Arkhive

Killing Joke

2008-06-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

It’s armageddon time again. Following last year’s 25th anniversary celebrations, Killing Joke are about to unleash their latest album on a world ravaged by war, fire, floods, earthquakes and bracing itself for impending eco-crisis. ‘Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell’ is arguably the most Killing Joke-sounding record since the early 1980s, and it’s also a dramatic reassertion of the group’s ongoing mission to face down the apocalypse... with a smile.
“Killing Joke must be the only group of people where I’ve had to start a physical fight because I’m laughing so much at what’s going down.” Jaz Coleman, KJ singer, classical composer and black-clad clown of the apocalypse, is sitting in the lounge of London’s Columbia Hotel, smoking Marlboros and downing bottles of Guinness. He’s in fine fettle, regaling Terrorizer with opinions and reminiscences ranging from the hilarious to the downright outrageous. “We’ve got the blackest sense of humour in the world,” he continues. “When things go really bad, it’s the way you laugh at it. I still think laughter is the best cure, however disastrous everything is. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! When I think about it, Killing Joke started out for us as two words that represented a sense of no control over your destiny. Then it changed to the laughter that overcomes all fear, those two seconds you have before you take your final breath and you die, the crystallisation and realisation of everything.”
Killing Joke have been laughing in the face of death since 1978, when Coleman and drummer ‘Big’ Paul Ferguson left the Matt Stagger Band to form their own group. Recruiting the singular talents of bass player Youth and guitarist Geordie Walker, the resulting four piece made a noise which was inspired by, but by no means bound to, the DIY punk explosion of the late 1970s.
“At this time, everybody was in a band, you didn’t have to be a musician, everybody had their own record company,” Coleman remembers, fondly. “You could do a recording on Friday and it’d be in the shops on Monday, ha ha ha! It was a tremendous time. There was less competitiveness between bands and there was more a fraternal feeling at that time, which has almost gone. Now the whole pop star idea, sadly, has come back into vogue.
“I think it’s possible that you can be a gifted, talented classical musician or rock musician, whatever, and still be a normal person. Playing this game of ‘I want to be a rock star’ and you get your big house... this was never part of my vision or my dream, I never wanted this. For me, freedom, travel, this was the emphasis. Individual freedom. In fact, while I think about it Killing Joke has never done a love song. In all the albums that we’ve done, there’s only one song that we write and that’s about freedom on it’s various levels and letting the spirit go.”
This emphasis on freedom not only informed the band’s philosophy from day one, but also its musical output. Despite their punk roots, Killing Joke offered something more demanding than reheated Ramones riffs and stylish rebellion; Youth’s fat, dub-influenced bass lines, Big Paul’s furious tribal battery, Geordie’s trebly, wire-wool guitar and Coleman’s psychotic, sardonic vocals meshed into a lethally effective whole, as illustrated by EMI’s recent reissues of the band’s first four albums ‘Killing Joke’, ‘What’s THIS For...?’, ‘Revelations’ and ‘Ha’. Their early sound shared some elements with similarly bottom-end obsessed contemporaries Public Image Ltd and Joy Division, but the Notting Hill-based reprobates arguably outdid both in terms of teeth-grinding intensity. Where PiL gave the impression of being more John Lydon’s (excellent) pet project than a fully fledged band and Joy Division were fundamentally mired in Ian Curtis’s doleful gothicism, Killing Joke were unfashionable, brutal and charged with occult energies, possibly due to Jaz and Youth’s fascination with the magickal teachings of Aleister Crowley. As vicious and unforgiving as their music gets, Killing Joke’s aim is to transcend the mundane and break through to a higher state of consciousness. They are, as Jaz puts it, “about revelry!”
“We used to co-headline with Joy Division all those years ago - they used to call us ‘Southern Stomp’ and Joy Division ‘Northern Gloom’ - and everybody would just go physically crazy for Killing Joke and just stand there for Joy Division! I find Killing Joke very uplifting music. It lifts my spirit, it lifts my heart, it still makes me smile, and I get to lose a few pounds as well in the process, right? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Like many of their punk and new wave contemporaries, Killing Joke were heavily influenced by Jamaican dub reggae. Characterised by earthshaking bass frequencies, disorienting sound FX and the hardcore apocalyptic/elitist philosophy of Rastafarianism, it’s easy to see the appeal dub held for young, disaffected teens in the late 1970s. Many bands, including the previously mentioned PiL and Joy Division as well as The Clash, The Ruts and The Slits made their love of dub clear through homage or imitation, but Killing Joke created their own hyper-aggressive variation, adding abrasive guitars and amplifying the dread factor a thousandfold.
“When we started, we used to have support bands and they were so bad that we used to turn ‘em off and turn our own reggae music up! Then we stopped the support band thing altogether and just DJed and put heavy dub reggae on. The way we viewed a concert was like, ‘We’re hiring this fucking hall and we’re going to have a good time in it!’ You’ll see members of Killing Joke walking around in the audience before a gig, saying hello to people. No bands would dream of doing that! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
It isn’t unusual for Killing Joke to take the road less travelled, and latest album ‘Hosannas...’ is a case in point. The casual observer might have expected the band to follow up the success of 2003’s Dave Grohl-assisted ‘Killing Joke’ with another big-budget, high-definition juggernaut. Then again, the casual observer probably knows very little about how this band works. Holing up in a Prague basement owned by a mysterious ‘Dr Faust’, Jaz and his comrades eventually emerged with a rough document of a particular point in the lives of the band, the ragged, lo-fi splendour of which makes it much more of a ‘return to form’ than the previous effort, which while excellent, sounded more like an effective post-millennial update of the band’s sound than yer actual classic KJ.
“The whole thing was recorded in a fucking cheap basement with inferior equipment,” states Jaz proudly. “A studio in London’s going to cost you £1, 200 a day before you get to the engineer. If you put that and accommodation costs and everything together, you can see you’re running up one fuck of a bill, right? We decide that’s not the way we make music any more, so we used like a really tiny studio, a few more tracks than an eight track, that’s how we started, and record in this little wine cellar underneath. Then we started encouraging people to come down to rehearsals. Rehearsals for Killing Joke, there’s always 30 or 40 people sitting around on the sofas, having a good time, and I enjoy that too. For some reason the band always plays better when there’s people there. I wouldn’t like to analyse why, but anyway... ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
The themes explored on ‘Hosannas...’ may prove surprising to those expecting a knotted mass of conspiracy theories and global politics. One song, ‘Majestic’ deals with the shadowy machinations of the world power elite, but elsewhere Jaz looks at the smaller picture, focusing on his own life and those of his bandmates and associates. On the title track, Jaz considers the role Killing Joke plays in his life, and the role he plays in Killing Joke. “I harbour thoughts of killing you/Pour petrol on you and then on me/But then I walk down the stairs/And Killing Joke waits for me there.” It’s apt that ‘Hosannas...’ follows last year’s 25th anniversary celebrations so closely, as it’s an album that concerns itself not just with the band but also the fans and friends - ‘Gatherers’ - that surround them. Jaz maintains that Killing Joke is made up of more than just four musicians.
“The idea is literally liberate my spirit, get out of my body, and share this experience with everybody,” he claims. “I love this life and I love the people outside of the band. The people that love Killing Joke have made Killing Joke what it is more than the band itself. They’ve kept us going, and have inspired us to keep going when we’ve gone through dark times because of that loving support. I mean, I’m amazed to see how young our audience is now. We’re certainly old enough to be their fathers. Our drummer, Benny (Calvert), he’s half the age of all of us! He calls me ‘Papa Jaz’, he calls Geordie ‘Uncle Geordie’ and Raven ‘Uncle Paul’! He’s the same age as my oldest daughter!”
Typically labelled a ‘dark’ band, Killing Joke’s career is in fact littered with uplifting anthems of defiance. Songs like ‘Wardance’, ‘We Have Joy’, ‘Love Like Blood’, ‘Eighties’, ‘Money Is Not Our God’, ‘This Savage Freedom’ and ‘Loose Cannon’ are far from despondent. They’re rallying cries, even if the cry is to dance wildly into the abyss. The celebratory aspect of Killing Joke - another thing that separates them from most of their dour post-punk peers - endures to this day, as Jaz points out.
“We all still get fucking caned and shitfaced together when we go out on celebrations,” he confirms. “I’d hate to live a life of sobriety and drinking mineral water, you know. Life’s for living! We like feasts in Killing Joke. We like eating together, drinking together. I think this must be one of the few bands where everybody’s got a good basic knowledge of just about everything. What’s going on politically in different parts of the world, poetry, classical music, insects, everything. Everybody’s got strong opinions about so many different things, and for me it’s such a joy being with such a well-read, intelligent band of thugs. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Dividing his time between his island home off the coast of New Zealand and the city of Prague (where he scores classical music for orchestra) Jaz is a man reluctant to stand still. One of his upcoming projects is a spoken word collaboration with Paul Raven entitled ‘Gems Of Power’, an extension of Coleman’s career as a lecturer.
“I’ve lectured on music, on thinking, on techniques of giving yourself personal freedom if you’ve got no money. How to go anywhere in the world and live like a millionaire on fresh air. This is what I’m doing with ‘Gems Of Power’. The world is changing, we know it’s going to shift, how do we respond to it? So it’s simply that. It’s something you can play at home and think about. You don’t need any money for it, you need to get a map of the world and stick it on the toilet wall, that’s all I ask people to do.”
As an individual constantly struggling with very real problems of his own, Coleman is more than qualified to dispense wisdom.
“I go through this ‘Breakfast with Jaz Coleman’,” he smiles. “I can hardly sleep, I have this sleeping disorder, and when I do sleep it’s for two hours and then I wake up with massive panic attacks. So I go through a normal morning for me, sharing my Hell with everybody else and how I get out of it and how I get out of my depression. I suffer terrible depression. One in ten people suffer depression, I’m not alone. When you look at the world it’s hard to keep that spirit up sometimes. And the price of everything! My God, in London you have to have a hundred quid to step outside! That’ll buy you a couple of pints, a sandwich and your travel! It’s unbelievable. Then on top of that people are paying their rent! I don’t know how you lot do it!”
As several songs on the new album indicate, Jaz keeps his spirits up by keeping busy and concentrating on the things that matter and make his life worthwhile. After over 25 years, Killing Joke still acts both as community and catharsis for the charismatic musician.
“Spending time with the people you really love, eating and drinking well, these are the things that warm my heart. Sharing the music with everybody while we’re on two legs and we’re not dead. These things mean a lot to me and I rejoice in them on this record. Although I wrote a lot of the album in warzones, the result I got was completely different. I look now at Killing Joke’s music as the new folk music, because we never had folk music. The songs of our forefathers? I don’t know what a fucking English song is! We made our own with Killing Joke. In this way, I think we’ve contributed to modern culture. Although it’s always difficult we’re just going to keep doing it, I want the standards to be higher and the next album I want to be better again, and more honest again. I don’t know what it will sound like but it’ll sure sound like Killing Joke.
“It’s a good life. Don’t forget that. With all the depressions and all the shit that’s going on in the world, we’re not dead yet, and we can have a few laughs still. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Do you want a cigarette?”

