On the second night of Moodie Black's tour with Puscifer, frontwoman Kristen Martinez stood in the wings of what was then known as Arizona Federal Theatre, ready to kick off their set in Phoenix with "Death in LA (Pt. 1)," a track off their 2014 album, Nausea.
And then she realized her mic wasn't working.
"Whenever we've played Phoenix, we've had so many disastrous shows. And ever since we go back on tour to Phoenix, most of the time, something goes terribly wrong," Martinez says. "It became a joke: We're playing Phoenix, so some technical glitch is going to happen."
She didn't let it faze her — in fact, it was quite the opposite.
"In that moment, when that happened, I was so happy. I started smiling and I was so assured," Martinez says. "It was the most bizarre experience because I was like, this is what I was waiting for and this has happened."
Embracing the unexpected is par for the course for Martinez, who grew up in Phoenix and who is returning for a show at The Rhythm Room on Wednesday, October 19.
Born in El Paso, Texas, Martinez moved to town when she was 5. In high school, she was drawn to the world of hip-hop and started making music. Her first forays stuck closer to traditional rap, although she says she didn't find acceptance in the local scene.
"I thought that if you were good at what you did, people would embrace you and take you on and you'd have opportunities," she recalls. "But I realized that that's not what it was like, that these people were pretending that they were open and welcoming, and you'd meet them and then they'd be assholes. That kind of disillusioned me. It made me want to be everything that those people weren't, and be authentic to myself."
For Martinez, that meant a musical evolution that took her from more traditional hip-hop to Moodie Black's unique sound of dark, grimy, entrancing noise rap.
It didn't go over well in a lot of the Valley's hip-hop spaces, Martinez recalls.
"We started making crazier, louder, noisier, more abrasive music in hip-hop, and that made us more like outliers in Phoenix. People weren't really ready for that. We'd clear rooms instantly playing in Phoenix back in the day at hip-hop shows," she says.
In the mid-2000s, Martinez left Phoenix for Minneapolis. Her partner, Jamee Varda, is from Minnesota, and Martinez was seeking a more accepting music scene than she found here. She and bandmate Sean Lindahl built Moodie Black into a musical act that didn't necessarily click with everyone, but developed its own cult following.
They were preparing to tour to promote their 2020 album, Fuzz, and then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. Like pretty much every musician in the world, they had to pivot. For Lindahl and Martinez, that meant opening a Tex-Mex restaurant.
MB Foodhouse is a highly celebrated eatery inspired by the food Martinez remembers her Mexican grandmother cooking for the family. A peek at the menu shows a selection of tacos for breakfast and beyond, chilaquiles, taquitos, and more. Martinez and Lindahl started the business as a series of pop-ups, then moved into a popular Minneapolis food hall. (Varda designed the restaurant's eye-catching, surreal wolf logo.)
MB Foodhouse was gaining steam as the world moved out of the quarantine phase of the pandemic, and it was time to start thinking about touring again.
That's when Maynard James Keenan came calling. The Arizona music legend was looking for an opening act for Puscifer's summer 2022 concerts. (The second show of the tour was the site of Martinez's mic malfunction.)
Martinez says that the time on the road with Puscifer was an incredible experience that expanded their visibility and afforded them new opportunities.
But the things she learned from Keenan had nothing to do with music.
"I never talked to Maynard about music," she says. "It was always business, or food stuff, or art stuff. ... We'd drive overnight in the tour bus, and then you're up in the morning in a new city, and it would always be that me and Maynard were the first two up. And so we'd just have conversations in the morning, and he'd make an espresso in his espresso machine that he was very proud of, that he travels with everywhere.
"So we'd just talk about those kinds of things, and just watching how he does things and how he deals with stuff was invaluable."
Plans for the future include moving MB Foodhouse out of the food hall and into a trailer to ease the financial burden of rent when Moodie Black is on the road, as well as making another album. Martinez says they're shooting for a spring or summer 2023 release. Besides the mini headlining tour that will bring them to Phoenix next week, Moodie Black will continue to be the supporting act for Puscifer on the second leg of that band's tour. (Bentley Monet of local band Snailmate served as Moodie Black's drummer on the first leg of the Puscifer tour and will do so on this headlining tour.)
A Trans Woman Navigating Rap, Metal, and Rock Spaces
Between the pandemic, the restaurant, and the Puscifer gig, a lot has happened to Martinez in the last several years. But perhaps nothing has been as significant as her coming out as a transgender woman.
Though Varda knew of her evolving gender identity for several years prior, Martinez didn't begin to explore in earnest until around 2016, when they were briefly living in Los Angeles.
"I was starting to come out about it, and it was a weird thing where I was being femme at certain times, or I would go out under the cover of night to gay bars or seedy places, and it became this very bizarre double life thing," she recalls.
As Moodie Black's popularity in the music scene grew, so did Martinez's public presence.
"It was becoming something that was harder for me to suppress and hide and because we had a little bit of visibility as Moodie Black at that time and things were getting a little bit bigger, I didn't want somebody to out me. That was the last tipping point: I didn't want somebody to see it and post about it and then I was outed," she says.
"So I decided to come out with it. When I first did, I said I was nonbinary. Again, I was learning, and I didn't know what the terms were for things. But ever since then, it's been a downhill fucking slide of coming out: finding out who I was and coming to terms with a lot of stuff and embracing it. And it's changed who I am and it's made everything so much better in my life."
Navigating rap, metal, and rock spaces as a transgender woman isn't the most comfortable thing to do. Neither is returning to Arizona — though Martinez's family is accepting of her transition, the Grand Canyon State isn't the friendliest toward LGBTQ people, and Martinez says she'll never live here again.
"I was lucky that by the time I came out I didn't have to navigate those heavy hip-hop spaces. I was playing artsy places and off-kilter spaces, and I was playing with metal groups and rock groups, which have their own sets of problems," she says. "It's still dangerous and difficult touring as a trans woman in any of these spaces. And Arizona, politically, for trans people, it's pretty rough. It's another reason that I've stayed in Minneapolis. There's more acceptance. It's still dangerous, it's just less dangerous.
"But it's always special for me when we get to play Phoenix, because I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the things that I dealt with there."
Moodie Black. With Snailmate, Rogue!, Robbie The Rapper, and The Saturn III. 6 p.m. doors, 7 p.m. show, Wednesday, October 19. The Rhythm Room, 1019 East Indian School Road. Tickets are $10. Visit rhythmroom.com.
