When you get two music obsessives together who both have very eclectic tastes, the conversation might go off the rails. The chat might splinter in different directions. As always, we’re going to laugh. You know, it’s just music heads talking.
Vera Small (GorpoPap) is a wizard. Talking to her in February, just prior to her new album (Reach 4 The Stars) dropping, we started on electronic stigma, and went down the hole with references to psychedelic rock, Throbbing Gristle, Mother Earth’s Plantasia, jazz, Snarky Puppy, Lightning Bolt, FIDLAR, Pissed Jeans, Philly shoegaze, Alex G, Chemical, Sonic Youth, Boo Boo Spoiler, Nine of Wands (Wrench), Burial, Xiu Xiu, Sun Ra, Webmistress, Surgeon, Jeff Mills, Four Tet, Maurice Fulton (Syclops), Lust Orchid (Small’s band), and Sophie.
There’s so much music to be influenced by in modern times; our access seems endless. We can’t shut the fuck up about it. And we shouldn’t. Let’s keep talking and creating until the wheels fall off. I mean, the wheels seem to have fallen off.
“We’re at a very interesting spot,” Small says about the current state of music; she lives in Philadelphia. “I’m very optimistic about music, and I think there’s always something great and new coming out…you just have to know what’s going on. Production-wise, I am really into footwork and classic techno, and I think that stuff is always doing well.”
The same can’t be said for world affairs. We’re at war, and most of it makes no sense. Apparently, insiders are betting millions on military actions.
Music is a huge emotional release for many of us in this world full of negativity, stupidity, and death. We use music to cope; feelings of hopelessness and anger abound.
It’s not that I don’t want to report on political turmoil or this economic wasteland; it’s just not appealing. I’m way more suited to report on music of many kinds, talking to the artists who are creating the music to cope with. They make cool art, and people need to know about it.
So…where was I?
GorpoPap, named after a name Small made up while playing a Jackbox game in college, has 17 releases since 2018. She’s well known in the Philadelphia scene, and Lust Orchid seems to be going in a heady direction.
The unfortunate thing was that while Small and I were chatting, her apartment building had burned down the previous week. She threw it out to me in a nonchalant way, and we stopped…wait, what the fuck?
She lost all her records and CDs [she’s almost laughing, but this is terrible]. She lost a bunch of clothes and whatever else people usually have in their apartments. But she retained most of her music gear because she shares a music space with someone in Grays Ferry, Philadelphia. Someone donated a computer to her. Reach 4 The Stars was about to come out. Something bad versus something good.
“A fire started nearby, our apartment building caught the flames, and they couldn’t contain it,” says Small; the Northeast was in a deep freeze at the time. “When they were spraying the fire down, there were icicles everywhere. It was insane. It’s maybe the craziest week of my life, not gonna lie. I made a GoFundMe, and I have some money coming my way. That’s really great. I have a bunch of friends giving me clothes.”
Small turned out all right. She got another apartment. She kept DJ’ing. She had a lot of gear on her the night of the fire because she was playing a warehouse party with Webmistress (from Los Angeles). Great night…until she found out her apartment was burning down.
Her banjo was safe. Some other instruments were safe. After the fire, she was in shock, but she eventually played music; that’s what she does. She released a good techno dance album.
When Clandestine (an amazing label service!) told me about GorpoPap, a reference that really stood out to me was Surgeon, who might be the best techno artist in the world. Small and I both love Surgeon’s dark techno; there’s tons of it to hear. His dirges are sick wormholes. He had a 2025 album, Shell ~ Wave, that I somehow missed, but eventually heard. Smashingly mysterious.
“He was dropping 90s deep cuts, and I was freaking out,” Small said of witnessing Surgeon last year in Detroit at Movement Fest. “There’s this mix by Jeff Mills, live at Liquid Room in Tokyo; he’s dropping a ton of Surgeon on it. I’m heavily influenced by Surgeon. When I first heard it, I was on hardwax.com, and there was a whole Surgeon section. I clicked it and realized that he is fucking crazy.”
