AUGUST 28-30 2026

Anyone who has ever been in a band knows that they run their course. Typically.

Early days are fed by a kind of fever to create. Make noise. Explore sound, space, your fuckin’ feelings. Whatever.

But fevers burn out, and when they do, it’s unlikely every individual in a group exits whatever collective mania had taken hold at them in the same way, at the same time.

In 1994, Silkworm had been in Seattle for four long years. Longer than a lot of bands stay together period, and Andy, Joel, and I had played together for many years before even coming to Seattle.

We’d eaten a lot of shit.

By and large, the greater Seattle music scene had no use for us. Not that we were so bizarre, but we weren’t garage, grunge, or punk. We were too loud. Hard to book, hard to get, hard to sign.

Did anyone want to punch that ticket? Yes, in fact. Some did! I’ve often said (only when asked, mind you) that Silkworm didn’t have limited appeal as much as we had a limited audience. Within that audience…more or less unlimited appeal. Rabid fans. Which, as insular as we were, was nevertheless a source of great sustenance to us at a particularly scrubby time.

Anyway. In the Westmarked a turn. Away from an inspired but still sorta developmental sound into something truly, uniquely ours. Scrabbling, lumbering, yelpy, searing. Sorta brutal. Sorta lovely at times. All served more raw than your average ding-dong wants his meat.

We hadn’t abdicated from English postpunk. From classic rock. From speed metal (a love of Metallica and Voivod still evident in some of the guitar playing). Certainly not from the American experimental rock milieu we were (very loosely) part of at the time and poised (I can see now) to enter as some kind of murky but unmistakeablytherepresence.

But through all of that, we’d found our own sound.

The tunes are caught up with it, more often than not. I haven’t written a better song than Garden City Blues, which required the full swing of the group to become what it is. Andy’s period of drilling, chugging weirdness, on Dust My Broom and the classic Into the Woods, which he more or less abandoned for more expansive, interstellar expression in coming years. Joel sets the mark with a completely realized vision—thick, pile-driving, crushingly beautiful, as heavy as post-punk gets. Wonderful, a privilege to be part of, perhaps unsustainable for too long. When Joel really opens everything up at the end of Dremate…I mean, I was there, and that’s not the sound of a person tryingto do anything. That’s just someone turning himself inside out. Of course, whether or not it was good for him, exactly…we followed his lead and helped him do it.

Through it all, a young drummer gets his sea legs. Michael had many masterful, album-length performances in our group, as maybe the greatest heavy rock drummer of his era. Certainly the best drummer who couldn’t play a double-stroke roll. But here he put it all together for the first time, with all the excitement of a dog who has just figured out how to run.

How we all navigated this turn…together…intact…touring our balls off at a survival level…I guess it owed a lot to the countless hours we spent together. To commitment. To love. To being fucking idiots. I can’t even honestly explain to you whywe did it, much less how. I’m sure a lot of our peers feel that way now. But I’m glad it worked out, and I’m glad there’s a definitive version of this record for you to hold in your hands today, 25 yrs later, for the first time.

Thanks.

Tim Midyett
Chicago
January 2019