"Berghain, this bastion of openness... Let's see how open they are." Marshstepper member Nick Nappa is telling me about his group's debut performance in Berlin, which took place in November of 2014.

"The first thing we did was push everyone out of the way and set up a huge tarp," he says. "We flew out our friend Emil [Bognar Nasdor] who does [the punk band] Dawn Of Humans and a bunch of other art projects. He's a master of performance, one of the best. He happened to be playing a hardcore fest in London that same weekend. I asked him, 'Can we fly you out to play Berghain and then fly you back for your show,' which in itself is such an extreme thing to do. He was like, 'OK...' We flew him out and Pharmakon was ending her tour, so she was also with us and [Marshstepper member and Ascetic House founder] JS [Aurelius]'s girlfriend [Caz Wallace] was also with us that night, so we had three Marshsteppers [non-musical performers] that night."

He continues: "We all took really strong drugs before the show and we were all like, 'EAAAAAAUGH,' right when we had to play. The first thing Emil does is get naked. The main act he did was a teeter tot, where Pharmakon tied a rope around his dick. They were both leaning back so his whole weight was being held by his dick with Pharmakon pulling him the opposite way. They were spinning around and then they started painting each other. Emil had fucking razorblades, they were attached to this bouquet of roses that he was cutting himself with. I climbed up the stairs and was hanging off of the smoke machine. JS wrapped his microphone with a towel and lit it on fire, then the sound guy ran out of the booth and knocked it out of his hands."

Nick Nappa, JS Aurelius

I'm speaking to Nappa, whose long, curly hair seems immune to the force of gravity, in the home he shares with his brother, a sun-bleached, one-story house on a gravel lot near Arizona State University. The suburban street is quiet, the kitchen tidy. There are few indicators this is the de facto headquarters for the prolific, chaotic Ascetic House collective, but a few hints are scattered here and there. The coloured pentagram affixed to the front door. A box of disused masks in a back room. A weird, makeshift fire circle next to the driveway. The air conditioning hums as we flip through a mountain of cassettes in the dim living room.

Nappa refers to Tempe's heat as "psychedelic." In an email exchange with Aurelius, he elaborates. "There is a profound wisdom and madness in the desert," he writes. "How do you define 'psychedelic' beyond that? The desert is where you go to find god and it's where god goes to find themself."

In 2011, Aurelius sold all of his worldly possessions and moved into a shack in a friend's backyard. He wrote and published zines like Towards Madness and A Book To Read Other Books, which had sandpaper pages in a nod to Guy Debord's Mémoires.

A veteran DIY booker and a member of a confrontational punk band called Avon Ladies, Aurelius balanced out his philosophical and religious studies with self-taught design and hacking skills. He'd slapped the name Ascetic House on the chapbooks and an LP by the gamelan group Sungsang, which came out in 2011. When Nappa asked him to design artwork for a few low-key releases he'd put together, Aurelius stamped those with the Ascetic House logo as well. From those early days, Ascetic House demonstrated a proclivity towards chaos and loud sound. In other words, they staged and attended violent basement punk shows.

Aurelius had been playing drums in a demented punk band called Pigeon Religion for a few years and their close friend Alex Jarson helped put out a 7-inch from the group. Nappa came along on an early tour, occasionally joining the fray on woodwinds and auxiliary noise. He'd form a buttoned-up but bizarre art punk band called Acid Dawgz, which Aurelius wound up playing in. "I think this was around the time each of our bands and releases all started merging together into a more coherent vision that became Ascetic House," Aurelius says on this messy, busy period. Ryan Rousseau recruited Nappa for Destruction Unit, and both Aurelius and core Ascetic member Danny Pupillo later joined what Nappa refers to as a "crazy, negative, psychedelic punk band" that would become one of the most recognizable from the Tempe milieu. The group booked DIY tours and attempted to do justice to their name, taking drugs, turning their amps and distortion pedals to ten and seeing what happened.

Through touring and promoting local shows, the crew connected with like-minded artists in other cities, fellow freaks running their own micro-labels, booking their own shows, sleeping on each other's floors—outfits like Night People, the label out of Minnesota that pumps out tiny-run, day-glo cassettes, and Posh Isolation, the punks-turned-international-playboys from Copenhagen. "Touring in a band, you meet like 50 people a night," Nappa says. "You just get used to vibing people out really quickly and being able to make an assessment."

They also discovered techno. "The first time I went to Berlin people were like, 'You've got to go to a techno club,' and I was like, 'OK, whatever,'" Nappa says. "And then we did and I was like, 'Holy shit, this is fucking insane.' I loved Aphex Twin when I was young, that was one of the first things I was obsessed with. I listened to Slayer and Aphex Twin, but I didn't get the context of a soundsystem until I was older. I would listen to this music and I didn't know how important the sub was, the idea of body music didn't permeate when I was introduced to it as a younger person. And then in a real club I understood, 'This is what it's about.'"