Liars

2008-06-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

The Luminaire, Kilburn High Street. Talking hairstyles, standing still, forearms vertical, like shields. The jubilant gay couple in front of me bounces like it's mardi gras but for the most part Liars are a freakshow this crowd are party to but won't party to, too busy chasing the secondhand smudge of cool by association. Angus, Julian and Aaron are onstage, pounding stuff, chanting, making noise, forcing the air around them into unreasonable shapes. Aaron in particular is contorting his extraordinarily simian face into something resembling an African witchdoctor mask, lower teeth bared, eyes back in their sockets. But why break a sweat when just being here is enough to get another stamp on your hipster card? Who gives a fuck about music anyway?

Who indeed. A few weeks from now I will spend the night of my 30th birthday in the moshpit at a Mastodon/High On Fire gig at the Scala. The audience, although that seems far too sedentary a term to use in this case, are genuinely losing it and themselves, blurring their bodies into a writhing mass of flailing flesh, building a savage utopia out of untrammeled physicality. Liars' music - and that’d be rock music, not punk-funk or no-wave or whatever might make it sound more palatable to the faithless - is propulsive, kinetic, visceral. It should generate a similar kind of feedback loop between band and audience, but the evident desperation on the part of many of their punters to be a face cancels out any possibility of becoming faceless, abandoned to mind-wiping ecstasies of the music. Heaven forbid that music or anything else should have any power over the most important thing in your world. You.

You spoiled brats. You never had it so good.

"We went to Cork, Limerick, Galway, Belfast... all those places where it's not like you're playing to a thousand people. Sometimes in Limerick we played to fifteen. But, you know, there are some kids there and often it's like a group of kids who are actually a band, you know? And they're like, 'Dude, I didn't know people were doing that! I never heard of your band before!' That's what they say! That's awesome! It's like, 'I saw this name 'Liars', I just thought you were some crap or whatever and we were just down for a pint, but I flipped my lid, man! We're going home now to figure it out!" And that's great, dude! You don't get that when you play in New York or London." - Angus

The new Liars album is called Drum's Not Dead. It is the sound of conflict, resolution, more conflict, further resolution, an endless jagged spiral of success and failure, the hardcore and headstrong giving way to the uncertain and unstable and vice versa. It's nothing so obvious as The Sound Of Total War. It's more fractured than that, and often tender. It's furiously telling someone you want to fucking kill them only to immediately regret both the sentiment and the needless schism that led up to those words leaving your lips and you'd do anything to suck them back through your mouth into the pit of pain churning in your stomach and now everything's fucked and you have to build something out of betrayal and broken promises. It's war, yes, but shattered and scattered and stamped into the bloody fabric of our everyday lives. It’s the comfort of simplicity smashed into a million pieces you cannot keep track of no matter how you try. This, of course, is only my interpretation. And what do I know?

