LOS ANGELES, CA — There are a certain number of superficial facts that could be stated about the Los Angeles based two-piece Terminal A. The band was started in 2012 and consists of guitarist Lee Busch and vocalist Colin Peterson who play a gothic strain of synth punk, with deep stylistic roots in the Los Angeles underground. They have released three singles, a split, and an EP on Records Ad Nauseum, and they are active within the Los Angeles Part Time Punks scene.
To simply expound upon those facts however, would be to almost entirely miss the point of what Colin and Lee are trying to achieve as artists and performers. While Terminal A is technically a nowadays “dark punk” band, they cast a wider net to capture their musical and ideological influences than the majority of other darkwave and deathrock acts that have cropped up in recent years. Their creative process is a fluid amalgam of influences spanning from The Symbolists, The Viennese Actionists, what the band describes as “Romantic Essentialism”, and various proto- and post- punk artists from within and outside the main currents of their genres. It’s no small miracle that Terminal A manage to leverage this heady creative bedrock and still deliver emotionally penetrative jams that aim for the gut and the groin, that are still undeniably rock and roll in nature. And in the tradition of many great underground bands before them, the recordings alone are completely insufficient to understand the experience delivered by the band live.
Colin Petersen photographed by Milana Burdette for SOVO// Magazine, 2018.
Both members perform dressed like edgy waitstaff – all black everything, collared tucked shirts, militaristic minimalism, a sartorial tabula rasa upon which to play out the deep seated “thing behind the thing” that Terminal A can only express through live, rapturous performance. Colin cuts a striking figure,a synthesis of Jaz Coleman around his heavy brows and sunken eyes, and the urbane vampiric styling of Dave Vanian in his poise and slicked back hair – a preternatural Byronic hero. From moment to moment, the emotional minutiae of the performance dance across his face like ripples on water. He pulls himself freely through the room, effervescent and telegenic, engaging individuals in the universal physicallanguage of play, challenging them to meet his gaze and reflector absorb his corporeal distortions as he stops between verses to pull the corners of his mouth out past his ears. While Colin directs the focus of the performance far out into the audience, Lee staggers and gallops about the stage with his guitar slung low, and in his mixture of detachment and fury, channels the unassailable cool of Rowland S Howard in The Birthday Party. He is the stable rhythmic core of the band, yoked directly to the unforgiving backing track, and at the same time he’s mercurial, a live wire, pummeling rhythms and melodies out of his guitar with a physical confidence that edges on violence, that sometimes is violence.
Earlier this year, the band was able to sit down for a conversation with one of their heroes and forebearers, Terry Graham. Terry, drummer for seminal Los Angeles punk bands The Bags, The Cramps, and The Gun Club, and a foun- dational member of the Los Angeles punk underground, spoke knowingly of Terminal A’s place within the lineage:
“You guys found the same place… Something about it, it just takes me back, but in the best possible sense of that, and yet it’s brand new, it’s right here, it’s now.”
Lee Busch photographed by Milana Burdette for SOVO// Magazine, 2018.
The sympatico that older punkers might feel with Terminal A is not coincidental. The band is perfectly positioned to inherit the spirited self-annihilation that has rendered underground music in Los Angeles both more sordid and more romantic than its historic peers. They draw direct influence from the underground music of the late 70s, a period which served as the crucible in which punk, industrial, and many other forms first took shape. When they first met, Colin was listening to the proto-industrial of Throbbing Gristle and wild experimentation of Cabaret Voltaire, while Lee was spinning torchbearers of Los Angeles hardcore such as Black Flag and The Adolescents, but it was in the highly constructed, experimental punk of The Screamers that Colin and Lee found their point of symphysis.
“I would deconstruct Screamers songs, for instance. I spent three hours once going over a single phrase in one of their songs. Lee was the only one to put up with shit that abstract, but there was almost no understanding otherwise, everyone else was just sketched out.” — Colin Petersen
The Screamers, along with contemporaries such as Suicide and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, were notorious for their conceptual density, as well as the unapologetic visceral and emotional attack of their music, unafraid to alienate their audience to the point of near riot if it so moved them. Reminiscent of their predecessors, Terminal A project power and strive for unrelenting artistic honesty through the emotional impact of their music, and they drive their creative process through their ideological constructions. When asked about their creative process, the band cites the crucial importance of Symbolist theory. The Symbolists believed “art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly”. Terminal A interpret rock and roll as a way to let the truth, an unspeakable internal reality, whatever it may be, punch through.
Any kind of art has to come from a real place. It’s the fractional difference between art and shit.” — Terry Graham
The primordial stuff of rock and roll allows performers and audience to join in a covenant beyond rationality, beyond precedence or continuity, and engage in behavior that serves as process and escape wholly valid unto itself, and in the most powerful cases, threatens to burst out into the world we temporarily left behind to transform or destroy us. This deep, violent romantic idealism is what Colin and Lee conjure during their performances, setting them above the pantomime of shallow aesthetics and practiced form that tend to fossilize long-standing music genres.
“Rock and roll does something that is so immediate and visceral, it does something that is unique. So much more than static art. If Jeff Koontz is our generation’s golden boy then I’m not a part of that game. With rock and roll you can cut through the bullshit, and the statement is made.” — Lee Busch
To watch Terminal A play is to watch a band effortlessly balance opposites. Lee embodies the extreme introvert, surgically focused on his instrument while drowning in a fugue state,and sometimes in a fit of anguish, maiming himself on his guitar strings and letting hisblood course down his arms. Colin embodies the agonizingly sincere extrovert, melting his face into a million expressions and accosting the audience with riotous jubilance. What makes the band more than two individuals locked to an arbitrary rhythm is their undeniable emotional synergy, their shared longing to attain a catharsis that is only found in the self-exorcism of performance. Like Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, “total work of art”, the band employs sight, sound, touch, spirit and even theatrical contradiction to make the greatest possible impact. You can engage with Terminal A as a series of recordings, as a live performance, or as a pair of artists, but they remain powerful at every level, with or without a greater context, like the feeling of love, or an act of war.
— Written by Arjun Ray
— Photography by Milana Burdette
— First published in [ Issue 1 ]
“Punk and Rock n’ Roll is important because the teaching of irreverence is a way to deal with the traumatic memories culture hoists upon us. When you can drain a set of symbols of their meaning and have fun in spite of the fact that you shouldn’t be having fun, you’re creating a new life.” — Colin Petersen