byproduct of a lot of this is that there are a lot of kids that are legitimately into this for real and are making some of the best music that I've seen come around for as long as I can remember.

Painful Burning:
Even in Los Angeles, we have High-Functioning Flesh and Youth Code.

Michael Berdan:
The shit that's coming out of LA... High-Functioning Flesh are wonderful and Youth Code are dear friends. They are one of the first bands that have really inspired me in a long time. When they came around maybe two years ago I was completely floored. It's weird that that style has become repopularized but they do it better than anyone else and they mean it. I love those guys.

Painful Burning:
You mentioned your chemistry with Ben Greenberg, but how about your chemistry with Ryan Martin influencing York Factory Complaint?

Michael Berdan:
The chemistry with Ryan comes from a long term friendship and being able to be honest with each other about our doubts within our community. He's one of the most well thought out, loving, caring, understanding people that I've ever had the fortune to work with. We started this because we were friends and we wanted to play music. I was playing solo show one night and I asked Ryan to join me and we started the band on the spot.

Painful Burning:
That's very organic.

Michael Berdan:
Yeah, and it's always gelled like that. Through the years we've taken a bunch of people on. Some people stuck around for a minute then dropped out, some people longer than others. Some people only played one or two shows with us. Some people only recorded with us. At the core it's always been me and Ryan. It's wonderful to be close with a guy like that. He has a really genuine soul and he's not afraid to question anything. I need more people like that in my life.

Painful Burning:
It seems like that's what the root of punk was at one point and it seems like it has been lost in worrying what genre people are playing.

Michael Berdan:
Yeah, absolutely.

Painful Burning:
You were talking about the hopes of people hearing York Factory Complaint and not enjoying it if that's genuine, I was recently reading an article about bartenders having certain music played when persuading patrons to leave. One of the few mentioned records was Lost In The Spectacle. Was that a compliment?

Michael Berdan:
It was a huge compliment. To me that's high praise, that's someone actually getting it for what it was. This is not digestible music. This is not shit to put on at the bar for people to bob their heads to and dance. This is something to get you to leave. It's for a very specific taste. It blows my fucking mind when people pretend that something is kind of high frequency noise with that kind of harsh spirit and that kind of harsh delivery, when they're pretending to snap their fingers and tap their toes to that, go fuck yourself. So yeah, I took that as a compliment and I took that as someone using that record for its proper purpose.

Painful Burning:
The true spirit of the group.

Michael Berdan:
Yes, very much so. We love this, we think that it's good and we're very proud of this, but at the same time, fuck you. We're almost daring you to enjoy it with the follow up question, "Why do you enjoy it?" If this is something that means something to you, then absolutely. We hope you identify, we love that you identify, but if it's not something that means something to you? Go the fuck away.

Michael Berdan performing in Uniform.
(Photo by Sam Polcer.)

Painful Burning:
If you were bartending and you could play an album to make people leave, what would your pick be?

Michael Berdan:
That's fucking great, Zach who wrote the article kind of hit on it with the Beatle Barkers but Jingle Cats has a way of getting people to move things along. I work in a business where, for a long time, I would put on records to try to get people to leave. I'd put on free jazz or no wave shit, some Art Ensemble Of Chicago or Mars, Dark Day stuff to get people to keep on moving but it'd never work. You know the thing that works the best is spoken word. Ideally what I would do if I wanted people to leave is probably play the "American Psycho" audio book.

Painful Burning:
That's funny.

Michael Berdan:
If you've ever heard that thing it's unpleasant. The tone doesn't change, the narrator speaks in this really offhand ambivalent manner all the way through. When he's talking about Huey Lewis and when he's talking about doing awful, awful things to people, causing real bodily harm and emotional scarring and killing and all those other awful things, it stays the same pace. Sometimes it's really fluid, one sentence will be about doing something awful to someone's eyeball and the next sentence will be about Huey Lewis. If somebody's at a bar paying attention to that? They'll fucking leave.

Painful Burning:
That book and that movie encapsulate this in some ways. I'm so surprised that that book and movie were so widely loved because I wonder if these people understand that it is critiquing the life that they live.