"I'm not lumping you into this category, but I view press and reviews as a technicolour version of what people may think or may be influenced to think. I think it's a very exaggerated and very animated version. There are these terms that are developed and these tie-ins to other more interesting and more enticing things that may have influenced the music in this kind of cartoonish way. And I'm not discounting it at all, I think it's just that it's an over-exaggerated idea of something I don't know how to think about or know how to gauge or put in a container. I don't think we pay any attention to it when we make things, but certainly, you know, you have to be aware of that." - Aaron

Drum’s Not Dead is a conversational record. It centres around relationships fractured and re-established, and allegorises these in form of two polar characters, Drum and Mt. Heart Attack. Drum is humanity at its most confident, capable and unintellectual. Drum sees only cause and effect. Drum can always be trusted to act without reservation or reluctance. Drum does not fuss over the details. On the other hand, Mt. Heart Attack is the fretful sort. Mt. Heart Attack points out the drawbacks. Mt. Heart Attack feels guilty about the past and is fearful of the future.

"Drum became a sort of elemental part of our band. It was almost like it was another member that needed constant attention. Both Aaron and Julian play drums, y'know? So it really felt like Drum was a person and a representation of something that worked for us, the instinctual hitting of something, where you don't really need to know that much about it. You can hit it soft and it sounds different to when you hit it hard. And that's great. And then we developed the idea of this alternate element, Mt. Heart Attack, because everything isn't so easy like that. I mean, in some ways we wish it was all that instinctual but sometimes we do think about it too much. And it can swap in the same way that your mood changes, like, you can be Drum now but then in ten minutes you might be Mt. Heart Attack." - Angus

So, Angus. You decided to move to Berlin and tour Europe, right?
"Yeah,” he affirms. “We did it for financial reasons and to explore, and the opportunity came up with the European Union and all that. We went to Budapest and Croatia and Slovenia and Slovakia and Poland and then we went to Turkey, even though they're not allowed in the EU yet. We went there to make our thoughts felt about the whole situation there."
What kind of impressions were you left with from your travels?
"I came from Los Angeles,” confides Julian. “You know, the dry wall capital? So it was just a whole different world to come into places that so much history right there in your face, you know? The first time you visit it you look outside and there's this Swiss cheese building, just bullet-ridden, and then when you look for it it's everywhere. Then the more you learn about history and the more... it's really kind of intense, each neighborhood, each street, sometimes you're just going to get a doughnut then all of a sudden you're like, 'Oh my God, there's bombs dropped, and thousands of people marching down the street, going to die!' So much of that has happened. It's really a weird flip-flop, you know?
There's an element of leaving the comfort zone, then?
"Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Angus is nothing if not enthusiastic. “And trying to open up a bit. And this is a bit stupid, but maybe it's the same as the EU opening up. It felt to us like these places are there to go to and honestly, it really makes a great deal of difference to a tour if you're going to somewhere new and also if you're going to somewhere where people don't always get a chance to see the type of stuff that you do. It really feels like you're bringing something and you're doing something, not like just the average day-to-day club show, you're going to Slovenia and people there haven't seen you, and you blow some kids’ minds, and it feels kinda cool. It makes it kinda worthwhile."
"For some reason I'm just thinking of Belgrade when we were in Serbia,” begins Julian. “And you get there and then you meet the promoter, and the promoter wants to take you to somewhere to get something to eat, so he takes you to get something to eat and you have this really nice meal and you're talking all about Serbia, and you're talking about Belgrade and you're talking about Croatia, and you know, 'What was the division back then?' and 'How do you say ‘thank you’ here? Oh, it's the same in Croatia? Oh really? They said it was totally different...'"
"It's really important for people like us who've grown up in colonies to get a sense of history that we haven't had before,” states Angus. “It makes a big difference to go there and have a guy who was living there tell you, 'There were tanks pointed there, and we were scared.' You know? It was like, 'Wow!’ There's a real sense of inspiration you can draw from that. In the same way, you can draw a lot of inspiration from Los Angeles, and the way that is. It's a different sense of what you're looking for at the time and this time for us it was a sort of European experience."
Do you feel that the US and Western Europe are kept at arm's length from history? That it takes something like a natural disaster or a terrorist attack to wake us up to the fact that history is in fact a continuous process that doesn’t just end when we put down our high school or sixth form textbooks?
“Oooh, yeah! It's the insulation that's the scary thing. I don't know what it's like particularly here, but in Australia and America it's difficult for people to tell you where these countries are! You know? Or name these countries! And it's like, damn, man, this is your world! How can you not be interested in what's going on in the other neighbourhood? Y'know? So it's really insular, and that's what's scary, and that scared me out of being in that climate."
Early on in the band’s career, you were lumped in with the whole NYC art-punk-funk kind of thing. Maybe one thing that separates Liars from all of that is that you have a broader perspective.
"Well, New York was really important to us too,” says Angus. “Just to make that clear."
"But you can do it anywhere,” counters Julian. “It's not so much about New York City. That's not the only place where things happen."

We’re back at the Luminaire. Liars are tearing through a version of Nirvana’s ‘Territorial Pissings’ and I’m sure they’re doing it for the hell of it, not because they’re faced with a crowd that are nodding politely when they should be ripping chunks out of the air and stuffing them in their mouths and growling and slavering and shaking their heads from side to side. The gig is almost over. Drum’s not dead, and we’re all still alive, so everything’s cool. No-one’s getting out of hand. We’re safe. Real fucking safe. Especially compared to a band who constantly make life difficult for themselves, pushing themselves further from home with everything they do. Do you understand how rare that is? How brave? Rather than stand still and allow the universe to coalesce around them, to solidify and become familiar, Liars act on the knowledge that a new environment creates new personalities and new relationships, demanding reinvention and readjustment. Sure, I’m presenting an exaggerated and animated view of all this. I know Angus moved to Berlin for financial reasons, to take advantage of the cheap accommodation and studio time offered by the city. I know this, but I can’t quite believe it. I believe Liars make it all up as they go along, and that’s exhilarating.

“I think we've been kind of lucky. From the interviews we've done, which are a good source of feedback as to what people outside of the three of us think, the kind of consensus is that people don't really know what to expect. If anything they expect us to change now. So that's really lucky for us, a very fortunate position to be in. Almost to the sense that if we made another record that was similar to this one, that would be the more shocking... not shocking but surprising, thing. And that's kind of cool. I'd rather be in that position than another one." - Aaron

During the interview, I do something no music writer is ever allowed to do. Not ever, or you get shot in the back of the head and all traces of your existence, which basically amount to a bunch of articles, interviews and reviews, are wiped from the face of the earth for ever and ever, amen. What is this heinous act? Well, I get something wrong. Apparently. Or perhaps I just get it my kind of right. I remark that one of the songs on the new album, ‘It Fit When I Was A Kid’ sounds like a dream. It’s something in the way the sections of the song fit together, the way it makes sense when you’re experiencing it but then you try and explain it to others and it falls apart in the telling.

