Today we’d like to introduce you to Bryan Phillips.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
The Stories of both All Beat Up and Goal Achiever are very much intertwined. For its part, All Beat Up is a DIY punk band that I started with a few of my closest friends – Darrel Wood (D.wrex), Damian Burgin, and Jeremy Garcia back in 2014. The whole band lives together in a small house in the mid-city area and has for the past five years. Our main focus as a band is to make consistently interesting choices that surprise or at least entertain those who have a pallet for heavy, fast music.
As far as our trajectory we owe it all to the San Diego city punk community- particularly bands like Therapy, BobXRoss, Bayonet, New Crimes and The Gay Agenda. There’s a real punk rock renaissance happening in San Diego dive bars and record stores right now that rivals the scenes of other big name cities.
What separates us as a community I think is how well we treat each other. All these bands and more I haven’t mentioned are all friends- like real friends. We support each other. There’s no shit-talking or posturing, no jockeying for position – just good people making hard music. Take Mike from Bayonet, he helped us make tapes for our split record with BobXross for free and Sean from Therapy helped us get connections to go on tour this upcoming spring. It’s a special thing we’ve got going on here. I’m glad All Beat Up gets to be a part of it and has something to contribute to it- which leads us to Goal Achiever.
Goal Achiever is a DIY recording studio that empowers working class musicians by giving them free access to recording time. When a band or artist puts out music though Goal Achiever that music is fully theirs to distribute how they please. We don’t charge them anything for our time nor the use of our space and we never will. I run GA out of the home I share with my bandmates and a dog named Spaghetti.
GA was born out of necessity. When it came time to record All Beat Up, I realized pretty quickly that this was going to be insurmountably expensive. I, like many other creative people, work in a restaurant. It’s not glamorous- but then day jobs usually aren’t. I can cover my bills and all but recording at a studio without label representation is not cheap. So I bought everything I needed to record one item at a time and used the internet to teach myself the foundations of record production.
Luckily for me two years into my self-taught recording journey I stumbled upon a teacher. Deb Reeves, a neighbor from down the block, heard All Beat Up practicing in the house one afternoon while walking her dog and decided to knock on our door to see what we were about. She teaches music recording and production at a local college and briefly took me under her wing to teach me the skills I needed to feel confident in my recorded work.
After her mentorship I mustered up the courage to launch Goal Achiever and since we’ve helped five bands release music that otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to afford to make and we plan to keep expanding GA over this upcoming year.
It’s people like Deb and Mike and Sean that inspired me really pursue GA not as a means to make money but as a means to make art and community.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
If you’re always running up a hill, eventually it starts to feel normal. That is to say that I’m fairly used to things not going according to plan. There are many moving parts that make a record, mechanical and biological, and they tend to break. These can include computer crashes, scheduling mishaps, broken hardware, miscommunication, and the emotional and physical exhaustion of putting out into the world your best work.
All Beat Up being my primary creative outlet is equal parts torture and delight. Punk rock, philosophically and musically, is actually my favorite thing that has ever been. It can give you the answers to life’s toughest questions at break-neck speed should you learn to listen- so participating in the making of punk rock is more than a dream come true for me. That said, I’m a tough critic. I’ve always been particular about what I like and dislike so it’s really hard for me to be content with any of my work.
The thing about punk, specifically hardcore, is it can be pretty formulaic. It’s easy to write a rippin’-ass punk song if you’re familiar with the genre tropes. That’s not to say that I dislike those tropes, indeed they’re the soundtrack to my entire life. It’s that form should, in my opinion, never be more than an extension of content. Content necessitates form.
In poetry for example- if you’re going to write a sonnet, it should be because that poem NEEDS to be a sonnet. There should be no other form that can more effectively communicate the ideas of that poem than a sonnet, lest your sonnet be inauthentic and hollow.
In that same way the well-established tropes and formulas of hardcore punk should be used only when they feel most necessary to convey the ideas or emotions of the song. This musical authenticity is what we strive to achieve in All Beat Up and it’s not an easy way to write songs but it is the way we do things.
If you think that I’m putting too much creative pressure on the making of relatively simple music, you’re probably right.
And if you think I have my head up my ass, you’re probably right about that too. But it’s my head and my ass and I’ll do with them as I please.
Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
I’d say I’m most proud of the relationships we’ve made through All Beat Up and Goal Achiever. Seeing the camaraderie between bands and contributing to the growth of an artistic community fill us with hope and purpose.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
The future for All Beat Up is going on our first tour as a band. In late April and early May, we’ll be performing up and down the Pacific Coast for two weeks. It is sure to be a good time seeing our far away friends and making some new ones. We’re also putting out another split record, this time with local punk rippers New Crimes.
For Goal Achiever, the path is less set but we still charge forward with a clear purpose. Keep helping good people make good music. You can look forward to the release of some compilation records we have in the making as well as new merchandise in the near future.
Contact Info:
- Website: goalachieverrecords.com and allbeatup.bandcamp.com
- Instagram: @all_beat_up and @goalachiever_
- Facebook: Facebook is for the dinosaurs
Image Credit:
Oscar Aranda, Nathan Reinicke
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