Back at home in Tempe, Ascetic House's core members formed new projects applying this newfound knowledge. Alex Jarson recorded three tapes of sparse, minimal synth pop as Body Of Light. In between Destruction Unit rehearsals, Aurelius and Nappa threw their efforts into a band called Marshstepper, which combined the chaotic spirit of hardcore punk with queasy, Coil-informed industrial soundscapes. Aurelius also used the project as a platform for performance art pieces he'd written. They'd release six tapes off the bat in 2012 while immediately developing a reputation for intense, antagonistic live shows.

Over the years, I've seen Marshstepper a handful of times. The shows can go one of a few ways. Some nights, Nick and JS are fairly low-key, hunched over a table of electronics whipping up a menacing, half-time churn. At some point, Nappa screams into the mic, building up a towering wall of teeth-gnashing reverb before stalking into the audience. Sometimes, when they bring along a "marshstepper" or two, it can be far more intense. At a 2015 show opening for Lust For Youth in LA, the "marshsteppers" began stapling pages from occult texts to each other, the smell of blood in the air. A friend of mine, who had attended the show at the urging of longtime Ascetic supporter and Mount Analog cofounder Mahssa Taghinia, passed out.

For all the grim-faced theatrics—"a woman was crying in the front row at our first LA show," Nappa tells me—there's a surreal sense of humor at the heart of Marshstepper. About a year after they formed, the artist Doug Aitken tapped Marshstepper to be featured in his Station To Station project. "Three or four vans were parked in the driveway," Nappa recalls, "full of ground crews and camera crews. We were like, 'Why the fuck do these people want anything to do with us?'" Aurelius and Nappa led them on a six-hour drive over unpaved roads, deep into the desert. "We kept being like, 'No it's just a little further,' we kept doing that until they said, 'OK, we're not driving anymore.' We finally get them out there and start setting up all these sheets and lighting them all on fire. I made that song a few weeks prior just so we could do that." After the camera crew left, Marshstepper took psychedelics and jammed until the sun baked the barren wilderness.

Around that time, the label's scope oozed outwards. Destruction Unit had signed to Sacred Bones, and Ascetic House released a cassette edition of Perfect View, the 2013 album from Lust For Youth, their Copenhagen-based labelmates and friends. When Destruction Unit needed a new drummer, they immediately thought of Andrew Flores, a jazz-schooled percussionist from a destructive teenage punk band called Urban Struggles. Nappa and Aurelius showed up at the band's last show and asked Flores to join up. In addition to heading out on tour with Destruction Unit at 17, he'd also release house music on Ascetic House as Jock Club. Danny Pupillo, Flores and Urban Struggles' former singer, known as Speedboat, who often ended basement shows naked and bleeding, became regular "marshsteppers." All of them were putting out tapes on Ascetic House. Still, collectors grumbled, because you couldn't actually buy the label's releases outside of a show or the record stores the crew happened to wander into.

No Ascetic House releases have a catalogue number. The label is anti-collector. When I ask Nappa how many Ascetic House releases there are, he shrugs. (It's well over 200.) As Aurelius puts it, "All of our artistic and social growth has been documented within these public artifacts, tapes and videos and zines and discussions, it's not something we hide. However, it's also not something we have any interest in revisiting."

In January of 2014, Ascetic House responded to demand with an extended middle-finger, dropping 30 tapes in 30 days. Each cassette was only available via the Ascetic House website for one day, with no previously available information. This batch started with a cassette version of Destruction Unit's 2013 LP, Deep Trip, and included tapes from core Tempe artists Marshstepper, Body Of Light, Jock Club, Glochids, Sublimation (a project of Aurelius's) and Memorymann (Andrew Jarson, Body Of Light member and Alex's younger brother), ending with a live recording, Snakes Of The Far West, from Ascetic House jam band of sorts, Boys Of Paradise. But The January Program also marked Ascetic House's pivot to representing far-flung hubs in an interconnected global underground.

"The January Program tried to showcase one or two acts from these different contemporary scenes," Nappa explains. "It's all people from different places that we met while touring. Transfix was from Olympia, they're part of a label called Perennial. Helm, from the UK, runs Alter and plays bass in a punk band called Lowest Form. Tollund Men are from Denver, part of this label called Bleak Environment. It seems random from an outside perspective, but it's almost like a travel journal of experiences we've had and people we've met."

The January batch also included releases from Copenhagen acts Iceage and Puce Mary. "It was the biggest thing we've done," Nappa says. "I wasn't even ready for it. I didn't think we'd be selling 400 copies of one thing. It worked way better than I could have possibly expected. That's when we went to the next level, in terms of people knowing what we were all about. It was so many different scenes... These people have completely different followers with no overlap, so you get people who don't even know what techno is who are forced to check out all this stuff."

