INTERVIEW: Experimental Folk Collective Middle Sattre Shatters Queer Shame in Powerful Album

Austin’s queer folk collective Middle Sattre shatters queer shame in their powerful upcoming album, Tendencies, out tomorrow. Frontman Hunter Prueger grew up Mormon, filled with shame and embarrassment and rage. Tendencies illustrates Prueger’s journey, from shame to reconciliation with all the difficult emotions in between. Prueger’s experience has a noise artist leads him into wildly experimental and inventive ways to push the boundaries of folk music.

Middle Sattre originated as a solo home-recording project in Salt Lake City using a cheap microphone and discarded instruments acquired from working at a middle school. Gradually, Prueger looped in collaborators from around the country, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become an eight-piece band. In early 2022, he moved to Austin, TX with S. Wallace (vocals, keyboard) and Mitch Stevens (guitar, banjo, piano). From there the band grew to include Jordan Walsh (prepared guitar, drums), Juniper Card (guitar, drums), Kai Jasmin (viola, guitar), Sophie Mathieu (cello), and James Tabata (bass). After a year of regularly gigging in Austin, they went on their first tour in July of 2023.

In our interview, Prueger describes how Middle Sattre created the soundscapes through his fragile, precious path to self-acceptance.

Explain the title of your album.
The album is called Tendencies. There used to be a song on the tracklist called “Tendencies”, but I couldn’t get the recording right, so I sort of took it apart and put it back together as a different song called “Hate Yourself to the Core”. At one point Hate Yourself to the Core was the working title of the record, but I felt like maybe it was a little too dramatic.

Then my bandmate Mitch Stevens suggested I call it Tendencies, named after the song that got cut, and I really liked that idea for a few reasons. First of all, naming an album after a song that got scrapped is kinda funny, and it’s some intriguing lore. But it also fits musically. There was a melody in the chorus of the song “Tendencies” that reappears in “Hate Yourself to the Core,” “Pouring Water” and “Getting There”. And also the demo track of that “Tendencies” got sampled in a couple other songs as well.

But most importantly, tendencies feels like such a loaded word to me. It’s often used by certain folks as this disingenuous code word for queerness without actually saying the word gay. It’s like, “We have to talk about your (homosexual) tendencies.” It immediately suggests that something is wrong. Like, “You’re not gay, you just have this propensity that can be course-corrected, and it’s not an identity – it’s a behavior.” This record sort of puts a spotlight on a particular type of shame that so many queer people know far too well and so many straight people might not have even considered, and I feel like Tendencies encapsulates that in a single word.

What words did you need to hear as you explored your identity?
There’s this scene in the 2008 film Milk where Harvey Milk tells Cleve Jones, “You’re going to meet the most extraordinary men, the sexiest, funniest, brightest men. You’re gonna meet so many of them, fall in love with so many of them you won’t know until the end of your life which ones were your greatest lovers and which were your greatest friends.”

That was something I needed to hear, even if I was hearing it a little vicariously. To be told that I was going to meet some great guy. At one point while I was recording the song “Pouring Water” I placed the audio from that scene over the outro. I kinda wish I kept it, or at least put it somewhere in the album.

Tell us about the first song you wrote.
I’ve been a composer for a while now. I first started writing music on this little NES game called Mario Paint Composer. But I had never really tried to be a songwriter until one night in 2019 when I was walking around outside listening to Perfume Genius. His music deals with a lot of intrapersonal queer issues, and I kinda stopped at one point and thought, “I have stories like these. I can set them to music. Is that all it takes to be a songwriter?”

So I took off my headphones and started setting one of my stories to a melody I had written a few years prior, still just walking around at night, and I realized that the act of fitting lyrics into a melody, and making sure that the emphasis of each word matched the accents in the melody – it sort of forced me to examine this experience in a completely new way that I found very therapeutic. It definitely opened the
floodgates.

I think this record owes a lot to Perfume Genius. That first song sort of laid the thematic groundwork for the songs that eventually became this album. Trying to convey these complex, conflicting emotions about queerness and religion and identity through a sort of plainspoken storytelling. I definitely use more words than he does, though, haha.

What’s a recent release you cannot stop listening to?
If I can name a few…

• Been really loving this new Daniel Bachman album When the Roses Come Again. I could see a
  future Middle Sattre album sounding something like that.
• Loukeman’s Sd-2 has been soundtracking my mornings, which is such a fun and happy way to
  start the day.
• Large Brush Collection just put out this awesome record called Off Center that I’ve been
  listening to like every day while I make dinner.
• And Hayden Pedigo’s The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored has been on repeat pretty much since
  it dropped last summer.

Who would you love to collaborate with? Why?
Oh jeez I would love to help produce something for FKA twigs. It would be somewhat of a full-circle moment for me. Her album MAGDALENE was one of the biggest inspirations for Tendencies. When it came out I was listening to it a lot and at some point I thought, “I want to do to folk music what FKA twigs is doing to pop music,” which was pretty much the sonic origin of this entire project.

She uses all these awesome, mind-bending sounds that make you go, “How did you make that? What am I even listening to right now?” While recording this album, I was constantly asking myself, “How can I push this sound into something weirder? How can I distort this further?” I think that manifests mostly in songs like, “Imperfect Hands,” where I recorded like twenty tracks of myself attacking my banjo and guitar with fidget spinners, and it makes this raucous, beautiful, noisy mess. Or in “Corrupted” where I fed a strummed guitar track into a granular synthesizer in Max/MSP, and it turned it into these jangly vibrating chords that I think sounds like a cross between a guitar and a busted air conditioner.

It would be such a dream to collaborate with her. I can only hope our respective approaches to music-making would coalesce in a beautiful way.

Tendencies will be available everywhere tomorrow.

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