Life Vs Brothers Hand Mirror: Evidence For The Redemptive Potential Of Music

There are as many layers to the story of Grant Gronewold and Oscar Vincente Slorach-Thorn as there are to the meticulous art-rap they make as Brothers Hand Mirror. ADAM CURLEY dives in. Photos by ELLIOTT LAUREN.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] EXHIBIT A. The young boy sucks on his bottom lip, holding a microphone with both hands. He’s alone on the wide studio stage now. His eyes wet with tears, he looks to the wings where his mother is standing. She’s been crying, too, having minutes before (or seconds, to us at home) dashed onto the stage to wrap the boy in her arms. Behind the boy, a giant screen simulates a wall of blue and purple LED lights. A piano backing track starts up. The boy faces the studio audience once more. Calmer now, he raises the microphone to his lips.

EXHIBIT B. A part of a body – someone else’s body – is moving rhythmically against the small of my back. It’s dark and warm and the trim that separates the worn wood floor from the carpeted stage has been breached. Up front, two dancers – one wearing a baseball jersey cropped under the armpits, the other wearing the remainder of the jersey as a skirt – are throwing themselves into moves that might be described as a combination of hip-hop and interpretive. Grant Gronewold, an elfin 25-year-old with home-job tattoos covering his hands, has moved to the raised platform at the back of the stage. He’s gripping a microphone, calling raps towards Oscar Vincente Slorach-Thorn, whose slicked, noodle-like curls bounce to the distorted beats and sparkling effects he’s triggering on his drum machine and laptop. “Summon me, summon me, summon me,” Gronewold chants. Fifty or so people have squeezed into the enclave where the duo is performing. Without exception, everyone is dancing: rocking shoulders, bending knees, dropping to the floor and enacting entirely unpractised and almost painful-looking breakdance manoeuvres. When that happens, a holler goes up, laughter. Gronewold announces the dancer into the mic: “Go Callan, go Callan!”

EXHIBIT C. Grant Gronewold has a cold.

EXHIBIT D. Inside the ground-floor Brunswick apartment Gronewold shares with his mother, he sits at a study desk with a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza and a MacBook in front of him. Slorach-Thorn sits beside him on a swivel chair, also with a laptop open, headphones on, clicking between the tracks of a song in the production program Pro Tools.

Brothers Hand Mirror are at work. It’s the second day of a weeklong schedule to record songs for a new EP. The plan is to release the EP in little under three weeks, at the last of the Thursday-night shows Brothers Hand Mirror is playing through July at Melbourne’s Cobra Bar, upstairs of the proudly battered Collingwood venue The Tote. The first of those shows was a few nights ago, when Gronewold and Slorach-Thorn oversaw so much dancing and hollering.

“They’re light, translucent things, the beats.”

The mood in the room is insular if a little giddy. Gronewold scribbles on a piece of paper, potters around, disappears to make instant coffee for himself and Slorach-Thorn. “Do you want to hear it?” Slorach-Thorn asks, removing his headphones, when Gronewold returns with the mugs. The question is to me. I’m sitting on a low table behind him, between a bookcase of keyboards and one stacked with small ceramic bowls drying on sheets of pink paper. Next to the bowls is a padded massage table on which a handwritten sign is propped. The words on the sign are squiggled, the style of printing familiar from the photocopied comic books Gronewold writes and illustrates under the name HTML Flowers. The sign reads: “THIS TABLE IS A CLEAN & STERILE TABLE. PLEASE RESPECT THAT.” On the other side of the table stands a microphone, positioned to face the corner of the room. A thin floral doona is stuck to the wall with gaffa tape to absorb vocal echoes when the duo is recording.

