chancla fight club
about
chancla fight club is a post-rock group from austin, texas—ashley dawson on vocals, mark ghastine on bass, and justin dear on drums.
i originally met ashley back in 2015 through a mutual friend and we began chatting about her desire to make music. she shared some songs she had written on her acoustic guitar and how she wanted them to have a full band to accompany them.
we agreed to work on her music and she began sending me voice memos of her songs she had recorded using her phone. i imported them into my audio software, lined up her recordings to a metronome, began adding live band elements to them, and then had her come into the studio to re-record her vocals on top of it all. in a matter of weeks, it was fully fledged rock music. we continued this process for some time and eventually she put together a band to begin performing the songs in a live setting, with me on guitar.
i eventually stepped away from the band to focus on my career, but continued to assist with the writing process behind the scenes. since then, she’s found a talented new group of musicians to work with, and they’ve been cranking out great new material and continuing to perform live.
working with ashley on this project was a great experience, as i enjoyed the challenge of having to build up something in her vision from the ground up. it really forced me to think outside the box and change how i approach writing, producing, and in general — creating.
for more about the band, check out their website or follow them on social media and streaming platforms below!
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releases
“arkenstone” is the 7th song i worked on with chancla fight club. this is one of two songs that were already in early development with alexis zaragoza and andrew guajardo, musicians ashley had recruited to work with her on new music, before it fell into my lap. they departed from the band to pursue their own projects before the song reached production, so, i wanted to pay homage to their original work and wound up not changing much beyond some guitar arrangement.
for fans of the lord of the rings series, this song is for you. the lyrics take the focal point of this song, based on the story of the hobbit, so, i didn’t want to do too much musically to pull focus from that.
it’s one of the more easy-listening tunes from the band, as it’s more about storytelling than it is about the music.
“vestal’s lost (the world forgot)” was another extremely guitar-heavy tune. actually, the instrumentation for this song was originally music written for the boston project, my personal solo project, that i never got around to fully developing. so, i recycled it to be used for chancla fight club.
i wanted this song to sound very “mechanical” and “manipulated” in essence, since the original music i wrote was very rigid and articulated itself. so, beyond reprising the old guitar work, i incorporated various guitar effects to give the listener a feeling that the music was being affected by something cerebral.
ashley’s lyrical concept of the song was about reminiscing on memories, so, i tried to give the guitar a feeling of being “warped” back and forth as if it was traveling through time. overall a very lively track to have worked on, and it quickly became my favorite to perform live.
“best interest” was another song sprouted from ashley’s acoustic demos, this one becoming even more of a distant resemblance to the original. i leaned heavily into making this track a musically technical journey that somewhat seemed to float around the original structure of the song that ashley created as opposed to firmly adhering to it.
it’s one of many very guitar-centric songs from chancla fight club, as i was at the time exploring different ways of implementing the instrument into a song. it turned out to be an ear-tickler and secured a spot on the list of songs that defined the band’s sound.
“monster” was the 3rd original release i worked on with chancla fight club. this was around the time ashley began recruiting other musicians to perform her songs with her live, so they had a part in writing the arrangement for it. with alexis zaragoza on bass, and andrew guajardo on drums, the song took on a different sound than the music i had previously written for the project.
alexis and andrew exited the band to pursue their own projects before the song entered production, so it was left to me to take the golden egg they had created and deliver it in their stead. i listened to recordings of them playing the song live and learned the parts in order to recreate them myself at my studio, then added the other elements you hear in the song.
i wanted to make sure the song was faithful to its roots and was conscious while recording guitar parts to not take too much away from that. it wound up being a great track with an overwhelmingly captivating and creepy presence.
something worth mentioning is during this time, the guys in islands of pear, ashley, and myself were all very good friends. we hung out often and would help support each other’s musical endeavors. so when the idea came about to do a holiday release for islands of pear, we all jumped in on the opportunity with our own respective music projects.
“santa baby” was chancla fight club’s submission to the event, and boy was it fun to make. i pulled a recording of eartha kitt’s original rendition of the song and began laying down instrumentation over it that fit chancla fight club’s sound. it turned out to be this heavy-hitting and bewitching monster and, for us, presented the tune in a new perspective.
behind all the screaming guitars, slamming drums, and fuzzy bass is the real feature of this tune which is ashley’s omnichord. it has a synthetic and almost eerie aesthetic that adds a whole new dynamic to the song.
“good looking idiot” was the 2nd of the 2 original demos i first set out with ashley to turn into full pieces. this song went through so many iterations it almost became difficult to keep track of all the various versions floating about my hard drive. but, after a very long time of twisting and turning it to be something we were proud of, we landed on what you hear today.
this song was a beast to begin with, as it’s got several very technical elements in the arrangement, all needing a proper balance to work cohesively together. this made not only writing for it a challenge but producing it became a feat of its own.
looking back, i’m glad that it proved to be such an endeavor as i learned a vast amount from working on this, and we’re proud of what it turned out to be.
“piece of glass” was one of the first songs i released with ashley, long before the entity that is chancla fight club even came to fruition. this project set the course for how the rest of my work on her music would play out, as it was an interesting challenge to take her otherwise soft and light acoustic demos and fuel them to be the energetic fireballs that they’ve become.
i went through a plethora of different sounds and arrangements before landing on this one, and it pushed me to my limit to try and find the right balance knowing i was writing instrumentals to someone else’s music while also being the one to produce it. i was given more creative control over this project than i could have anticipated, and while it was daunting at times as i wanted to do her original demos justice, it made for an extremely gratifying learning experience.