Chad Van Gaalen

My name is Chad Van Gaalen and I have some words to say about your beautiful brother.

I started hanging out with a group of feral newborns in 2006, introduced to me through matt flegel when we started recording the first Women record. Chris was by far the shyest of the bunch, but this didn’t last long. We soon realized we shared a common interest of listening to what most people would consider to be total noise. Soon after realizing this, we swapped CDR’s of nonsense and that is when I discovered Chris was a sonic motherfucker. I couldn’t believe he had so much beautiful music that he had shared with so few people. This made more sense to me as I got to know Chris better over the years.

He was so sonically curious and had such vision in his mind, that the bar was always going up. He was so humble and was always talking about microscopic improvements he could be making. Or the tone questing that had to be done on compositions that were absolutely flawless to anyone else that listened to them. On top of that, finding out that he was making most of these sounds with just a guitar… This to me is the mark of a true artist.

He inspired me. He set an example of what could be done with sound. He reminded me to keep having fun searching for noise on a planet of noise.

I loved your brother chris.