Slorach-Thorn hits play on the song and beats come through speakers positioned on the desk. They’re light, translucent things, the beats. On first hearing, they owe something to the toy birdcall sounds attached to so-called ‘Dirty South’ beats of recent years, and also perhaps to low-key R&B of the early 2000s. Gronewold joins in through the speakers. He pushes and pulls the curled accent he acquired in his childhood as a US citizen and resident of Illinois. The effect is a rapping voice that delivers both a childlike fragility and a baggy-pants twang via 1984 New York City, the crossroads of hardcore and hip-hop. “Maybe you don’t see me, but I’m still hee-yer,” he starts. “Maybe you don’t need me, but I’m still rill.”

Gronewold and Slorach-Thorn listen to the recording, quietly affecting backup shouts when the song peaks. “I’m still real, I’m still real,” they whisper-yell together over the track. Gronewold interrupts to say that they’re still considering whether to add the shouts on overdubs. “Oscar’s thinking about doing a real minimal Drake thing to it,” he suggests as an alternative.

The song, which takes its name from its peak refrain, is the first they’ve recorded for the EP. Today, though it’s nearly 3pm, Gronewold will record more vocal takes. Five songs will be recorded in all: three for the EP and two for a possible vinyl release later on. If Gronewold and Slorach-Thorn are stressed about reaching their goal of having everything wrapped in seven days, and out to the public in 20, they aren’t showing it. Nor are they showing any anxiety over the fact that the EP will be the first output of a new Los Angeles-based label, TAR, helmed by a DJ named Paul Preston, a.k.a. PBDY. Part of Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder crew, Preston is an occasional live DJ for the exploding Brooklyn hip-hop group The Underachievers and housemate to The Gaslamp Killer’s William Bensussen. (They live at the tip of Mount Washington, in LA’s northern hills.)

“Together they’re boys-y in that grew-up-playing-video-games manner, all character voices and hyperactive eyes.”

Then again, it isn’t immediately obvious when Gronewold and Slorach-Thorn are working and when they’re simply mucking around. Together they’re boys-y in that grew-up-playing-video-games manner, all character voices and hyperactive eyes. The line is blurred more by the fact that they work so quickly, it’s easy to miss it. After one run-through of the song with Gronewold at the mic, Gronewold sits with Slorach-Thorn to listen again. Gronewold gives a phlegmy cough. He’s still struggling with his cold.

“There ain’t never been a time when it ain’t been broke-person hunting season,” the song goes.

“I like that one,” Slorach-Thorn says when the song has played.

“Does it need to be more intimate?”

“More skeezy.”

“What does skeezy mean?”

“More like” – Slorach-Thorn makes a guttural sound from his throat – “eurgh.”

The exchange diverts to more muddled character voices and comedic jazz scatting before arriving to some kind of decision about recording.

“It should be more fun,” Slorach-Thorn nods. “It was so much fun yesterday.”

“Get stupid,” Gronewold spits.

“Get stupid, baby.”

EXHIBIT E. “This is my humanness / An essay with badly ruled margins / Lines waver and I save blame for this chipped wooden ruler / Always a study hall drooler / I don’t want to talk about my potential or my future.” Brothers Hand Mirror, ‘Our Will’.

EXHIBIT F. Grant Gronewold was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at six months of age. He was coughing and vomiting a lot, he says; the genetic disease typically affects function of the lungs and digestive system. Aside from the stress of a baby diagnosed with an as-yet-incurable illness, the financial burden on Gronewold’s family was large. In those first six months, tests and treatments amounted to a half-million-dollar debt to medical insurance agencies. By the time Gronewold was eight, his family was living in the spare room of his grandmother’s house. He shared a bed with his mum and younger brother. “We were just incredibly impoverished because of my ongoing health issues,” he says.

The promise of relief in the form of a pubic health system led the three of them to Australia when Gronewold was 10. It was in Melbourne that Gronewold started playing around in punk bands, but he had his musical education before that. Gronewold’s mum, music publicist Karen Conrad, is a dedicated rock ’n’ roll fan. Gronewold remembers Grateful Dead concerts in his earliest years. There’s a story about Karen hanging around pinball parlours in New York with the hope of running into Lou Reed. Another story, which Gronewold tells with a laugh, describes social services receiving a call from Gronewold’s grade school after a vocal performance of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’. The hallway of their Brunswick apartment is lined with framed posters of Australian rock royalty – Penny Ikinger, Charles Jenkins – personally signed to Karen.

