“We’re deep in this labyrinth, trying to find our way out”: NOWHERE2RUN reveal shattering new EP What Did You Do?

Jami Morgan is still a hard creative on whom to get a handle. Stepping into the colourful surrounds of an office affectionately referred to as the frontman’s “weird serial killer art den”, in the house he shares with his wife in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we are reminded of the shapeshifting wild light of The Above, his last album with Code Orange. A space decorated with scalpel-carved collage art, experimental bio-organic textures and a skeleton board tying together ideas for a short film, it is the physical manifestation of his “art brain”: proof of a mercurial imagination ready to run riot.

But NOWHERE2RUN is a project still based firmly in the shadows. An all-encompassing collaboration with longtime creative partner Eric ‘Shade’ Balderose, it has expanded, like a sort of reverse-Nine Inch Nails, from music and video production for other acts, to the collaborative composition of film scores, live ‘bloodraves’, and eventually original music on its own terms.

The industrial/techno/rap hybrid sits somewhere between the pumping synthwave of Carpenter Brut or Perturbator and the grimy nightmare hip-hop of Ho99o9 and Mimi Barks. Ho99o9 actually feature on Little Prince, the fourth track of NOWHERE2RUN’s What Did You Do? EP, which drops on Halloween. As Jami explains, however, they’re a small part of a sprawling narrative that’s still just beginning to unfold…

Texture has always been a fascination for you, Jami. Is it fair to characterise NOWHERE2RUN as a cold, dark sonic space?
“It feels like ultimate blackness to me. Like a void. When I think about NOWHERE2RUN, I think about travelling down the lost highway. We have a producer tag, which also appears as a motif on the record which came from another artist we’re working with: ‘We are all lost in this maze…’ That stuck with me. It’s a mystery, a kind of noir, that reflects the last couple of years where it feels like we’ve been trying to ‘solve’ something. We’re deep in this labyrinth, trying to find our way out.”

Which artist came up with that tag?
“We’ve worked with a bunch of artists over the last couple of years to the extent that we’ve almost got our own little stable. One of those is an artsy French rapper called EREX who also plays keyboards in the band for Jehnny Beth. We produced an EP for her with the legendary producer Mirwais, who’s worked with people like Madonna in the past. We asked her to do a verse on our record and when I heard that I immediately texted her, ‘That’s the tag!’”

And you don’t talk about the origin of the NOWHERE2RUN title…
“That’s a deep, hidden secret that Shade and I have promised never to divulge. It started maybe a decade ago. I’ve always loved rap and I thought it would be cool to have a producer tag, to utilise that in this rock world. You hear that in the Code stuff from right after Forever – [2018’s] The Hurt Will Go On EP onwards. Sometimes it’s a tag. Sometimes it’s in the lyrics. Then it became the title for our producer project. Now it’s sort of morphed into this artist project.”

You’ve always talked about your love for Nine Inch Nails. Is it fair to characterise NOWHERE2RUN as your version of the more expansive creative approach that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have taken in recent years?
“I definitely see that. We did a band that I’m really proud of, but the evolution from that has been something more modern. What we’ve been doing is like a hybrid between producers and a DJ and a band. Blending those things together has always been what we’ve wanted to do, but this is more like we’re trying to build a town rather than just a house. There’s a cool story to tell, personally, with all the things that have happened, but also aesthetically. It’s kind of hard to describe right now but it makes sense to me. It’s an art entity that now has this head in the artist project. I like the idea that we don’t have to be compartmentalised. There needs to be synergy and not just a big pile of slop. That’s why we created our symbol that looks like something between the bat symbol, a cybersigil and some foreign language. We call it ‘The Bar’. We spent a lot of time creating something that we could stamp on everything forever. Another tag is that, ‘It’s not just a signal, it’s a warning!’ It’s about being that omnipresent entity. We’re inspired by Batman and Kurosawa, Cure and Minority Report. How do we blend all these things we like into a new artistic endeavour? That’s why What Did You Do? feels like our first EP. We’ve put out music previously, but it didn’t have the same sense of narrative soul. This is more like the first stage in a story that I want to tell.”

So where does 2024’s Slivering The Senses fit in?
“Those singles are really other people’s projects that we’re collaborators on. We work with and curate other things like Siiickbrain, who was one of the first artists we signed to our NOWHERE Recordings label and she’ll have her own record coming out next year. We did a rap record with Sadsitik, too. He allowed us to produce the whole project, make the artwork and do the videos, but that’s still very much his record in his voice. EREX has her record coming out, too. It’s like we’re building out our own little cast of characters: people who are talented and who we believe in. We’re putting a video out with this EP to stress that this is really the figurehead for it all.”