"I think dreams are a great subject and still one of the great mysteries of the world. Isn't it so weird that we don't know what's going on? I mean, people tell you that it's the brain in neutral or whatever. Have you ever done, like, a dream diary? Where you keep a pencil and you write down things you've been dreaming? That's interesting. But no, hahahaha! 'It Fit When I Was A Kid' is not a dream. But I guess maybe the imagery could be imagined, and in that way I can see what you're saying. That's the great thing about dreams, right? There's no concrete interpretation. And those are the possibilities of a dream diary, that you go in tangents, and with a word you could say five different other things and maybe I think in our lyric writing we find an interest in that. Making things available for interpretation rather than a dictation." - Angus

Drum’s not dead, we’re all still alive, and everything’s cool. But there’s one song left tonight and just as I’m about to give up on all these damn spoilt kids there’s a glimpse of what could have been. Scratch that, it’s a glimpse of what is, but until now has been held in check, mollified, shut away like the madwoman in the attic. Liars are pounding stuff, chanting, making noise, forcing the air around them into unreasonable shapes, Angus is screaming, “I am a BEAR! Give me a TAIL!” and suddenly we’re united in our desire to tear away our skin and expose the sleek fur beneath. The Luminaire becomes a menagerie. With what is left of our human voices we chant for something we forgot we wanted so badly.

“Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood! BLOOD!”

Mastodon

2008-06-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

“Take away the anchor/Amplify the mystery” - ‘Capillarian Crest’

“Baba Yaga.”
Brann Dailor, Mastodon drummer and tattooed love boy, picks his favourite mythical creature.The decision takes him roughly half a second. Like fellow bandmates Troy Sanders (bass/vocals), Brent Hinds (guitars/vocals) and Bill Kelliher (guitars/vocals) he’s intimately acquainted with the everlasting power of myth. After all, Mastodon only grudgingly exist in our world. They’d rather be elsewhere. Where the wild things are...
“She’s a badass evil Russian witch,” he continues, enthused. “She has a run-in with these kids in the forest and she’s got this crazy fuckin’ thing she flies around in. All those Russian fairytales they paint on the little tiny black lacquer boxes? They’re so cool. My wife went to Russia, and there were these people painting these boxes with little tiny brushes, working at ‘em for weeks and selling them for less than ten dollars. People are really poor over there right now. We fucked ‘em up good. ‘Yeah, be democratic, it’s great! Oops! It failed. Sorry about that. Build some bombs, alright?’ The mob are runnin’ shit over there.”
“I still wish they would find Bigfoot,” admits Troy, bashfully.
“Yeah,” agrees Brann. “Where is that motherfucker?”
Mastodon have just released their third album. It’s entitled Blood Mountain and what can I say about it but... oh my God, the RIFFS!!! There are few bands throwing riffs of this quality around with such reckless abandon right now. Brann and his merry band of explorers have taken the hyperkinetic heroism of their previous two albums Remission (2002) and Leviathan (2004) and twisted it into a Mobius comic strip populated by crazed mutations such as the Cysquatch (“a one-eyed sasquatch that can see into the future,” explains Brann) and the Birchmen (probably not members of American Anti-Communist organisation The John Birch Society). It’d all be impossible to absorb were it not for the fact that each and every one of the fucking things is catchier than a Cenobite’s flesh-hook, making Blood Mountain as much a total POP experience as an object lesson in the art of shredding. These riffs are so maddeningly infectious, they drove Brann Dailor crazy before he’d written them.
“You can’t control what riff is gonna come to you when and where or what’s gonna inspire it,” drawls the drummer. “I think the stuff that I write comes out of severe frustration from insomnia or whatever I might be going through at the time. My brain just won’t... I have real trouble sleeping, y’know?”
Have you had that for a long time?
“It’s been since uh... since Leviathan, I think. Yeah.”
Where does it come from? Too much caffeine? Not being able to shut off?
“Fuckin’ just trying to write songs. Or not even trying to write songs, but the riffs will just not stop in your head, y’know? The riff for ‘Blood And Thunder’ (off Leviathan) was in there for ever and it took me so long to get it out through a guitar and an amp. Then it was like, ‘Okay! That one’s gone!’ Know what I mean? I don’t know. If I’m not worrying about something, I don’t know what to do with myself. It gets messy up there.”
Have you considered treatment?
“No no no,” he sighs. “If I get drunk enough I can pass out on the bus with everybody else. And that’s what it comes down to sometimes. I get a couple of drinks in me and then I’m okay. And at home it’s not too bad unless we’re in the writing phase. Then I’m fucked, y’know? I’ll just lie there like, (hums main riff to ‘Blood And Thunder’ from Leviathan) ‘Dun-de-dun-de-dun-de-dun-dun!’ Or ‘Crystal Skull’. There’s a part in there that I knew wasn’t totally ready. The I went to see King Kong and they’re playing these wardrums, trying to get Kong to come out, and I got this part that went (hums ‘Crystal Skull’s tribal riff) ‘Guh-guh! Gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu!’ I couldn’t even pay attention to the movie after that! In the parking lot my wife asked me, ‘What riff do you have going?’ Hahaha! ‘Cos we’ll even be in the shower and she’ll be like, ‘What riff you got?’ I’m like, ‘Guh-guh! Gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu!’ Hahahaha! She’ll go, ‘Oh, that one. Is that the one from last night that was all night?’ I’m like, ‘Um... yeah’. My teeth’ll be grinding, y’know...”
Despite backgrounds in the typically reality-obsessed world of US hardcore (Brann and Troy are both former members of Lethargy and Today Is The Day) Mastodon have always leaned heavily towards myth and legend, but with a greater degree of erudition and sincerity than say, Hammerfall or Dragonforce. Brann in particular cites Joseph Campbell’s The Power Of Myth as an inspiration. Is that the kind of stuff you’ve always been into individually?
“That’s kind of what ties us together as people,” replies Brann. “We’re all like, ‘Yeah, cool! The Cysquatch!’ I thought everybody was like that! Myth and legend, that’s the beginning of human culture. That was the way you were taught manners or how to avoid horrible situations. Like, here’s what happened to Hansel and Gretel, y’know? It’s the beginning of religion, fables and fairytales. And there are monsters involved, so that’s cool. Hahaha!”
Would you ever forsake the world of fantasy and ‘go political’?
“It would interest me, personally,” muses Troy. “But I think Mastodon would go more bizarre than that, the way we all focus.”
“I’d rather be in a more spiritual realm,” agrees Brann. “I don’t wanna mix my music with war. I read as much as I can about it to have an inkling of a clue what’s going on even though there’s not much anybody can do about it. But I don’t know if I feel comfortable with that stuff in my music. It’s more like a spiritual thing, trying to go to the next level.”
You’re aiming for the fantastic, the transcendent.
“Yeah,” nods the drummer. “Everybody’s so obsessed with reality television and reality in everything, it’s like... where’s the fantasy?”
“I’d rather close my eyes and think of something cooler,” says Troy. “We like to go into our own little world.”
So we won’t ever see Mastodon trifling with the Punk The Vote movement?
“If we’re gonna be singing about tanks, they’ve gotta be... alive!” grins Brann. “If we’re gonna do some kind of anti-war album it would have to be totally metaphorical and cleverly done. Most of the people who decide, ‘We’re gonna make a political record because we’re upset about President Bush!’ They jump on that bandwagon and it’s like, ‘Yeah? Really? You think?’ We know he’s horrible and awful and that everyone around him is awful. You’re not saying anything.”
Okay, back to nature then. Have any of you ever been stuck up a mountain? Are you outdoors, trekking types?
“We try to be,” laughs Brann. “But we’re always stuck in a fucking van or a bus! I wanna go camping so bad, you have no idea. I used to camp all the time. I used to go to this place in upstate New York called Stony Brook Falls, and it had all these huge waterfalls and a big long trail. You could walk the trail and get in the waterfalls. I almost fell over in one once. I slipped on some algae, got pushed up and my legs went over. It was about a 120 feet drop, this waterfall, gushing over. I shit myself, hahaha!”
“I remember being lost,” Troy recalls. “You know, that feeling of having no direction, just infinite, non-stop trees? It made me fucking nervous. I remember that kind of shit from being little and exploring where my mom told me not to go, getting too far away and really losing it. I remember that feeling very well.”
Is it too fanciful to suggest that Mastodon are currently the world’s biggest psychedelic band? I don’t think so. Blood Mountain may be many things - superlative heavy metal, iron-clad pop, vertiginous prog - but it also follows an internal logic that can only have derived from a perspective bent all fucking sideways on hallucinogens. And nature, perhaps the greatest psychedelic of them all, if you’ll forgive me getting all Arthur Magazine on your ass.
“When I was a teenager, the only place for us to go to take acid was the woods,” confides Brann. “We’d just go out there for fuckin’ eighteen hours and start a bonfire and get lost in there. We’d see people in the trees and completely lose our minds. It was awesome. But y’know, I was a teenager, so no worries. We’d just go out there and laugh for hours and come up with the most bizarre scenarios of what was happening in the jungle, hahahaha! When it was really only a few yards away from someone’s backyard.”
That’s carried on into what you’re doing with Blood Mountain. A kind of self-generated syncretic myth-making.
“Yeah,” Brann smiles. “I can’t do acid anymore, but it got me into a good spot, I think. I could see everything so clearly under the influence of LSD.”
When did you realise you couldn’t do it anymore?
“I was in my mid-20s, I think,” he remembers. “Me and a friend of mine went over to our other friend’s house and there was a dude there who had some acid. I hadn’t done it in a long time but I was with a good, close friend of mine who I was actually helping off heroin at the time. He was like, ‘I just wanna take acid with you and have an awesome time,’ so we went over to this guy’s house and he had an eyedropper. He was like, ‘Just hold your tongue out,’ so I went ‘Alright,’ and that was a mistake. He dropped it and was like, ‘Oh fuck! I gave you way too much!’ He gave me the whole dropper. So I immediately started trying to scrape my tongue off, y’know.
“Anyway,” he continues. “That was a really, really, super-heavy trip. Rainbow coloured maggots coming out of the ceiling, the floor turning into water, my girlfriend turning into Satan. She was fuckin’ with me too, asking ‘What am I to you right now?’ And her face was like melting, so I was like, ‘You don’t wanna know! You just need to leave me alone right now...’ Actually what did it was, at six in the morning the phone rang. And you know when the phone rings and you’re tripping? ‘Oh my God! That’s the outside!’ My girlfriend got up to answer the phone, and it was her work calling, a Greek diner right around the corner from us. They were like, ‘Hey, this woman Cindy who works here has had a heart attack, and they’re taking her away in an ambulance!’ I could hear my girlfriend in the other room going, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ and I was like ‘OH MY GOD!!!’ My mother was in the hospital at the time, she’d recently had some really hardcore crazy shit go down. She was in intensive care, and that could have been a phone call to tell me my mom was dead or something. So from that point I was like, ‘I’m an adult, I can’t be doing that shit anymore. I have to be responsible, I’m not fifteen’. So that’s how it is.”
As you get older, the easier it is for reality to intrude...
“And the worse it gets,” Brann shakes his head. “Fuck that! I never wanna do that again in my whole life. I went through it, I had the best time in my life doing it, had a couple of flips, a couple of bad ones, but for the most part it got me to experience different kinds of music, different kinds of movies, different kinds of art. I think it expanded my mind, and I was able to use it as a tool to get to certain places. Now I know where those places are. So I don’t need it.”