At school in Melbourne, Gronewold routinely forewent class to sit in the music room and play around on the keyboards. “Because I was sick and the teachers all thought – and I thought as well, and my family thought – that I was going to die quite young, they just never really made me go to class,” he says. Then came the punk bands, then solo bedroom-electro-folky songs under the name Cougar Flashy. “The weight of my illness had finally occurred to me when I was about 17 and I dropped out of high school and started recording songs, just real sad shit like, ‘I’m so fucking scared that I might really die this time,’” Gronewold tells. “Or about going back into hospital, stuff like that. So I started doing that and hand-making CDs and drawing on the covers.”

“Next to Gronewold’s slice of pizza is a bottle of Creon tablets.”

Gronewold’s illness still makes it into his music, though with Brothers Hand Mirror the emphasis is almost wholly on overcoming the bad rather than fearing it. Gronewold instead uses his Tumblr account to directly address the challenges of living with cystic fibrosis. His Tumblr also documents his passion for ‘stick-and-poke’ tattooing and the development of his visual art. (In May and June his work was featured in an exhibition in Madrid, along with work by Tasmanian comic artist Simon Hanselmann, a.k.a. Girl Mountain.)

But there’s no escaping the maintenance a disease like cystic fibrosis requires. On the desk next to Gronewold’s slice of pizza is a bottle of Creon tablets, which contain enzymes to aid digestion. A gig at Fitzroy venue The Workers Club in March, one that saw Gronewold climbing and hanging from the exposed wall framework, came in the middle of a weeklong hospital stay. He had a thick bandage around his upper arm at that show. Later that same night, it turns out, nurses removed a venous catheter from Gronewold’s arm due to clotting.

A NOTE ON EXHIBIT F. In approaching this story I questioned the value of writing about Gronewold’s illness when he already capably writes about it on Tumblr and through his various art forms. I’m still somewhat uncomfortable with the power I wield here as a third-party storyteller choosing and arranging details of Gronewold’s lifelong disease. However, it became apparent to me that, if I was going to write a piece with integrity about Brothers Hand Mirror, I had to include some consideration and backgrounding of Gronewold’s illness. I chose to write about it because Gronewold’s personal life is integral to the story of Brothers Hand Mirror, but also because it is not the only story of Brothers Hand Mirror.

EXHIBIT G. Oscar Slorach-Thorn, 23, describes himself in his teen years as “agoraphobic.” He was too nervous to go to high-school parties and spent most of his time in his bedroom with a guitar. Or he was with his girlfriend.

In a roundabout way, Slorach-Thorn’s girlfriend introduced him to Gronewold. The easiest (and more entertaining) thing to do is let him tell the story.

Slorach-Thorn: “Basically some guys at a party called me up and said, ‘There’s this guy trying to kiss your girlfriend.’ And I was just like, ‘What a dick,’ or whatever. And these dudes loved to get drunk and fight, so they actually went and hit Grant … So that’s how we met. That’s how I became aware of Grant. I felt kind of bad about it, but I didn’t really…”

Gronewold: “I was being an arsehole.”

S-T: “And I thought he was an arsehole, yeah.”

G: “Consequently, from that, I developed quite a fear of parties and thought he was an arsehole, too. There’s a perfect word for … starts with an A … animosity.”

S-T: “We definitely had a lot of animosity between us. If I was with friends and I saw you, I’d be like, ‘That guy’s a dick.’”

G: “And I’d be the same about Oscar.”

S-T: “And I’d rant about you if they let me. And I think if I was going to try to create some kind of linearity from that, I think I can remember we were at some kind of party [years later] at a girl named Laura’s house and it was the first time I’d been in close proximity to Grant. And I can remember at one point having been asleep and then hearing him play guitar and singing from the next room and thinking, ‘Actually, that sounds nice,’ and just listening to him … And according to Grant, he saw me asleep…”

G: “I can’t believe you even remember this because it seems so crazy now that I look back on it.”

