Talking With 13th Ward Social Club

How a guy with no training except as a listener taught himself to create music and invented chooch core, paisan punk, wop wave, and marinara music.

While jamming some instrumental beat music on a streaming service one day, the algorithm suggested a song by something called 13th Ward Social Club. I clicked it. The song mesmerized me. It was an infectious amalgam of all kinds of world music mixed with a hip-hop sensibility, a jazz pedigree, and a psychedelic feeling of tropical heatstroke. It seemed to hold everything I already loved about music while also carrying me into the kind of new sonic frontiers I always crave as a listener.

It didn’t take many more songs to turn me into a devoted 13th Ward listener. Shortly into my entry into this artists’ universe, I wondered what I always wondered about the best musicians: Who was this person, and how did they make this?

13th Ward Social Club is the name for the self-described “one-man sound orchestra” that Justin Catoni creates under, in Providence, Rhode Island. Catoni was generous enough to speak with me about his musical life, and to explore the ways his life in the 1990s influences his life now.

Catoni is a passionate listener who self-taught music, recording, and composition. His music blends what his Soundcloud profile describes as “psych-rock, samba, jazz, afrobeat, and Holy Week processional hymns, also known as: chooch-core / wop-wave / goombah-groove / paisan-punk.” In our globalized world, it’s inventive stuff. 13th Ward offers proof that the ancient wisdom was wrong: There are new things under the sun. Even if some of these musical influences sound vaguely familiar, the sum of their parts is fresh and electrifyingly new—the whole world passed through the sausage maker of Cantoni’s brimming imagination.

Originals like “Ariana La Madre” sit naturally alongside modern reimaginings of Compay Segundo’s classic “Chan Chan” and Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy.”

With three EPs, four LPs, a greatest hits compilation, and tons of individual songs, 13th Ward is also proof that the algorithm can deliver incredible music. Having grown up in the tape and CD era, I can see how it can also erode the listening experience, but I’ll happily take what I learned about listening to full albums in my youth to embrace the ways modern streaming technology delivers us new music and lets artists create it, because that’s exactly what it can do.

Buy his music at Bandcamp.

Listen to his music on the usual streaming services.

And buy his vinyl. It sounds awesome offline.

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AG: What year did you start recording and producing music yourself under the name 13th Ward Social Club?

13th: 2020, after many of us found our schedules cleared indefinitely. I had bread baking down by May, so I decided to rededicate myself to music.

AG: What’s your history as a musician: You are self-taught, but what instruments and techniques did you teach yourself?

13th: Around 1993 I downloaded a program called ScreamTracker, which only ran in DOS. It was a predecessor to FruityLoops, meant for triggering sounds rather than composing.

I’ve always had moral issues with sampling, which I can manage to connect to all of society’s woes if I think hard enough. So I bought a keyboard and aimlessly hit the keys for a couple years.

I tried to give myself a traditional training, hoping to learn to read music by transcribing Chopin, keeping my hands in the proper place to hit the right key with the assigned finger. Eventually I went back to aimlessly hitting the keys. I’m writing these details for the benefit of any overwhelmed aspiring musician who reads this. I think the more rules you learn, the smaller the box you’re in.

Until recently, every string, woodwind, brass, and percussion you heard from me was played on the keys, running through guitar amps and tape machines, all in the box.

AG: So if you started that in 1993, what came before: wWere you a musical kid? Did you play in bands before?

13th: No musical background before that except as a collector. Rock, heavy metal, hiphop, jazz, doowop. I carried a case of 50 cassettes with me wherever I went. I didn’t have much of a budget at 10 years old so I would go to the flea market and buy bootlegged tapes, I believe they were 3 for $5 at that time.

AG: What moved you to start teaching yourself: Did you hear something so powerful in those cassettes that you decided I’m going to learn to do that, too? Did your parents play lots of music at home?

13th: At that age I’m sure it was just about admiration. As I get older, it is still about that, but more noble. You can be inspired by a movie or cry reading a book, but have you ever seen someone start dancing while looking at a painting? Music is uniquely powerful, you can make people feel the whole range of emotions, within minutes.