Ant In The Afterbirth, your collaboration with Loathe, felt like a big deal, too…
“Loathe are awesome guys. At a time when a lot of people disappeared, they were still there. They were like, ‘Yeah dude, we’re gonna do your shit. We haven’t done a song in years and the first is going to be this weird thing we feature on.’ I love those guys and I’m really excited about what they’ve got coming up. I’ve had a lot of bitterness over the years where you do X, Y and Z and a lot of it isn’t returned. But those guys stepped up. They believe in us and I really believe in them. It filled a hole in my heart to see that those things do get returned. And whenever they come calling, we’ll be there for them in whatever way they need!”

Motives, the first track on What Did You Do? begins with a laundry list of ‘fear, lust, salvation, love, loneliness, delusion’. What are the overwhelming emotions on this EP?
“Pain, for sure. There’s always a narrative, but it’s always very personal. Each of our records have been about where I’m at at that point. With [Code Orange] I would sometimes write from the perspective of other people in the group. But here I circled back to somewhere that I hadn’t been in a really long time. Not to be dramatic, but it’s a really dark place. In life you can lose a lot quick. That’s how I’ve felt. When we first came to making this music, I didn’t feel like we were sitting down to write about the period [we’ve just gone through] but as it came together, as much as it doesn’t tell the whole story, it does open the door. There has been a lot of mystery about what’s been going on with us the last few years and it felt like the best way to reflect that was a record that’s a mystery. It’s art imitating life. I’d like to think there’s no bitterness in that, just rebirth, coming back into the dark, finding yourself back in the void and trying to find your way out. With fewer people involved here, it’s much more personal.”

It’s interesting to see this as a circling-back to the emotional basis music that you’ve made before, which felt very different. Which of your earlier music does it chime with? Does it fulfil the same purpose?
“When I was a teenager, before [Code Orange] got going, I was really depressed. I used the band to mask that. I used the band to answer to a lot of things I wanted to ignore, a lot of negative feelings. As I knew it would, the last Code Orange record winds up on the island of self, and when you’re faced with [creating] without this shield of all these people you have to dig deep into who you are. I used to say in interviews that it always felt like it was going up and up, and when it turned down we would know. In many ways, that’s what happened, but in a different way than I expected. I reverted back to being a teenager, a scared little man. I needed to become a real man.
“Musically, this is very different. It’s not a metal record. There’s screaming. There is guitar on there, and there will continue to be more. But it’s hard to pinpoint with industrial elements, techno elements and hip-hop elements. We’re still only six or seven shows in – Shade is up there with me, and [Code Orange guitarist] Dominic [Landolina] – but with every show it’s getting better.”

You’ve characterised your live shows as ‘bloodraves’. How do they fit into this broader vision?
“The bloodraves really brought me back to life. They’re basically our touring mechanism at the moment: a rave where we do a NOWHERE2RUN set in the middle of it. We throw the rave. We set up the rave. We book all the acts. We book all the dancers. There are no agents or crew so we grind our asses off. We’re in there at, like, 2pm and we’re not out ’til 5am! But that’s how you make it cool. Someone tried to charge us $1,000 to rent cage platforms for the go-go dancers, so Shade just built some of our own. It feels like the people coming don’t really even know who we are, but they seem to really like it. We just did two in Nashville and Louisville and we’ve booked Pittsburgh on Halloween. Hopefully we’ll get to do something in the UK next year. It’s basically about evoking the nightclub vibe of the movies we like: The Matrix, Blade, Enter The Void, but with added guitar. We’ve had people from 3TEETH and Show Me The Body play. Shaun Lopez from ††† (Crosses) was at one, and Kittie even did a DJ set in Louisville!”

Is this music enough to satisfy you now, or is it likely to come back to encompass hardcore?
“I’ve never been traditionally ‘hardcore’. I don’t even know what that really means at this point. I would definitely do another hardcore/metal band, something more back to basics, but it would probably have to be with Dom and those guys. In terms of working with Code Orange, I don’t really see it happening in this moment. Dominic is with us a lot, but he’s also making wrestling gear for companies like WWE, which is sick. Joe [Goldman, Code Orange bassist] has a baby and is at plumbing school right now. At some point, Code Orange will exist again, but it will be different.”