S-T: “He remembers me being awake and thinking I was an arsehole and then being like, ‘But he looks quite beautiful when he’s asleep.’”

G: “I was sitting there writing a letter to my friend Zoey and I was like, ‘I really dislike Oscar. I think he’s a total pretentious dick. But right now he’s asleep on the couch and he just looks like an angel.’”

It took a few more years and a few more musical projects for the pair to bury the hatchet and get around to collaborating. They circled each other in the late-2000s live scene focused on the tiny Alberts Basement label and booking project, under which Melbourne acts such as Pikelet and Great Earthquake got their starts. Those shows coaxed Slorach-Thorn out of his bedroom. He played under his own name and in the acclaimed lo-fi pop group Psuche, which spawned his other, continuing two-piece, Oscar + Martin. (Since 2011 he’s also released solo work under the name Oscar Key Sung.) At the same time, Gronewold was touring and recording as Cougar Flashy and rapping on the side.

“When we became friends, we were both in this summertime of creativity.”

In the summer of 2009-10, they were drawn together by a mutual appreciation for the Melbourne psych-pop band The Parking Lot Experiments. Slorach-Thorn had tapes of beats he’d made and nowhere to make use of them. Gronewold was looking to further develop his rapping style. “When we became friends,” Gronewold says, “we were both in this summertime of creativity and were both feeling like, ‘Fuck, we’ve wasted so much time brooding on our sadness and we’ve forgotten that you can actually have an effect on your sadness and an effect on your life by expressing joy and making people move and have a joyful response.’ And out that, I think, came Brothers Hand Mirror.”

EXHIBIT H. Brothers Hand Mirror performing their song ‘Bus Tickets’ at the Sugar Mountain festival in Melbourne, January 2013, filmed and edited by Ryan Alexander Lloyd.

EXHIBIT I. On the screen of Gronewold’s MacBook, a YouTube video plays. A young boy with tears in his eyes raises a microphone to his lips and sings. His name is Malaki and he’s a contestant on the UK reality show Britain’s Got Talent. The video, from the 2012 season of the series, is one of Gronewold’s favourite online distractions.

The boy’s voice is untrained but soulful. It trembles slightly on his second attempt at the Beyonce song ‘Listen’. Then it grows stronger. Malaki reaches a hand towards the audience, scrunches his face on a big note. The judges smile; the audience erupts in a cheer.

Gronewold hits pause, Malaki’s squinting eyes frozen on the screen. “We should see if he’ll do a collab,” Gronewold says.

Slorach-Thorn considers it. “No…”

“He’s 10, he’ll do anything.”

“If it was possible, Marcus would have done it by now,” Slorach-Thorn says, referring to Marcus Whale of the group Collarbones. Whale is known for seeking out collaborations. They laugh.

The moment passes and Brothers Hand Mirror are back to work. They’re listening to another take of ‘I’m Still Real’. “Look at you, your skin is loosening,” the song goes. “Come a time when a boy has to do something.” It’s agreed that this take, the second Gronewold has performed today, is better than the first, but there are a few points of contention.

“Maybe I’ll have to do another perfect take,” Gronewold grins.

“I can cut them,” Slorach-Thorn says, suggesting he digitally splice Gronewold’s performances together.

“But then I lose the chance to have one perfect take.” Gronewold feigns a sulk.

“Each performance requires a tightly focused attention to detail on Gronewold’s part.”

At this point it becomes apparent that Gronewold and Slorach-Thorn are paying so much mind to just two takes of the song because each performance requires a tightly focused attention to detail on Gronewold’s part. Each line is delivered in a nuanced manner. The pronunciation of repeated words is altered slightly on each utterance. Likewise, Slorach-Thorn listens intently for ways to improve the production. He makes Gronewold close his eyes as he minutely condenses and expands the beats in one section of the song. “See, can you hear that?”

