The hardest part of researching Radio Silence wasn’t flying across the country and digging through boxes of old photos belonging complete strangers. Often times it was the most difficult to coordinate with your friends down the street. They weren’t going anywhere, we weren’t going anywhere and it gets really easy to just put things off until it’s too late. Unfortunately due to conflicting schedules this was the case with Mark Ryan, we would have loved to have the Minor Threat set list he saved from Gildersleeve’s or countless other artifacts in Radio Silence along with his commentary but our signals kept getting crossed.
We might have missed out on some great visuals but this past weekend I got a text message from Mark mentioning that he found an mp3 from a project he recorded with Sammy Siegler and some friends in 1996. I remember Mark telling me about the track when I first started playing with him and Dean Baltulonis around 2003 in what would become their current band Foreign Islands. I was really curious as to what it sounded like because the line up sounded sick and there was a genuine enthusiasum that radiated when he detailed the circumstances that led to the recording of the track. Being a huge Supertouch fan I always felt like the band gave us all a cliff-hanger ending. The Earth Is Flat was a groundbreaking Lp that ushered in a new era for hardcore and for Supertouch, it sounded like a prequel to a new chapter that would continue to evolve and expand. Years passed and Supertouch continued to play new material live, several songs became familar to everyone who packed matinees but new recordings never surfaced. When Better appeared on the Anti-Matter Compilation it appeared that Supertouch was ready to climb back aboard but to make a long story short, shit happens. Luckily the band gave us an incredible catalog, plenty of epic shows and some memorable visuals which are still emulated and embraced today.
We might have gotten that second Supertouch LP but we do have a recently unearthed track with Mark singing. Just These Days boasts a great vocal line over an upbeat track with the perfect balance of crunch, melody and dissonance….and they belted it out in ONE fucking night!
Here’s the info in Mark’s words along with the long lost mp3 that most of us never knew existed:
Ravi Dhar and I were talking about starting a band around 1996. One of Ravi’s friends asked if he had a band because they were casting for a group for a film. Ravi said yes and I called Sammy, Antonio Ballatore (Who used to run Z-bar on ave A and later worked for photographer David LaChappelle ) and Shane Vetter (Samsara) and asked them if they could meet up in an hour and write and record a song.
It felt a little crazy and rushed but everyone was like, fuck it alright. We rented a room to practice then set up time with Davide Gentile (Orange 9mm) and spent all night recording as it needed to be done first thing following morning. Here’s what we came up with.
Sammy, Ravi and I did a couple of rehearsals after this because we liked it so much but Sammy had his hands full with Civ. We tried another drummer but it didn’t work because Sammy killed it on this track and we wound up just bailing on it. We would have loved to have put out an 7″.
Here’s the track titled
Just These Days.
Photo: Supertouch, The Anthrax, Norwalk, Connecticut, 1989; By Sean Cronan
