speed grieving with Joe Cardamone (Icarus Line, Dark Mark vs Skeleton Joe)

Mishka Shubaly Podcast

Joe Cardamone has been on my radar for fifteen years but I actually met him for the first time at Lanegan's funeral. He made a keychain for Mark's friends like the old hotel keys, imprinted with "Mark Lanegan, the Night Porter, 1964-2022." This is our first real conversation and, man, it was really so fantastic to talk to him.

Los Angeles native artist Joe Cardamone has lived a few lifetimes while leaving a wiry dent in the global underground music and film scenes. The band that Joe fronted for 17 years, The Icarus Line, formed in East Los Angeles in 1998. Over the course of six albums the punk agitators became an underground phenomenon and the most dangerous, if not the greatest, punk group of their generation. The cult band that never gave up. Performances at the Reading and Leeds Festivals in front of 30,000+ fans, multiple appearances on the legendary John Peel show, criss-crossing the US in a van opening a stadium tour for A Perfect Circle and The Cult and a UK tour with Primal Scream are just some of the "greatest hits" of a legend loaded with nearly mythic live performances and chaos. But it was the death of guitarist and
original member Alvin DeGuzman in 2017 following a long battle with cancer, which was the actual end of The Icarus Line (a demise recently depicted in Michael Grodner's independent film "The Icarus Line Must Die" which is now streaming on Amazon and Hulu).

The following year Joe released his solo debut, the frenzied Holy War album and film on his own imprint American Primitive. Cardamone's new approach was a modern one man show that forged R&B and crushing electronics with the combative spirit of his formative punk years. While crafting a pair of follow up albums in 2020 the world stopped and the QUARENTINA project emerged in response. Outside of his work as an artist Joe has produced and collaborated with some of the greatest artists of our time including Mark Lanegan, lan Astbury, Warren Ellis (Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) and James Williamson (The Stooges).