For the duo’s 2012 Our Will EP, Slorach-Thorn recorded them in a warehouse, using the open space to capture natural reverb. They stood at one end of the warehouse and shouted backing vocals to a microphone set up at the other.

Slorach-Thorn looks up from his screen. “Want to know something I know about you that I bet no one else knows?” he says to Gronewold.

“What’s that?”

“When you go sss” – he makes a hissing sound – “you do it at six K’s [kilohertz].”

“Even I don’t know that about myself,” Gronewold says.

EXHIBIT J. In the final writing stage of this story, I decide it would be best to incorporate Gronewold’s own words about his illness and request his permission to use an extract from his Tumblr. He’d prefer to have me ask any questions directly, he responds. So, on a Friday afternoon, I’m back at his apartment. Out the front, a council worker in a yellow vest is testing for a leak in the gas main.

“They said, ‘He’s doing pretty well … he might make it to the age of 21 even.’”

We sit and talk for 10 minutes about the importance and difficulty of writing publicly about Gronewold’s illness and illness in general. Gronewold talks about his desire to communicate what it’s like for sick people to live in a culture that places a high value on commerce and employment, as well as his desire to empower patients in the context of doctor-patient relationships; a desire to make visible a cultural protagonist with an illness. We consider whether the point of trying to write about difficult concepts is the very fact that they’re difficult to express, and Gronewold says writing on Tumblr has been a coping mechanism for him in that way, learning how to write about ambiguous feelings. Then I arrive at the question I think I’m here to ask.

Have there been any major realisations that you’ve had about yourself and your illness?
[Draws breath] There have been some fairly new ones and then there are also some old ones that I always expected and always got warned about by social workers, stuff that I’ve just had to accept. Like I think the one in the Tumblr post you wanted to use was about having problems with the idea of just relaxing, which is true. I’ve tried very hard since I was young to make art my relaxation so I that I can always be creating something, because I think there’s this deep-seated psychological belief that I developed in childhood about feeling that I was just taking things and always had been taking things and can’t help but take things, and that I have the opposite of the Midas touch, like I just ruin things when I touch them.

So the importance of constantly creating things is tantamount to the importance of trying to stay healthy and persist through the illness because it pays people back for all the awfulness my genetic disposition has caused them. I think that’s something that’s become obvious from writing on the Tumblr and something that has affected me.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Yeah, I just can’t relax really, it sucks. But actually I’m doing better now that I’ve started keeping a private journal where I don’t write for other people. That’s helping me respect my own production of things rather than having to share it all the time, you know? I’m trying to meditate, but previously the only way I could relax was through drug use and alcohol and potentially life-endangering things at times – but that was mostly back when I thought I was going to die quite young.

That’s the other thing the Tumblr post was about, the fact that you have outlived the age doctors said you would live to…
Actually the third life expectancy.

What’s the process of that? They give you one and you outlive it and then they give you another one?
It’s a calibration of diagnosis. That first one was a year. And then my mum lived with that for quite a while before she found another doctor who said, ‘I don’t know what that doctor was trying to tell you but it’s actually 10 years.’ And so my mum was like, ‘Oh, that’s much better – not.’ So she was just as sad.

And as that went on and I got closer and closer to the age of 10, they said, ‘He’s doing pretty well, actually, he might make it to the age of 21 even.’ And then when I passed that age it was, ‘Oh, OK…’ It’s sort of like realising that maybe doctors are as fallible as anyone and that they’re … like you might get a gas plumber who tells you your pipes are leaking gas in your house and you have to have all your walls torn out and then you might have someone else come over and say, ‘Oh, no, your valve is just on.’