Melvins

2008-06-23T16:20:00.001-07:00

Thank fuck for The Melvins. While other bands chase their own behinds in the attempt to stay current, fall over themselves trying to placate their fanbase and generally forget why they started making music in the first place, Buzz Osborne (vocals/guitar) and Dale Crover (drums) keep on doing exactly what they want, when they want. It’s tempting to peg their new album ‘A Senile Animal’ as some kind of heroic return, featuring as it does some of their most infectious and accessible work to date, as well as new recruits Jared Warren (bass/vocals) and Coady Willis (more drums) aka Big Business. But with five album releases in the last two years, the fact of the matter is they’ve never been away.
“I’ve had people talk about ‘The last real Melvins record...’ I’m like, ‘Real[$italics] Melvins record?’ I have no concept of what they’re talking about," laughs Buzz. "If you put it out, it’s a real album! Considering how much time we put into that stuff, for it not to be a real record... y’know? I’d put the album we did with Lustmord, ‘Pigs Of The Roman Empire’ (2004) in our top five records because it covered ground that we hadn’t covered before. It’s the exact record that we needed to put out at that point.”
One only has to look at their recent projects - the Lustmord collaboration, two albums with Jello Biafra, a live remake of 1993’s ‘Houdini’ - to conclude that The Melvins are scarcely the most predictable of bands.
“God forbid,’ shudders the guitarist. ‘We can do straighter stuff if we want to. We can also do a lot of other stuff, which sets us apart from almost every other band. We can do just about anything any other band can do, but they can’t do what we[$italics] do.”
This (per)versatility has ensured that The Melvins have continued to be a vital musical force even as their more photogenic peers have fallen by the wayside. Or died.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason most of our contemporaries were able to become famous is because they all had frontmen that looked like cute wounded junkies. Layne Staley, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell. And none of us could really pull that off. I honestly believe that if the singers from those bands were 300 pound black guys with the exact same voices, nobody would have bought their records.”
Despite their relative lack of commercial success, The Melvins are regularly cited as an inspiration by younger bands. Buzz views this with a degree of scepticism.
“Most of them miss the point. I’m not even sure what the point is. But they’re missing it.”
True. The Melvins are not an easy band to emulate. For one thing, they’re awesomely talented musicians. For another, they’ve never stopped trying new approaches to their music. This, after all, is the band that recorded ‘Gluey Porch Treatments’, ‘Lysol’, ‘Stag’, ‘Prick’ and ‘Colossus Of Destiny’. None of which indicate a band given to second guessing the requirements of their listeners.
“Well, if we did that people would hate us anyway. I’ve always said that. So I’m not afraid of doing things differently. I’m really, really happy with the new album... I'd put it in my top five as well!”
When discussing the new album, a curious thing happens to Buzz’s voice. It almost cracks into a giggle. While it’s hard to find an artist who doesn’t hail his or her latest work as the best thing they’ve ever done (aside from Devin Townsend) few seem so genuinely thrilled about their new work as Osborne does today. Especially after 20-odd years of making music. And he’s right to be. ‘A Senile Animal’ is a fucking great rock album just like Sabbath, Kiss or Cheap Trick used to make. It’s a hell of a lot heavier, of course, but just as concise. Six of its ten tracks clock in under the three minute mark, while the whole album lasts just over 41 minutes. Though prolific, The Melvins are firm believers in quality over quantity at a time when many bands feel the need to fill all 80 minutes of a single disc or - heaven forbid - present the listener with an interminable double disc opus.
“That’s ridiculously long. We always shoot for somewhere between 40 and 45 minutes. 50, max. It’s all I wanna hear.”
The recruitment of Jared and Coady following the exit of bass player Kevin Rutmanis was something of a thunderbolt for Melvins fans. The pulverising twin-kit charge of ‘A Senile Animal’ illustrates that it was in fact a masterstroke.
“I’ve been in this position so many times before," recalls Buzz. "You try to think of what you’re gonna do now. The last thing I wanted to do was just get somebody that fit the suit. I wanted something that was a little more out there. So we started thinking about people to play with and Jared’s name came up. We had played with Big Business before and liked ‘em. We’d also talked for years about adding another drummer. So I said to Dale, ‘Instead of just asking Jared, why don’t we ask both of them to join?’ He thought that was a great idea.”
Thankfully, the absorption of Jared and Coady into The Melvins didn’t result in the end of their own band.
“We insisted that they continue with Big Business. We wanted them to focus on that and play with us as well. And it worked out well. They moved from Seattle to LA, but they were going to anyway! We did a lot of work in a very short amount of time.”
On the subject of previous bass player Kevin Rutmanis and his eventual departure from the band in 2005, Buzz is tight-lipped but gracious.
“We hit an impasse as a result of personal issues. Let’s leave it at that. I honestly hope things work out for the best with Kevin and I have nothing bad to say. I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know what any of our ex-bass players are doing. Lori Black lives in San Francisco but I haven’t talked to her in about four years. Joe Preston, I have no idea. Mark D, I have no idea at all. Matt Lukin played with Mudhoney for a long time and then was completely out of music probably for five or six years. That’s it, y’know?”
Bearing in mind the number of bass players that have passed through the ranks, one wonders if Jared is a little worried about his job security...
“He better[$italics] be. None of those people would have ever quit. Regardless of what they think now. We never had anybody quit our band. They were booted, whether it was their fault or not. I actually liked all the bass players. I really liked the things that they contributed musically. Jared is outstanding by his being a lead singer as well.”
There’s no doubt that Jared’s vocals - uncannily similar to the young King Buzzo’s - add a certain depth and shade to the new material. One of the key moments on ‘A Senile Animal’ is the glorious choral section of ‘A History Of Bad Men’. It’s a brilliant example of the secret pop heart that beats beneath The Melvins’ crusty carapace. It also sounds a bit like classic Queen.
“That’s what happens when you have someone who can actually sing with the band,” sighs Buzz.
The final song on the album is entitled ‘A Vast Filthy Prison’. While the title might suggest a somewhat Gnostic perspective on the world, perhaps inspired by the work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick (who coined the phrase ‘Black Iron Prison’ in his mindblowing semi-autobiographical novel ‘Valis’) it is in fact an oblique summary of Buzz’s philosophy of self-determination.
“It’s about a prison for the self. It’s something you’ve built. You’re now in it and it’s beyond your imagination. You can’t blame the world for it. Basically it’s about desperation and being stingy. Demanding things while looking like you’re being benevolent, but you’re really not. That’s as close as I can come to where it’s actually at.”
Buzz warms to this theme.
“We are personally responsible for our own destiny. You have to make things happen on your own terms. If you’re gonna sit around and wait for somebody else or the government to do it for you, you’re an idiot. People who wanna sit there and blame the way the world is for all their woes, I have no hope for them. Most of these people can’t even pick a good band to listen to, let alone comment on what’s going on in the outside world. Or monied celebrities trying to tell me what I should do with my money? Fuck that. They should all be hanging by their necks. ‘Save Africa!’ First, find Africa! ‘Save Tibet!’ Fuck[$italics] Tibet! Find it on the map, now tell me why you care about it. Fuck that, I have no interest. If there are celebrities involved and they have some interest in it, then that is exactly why I am not interested in it. Brad Pitt talking about Africa... fuck that. Fuck[$italics] Africa. If he’s involved there’s gotta be something wrong.”
The Melvins are isolationists, having always existed in their own private universe, aloof from any current scene or trend. And Buzz likes it that way.
“It’s self-inflicted,” Buzz explains. “That’s always been the case throughout our career. There’s no golden era. I lived through all those eras and if people wanna look back on all that stuff as the good old days, they can go right ahead. I’m looking to the future, y’know?”

Mordant Music

2008-06-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

Summer 2006. I stumble upon an intriguing, teardrop-shaped CD sleeve in one of London’s bespoke audio boutiques. On closer inspection, I note that the CD features the voice of Thames TV continuity announcer Philip Elsemore, whose rich, comforting tones and crumpled, friendly face I had forgotten until this very moment. Ghosted. I scan the sleevenotes, a mossy manifesto conjuring images of Britain succumbing to corvidae while ‘the amplified sound of dead air’ leaks from melted transistor radios. I purchase the CD, but I’m discombobulated by its hyper-sampleadelic plundering of Britains past and present, its salty evocation of early ‘90s UK techno (Stakker, FSOL, Bandulu, et al) and crafty nods toward dubstep. I return it to the shop, mildly aggrieved.
But something isn’t right. In spite of myself, I’m still breathing Dead Air. I buy it again, and spend the rest of the summer, autumn and winter travelling up and down the Silverlink, binding the sound in my headphones to the concrete and pebbledash and undead, dreamless sky.
Admiral Greyscale and Baron Mordant are the shadow-hosts to Mordant Music, a constantly sporing subcultural entity which, as well as releasing the insidiously essential Dead Air, has spat out collaborative emissions with dubstep artist Shackleton (notably 2004’s now-classic ‘Stalker’ 7”) and comedian Simon Munnery (the pornographic View Mastur toy). I contacted the pair for a furtive electronic interview...

Why 'Mordant'? Does the aesthetic dictate the music or vice versa?

Admiral Greyscale: “I think the deathly aesthetic unquestionably fuels the art... it’s a beast that feeds on itself in perpetuity.”

Why is now the right time for a soft explosion of British Weird?

Baron Mordant: “We're right down to the marrow now in terms of yield and an exciting final finality is being viscerally heralded from all quarters, whether it be doom, dubstep, noise, folk or our own brand of death-throw archiving. It is certainly an overall period of mourning and a vast shedding of sonic skin. The glee club has finally departed and a realistic social interaction, imbued with a stark musical framework, has begun to infiltrate everyday lives... '1984' with a better soundtrack. Pound for pound the overall salvation factor is actually in rude health.”

Is Philip Elsemore pleased with the results of his participation?

BM: “A wonderful combination of ecstacy and reticence...'ecstaticence'.”

Is MM part of a British musical lineage?

