fish narc

The Olympia, WA-based songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, Ben Funkhouser, has an expansive catalog of work as a rap producer and a solo artist–one that’s often distinguished by its sonic references to his background in the Pacific Northwest DIY punk scene. Now frog song finds Funkhouser teaming with Calvin Johnson’s legendary record label, K, to fully embrace the guitar-forward indie rock songwriting of his youth. It’s a return to his roots that has inadvertently created a new beginning for fish narc. 

The story of fish narc stretches all the way back to the early 2010s. Funkhouser was living in Seattle, his band had broken up and a friend had installed a cracked version of Ableton on his laptop. He began learning to create music through more digital means and moved to Los Angeles in 2014 where he joined the ThraxxHouse collective. The group helped pioneer what would broadly become known as SoundCloud Rap, but at the time it was more of a loose constellation of artists, producers, and micro-scenes connected by the internet. “Everyone was working at lightning speed,” Funkhouser recalls. “You could upload music and receive instant feedback, which just prompted more innovation. It was a lot like the punk and indie scenes from when I was a kid–a DIY movement that rewarded boldness.” 

Under the fish narc moniker Funkhouser made many types of beats but it was the ones that featured his distinct guitar playing–a product of his hybrid musical identity–that would bring him to prominence. As a member of GothBoiClique (GBC), a sub-group of ThraxxHouse, his work contributed heavily to the development of the sound that became Emo Rap. With copyright issues making it difficult to sample existing music, the GBC members relied on fish narc to write and track the melodic parts for songs that needed a rock feel. Funkhouser’s best known work as a producer is with the late Lil Peep, including his final output, the Goth Angel Sinner EP. 

After Peep’s passing in 2017, Funkhouser continued to produce other artists but found that the magical and hopeful fervor of the previous few years was lost. “By that point it had been years since I’d sung on a track–a lot of my beats were things I might have arranged for my voice but they’d ended up tailored for someone else’s song. It just seemed like time to start working on my own music again.” The result was his debut solo record, WiLDFiRE, which came out in 2020 via GBC and the punk label, Pop Wig Records. Around that same time he moved back to Washington and settled in Olympia, home of the storied record label, K. Funkhouser had been a fan of the label since his teenage years, dubbing mixtapes with Beat Happening and Lync songs, and always hoping someone there might hear his music. He also found himself once again working in the same underground model that K had helped pioneer–making and distributing his own music with limited means. 

In 2022 he released Camouflage, followed by fruiting body in 2023. “My first few albums were basically transitional,” Funkhouser says, “sort of warmups and testing grounds to figure out what kinds of songs I would write–basically mixtapes.” This work was creatively fulfilling but frustrating to release and promote primarily on his own. “When fruiting body came out I made these posters and wheat-pasted them around Olympia–it was laughably outdated but it was something to do and I liked that it felt back-to-basics,” Funkhouser explains. “A few weeks later I got a Twitter dm from K. It was Calvin Johnson, he’d seen the poster while walking around downtown, and he wanted to know if fruiting body had a distributor.” A lifelong fan of Johnson and K, Funkhouser agreed immediately and a rapport between the two began to grow–both recognized the interconnected nature of the ideology behind K and what Johnson described as the “folk-minded” nature of GBC and SoundCloud Rap. "fish narc is a dedicated artist,” says Johnson. “It was clear from the first encounter that he has a vision and follows through in trying to achieve it. Plus, his songs are catchy, the dancing is mandatory, the sing-along irresistible."

The relationship was grounding and reinvigorating, and Funkhouser found himself diving headfirst back into the guitar-heavy sounds and styles that had inspired him most in his teenage years. He practiced guitar until his fingers built back the callouses that had receded from years of working on a laptop, and the music that would become frog song began to take shape. Funkhouser wrote the majority of the tracks on an acoustic guitar, making sure each song had an effective core that didn’t over-rely on added elements. He then enlisted Bay Area songwriter and Cage World mastermind Ava Smith to produce and engineer. She flew up to Olympia and the two hunkered down in Funkhouser’s minimal home studio to record, aiming for an organic sound and purposely limiting their sonic toolkit to guitars, bass, drums, and a few scattered piano parts. “Anything overly complicated or requiring logistical depth was outside the scope of the project,” he says. “We tried to follow the mantra of doing less.”

The result is a lean half hour of deeply satisfying guitar music that feels intrinsically tied to the Pacific Northwest indie rock tradition. A blend of ‘80s punk, ‘90s alternative, and punchy modern production, frog song manages to sound timeless. Its twelve songs are presented with intentional rawness, gilded by moments of uncanny beauty. “frog song feels very full circle for me,” Funkhouser says. “The songs aren’t experiments anymore, they’re just songs–plain and simple.” 

Tracks like “my ceiling,” “old band,” and “cluefinder” roar to life with huge distorted guitars, shoegazey textures, and widescreen melodies that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on an episode of 120 Minutes. Elsewhere more plaintive songs like “boxy volvo” and “interstate” channel the stripped back intimacy of an MTV Unplugged session or the homespun charm that runs through much of the K catalog. Most of all, frog song highlights Funkhouser’s distinct ability to synthesize decades of music into a feeling–these aren’t copies of copies, the influences are unabashed but there’s a distinctly fish narc quality to the gauzy instrumentals, warm vocals, earnest lyricism. “My lyrics often express the confusion of holding two equal but opposing feelings at once,” Funkhouser says, “I’m seeking, but not always finding, a path forward.” His relationship with his girlfriend, Emma (who plays bass and sings in the fish narc live band) plays a role throughout the album–a stabilizing presence that buoys vulnerability and gratitude. “A lot of the album is about love and disavowing greed,” he says. 

Much of the music on frog song is hazy and fuzzed-out but there’s a sense of clarity and acceptance in its confident execution. “I think living in Olympia–a place with this long and continuing history of alternative culture–helped me see myself a bit less distorted,” Funkhouser says. “I spent so much time and energy restlessly trying to expand what my music could be, that it ended up seeming kind of radical to just observe where I was and just try to represent that without eyes to the future.” The album’s sonic palette harkens back to Funkhouser’s youth but it’s a record that could only have come from years of creativity and lived experience coming together. frog song comes to a close with the moody majesty of “disregulated.” The song sounds like a collaboration between Dean Blunt and Robert Smith and its final downtuned notes ring out like a question mark–if this is a fresh start for fish narc, where will he go next?

Since 2019, fish narc has returned to writing and touring his own graphemic songs, influenced by rap, punk and underground sounds. He released the albums WiLDFiRE in 2020 (see above photog), Camouflage in 2022 and fruiting body [KLP295], which dropped in June 2023. Catch fish narc & band on tour with Lil Tracy and Hi-c in September and October, 2023.

Listen to fish narc, fruiting body [KLP295].