EXHIBIT K. A comic book presented to me by Gronewold before an interview for this story.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

EXHIBIT L. The Cobra Bar begins to clear out. Those who’ve been dancing the hardest head for jugs of water on the bar top. A few of them are members of the Always Crew, a group of friends who met at Brothers Hand Mirror gigs and now turn up to each one dressed in homemade outfits (such as the cropped baseball jersey and matching skirt) ready to give their all to the show. Gronewold calls them performance artists, a title that sounds a fair embellishment until the music starts. Give or take a member or two, the Always Crew has made it to every local Brothers Hand Mirror performance of the past year or so.

Gronewold joins me in the corner where I’m making notes. Soon, still catching his breath, he’s talking about the racial politics of rappers Kreayshawn and Iggy Azalia. Over on the stage, Slorach-Thorn hooks up his iPod and plays the latest single from Ciara. The Always Crew wanders over and dances casually in front of him.

“We’ll probably have a few YouTube breaks,” Gronewold says of the upcoming day of recording I’ve asked to sit in on. “I love watching inspiring clips of talent-show auditions. I always cry at them. Have you seen the one of that kid Malaki?”

EXHIBIT M. In the early hours of the morning, I watch a YouTube video of a scared young boy auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent. He ends the song and stands in place, his shoulders relaxed, his smile crooked but clear. After succumbing to his insecurities, revealing them to the world, the boy has tamed his fears. He’s made himself anew.

A NOTE ON EXHIBIT M. What causes us to seek out these stories of redemption again and again?

EXHIBIT N. We walk to a café down the street from Gronewold’s apartment. The woman at the coffee machine asks how the recording is going and a boy of about four stares at us through the glass shopfront as we wait outside for our takeaways, his fat palms squished to the passing traffic. Slorach-Thorn waves to him. Behind the boy, a girl about the same age clings to her mother’s leg.

“Brother and sister?” Gronewold says.

“Yeah, but all kids look like brother and sister at that age,” says Slorach-Thorn.

“I thought they sounded like Shabazz Palaces meets CocoRosie.”

We head back sipping from cardboard cups. It’s a stretch of Brunswick in which design-concerned cafés back onto overgrown vacant blocks. I ask about the deal with Paul Preston and his TAR label. There’s no contract and no money changing hands, Gronewold tells. Preston sent messages to the pair through Soundcloud, Facebook, Tumblr and Bandcamp expressing his interest in releasing their music. Later that week, Preston explains via email how he came upon the duo: “I saw HTML’s artwork randomly on a friend’s Tumblr. At the time TAR was just going to be a zine. So I was looking for artists and it ended up he made dope music too. They should be heard more; thus I’m bringing them on to do so. Help spread sound. I thought they sounded like Shabazz Palaces meets CocoRosie.”

Gronewold says they sent Preston a list of things they wouldn’t want to happen were they to release music with TAR, including being featured in magazines next to products made by companies they didn’t support. Preston writes: “It was basically like, ‘Please don’t compromise our art.’ Which I’m totally against. So I told them just do what you do and that is what I want to release.” Gronewold hopes the release, titled Picture Tape, will get Brothers Hand Mirror to the attention of other “good people” in Los Angeles.

Somehow the conversation goes back to the kids at the café and, as we round the corner to the front of the apartment block, Slorach-Thorn tells a childhood story about changing the words of 2Pac’s ‘California Love’ to include the name of his little brother. “Henry Slorach knows how to party,” he sings.

At the suggestion of a new song, Gronewold pipes up that the pair should get to work on a track they wrote the day before. It’s about their friendship, Gronewold says. “It’s real cutesy pie,” Slorach-Thorn adds.

Gronewold feels the need to explain. “We had this disagreement,” he says, “and then so we wrote this song about being BFFs.” As if in answer to this need, Slorach-Thorn leaps up the stairs of the apartment, breaking into a jazz scat, cutting Gronewold off.

“Sca-dab-a-dibidib-bop,” the song goes. “Sca-dab-a-dooboo-doo-bibidi-bop.”

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Brothers Hand Mirror’s ‘Picture Tape’ EP is out now. Adam Curley’s last piece for M+N was on Kirin J Callinan.