Quicksand

So Black Train Jack started.

And they were playing with Quicksand at the Wetlands in New York.

And I...

Ernie talked me into going and I was like, I got to do something.

Yeah

... with Quicksand.

And um, you know, three of the founding members of this band.

Um, they came together.

Uh-huh.

It's like, "No, I'm into this," which is no one's sticking around, and I'll put your band in the context of this quote.

No one's waiting around for a new Quicksand album.

They're waiting around for a great Quicksand album.

Psychedelic hardcore.

Yeah, like Die16 and Quicksand-

Yeah, yeah

... and as soon as shit became, like, New York City got a little zany and-

Love you, Chino.

I know you're inspired by Quicksand, for sure.

They inspired so many bands, dude.

Yeah,

Sugar Cubes and all this stuff, Bjork.

I was like, man, what is this stuff? He was so open-minded in the 80s with everything.

I think that's why he could do stuff with Quicksand and all these other diverse styles of music and

And still, yeah, and he still is very open-minded.

As the 80s rolled into the 90s, Revelation wasn't content to just double down on straight edge.

It pivoted toward bands that stretched the boundaries of hardcore by infusing more melody and atmosphere, beginning with Quicksand's debut single traded, that traded the frantic energy for layered guitars, complex rhythms, and a vocal style that felt raw yet introspective.

The label's handling of Quicksand's record mirrored its core DIY logic.

Small runs, careful mastering at a boutique studio in Brooklyn where they could control the tape hiss, and a release strategy that let the vinyl circulate through underground shops before hitting the international mail order list that fans across Europe coveted.

The ripple effect was clear.

Because of this autonomy, Revelation could experiment with different pricing, pricing strategies, sometimes selling a single for sixty cents and a full album for eight dollars, making the music accessible while still covering production costs, thereby nurturing an underground economy that allowed even the smallest bands to stay afloat.

Revelation's influence is best seen in how it legitimized a shift toward melodic hardcore that would later define the emo movement.

Bands like Quicksand and Texas Is The Reason proved that punk could be introspective without sacrificing intensity.

And a lot of them were just members of previous bands that they had put out.

So you have Walter doing Quicksand and, you know, you know, Burn is like a kind of a unique sounding band.

And then Richie is doing Into Another and Into Another sounds like nothing anyone in hardcore had ever listened to before.

And you've got all this interesting kind of like this change in hardcore.

Yeah.

And here we are still loving Youth of Today and Minor Threat, Sick of It All, Uniform Choice, all the traditional hardcore.

But then we also, we started really loving like Quicksand and Dag Nasty and Fugazi and all these things.

So we just kind of were a band that didn't know what we wanted to be.

So maybe I, I was, my timeframe is off a little bit.

I would say Quicksand you're right, though.

Like, Walter, like, touring, putting out Quicksand records.

But by that point he's, like, it's kind of those weird Walter wilderness years where he's doing, like, World's Fastest Car-

Yeah, Moondog and like those other-

Yeah, Slapshot played there.

They were, like, a fucking local band there, man.

[laughs] Slap- Slapshot, like, Qui- I remember Quicksand played there where that one Walter was just singing and Charlie Garaga was playing guitar.