Speaking of wrestling, you’ve continued the link with that world, collaborating with Killer Kross on a new theme and contributed to projects with The Wyatt Sicks. Backxwash even throws in a WWE reference during their feature on Home Addresses. To what extent does that, along with more high-brow influences from Kurosawa to Nine Inch Nails, demonstrate how this is a continuation in the same universe that you’ve inhabited before?
“Not to be egotistical, just to tell the truth, but the world that we created is my world. And that’s probably going to continue. That’s not to say that there weren’t amazing contributions, or that what we did before could ever have been done without those, but every word was my word, every piece of art was my art, those things are my things. At the end of the day, that’s why I took everything so hard while [the others] didn’t. Part of that is because they’re stronger than me, part of it is they know [it’s closer to me]. A lot of my choices on this new project have been based on [my bandmates’] thoughts and feelings, because they’ve given me the opportunity to do all this.”

You’ve always presented music cinematically, but What Did You Do? feels like a step further, with the EP being offered as both a single ‘FULL SEQUENCE’ and individual tracks. Why?
“I like the idea of it being listened to in that way, so I try to force the issue as much as possible. The EP has a cool journey where it takes off, then it really ramps up, then it dips into this grimy Carcosa, True Detective-style world, then it spits out with guitar almost somewhere close to the band. I want people to read the whole book rather than just one or two chapters. I actually still don’t know whether Spotify will let us include the ‘FULL SEQUENCE’, but we’ll see how it pans out.”

It’s more like chapters in a DVD than tracks on an album.
“That’s where the artist-to-project mentality comes into play. We’re treating this more seriously. We’re trying to remain in a flow state and not go fucking insane just yet. But I feel like we’re building in the direction of going fucking insane. It’s taken a couple of years, but you’re about to see a lot of stuff from us, from producing to bloodraves, and we’ve even scored a film...”

What can you tell us about the film score?
“I used to complain in interviews that no-one would give us the opportunity to do a film score. Then at one point I realised I had these messages from this kid [Connor Marsden] saying he was making a movie he wanted me to score. I saw that the lead actor was Rohan Campbell – the lead of Halloween Ends – and realised that it must be legit. Weirdly, at the same time, we were meeting with a scoring agent Bradley Rainey who works with some of our favourite guys like Trent Reznor and Nick Cave. So we found ourselves talking to this kid and his producer about the movie over Zoom, brought it to our guy and made it happen. It’s a punk thriller called Violence. It’s got a little bit of Repo Man, a little bit of The Warriors, a little noir, a little goofy ’80s influence. We wrote a whole original punk seven-inch for it – me, Dom, Joe [before he had the baby] and Shade working together – and we’re in the movie as a band. I even get a line or two. In a weird twist, Shade and I got to be part of the editing team. It’s premiering next month at the Brooklyn Horror Festival and we’ll see where it goes from there. The music is cool, like John Carpenter/Tangerine Dream meets Code Orange!”

How important is it that you keep taking the initiative and creating opportunity like that as the master of your own destiny?
“This has been hard. It’s a different path. When the band wound down, I had to realise that no-one was coming to get me, and maybe that was down to some problems of my own. We’ve sent a lot of messages this last couple of years that have gone ignored. No-one has called us. But as Shade always says, we just need to keep our eyes on the ground and build something else. That’s what we do. We scrap for it. If we weren’t doing this, we’d be working at Citco right now…”

If this is still the starting point, how far can the NOWHERE2RUN tendrils spread?
“I have this vision of us being able to flow between cool projects that we want to be involved with, while also being able to perform and having a kind of art/aesthetic identity that scratches our itch. This EP is definitely the first step towards doing a full record at some point down the line. And I’d love to soundtrack another movie. Hell, I’d love to make a movie! I’d love to do stuff in the fashion world, too – I hate brands, but I love clothes. I have this board at home with all of these ideas and our symbol in the middle. The dream would be to do a tour here, a flick there, then more music and videos for other people. I just want there to be enough to maintain and sustain!”

Motives is out now via NOWHERE Recordings. What Did You Do? will be released on October 31.

Read this next:

• Code Orange: “Listen to what we do, look at what we do – we don’t fit in anywhere”
• From parenthood to politics: Why Ho99o9 are finally confronting themselves
• Loathe: “There’s a revolution of people wanting interesting, introspective, creative, weirdo shit”