AG: The range of styles you owned as a kid collector is impressively broad. I mean, doowop and metal is impressive. People often talk about the 90s as this diverse musical decade, with Lollapalooza putting all kinds of bands on the same bill, and the divisions between genres dissolving so people were freer to like hip-hop, rock, and metal. Did you feel it was like that?

13th: The one block street I grew up on had first generation Italian, Cape Verdean, Portuguese, Colombian, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican families. As kids we were in everyone’s apartment, ate meals there, listened to their parents’ music, went to their churches. The religious societies had processions go down our streets with their bands. Doowop came from my dad, Motown from my mom, my grandfather would play the guitarra. Then I got sent to a school a world away where I started listening to metal and altrock in a failed attempt to fit in. But I see it all finding its way into my music.

AG: Your experience on your street sounds way more multicultural than many so called multicultural places. And the beautiful intimacy of your relationships there. But in our era, do you find that underground music or any musical circles have become more multicultural than even a decade ago? Because in the early ’90s, music was very siloed into genres, sadly.

13th: I remember feeling that way then. In adolescence, music is your identity. You base your appearance and attitude off it, and you build your social circle around it. Each group becomes isolated in that way. So perhaps those differences seemed larger when we were younger. I don’t see the isolation as a negative, though. I prefer multiple distinct groups evolving separately. When there is crossover it can be beautiful, but too much and everything sounds/looks the same.

AG: So you mean there’s a kind of flattening of each musical groups’ uniqueness when things blend too much? Or it just turns murky when you mix it? Because that siloeing in decades past had pros and cons: Sure, musically, divisions kept each genre’s sound distinct in a way, but we listeners weren’t always allowed to bridge the divide to enjoy multiple things. When I was a kid, the metal kids hated the punks, the punks hated the hippies, you weren’t supposed to like Y if you liked Z. It’s like our table was set for us. What’s more flattening than that?

13th: The blending will definitely water it down. Globalization can be a positive for some industries, science and healthcare come to mind, but not culture. It cannot be good for any art. The end result is complete homogenization. I see your point though, and I am familiar with those feelings of hate (really, misunderstanding), we may just be referring to different age groups. Things change quickly at that age, by 15 I think we start to be more open minded.

AG: But what about the Blues: Wasn’t that art that sprang directly from the meeting of African tradition and North American slave music, ie globalization?

When world music reaches you personally, don’t the forces of globalization carry it into your orbit?

13th: Right. We had musical traditions from different regions of Africa and Europe meeting in the Americas for the first time and giving birth to many distinct new genres. But they grew independently for generations before meeting here. It created something beautiful, but now they share DNA, repeat the process and they share more, the genetic diversity dwindles, and you see where this metaphor is going. It applies to humans, fruit, why not music?

AG: Going back to sampling, what are the moral issues with sampling that you mentioned?

13th: Imagine the ridicule you would face if you took a photo of a Rembrandt and signed it. For some reason in music, you can take someone’s entire life’s work and program it to a few buttons, and as long as you can count to four the crowd goes crazy. All the years of practice, sacrifice, missed meals and rent to save for your instrument, you pour it into your music, and someone reduces it to a button and puts their name on it. It’s not all negative, I can create a lengthy pros/cons list for this, but we know which side would be much longer.

AG: Excellent, pointed comparison. Let me ask about output. Maybe I’m off but it seems like many musicians release a ton of singles on streaming nowadays. Some compile them into albums. Some don’t. So singles serve a different purpose than they did in the ’90s?

Why do you do albums and singles?

13th: Every algorithm favors consistent output, so even if you plan to compile your songs into an album it is best to release them one at a time. I’ve done well with three-week spacing. I spend most of my summer in the garden rather than the studio and my streaming numbers are down 50% from their average.

Since I work in different genres, it may take years for me to have enough cohesive material to create an album.

AG: That’s super interesting about the algo. Do you think our modern era’s business model has advantages over the model of decades past? Big question, but from recording and distributing yourself without a label or label debt, to working the algorithms in streaming services, what do you think: Is 2025 better or worse than the ’90s?