Tempe had become an unlikely nerve center of an esoteric platform for artists who either could not participate in, or chose to ignore, the commercial-minded music industry. The acts Ascetic House worked with were unbound by genre or the need to make a pristine recording. The January Program included traditional American folk from Anthony Pasquarosa, the singer of brutal hardcore punk band SQRM, under the name Crystalline Roses. Months later they'd release a live tape from LA techno legend Silent Servant. Soon thereafter came Frontier, a beautiful full-length of soundtrack-style wanderings by a band called Darto, reminiscent of Morricone or Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack.

Each batch of tapes has a distinct visual identity. Silent Servant, real name Juan Mendez, who has helped shape the sound and look of contemporary techno as a designer and artist, says the label's visual aesthetic, such as the Ascetic House logo, as well as the endless Xerox art mutations unfurling across Ascetic House J-cards, lend the label's releases a clean, immediately identifiable feel. "JS is super talented," Mendez says. "He's come into his own with that stuff. It has that feel of total creativity and self-sufficiency that is so key... All aspects coming from within."

As its influence spread, a crew prone to excess pushed the limits at home and abroad. On several occasions, Nappa filled his modest house with fog, approximating a dance club with DJ and live sets from Deep Pill and Jock Club, an Ascetic House infinity mirror and disorienting strobes. When the crew was asked to throw a club night in LA, which they called Threshold, A Night For Maladjusted Youth, they went for a similar feel.

I went to the second Threshold party, featuring Container and Vessel. I couldn't make out the people standing in front of me, much less who was on stage. They borrowed this technique from those house parties in Tempe, where the fog was a necessary social lubricant. "Here, no one would dance unless it was super foggy because everyone is awkward and anxious," Nappa says. "Once we started filling the room with fog, people were more open. We wanted to try to translate that to a bigger space."

Nappa describes the philosophy behind Threshold. "We got into techno in Berlin, the generic story. Another aspect of that is that there were so many fucking rules. I hate that shit, man. The beat can't stop. It has to sound like this, it has to pump like this, it has to be this BPM, you have to dress like this. For me, Threshold was a reaction to that."

The very first Threshold had Silent Servant and Puce Mary. "We had never done a big techno show in a city that's foreign to us," Nappa says. "It was at [historic Mid-City LA gay club] Jewel's Catch One. It was the first time I had ever been there. You could feel the history. There was a line out the door, people were waiting to get in. It was just such a surreal moment... We played to ten people in Arizona, so to be able to drive six hours and we're a hyped thing that people wait in a line for, it was such a headfuck. It still is today."

In Europe, Destruction Unit brought the likes of Varg and Puce Mary on tour as guest members. I ask Varg what it was like touring with the chaotic live band. "Unique," he laughs. "Best time of my life. We were packed in to a small van with a straight-edge driver who was not really down with us and our view of life. Playing 24 shows in 23 days, eating stolen gas station sandwiches, guessing what drugs we got traded for merch from the day before and playing way too loud."

Varg

In 2015, Red Bull Music Academy gave experimental NYC weekly Nothing Changes an outsized budget for a one-off, large-scale version to be held at Williamsburg superclub Output. The lineup included Pharmakon, Prurient, Ron Morelli, Genesis P-Orridge & Aaron Dilloway and Merzbow. Marshstepper closed out the main room. Throngs of people from the noise, experimental and techno scenes flooded the green room, which was stocked with an open bar. Varg was there. "The alcohol was out in the back room so I decided to jump the bar counter and steal two bottles of vodka," he says. "The stage manager caught me in the act and kind of chased me around the venue until I finally just jumped the stage right at the start of the Marshstepper show and just asked JS, 'What gear can I use?'" During the show Nappa hung from a $100,000 projector as security guards glowered beneath him. "Horrible show, perfect night," Varg concludes. "Friends for life!"

"You can't escape chaos, so embracing it seems the only logical thing to do. Not to be confused with embracing nihilism," Aurelius writes on the ideas underpinning the collective. "The more you immerse yourself within that chaos, the more comfortable it becomes. Eventually it's all you know, and you start to see the fundamental elements of both your practice and your being more clearly."

Marshstepper, the screaming, antagonistic id of Ascetic House, was a bold, taxing endeavor, not without consequence. The group's Berghain show happened after Downwards North America issued their excellent tape, A New Sacrament Of Penance, in 2014. Silent Servant helped bankroll travel and expenses. After the show, the bruised crew regrouped backstage.