His name is Anthony Child. He’s from the United Kingdom. He’s a pioneer of sound. His releases go all the way back to 1994. He has some odd ties to Naplam Death.
“It’s very atonal, very minimal, not a lot of percussion, but the patches [saved sound preset on a synthesizer or sampler] act as the percussion,” Small says of Surgeon. “The abstraction of moving energy around—putting things in, taking them away—allows the beat to express itself and jump out. He’s really good for blending and sitting in.”
Some of GorpoPap’s music is complex, some is 4 To The Floor by messing with patches. Most of it is recorded live with three stereo tracks, and all the drums are in one. The fourth track on Reach 4 The Stars, “Rubber Bass,” might be six different tracks; the drum tracks are from a Korg Electribe 2 drum machine sampler. The zap noises are from a Moog DFAM. Small’s Moog Werksttat is the first synthesizer she ever had (2014).
Small throws together basslines, zaps, drums, and a “mini-log of chords,” hits play, and records. She does a take. “Once I have it all in there, I will chop it up and arrange it. It is a lot of audio. I don’t do much MIDI arranging [manipulating music notes]. I edit the fuck out of the tracks once it’s in there, but I don’t get deep with audio MIDI stuff.”
Well, that’s good. Manipulation can be bad.
“I wasn’t moving quickly with this album; I wasn’t thinking that an album was being made,” says Small. “I was making tracks and experimenting, and if I really liked a track, I would send it to friends and ask what they thought, and they would DJ it and maybe say it was awesome. Or I would tease the tracks on Twitter, asking what people think, and maybe they would want it sent over.”
Slowly testing the tracks, gauging the crowd. What’s the inner turmoil of being satisfied with music that might become an album?
Small laughs, saying that electronic musicians usually put all the pieces together themselves, they don’t have a band of opinions around them. “I was in bands for a while in college, but I would never stick around for very long; I was always doing a solo thing, I knew I could always count on myself, trust my gut. Now, making the beats is easier. I know what I want, I know exactly what to do, just following it like that. But singing and writing lyrics, I can’t bounce it off other people; it’s all based on what I want. I try to ask myself if I am happy with this, is it hitting me the right way?”
There’s no rush for Small to release music. She doesn’t feel as if anyone is counting on her to release anything. She waits until she’s happy with what she’s got. She’s a drummer, too, and she’s toying with some house techno ideas. She’s looking something up after I mention the possibility of manipulation of live instrumentation into electronic music, searching for an artist who appeared on a Four Tet DJ-Kicks set. His name is Maurice Fulton, also known as Syclops. He used to be on the DFA label.
GorpoPap has a cover of “Helsabot” by Xiu Xiu, which came out in September of 2022. Originally, “Helsabot” was the opening track on Fag Patrol (2005). Helsabot is a hard-working, alcohol-fueled robot that is all you’re not. Xiu Xiu released Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 in January, and Small and I agreed that it is a very good covers collection. Xiu Xiu just announced Eraserhead Xiu Xiu, a tribute project to David Lynch.
“Yes, I have been following Xiu Xiu for a long time, and I have been hearing those covers for a while,” says Small. “It’s fucking awesome. They’re very good. I am hugely influenced by their sound design, just using crazy noises, being like ‘fuck it,’ you know? Their synth choices are awesome, really out there, but they make it work. They have really good taste in drum machines—it’s insane.”
Small knows that GorpoPap is a silly name that makes no sense; it’s as if she were making her own Apples to Apples. “I was listening to a lot of Sun Ra at the time, and really into his whole mythology of being from Saturn: ‘I am an alien from Earth.’ I think that…pulling yourself away from the identity of… separating the artist and the self a little bit to create this myth around you. Looking back, that was my way of trying to understand myself outside of myself because I didn’t know that I was trans[gender]…that was very…I was trying to get away from who I was, and I think making music was very much an escape. I was wearing a lot of masks on my album covers.”