BM: “MMore an overall cultural lineage that music is the host to... Chris Morris and Leerdammer are as influential as Aphex Twin. The lineage is cosmic and not confined to Broadstairs.”

AG: “We’re pretty keen on Tulse Luper (a fictional British raconteur invented by filmmaker Peter Greenaway). Leonard Rossiter is also a talisman.”

So how would you describe your relationship with good old Blighty? Is there a kind of patriotic pride to MM?

BM: “Blighted by shortsightedness more like. As cultures clash and dovetail, with only a handful of mavericks to applaud, I'm firmly opposed to patriotism. It's the vast unknown that I pledge allegiance to... I'm fed up of the forecourts.”

What influenced your decision to make each MM release a covetable 'item'?

AG: “We fumble in the wake of Mo Wax, 4AD, Factory and all those labels/artists for whom a visual identity is as fundamental as the sonic output. We’re also both collectors by nature to differing degrees. We approach the making of everything with an eye on whether or not we’d treasure the item ourselves.”

Given the amount of samples used on Dead Air, how did you decide what went in and what stayed out? Was there a particular 'feel' you were looking/listening for?

BM: “It distilled itself from a lifetime of influences somehow... the BM/AG 'Grey Library'. There were several phases of aligned creativity and it was certainly not just tossed off, however despite the convoluted processes both creatively and socially Dead Air can be looked upon as a veritable 'chicken in a bastard'... only the listener can decide to delve deeper or treat it as scree.”

AG: “We generally aim for a nuance, a vague notion of something... anything overly familiar tends to get lobbed overboard.”

How did the relationship between MM and dubstep come about?

BM: “Dubstep is somewhere in the MM tea-leaves albeit a peripheral cuppa. Sam Shackleton is a friend who happened to be making music in that vein. MM released 'Stalker' which defies the dubstep tag in my book. It's more John Carpenter to my ears. The recent 'I Want To Eat You' (available on double a-sided 10” with MM’s ‘Hummdrumm’) is certainly in dubstep's six-yard box. Sam's totally 'Mordant' and will breach our defences at some point again in the future.”

What do you feel MM's music shares with dubstep?

BM: “The burden! Note for note, not much, although I am into the tempo and convex production. I think it's suffocating itself and maybe that's the point. We certainly inhabit the same bitumen lined vacuum.”