13th: It is easier to pursue art and get in front of an audience than ever before. It is so easy that you don’t even have to be an artist...

The internet indiscriminately provides a global platform to everyone regardless of talent, and the abrasive record executive stomping on your dream has been replaced by the coddling of your friends. The financial barrier to entry has also nosedived. If you’re not creative enough to produce your music without a Gofundme then I’ll assume your music also lacks creativity. It couldn’t be easier or cheaper.

So this means the market is flooded with people who have no business making music, yet they will latch onto any excuse to explain their low listenership besides the obvious. Spotify is a common scapegoat.

Did you know artists don’t pay Spotify to host their music? They take it onto their platform for free, give you access to their millions of listeners for free, promote it for you for free. Then they pay you if people listen. That’s wild. Now this averages out to a fraction of a cent per stream and I do think they could do better, but when you run the numbers is not as far from reasonable as it initially seems.

AG: So you see streaming services as more empowering and helpful than as vampires growing off artists’ output?

13th: Even if that’s true, I don’t play the victim card. If this is the current landscape, I have to pivot and make it work.

AG: That’s a reasonable approach: work within the the parameters of our era, don’t embrace a defeatist attitude, do what you can with what’s here.

I want to go back to something you said earlier about growing up in a multicultural neighborhood. When you went to a school a world away, you started listening to metal and altrock but still didn’t fit in. So were you an edge dweller in school? What way did music shape your life back then. And do you still feel that way as a musician now, like, you don’t fit in, or no?

13th: I don’t want to be dramatic, I had plenty of friends, but I was and still am the oddball. Until I started releasing music a few years ago, I had no idea there was an audience for it. For better or worse, the internet helps you find your tribe. And these experiences definitely inform my music. I sampled for years as a teen, so I have to give credit there for sparking the desire to explore all the foreign film soundtracks and library music I became obsessed with. But to that point, Smashing Pumpkins are one of my biggest influences.

AG: The internet’s power of forging connections is incredible. Truly. So what about the Pumpkins do you like so much?

13th: One of my favorite Frasier quotes:

Niles: “I thought you prided yourself on supporting the arts?”

Frasier: “The arts, Niles, not the crafts.”

There were some phenomenal rock bands in the ’90s, but they stayed in their lane and perfected their craft. They couldn’t cohesively blend five genres on one album like Billy. That’s what separates the musician from the artist. He chose music, but if he pursued painting I imagine it would be brilliant.

AG: Oh my god, that’s one of the most ’90s quotes ever, and it’s excellent. Frasier was a hilarious show. I loved when Daphne called them out on their poshness, like the time she said something like “Oh, I’m soooo sorry. Here I am dawdling with the laundry and it’s 10 minutes into caviar time!”

So if the internet helps us find our tribes, what tribe or tribes are you in?

13th: The algorithm has placed me with good company, the instrumental/cumbia/surf scene.

AG: Damn good company. Tell me what you think about instrumental surf music specifically. I’m a huge old school fan of it so curious about your perspective.

13th: I’m not familiar enough to speak about it. I’ll explore it further someday and I’ll be ready in part two. These are just the genres the algorithm of the streaming services have told me I fit in with. For actual artists, I get placed in with La Lom, Khruangbin, and El Michels often, which I’m happy with.

AG: Those are stellar musicians to be grouped with. Going back to Smashing Pumpkins, I have to agree. Corgan is singular. To me, Gish and Siamese Dream are uniquely imaginative statements that sound just as moving and interesting today as they did when they came out. And he just kept making more stellar music. What other bands do you love that might surprise listeners?

13th: This isn’t surprising for the content but maybe for the length of time: I listened to Gainsbourg for years straight, rarely anything else. Jazz, especially bebop. Giant Steps is my top album of all time. Jorge Ben, Adoniran Barbosa, Fela, Galt Macdermot. Ska and rocksteady. New wave and freestyle. I think they would be more surprised by what I don’t listen to, which hasn’t included any hip-hop for nearly 30 years.

AG: What a varied interesting mix. The particulars are interesting but any listener of yours should expect this kind of range. Giant Steps continues to inspire artists of all kinds.