GorpoPap was a transition, a persona outside of the self. Androgynous nonsense, maybe. Music is an escape, but also a career path. Maybe they get to make a living out of escaping.
“Everyone is working their ass off out here,” Small says. “Or they’re not, I dunno. There’s not one way that I made all of these songs. A lot of them are really simple [she doesn’t have the project files anymore; they were lost in the fire], which is a huge bummer. I lost my computers.”
Old school rock ‘n’ roll heads need to see people playing actual instruments in a band [laughs]. Rock ‘n’ roll is probably our #1 genre choice, especially the psychedelic kind. However, over the past decade, I have snuck my ears through plenty of frenetic electronic music.
“Psych-rock is probably as trippy as it gets,” Small says. “A lot of people my age were listening to trance [she’s 28] on YouTube in the late 2000s, early Facebook era. I have played drums since eight years old, and if we fast-forward, I started getting into experimental music around the time that I was getting into synths. That was my introduction to electronic, in a way, and industrial stuff—Throbbing Gristle, Plantasia moog music, and jazz. I am rooted in avant jazz.”
Most likely, rock orientation started with the jazz improvisation of the 1950s and 1960s. If you don’t appreciate jazz, then…I don’t know…Small studied music technology in college, and a lot of other students were not into jazz at all. Maybe some contemporary jazz, or Snarky Puppy, bands that weren’t really her thing.
We’re not familiar with much jazz of the 1980s. Small won’t get into classical unless it’s very dramatic and dark because of the scale of it being interesting. See: Mozart or Mahler.
Speaking of Throbbing Gristle, it took Small a long time to realize their effect on the whole scene. “I was really into punk at a moment—extreme noise stuff that was kind of weird and scary, but not a scary, intense noise wall—kind of creaky and spacey.”
Lightning Bolt?
“Yes,” Small says. “Also, I was obsessed with FIDLAR and garage rock for a time. I really liked their first album. They still make music, apparently.”
Small kept agreeing with almost everything that I said, saying either “for sure” or “totally.” Pissed Jeans is my favorite Philadelphia band, and Small follows, saying, “for sure.”
Philadelphia is having an intense shoegaze moment right now, Small says. “Before the pandemic, everywhere you looked, it was emo and pop punk. That was the default. During the pandemic, with the shows stopping, there were some bands that had more of a blow up, and that’s where the shoegaze came up. Now, they think of Alex G, or grungy shoegaze in Philly. But there’s still a lot of pop punk and emo.”
Chemical is a favorite of Small’s currently. She’s biased; the drummer of Chemical is the drummer in her band. Chemical’s self-titled release came out in August of 2025. The guitarist uses a lot of chorus and crazy tuning, a Sonic Youth type of thing. The tone reminds of Nirvana.
“There’s a lot of different circles, and they overlap a lot,” says Small of the Philly scene. “As far as DJ’ing, I think of it as two different scenes: the underground with raves, more experimental techno, and then the DJ scene in the clubs. They overlap, but are separate, too. You either want to get heads in the door, or you’re throwing a rave in the park. We’ve got our friends, a generator, and the people come through. You can’t really expect money when there are 10 different ways to walk in. It’s throwing a party for the sake of it.”
Electronic Dance Music versus Intellectual Dance Music?
“I don’t know about any EDM in Philly, but there’s the ‘club’ sound,” Small says. “Philly Club is a classic sound, but there’s also a lot of house, techno, and pop. JEWELSSEA and Alexa Ultra are really good DJs who are pushing sound, and I recently did a party with Nine of Wands.”
See, I am starting to get lost. There’s so much fucking music. Nine of Wands used to be named Wrench. Everything became a playlist, but studio albums still exist. We want to listen to those, not some stupid mood playlist full of shit. GorpoPap is not on TIDAL, it’s not on Spotify. It’s on Bandcamp.
“It’s not really a political thing for me, I just didn’t pay the fees to get on the other streaming services,” says Small. “Fuck it. Obviously, Spotify sucks.”
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