Strapping Young Lad

2008-06-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

“You can only write what you can write and each year brings a different set of circumstances to the table that result in different types of music, right? ‘Alien’ was that year and ‘The New Black’ is this year.”
That’s Strapping Young Lad mastermind Devin Townsend, responding to the question ‘Did you feel any pressure in producing a follow up to ‘Alien’?’ His stock answer is delivered politely and professionally, but there’s a hint of boredom and frustration detectable through the layers of telephone fuzz. Unexpectedly, and within the same breath, that hint suddenly becomes the basis of the entire interview. The gist of it being, Devin’s in a rut, and he wants out. Surprised? Well... yeah[$italics].
“At the end of the day, man, I’m just tired, and old, and bald, and fat, and grouchy, and bored. You know? So I was just like, I’m going to make this record, and do this stupid Ozzfest thing, and tell a bunch of stupid jokes in front of a lot of people at Download, then I’m just going to fuck off for a while.”
Needless to say, this isn’t the kind of talk you would expect from an artist with a new album to promote, supported by a series of high profile festival dates. What exactly is going on here? Does Devin intend to exit the music business entirely? Or just put Strapping Young Lad out to pasture?
“I’ll be doing other projects,’ he answers. “But SYL was never supposed to be the type of band that played at Download or Ozzfest. Here we are doing it and I’m just like, ‘WHAAAT?’ There’s a part of me that just wants to step away from it. The new album’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re gonna be doing these big shows and doing the Ozzfest... alright, I’m going to write a sing-a-long record that essentially tells everybody that they’re idiots. Including myself.’ We’re all idiots, it’s all stupid. This record’s supposed to be a celebration of the idiocy that is this career.”
Devin Townsend has always approached the world of metal with a degree of laconic humour, but today he sounds exasperated. It seems the years of grinding through the music industry mill have taken their cumulative toll on our embattled protagonist.
“It’s been fifteen years of apathy and misanthropic views on life,” he explains. “The bigger this gets, the less I care, to the point where I just need to go spend some time with my family. I don’t wanna bastardise Strapping and all these other projects by doing it for the money. Strapping was about the big middle finger, and it still is, but I don’t think it needs to go any further than this. I’m always gonna be putting out music but I just need to put my guitar away for a while and step away from it. No matter how many people give you googly eyes while you’re on the stage, no matter how many people try and tell you that your band is really cool, or conversely, that your band sucks, at the end of the day it’s all a joke, and anybody who believes in it is just asking for trouble. I just don’t believe it. You know what I mean? Download? It was great! It was a lot of fun, right? ‘Feather in my hat, great, thank you very much...’ You can keep[$italics] it.
“I just don’t care[$italics],” he continues. “The record company are like, ‘Strapping’s on the rise! You guys have gotta sign for another fifteen records!’ And this started as a fuck you to everything! I don’t wanna be in a position where I’m like, ‘Fuck me[$italics]! Look at me! I’m a whore!’ You know?”
What might seem unnervingly close to self-sabotage is more likely indicative of Townsend’s keen instinct for self-preservation, and his unwillingness to become another dishonest shill pimping out a worn copy of his former self is actually pretty fucking admirable. He’s also refreshingly direct when called upon to survey the SYL ouevre.
“The best Strapping record was ‘City’,” he admits. “That’s not gonna change. I can do a hundred more Strapping records and I’m never gonna do ‘City’ again. A lot of people trumpet their new record as the best thing ever, but I did ‘City’ when I was 23 or 25, and at that point I truly felt it, I truly lived it, I truly believed it, as opposed to having to go there in order to have something to tour. That’s why I still feel like ‘The New Black’ is a valid piece of art, just because it’s like, ‘Alright, you want me to go there? Sing along! You’re an idiot! I’m an idiot! We’re all idiots!’”
While it might not scale the dizzy heights of SYL’s finest hour, ‘The New Black’ is an honest reflection of where Devin Townsend is at this moment in time. It’s a weird and bitter place, for sure, but don’t take Townsend’s current disdain for the rock ‘n’ roll circus as any indication that he’s lost the plot musically. “Artistically, it’s totally sound and I’m proud of it,” he states, and with good reason. The complex webs of cybernetic riffage that underpin songs like ‘Wrongside’, ‘Almost Again’ and the title track mean that ‘The New Black’ isn’t quite the dumbed-down, meatheaded metal album its chief architect might suggest.
However, were it not for the savage tech-metal fury with which it is delivered, some of the new material could be considered perilously close to the platitudinal. ‘You Suck’ and ‘Fucker’ are enjoyable slabs of rabble rousing mock-menace, but lyrically they’re entirely undemanding. Lest we forget, this is the guy who gave us such darkly confessional gems as ‘AAA’ and ‘Detox’. If Townsend is to be believed, he has written these specifically for rabid crowds to howl along to. Unfortunately, he also seems to have lost enthusiasm for touring, at least as far as SYL is concerned.
“It’s gotten to the point where it really interferes with my life,’ he explains. “Because not only don’t I care, now I have to not care for like, ten months of the year. Everybody’s got such a hard-on for touring, too. All these bands are like, ‘You know what I’d really like to do, man? I’d really like to get into a 40 foot steel tube, with fifteen men, drink beer and watch The Simpsons! For ten months! That would be great. Then for that one hour a day we’ll go up there and sweat, and pretend that it matters to our life personally that we can pretend that we’re rock stars.’ You know?”
Ironically, Devin’s lack of faith in the rock ‘n’ roll dream makes him a brilliantly entertaining frontman. His slyly sarcastic announcements at Download (“Down my fucking load, babies!”) punctured the pomposity of the event like a rain of tin tacks on an over-inflated balloon.
“You know what the best thing about Download was?” he laughs. “We watched the video after, and I blew a ball of snot out of my nose on the first song! It stuck to my cheek for the whole show. So I’m like, ‘Okay, here I am at the biggest show I’ll probably ever play, and I’ve got snot all over my face.’ I officially named the ball of snot ‘Herman’. You get to the point with your band after ten years where you’re finally able to play a show like that, and what do you see? You see this ugly, dirty, bald, old, fat, miserable fuck with snot on his face. There you go! Hahahahaha!”