Michael Berdan:
Yeah, absolutely. People wear these masks. Our outward appearance is largely completely artificial. We want to appear this way in order to impress or attract or sometimes intentionally repel the person next to us. In essence our real desires can be significantly more dark. A better example to that would be Hubert Selby's "The Demon." There's this guy and he has this job and he's doing really well. He starts engaging in some really lower tier sex addiction things. As he engages in it his appetites become more and more demanding. His face changes. By the end of the book he's full on apocalyptic. He's going from casual encounters shit to pushing people in front of trains, all for kicks. That's kind of what "American Psycho" speaks to me in a different tone but a similar theme. I think Selby kind of hits the nail about always wanting and needing more on the head. I love that shit. I think there's really honesty in it.

Painful Burning:
That hunger for wanting and needing more can come with diving deeper and deeper into genre charting. Has that happened with you?

Michael Berdan:
It absolutely has. The best way I can describe my music taste now is Headbanger's Ball circa 1993. I listen to bad death metal mixed in with new wave of British heavy metal stuff. I've got a couple of segues here and there but that's where I'm at. I've just kind of reverted back to what I've listened to when I was thirteen and fourteen years old. I absolutely remember being a kid and being at that point where I went to punk shows with John Sharkey. Picking out all of these new bands. I remember being given the C.R. seven inch. C.R. played a show with Ink & Dagger... I remember it perfectly. It was Deadguy, Ink & Dagger, I Hate You, Trial, C.R., and I want to say All Else Failed. I got the C.R. seven inch. It blew my mind, I hadn't heard anything that fast before. From there I was able to pick up other bands like that, such as Infest. Follow that down the line a little more. Then a couple of months later a friend of mine had a brother who was over hardcore and was getting rid of a bunch of his shit. He had gotten into rave culture which was also huge at the time, he was a drum and bass guy.

Painful Burning:
What year was this?

Michael Berdan:
This was 1995, mid nineties. He gave me this box of shit. In this box of shit there was the Lacking Mindset comp. In the Lacking Mindset comp there was Honeywell. And I heard Honeywell for the first time. That just opened me right the fuck up. From that point on I started to get into bands that sounded like Honeywell. That pretty quickly brings you over into what Black Dice was doing at the time which was this unbelievably harsh unmusical nonsense. It was beautiful. An Oxygen Auction. All this really great shit. From that point on I got into industrial and power electronics. That's where Merzbow comes into play, that's where Whitehouse comes into play, that's where Broken Flag comes into play. I got into the harsher stuff first, then I got into dancier things. I was hanging out in a different crowd and got into Wax Trax-y EBM stuff. Then I got into real mellow stuff. Then came this thing, Throbbing Gristle, which was perfect. Throbbing Gristle came after I already got into the harsher stuff.

Painful Burning:
And that was your musical route?

Michael Berdan:
Pretty much. I never stopped listening to the shit that I did in 1994. I never stopped listening to Ulver, Emperor, Cannibal Corpse, and Judas Priest. I've always loved black metal, I've always loved death metal. I've always loved metal. I've never been too much of a punk's punk. It went from metal stuff to electronic stuff to experimental stuff. Kind of all around here wherever the fuck I am now.

Painful Burning:
Which is the new Uniform twelve inch on Beggar's Tomb. Do you have plans for future releases?

Michael Berdan:
Yeah, we're working on an LP right now.

Painful Burning:
Have you announced any details about that?

Michael Berdan:
We're still in the planning stages, we have a couple of songs written. The twelve inch is very raw and we've recorded it like we wanted to. We want to take a little more time with the following release. We don't know exactly when it's going to be done. We just want to have more songs together and then we'll hopefully be back in the studio early this winter.

Painful Burning:
How long have you guys been together for at this point?

Michael Berdan:
Less than a year. We started at the beginning of last November.

Painful Burning:
And already someone has your logo tattooed on their arm.

Michael Berdan:
Yeah, someone got the logo tattooed, that was a surprise.

Painful Burning:
I saw that online.

