PipemanRadio Interviews Tumbleweed Dealer

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Starting off in 2012 as a one-man digital adventure to explore Seb Painchaud’s interest in smoky, bluesy, haze-laden instrumental music, the project quickly grew into a melting pot of stoner, psychedelic, post, and math rock—an infrasonic concoction that was brewed to complement a potent mushroom trip across the desert. By 2014, the band’s sophomore release, Western Horror, leaned into a cinematic direction, immersing listeners into a wordless narrative that probably belongs best to a Tarantino film.

The following release of 2016, TDIII - Tokes, Hatred & Caffeine, saw the group tightening its compositions, resulting in an album that featured a total of 12 tracks over the span of 40-minutes. Gone were the long, drawn-out build ups! Tumbleweed Dealer began to favor quickly undulating cascades of harmonies, all of which were played against a rhythm section that openly showcased a vast array of musical influences.

While the band never actively toured, they played the occasional show. Scarce as they were, the band traveled as far as California to share their mastery of the loop station and to recreate their soundscapes in a live setting while commanding the stage with the authority of the seasoned extreme metal veterans that made up their ranks at the time.

By the time composition started for an eventual fourth album, the group’s live lineup had dissolved. What started as a simple decision to ward off the need to write music that can be recreated in front of a live audience quickly grew into what Sebastien coined a “bucket list album”, a shining new opportunity to indulge in every adventurous musical thought in a way that was free from any concern about the feasibility of its pieces. Pairing themselves with an unlikely drummer early in the creative process, Angelo Fata from local hardcore bands Jesus Horse and Hopeless Youth, group mainstays Painchaud and Joubaud went on to craft songs that merged oppositional forces of vintage sounds with modern ideas. Mellotrons, Hammonds, and Rhodes were added on top of jazzy, funky riffs that managed to maintain the group’s melodic pallet in a way that pushed it further. If there was an elevator pitch to sum this new direction up, it might go something like this: “What if Toe and Camel got high together in a swamp?”

More than 8 years in the making, Tumbleweed Dealer’s main driving force, Seb Painchaud, not only thinks that this album reflects a life-spanning culmination of his experience as a musician and composer, but also of his life as an avid musical fan with an obsessive need to discover new artists, genres, and sounds. Though he has released records with various projects since his early twenties, Dark Green is the album he has been working on his whole life, whether he knew it or not.