4333 Collective Presents: TWO PIECE FEST XIX
Featuring 1994!
847 N Franklin St.
Philadelphia
Feb. 21, 2026
It’s not easy to do anything for two decades. Not maintain a relationship, not find the motivation to continue on in the face of endless challenges, and certainly not remain the same person you were when you started. I believe Chris Diehm and Mike Kuhn of 1994! have done two of those three things, and no one is meant to remain the same person forever. We do this shit because we are meant to change; we want to see and to be it. This year, I’ll have been playing music for 20 years, the entirety of the time that 1994! has existed at varying levels of activity. Next year, Two Piece Fest will have its 20th anniversary. Over the last two decades we've watched the devolution of socioeconomic conditions and the industry that we, as musicians, interact with. We’ve watched Philadelphia change. We’ve continued to build our skills. We’ve continued to perform in various capacities. We’ve traveled, some of us relocated. We’ve grown, we’ve adapted.
1994! @ Barclay House 10.26.08
When I first heard 1994!, I was probably 16 or 17. I was deepening my own musical and artistic identity beyond the jazz fusion that my father raised me on and the death metal, grind, and mathcore I was into partially as a rejection of his influence. Thank You Arms And Fingers, the split with Spires, and Fckyrhed, represented findings that spoke to my need for hyperactive music played at the fringes of human ability without the needlessly violent posturing that was prevalent in a lot of my preferred listening. I didn’t know I was looking for that in those terms yet. What I learned that I didn’t like was people’s egos and seriousness about their tough and scary personas. It started to feel like the need to be a legendary figure was dominating a lot of the music I was hearing, and I wanted to hear music from people who didn’t seem as desperate to be seen as remarkable.
1994! - Kinda Like A Fest (8.08.09)
[IBR008] 1994! "Thank You Arms and Fingers" LP - Inkblot Records
[IBR011] SPIRES/1994! "Split" LP - Inkblot Records - Bandcamp
With deeply unserious song titles that were either puns, purposefully awkward, or both, I was shown that this music shit, no matter how seriously you bleed for it, is supposed to be fun. 1994! were always DIY as fuck, and always seemed to need so little to work. Not even a bassist. Their lyrics were nearly impossible to find while you strained to make them out on the recordings, but on those records, it never felt like anything more or less than two friends having fun getting away with playing hard and being weird. Despite how intentionally unrefined most of their recordings are, their sophistication and musical chemistry jumped out of every track.
Chris and Mike (pictured above) have always been definitively locked in. They thrive playing complicated phrases and melodies that intricately pair the note values of guitar and drums, a tactic that I have repeatedly watched drop people’s jaws. They are also loud as fucking hell, louder than many bands with twice as many members. Seeing Mike play the chrome kick drum that has now become iconic to me, it blew me away how well the kit and its old-ass drum heads handled his pummeling the other night. Chris has some of the most tone-filled hands I’ve ever heard. Mike plays like he’s gotten injected with the poison from the movie Crank or has become the personification of the bus from the movie Speed. In their earlier days, Mike would punctuate his performances by standing up and vomiting, sometimes in perfect time with the last note of the song. My first time seeing them live would, I think, be in late 2010/early 2011 at a DC warehouse spot called Hole In The Sky, where that was just what he did. You can’t teach shit like that.
I got the chance to own my first drum set from a high school friend in 2010. I was driving to and from school by this time, and I had resolved to pick it up from his house after school and drive it back to my parents house, hiding it in my closet. I would practice in the three hours I had before they would get home from work, dividing my sessions into three sections: easy, medium, and hard. I would warm up with songs by artists that had simple drums, like Sly and the Family Stone, Graham Central Station, and Dr. Dog (as I was just getting into my indie rock bag). I’d ramp things up by playing along with songs by The Killers, sometimes attempting traditional grip but never really getting anywhere with it. And the hard songs were exclusively 1994! and Hella.
Some of the first punk beats I ever learned to play I learned because of 1994! For years, I had no idea how in the hell Mike played “Shut Up The Fuck Up.” I was always going by ear. After seeing it live now, I’m concerned by how much trying to learn that main part is going to take from me mentally and emotionally, because it won’t be nothing. No one could ever or should quantify the amount of sweat and time I poured into perfecting the alternating kick and floor tom pattern and ensuing drum roll at the end of “Luke Gone Leidy.” That kick and tom pattern became a staple in my own playing. Their technicality is one thing, but it’s truly how they create grooves with it that gets people addicted. It was the energy in their songs that I could never get enough of. All of their songs are danceable despite how psychotic the musicianship is. Meanwhile, Chris Diehm is singing about things like forgiving themself for enjoying the experiences they've earned, living life with meaning, and not getting their ass kicked while touring other countries. When I decided to finally start learning guitar this summer, I asked online if anyone had a beater they could lend me. Who else but Chris Diehm answered the call, giving me the very Les Paul copy that they used for many of the early days of 94!; the very Les Paul copy that I’m now using to write songs for my own band. The beat goes on.
1994! / Algernon Cadwallader / Snowing / Boys and Sex
Though I had no way of knowing, 94! would become a part of how I formed my current understanding of the power of affirmation. I was drawn to the haunting melody of “Thank All You Guy Helpening,” and its powerful dynamic shifts between the verses and the hook, but it’s the lyrics that made it one of my favorite songs ever.
“I don’t want to die for the wrong reasons, or far too early…I can’t deliberate on the nature of gifts, ‘cus isn’t it gift enough to live halfway decent, if only for a few days?”
Avoiding bogging this piece down with discussion of my lifelong fear of dying early, my lifelong fear of feeling like I wasted my life when I draw my last breath, or the cosmic ties I have to a close relative who died prematurely and how it sometimes defined me during my childhood, I’ll simply share those simple facts about myself in order to elucidate why the lyrics to the entire song resonate with me. It’s been something I think about as I move through this world and try to do as much good for others and myself as possible. Part of what drives that fear is the inherently ephemeral nature of relationships. It’s never enough time, and most of us would be lying if we said we didn’t have regrets behind how some of our closest relationships have ended. Seeing Mike and Chris play together despite the fact that they live on two different continents now and have other projects in NAH and Snowing is a reminder of what is possible, meant to hit the different versions of myself that I’ve been since I first heard them.
1994! Thank All You Guy Helpening
[IBR019.5] 1994! - "Fuck It" LP - Inkblot Records - Bandcamp
And it turns out, 15 years later, I still need that. I might need it now more than I ever did, as I navigate the experience of music-as-business. I need to see people of all kinds have meaningful, lasting friendships, and their creative partnership reflect that. It was deeply gratifying to see that in 94!’s performance, and I saw that same gratitude in the faces of people around me the whole time they played.
This is one of two articles on Midbrow documenting this year's Two Piece Fest. Read more here.
