Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging

and accessible way. The first time I heard about Stephen Malchamus' band Pavement, I was reading

a zine.

I must have been 15 or 16 in small town, Pennsylvania.

And in the zine, it mentioned that the best band in the world

wasn't pavement or a comet gain.

It was a band playing in somebody's basement somewhere. I remember being really puzzled.

I didn't know who pavement was, but if they could be confused for one of the best bands in the

world, I should go check them out. So I did. I went to the local record store, and I bought two records.. One in EP with a rooster on the cover and another

that had words in the title that I didn't understand at all. And from that moment of listening to

that clattering, crazy, diverse, multi-layered sound of pavement up until the present day.

Decades later, when Stephen's latest album, Traditional Techniques, came out,

I have been a huge fan, and his music has shaped the way I've thought my aesthetics,

it's reinvigorated my will in the world. So I can't tell you how excited I am to share this

episode with you. I think one of the things that's really profound about Stephen is that he's somebody who has

actually created a new kind of sound, particularly with his band pavement. We spent a lot of time

talking about this in the episode and how what he did with his bandmates and then also in his solo work, it kind of broke free from

everything else that was happening in the world. And in a way that was uncomfortable for a lot of

people. I remember reading an article with one of my other favorite musicians, Damon Auburn from Blur, talking about how

as Brit Pop was forming into something that was sort of collapsing under itself and all its

ornamentation, he was looking for new directions in music and he found pavement and they were so

...