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Sam Levine

@samwlevine

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04.21.2025 - new sounds for old bodies, coming soon

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04.15.2025 - the first signs of life

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We talkin bout practice. Phone practice, not band practice. Practice…

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it’s a wrap 🎬

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Day 823: Fighter Hayabusa - demo CDR. # 24/50. I’m going to need someone from the band to remind me - was this demo recorded before the first Fighter show? I swear I either had a copy or got this copy at the first show. I have this distinct memory of already knowing “This Cheesesteak’s Gonna Taste a Whole Lot Better Once I Take My Shirt Off” at the show. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. Anything is possible. Here’s some backstory - I’ve known @samwlevine for a long time. We went to Hebrew school together when we were kids and then lost touch for a bit before reconnecting in high school in the band As We Grow. I left As We Grow after 1 show but we stayed close and then started another band called Christopher Walken a couple years later. That band played one show (as documented by @timefallsnear) before splitting up. Sam and I felt like we had something good going there, though. We kept a couple of the songs and started another band called The French Connection that played more than 1 show (~65 shows if my spreadsheet is accurate). After a few years, FC split up, and Sam joined this band Fighter Hayabusa. It was weird at first hearing his voice in a band that I wasn’t in! But I was all in from day 1 with this band. It was rad seeing how his voice worked with a totally different guitar and rhythmic style than we’d worked with in the past. It’s becoming kind of a cliche on this account, but I just love it when my friends make cool shit. This demo is 100% cool shit. Look at that multi-color screened artwork! I saw this band a bunch, especially since a good handful of their shows were in my basement at the time. I’ll throw a link to their first show in my stories. I’m really glad someone got video of it.

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Day 729: As We Grow - Demo tape. Oh man. Where do I start with this? Senior year of high school, me and my friend Zach decide to start a hardcore band. We picked the name As We Grow because 1. It was very close to a line in a Rigid song 2. It was the name of a children’s consignment shop in the town where we went to HS and we thought it would be funny. So we’d get together and write riffs and fuck around and eventually Sam joined to sing and Al joined on bass and we played our first show. It was at the Church in Philly on May 30, 1999 with This Day Forward and Blue Skies Fade. Just about a month before I graduated HS. We covered “Firestorm” because we didn’t have enough songs to fill a set. I quit the band after the show. I wasn’t really feeling it, and the other guys could do it better without me. That was proven on this demo. Bob is a way better guitarist than me, though I was psyched they kept the riffs I wrote for “Making Friends.” I couldn’t even count how many times I saw AWG after this demo came out. Sam and I would go on to form a few other bands throughout the last 25 years, including Drivel (@drivelnoise) right now. I’ve got a million memories wrapped up in this demo and these songs. This demo sounds to me like the feeling of fucking around as a kid and stumbling into making something meaningful. I started cataloging some old demos on discogs so maybe some more tapes will show up soon. Mostly south NJ band demos. I’ve got a lot.

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Day 248: Nine Will Die/the French Connection split 7”. Here’s another record that I played on. I wonder how often these will come up? Feels a little weird to write about my old bands and it feels a lot weird that this came out 20 years ago. The red version got selected by the app but we also did blue, green, clear, and black. I don’t remember how many were pressed in total, I’m guessing 500? 100 of each? We played and hung out with Nine Will Die all the time so it was only natural to do a split. I wish I could remember why we each did covers for this. French Connection had just written and recorded our 4 best songs but we only put one on the record. We make weird decisions in our early 20s. We were originally going to cover “Wish” by NIN but then Dillinger Escape Plan covered it live about a month before we were going to record. Didn’t want to seem like we were copying them. So we decided to do “Territorial Pissings” by Nirvana. Some other band covered that around the same time, so we scrapped that too. We learned this Blur song the day before we tracked it and played it together for the first time in the studio. It turned out pretty alright. I eventually ended up covering “Wish” years later in Psychic Teens and “Territorial Pissings” in at least 2 bands. and French Connection played an entire Nirvana cover set right before we broke up. So everything worked out OK.

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Drivel Portraits

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#drivel #portraitphotography

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Hey! We had another practice. #drivel #archivalnoise #diy #punk #basementswithlowceilings

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listen with headphones for maximum impact. featuring miss mabel as usual. youtube for the full video/track. fuzzy keyboards erry day. ❤️✌️😻 this compressed video sounds a little fucked but it’s ok.

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@kome_waza takeover with salmon and tuna via @nosidewalks

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