So speaking of 30 years: as you keep making music, where do you see yourself and your music in 30 years?

13th: I’ll be long gone, as for the future of music in general: I can see the utopian view that AI will free our time to create more as a possibility, but that would mean it would free us from most of our struggles as well. What’s the inspiration? Concentration camps create great writers, poverty great musicians. It’s a hard truth, but that’s where the magic is. Scientists will map our neural networks in no time, tying every key to a dopamine receptor until we’re numb. Musical pornography that can be generated with a prompt. I’m not optimistic.

AG: Yeah, ours is a dark enough time to see the power and the pitfalls of our technology. But you’ll be long gone in 30? Does that mean you’re 50 right now or just that pessimistic about our future?

Going back to music evoking a range of emotions: books have definitely made me cry, and they’ve bonded me with people, but yes, like you said, they don’t get you dancing the way music does. I dance with strangers all the time, at farmer’s markets, street fairs, a random celebration in downtown LA. Why do you think music is so powerful as a medium. Meaning, in an Oliver Sacks way, do you know what it does to your brains?

13th: Maybe because it doesn’t require much effort on the part of the listener, as opposed to a book or movie. You can’t close your ears, you just absorb it. It’s also fast paced and packed with stimulation compared to other media, which keeps you interested. Although it’s not always quick: Ballade 1 is great from start to finish, but you know if you wait til the 8 minute mark you’re rewarded with one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. I’m sure this is why people generally don’t care for jazz or classical, it’s less structured and the pay off requires some investment.

I am not familiar with Oliver Sacks, but I will be soon. A quick glance reminds me of the theory that people rewatch shows and movies repeatedly because it is predictable and calming, I’m sure the same could be applied to our favorite music.

I envy you. If I could dance it would be to ska.

AG: That sounds right about music’s impact, how stimulating it is even as a passive listener. But it can be pretty demanding. Jazz is so powerful, so it bums me out how it’s too demanding for so many people.

You mentioned spending most of your summers gardening. What do you like about gardening? Does time outside inform your music or approach to life?

13th: As for gardening, there may be some chain reaction that’s beneficial to creativity, but I don’t put too much thought into it. It’s not the spiritual experience you might be envisioning. It’s brutal, there’s blood, punctures, burns. Moving stone, digging trenches, building greenhouses. The only parallel I can draw between gardening and music is that I labor for weeks on end just for someone to say, “Oh, that’s nice.”

AG: In the ’90s, didn’t people call instrumental tracks with samples and drum beds “beat tapes,” or am I confused? I was pretty stoned back then, so….?

What do you even call music like yours?

13th: They did. I’m sure they still do.

You didn’t ask about the name but I’m going to give a quick history. The 13th Ward Social Club was one of my family’s bars on Federal Hill, the Little Italy section of Providence. Locals may know it as Lili Marlene’s or currently the Royal Bobcat. That set the theme for branding, an affectionate caricature of the culture. So to avoid the difficult task of categorizing whatever this is, I finally decided to invent my own genres: chooch core, paisan punk, wop wave, marinara music.

AG: Oh my gosh, good catch! I dropped the ball on that one. So when you describe your marinara music as chooch core and wop wave, what are peoples’ reactions?

13th: More confusion and disinterest. My friend hates it, he once said he wouldn’t let me play the dinner triangle for his deaf son, yet my first pressings sell out within a few hours. The cuica drum is polarizing.

AG: Not sure if you feel this way, but confusion and disinterest seem better than no reaction at all—just flatline, meh. Also, “I wouldn’t let 13th Ward Social Club play for me deaf son!” seems like a hilarious blurb to put on a record, or anything really. Cuica drum is often called “monkey drum,” but I wonder how many monkeys even like it

13th: I believe it was originally created to mimic a lioness, but I’ve also heard monkey, dog, even opossum. I couldn’t find any videos documenting an animals reaction to it, but my chihuahua perks up when it plays. There’s nothing pretentious about it, it’s utilitarian, and immediately places you in a West African jungle. It’s a powerful instrument.