Michael Berdan:
I met the guy who got it tattooed afterwards. He's a really nice kid. He comes to our shows, he's really enthusiastic. I'm glad somebody likes us. It's an honor when anyone likes you. It's cool. For someone to go that far is really cool.

Painful Burning:
Hopefully he likes the next record.

Michael Berdan:
Otherwise I wonder what he's going to get it covered with. He got it really big.

A Uniform tattoo.

Painful Burning:
Why do you keep living in New York City? It seems harder and harder for people to live there.

Michael Berdan:
I've been through a lot here. I grew up in Delaware County, Pennsylvania then moved to Philadelphia. The way my life was going, it didn't seem like I was going to make it out of there. Then I did. New York was close, I'm close to home, my pops lives here. When I moved to New York I remember getting here and being like, "I'm dead, what did I do?" That was eleven years ago. The neighborhood's changed, New York has changed. What used to be inviting and open and not all that cheap, but relatively cheap, is now really expensive and closed off and white washed and banal and just not very fun. At the same time there's really remarkable things going on, it's still New York. We have some of the best music in the entire world. I'm next to some of the most creative people that I could've ever imagined to have met. I have a good job, I have a good apartment, I'm getting married next year. My fiancee has a dog. My life is really simple here but it's really good. I go to work, I talk to my friends, I walk the dog, I go to band practice, I repeat. It is too fucking expensive, there is a lot bullshit here but it's only bullshit if you want to be in it, if you want to let that in. When you have Heaven Street and Dripper World and 538 still doing stuff, God knows how many other places are constantly going. I don't really want to name them because I don't really want to get anybody in trouble. Sorry, I'm rambling.

Painful Burning:
No, you like New York City.

Michael Berdan:
I love New York City, I still think it's the greatest city in the world. I came here completely broken. I got significantly more broken over time. The city helped put me back together. I feel like I owe this city a lot. I love my friends here, I love my job, I absolutely love my bandmates, and that's all here. It's all a product of this city. I wouldn't have it any other way, perhaps I could do this somewhere else. But I'm not exactly ready to give that a shot yet. That being said, my girl and I talk about moving all the time, who knows if this is actually gonna last here.

Painful Burning:
Why do you love horror so much? It seems like your genre of choice for movies.

Michael Berdan:
I love horror. Horror movies are significantly more important to me than anything else in the entire world, with the exception of my friends and family. I've always related to them. My dad showed me "Phantasm" when I was four. It just got into my head. I've always been aware of my mortality. I've always been scared to exist. I've always thought that I could die at any moment or get hurt at any moment. This idea of imminent danger... Horror movies allow me to step out of that. It's not so much that I like being scared, it's that these fears are well articulated or they're made to be so gregarious and so big and so absurd by these movies that I often take a lot of comfort in them. I either get relation or comfort from them. Sometimes humor, sometimes other kinds of identification. I love horror movies, they're desperately important to me.

Painful Burning:
Seeing all the death in the horror movies, do you think it makes light of it?

Michael Berdan:
It absolutely makes light of it. It either makes light of it or it makes it actually seem as horrible as it is. And I want both of those things. If there's one thing I don't like, in horror and art and literature, it's a baseless shock. There's a lot of shit that came out in the past X number of years, with bigger budgets that just serve to titillate these base sadistic instincts in people. I don't like that. What I do like is Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible" or Alexandre Aja's stuff like "High Tension." These terrible, terrible things happen in them. But they're displayed in a way that it lets you know they're not celebrating them. They're not saying these things are cool, they're not saying these things are good, they're saying these things are horrible. And they are. That's where the identification with my fears and my doubts and a lot of the issues I have with other people come in to play, my distrust. Whenever it's shocking for shocking's sake it puts me off. Everybody has a right to do what they're going to do and for whatever reason and I can't begin to say what somebody's impulse is when making something. I know how I relate to things. I want something that moves me, not that shocks me. I don't know if I can be shocked. I definitely don't think I can be offended. I can roll my eyes and keep going.

Painful Burning:
Gaspar Noé has said that the reason why he portrayed the rape scene as he did in "Irreversible" was because rape is terrible. He didn't want to romanticize it or anything like that. He said rape is terrible so it should make you feel terrible when it is portrayed.