"I had to immediately cut the rope off Emil's purple dick while we're all tripping on drugs," Nappa remembers. "He's screaming and crying in the back room, the girls are crying, we're all fucked emotionally. I'm trying to cut this thick but tight piece of rope around his dick, trying not to cut his dick open. Moments after that we had to rush him to the airport so he could get to his next show. He's covered in paint and bleeding, and we put his clothes on and send him off. Usually, after we play and we do something like that, I'm in a huge fight with the venue. I'm trying to get my gear packed and out of there before we get in too much trouble."

Marshstepper live in NYC

The group has faced other consequences of a creative life on the edge. Marshstepper made an album with Varg at a residency in Portugal, the basis for a planned tour, but Aurelius and Nappa had their hard drives stolen after a Threshold show in Detroit, with all traces of the album lost. A Destruction Unit tour of Europe was once completed, in the dead of winter, with a broken window patched over with duct tape, the group shivering through their entire trip. Neither group performs regularly anymore. Aurelius has relocated to Vancouver, though as he puts it, "my heart and soul remains in Arizona and always will."

For a collective so frequently threatening to ride off the rails, Ascetic House's influence continues to expand. Chris Hansell, a veteran of the New York City noise and punk scenes and former Tempe resident JR Nelson do a batch of tapes each year as Ascetic House East, mostly oriented towards harsher sounds from the likes of Vereker alias Grace, Ciarra Black & Jane Chardiet's Appetite project and L.I.E.S. affiliate Nick Klein.

Ascetic House made its vinyl debut in 2017 in a typical carpet-bomb style, releasing nine records from Jock Club, Soren Roi and meteoric wave band Boy Harsher, among others. They followed that up with a batch of 15 cassettes in early 2018. One of its strongest yet, this batch includes minimal organ music from Kali Malone, a noise-damaged hip-hop tape from King Vision Ultra, excellent post-punk by Jon Edifice, and a full-length of slippery, UK-flavored electronics from Roper Rider, which bears the hypnagogic charm of Actress. "This batch leans towards atmospheric, ambient-leaning electronics," Nappa says, "simply because that's what a lot of people we know are working on."

When I email with Aurelius, he's just returned from a bootstraps tour of Russia and Asia and handed in album art for the forthcoming releases from Nine Inch Nails and David August. I find some video of Aurelius's recent shows in Moscow. In one, he's playing a noise set in a modern art museum that reminds me of the underrated American sound artist Rene Hell. In another, recorded a couple days later, he's casually DJing punishing gabber to a sunrise crowd.

Aurelius runs the Ascetic Twitter, where he's as likely to post about the prison abolition movement as he is upcoming shows. Ascetic House ran a program in which tapes and zines would be sent free of charge to any inmate, or friend who requested materials on their behalf. Tempe is in Maricopa County, where "America's Toughest Sheriff" (and recent recipient of a presidential pardon from Donald Trump) Joe Arpaio built a tent city to house prisoners outside in the desert heat, instituted the nation's first juvenile and female chain gangs and attempted to humiliate prisoners by giving them pink underwear.

Ascetic House flourished in a climate hostile to radical thought. It feels like a blistering reaction to conservatism as well as a testament to the power of community. The collective, originally made up of a few friends making noise on obscure streets in Tempe, has now expanded to into a global network of like-minded individuals whose potential, Aurelius notes, has barely been tapped.

"I think there is only hope in the collective," he writes. "There is power in solidarity, power that we're only using a small percentage of. The foundations of these international networks already exist, and I think there is this hugely overlooked potential in strengthening and expanding upon them. Beyond just booking tours and festivals. These resources and systems can be applied to so much more, socially and politically. Since day one, the mission of Ascetic House has been to uplift and strengthen these networks. To create new connections and solidify them. There is a reason why state powers take so much care to disrupt and dismantle DIY communities and the spaces in which they exist. Trust me, it is not because they are worried about our safety or they care about the 15-person noise show next door to the power plant disrupting anyone's sleep. It's because of the potential we hold to support and uplift each other, to learn from each other's communities, to share resources and dialogue. It's quite revolutionary and we hardly even recognize it."

Label of the month mix

Jock Club, Nick Nappa and one of the label's primary visual architects, Collin Fletcher, compile an Ascetic House primer of barren soundscapes from the Sonoran Desert.

Tracklist /
Roper Rider - Halve
Free The Land - Movement 3
UBK - Drain
Harkonnen Sound - Delays In Time
City - Only Borders Excerpt
Din - Saturate
Celular Feel - Bends
Glochids - KPOCC No. 2
King Vision Ultra - Pain Of Mind Excerpt
Orgonon Pit - Mukoid Flex
Memorymann - Clouds
Horoscope - Common Ground
Boy Harsher - Westerners
Deep Pill - Modular Loops
Kali Malone - Fifth Worship