Michael Berdan:
Exactly, that's the whole fucking point. That's why there's a difference between Whitehouse and these other bands. Peter Sotos and Dennis Cooper who are actually saying things, putting things out there in this way that states that these things are terrible. It's not good, it's not cool. That's important. "Irreversible," which is all done in reverse, starts out with some guy bashing somebody's head in with a fire extinguisher at an after hours gay club. It ends with the beginning of a beautiful day. What's more jarring than that? The end of the movie is a beautiful day, a couple in a park who thinks they have their whole life ahead of them.

Painful Burning:
Seeing their happiness was the saddest thing because you knew where it was going to lead.

Michael Berdan:
Exactly. Not to be pessimistic, but you never know when these terrible life altering events are going to hit you. Every day can open up to something beautiful or something ugly, beautiful more often than not.

Painful Burning:
Is that why you finish every day with a pint of ice cream?

Michael Berdan:
I haven't finished a pint of ice cream in a very long time. Lately I've been finishing every day with a protein shake. I did the pint of ice cream for two years. For about two years I ate a pint of ice cream and smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes. Then one day I stopped. My blood sugar couldn't take it. I thought about my lungs, I have health insurance now, but who knows for how long. How would I feel if people had to take care of me because I was getting sick because of some dumb shit I did to myself? Fuck that. If I'm incapable of taking care of myself because, God forbid, I lose my job or don't have insurance... Nah. I don't want to do that to the people I love. So I quit that shit.

Painful Burning:
That's very Berdan, taking something like eating ice cream and making it into something dark like that.

Michael Berdan:
You can eat ice cream. You can do it responsibly. I hope you enjoy it, there's wonderful ice cream out there. I still like ice cream. I just tend to do things excessively. I'll have the occasional bowl of ice cream, but I don't do it every night. I've gotten really into pies recently. I was eating these mini peanut butter pies every night along with two slices of pizza. I started getting older, I started putting on weight. I wasn't doing it as excessively as I was doing with the ice cream and smoking. This is probably what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life, going six months where I try to take immaculate care of myself and overdo it and wind up hurting myself in the process then going back and freaking out and snapping and eating nothing but nachos and cookie dough for six months after that. This is back and forth. I just hope I don't end up with diabetes.

Michael Berdan swimming away from eating too much ice cream.
(Photo by Taylor Brode.)

Painful Burning:
So you're saying for the record that you're not done with ice cream?

Michael Berdan:
I am not officially done with ice cream. I can tell you, I'm not eating ice cream today and that I haven't for a couple of days now. But that doesn't really mean shit. I ate ice cream last week.

Painful Burning:
Congratulations on two days, that's a lot considering that you did it every night for two years.

Michael Berdan:
I've been going on and off with it. I did it every night for two years but that was two and a half years ago. For the past two and a half years I've been going on these kicks where I get really healthy then I fuck it all up, then I get really healthy, then I fuck it all up. It's been cyclical since. For the two years where it was nothing but ice cream at least that was consistent.

Painful Burning:
The most consistent thing in your life was eating ice cream.

Michael Berdan:
Eating ice cream and smoking cigarettes were the most consistent grounded thing, significant thing, I had in my life for a while. But it has expanded since then.

Painful Burning:
At this point, do you still have your shoes off?

Michael Berdan:
No, I put my shoes back on. I just took the dog out for a walk.

Painful Burning:
I didn't even realize you were walking.

Michael Berdan:
I was quiet about it. The dog peed, I picked up dog poop, all while we were talking. That happened when we were discussing "Irreversible."

Painful Burning:
You must've been wearing moccasins because I didn't hear a thing.

Michael Berdan:
I was on the go, I was on a street in Williamsburg. I just talk very loudly and over shit. I clogged your ear with my inane rambling. You didn't get a chance to hear anything else.

Painful Burning:
Right now this is fifty five minutes.

Michael Berdan:
You're not printing every word of this I take it?

Painful Burning:
We'll see.

-Z