According to Devin, he stumbled into his decade-plus career in heavy metal more or less an accident, and his subsequent inability to enjoy the superficial pleasures of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle means that he should get the fuck out. Right now.
“When I was a kid I was never like, ‘I’m gonna be a rock star! I’m gonna grow up and play my guitar in front of a whole bunch of people!’ I got out of school, I liked music, I was good at it, so I made a demo. The next thing I knew I was in LA. Here I am, fifteen years later, in an office in Germany, bitching and complaining about these great things that have happened. I’m just unappreciative, and therefore should not be allowed to do it.”
One thing that becomes abundantly clear from this conversation is that Townsend is thoroughly sick of seeing his own face plastered all over the music press. It’s perhaps easy to forget that Townsend is a musician - a highly talented one - first and foremost, and only grudgingly a ‘personality’.
“Believe it or not, I tend to be a rather private person. I don’t want people looking at me, I don’t want to be recognised, I don’t want to play the game, right? And because of downloading, you probably do the same amount of interviews and your face is in the same amount of magazines as maybe fifteen, twenty years ago, except you sell a tenth of the amount of records. So it’s like you get all the fame but none of the financial rewards, right? It’s like, if you really like fame, then again, I’m telling you man, this is the job for you. I have a baby, everybody knows about it. I fart sideways, everybody knows about it. I take pills for a very common mental ailment, everybody knows about it. For fuck’s sake, man! It’s impossible to kind of be alone and make music. If I could pay my rent by making music for me, my friends and a couple of people that I know here and there, man, I would do it.”
Although Devin has always been candid on the subject of his bipolar disorder both in his work and in interviews, he feels his reputation as the ‘mad scientist of metal’ has been blown out of all proportion. In essence, his attempts to demystify the condition have backfired.
“I’ve said this before,” he groans. “I’d say a good 60% of the English speaking world takes pills for some sort of thing, right? You can’t sleep, or you have crazy thoughts... we live in an industrial disease-ridden world, and you have to take steps in order to keep your equilibrium. But y’know, everybody’s so insistent on me being the ‘crazy guy’. I’ll take 50 photos at a photo shoot of me just looking normal. Then I’ll sneeze, and that one moment where my eyes are crossed and there’s spit coming out of my mouth and my teeth are all yellow, that’s when they’ll click the photo and they’ll put that on the interview and say, ‘He’s CRAZY!’ You know? The difference between now and fifteen years ago, is that would’ve sold you a lot more records then than it does now, because anybody who wants to hear Devin Townsend or Strapping Young Lad, or any band, they just have to punch it into the computer and there it is. You’ve got it for free. But that doesn’t change the amount of interviews and the amount of shows you have to do in order to get from point A to point B.”
So it’s maximum effort for minimum return?
“Yeah, but it’s not about the return,” flinches Devin. “The bottom line with my career is the art. Really. I love extreme art, I love extreme music for the sake of being able to convey extreme emotions, but... rock is stupid. I’m not a rock star, I never will be, but the whole facade and the whole image... it’s just stupid. Anybody who believes it is setting themselves up for a job in a pizza factory in ten years. We’re all the saaame[$italics]! Just because you’ve got fancy pants and sunglasses doesn’t make any difference when you’re crosslegged on the toilet, grunting out a curry shit at four o’ clock in the morning with your face pressed against the sink because you’re trying to find something cold to bring your temperature down. Everybody is an idiot, you know what I mean? I guess my problem with this whole rock ‘n’ roll thing is that they really try and convince whoever’s doing it that they’re not that person. That for some reason, you’re better, you’re more privileged, you’re smarter, you’re more gifted. So maybe if my career never does anything from here on out, the crowning moment of my entire career will be having a huge hunk of snot on my face at Download. ‘I’m an idiot! Thank you very much for coming! Buy a T-shirt!’”
So is this really the end of Strapping Young Lad? Does ‘The New Black’ represent the last gasp of a much loved metal institution? Or is this all some bizarre, elaborate promotional stunt? At the end of the conversation Townsend requests that we “take whatever I said with a grain of salt,” but the 34 year old Canadian sounds genuinely burnt out and pissed off. Only Devin knows what will happen next, and he may yet confound all our expectations. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Black Sabbath

2008-06-23T16:25:00.000-07:00

Pouring rain, rolling thunder, a church bell tolling in the distance. Already you are in a cold and lonely place, shivering as the downpour soaks you to the skin. The last train left hours ago, there’s nowhere to shelter from the storm except beneath the bare branches of gnarled winter trees. The sleeping village mocks you with its inhuman silence. Then, out of nowhere, three notes from a Gibson SG echo the doleful rhythm of the tolling bell and your fate is sealed, all hope of escape fading fast. You're doomed[$italics].

"What is this that stands before me?/Figure in black which points at me."

The opening title song of Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut album witnesses blues-influenced rock 'n' roll giving way to something darker, harder, thematically more phantasmagorical and baroque yet structurally more primal and neanderthal. With three notes strung together utilising the notorious Devil's Triad or tritone - an interval spanning six semitones, banned in the middle ages for its allegedly diabolical properties - guitarist Tony Iommi, vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward departed from the more traditional blues-based rock of contemporaries such as Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin and set to work on the pitch-black cauldron of weirdness and wonder that is Heavy Metal. While the aformentioned bands undoubtedly contributed to the foundation of the genre, Sabbath were the first fully-formed metal band, and they alone lay claim to being the originators of one of its hardiest and most adaptable subdivisions. Doom. The torpid, dragging tempos, the sudden accelerations, the sonorous, sustained chords, the lyrics of unremitting misery... all the elements fell into place with this one song.
Every permutation of doom - from the genre’s inception in the early ‘80s via Trouble, St. Vitus and Candlemass, right up to the present day - can be viewed as having been derived from the innovations of the classic Sabbath line-up. True doom, funeral doom, sludge doom, drone doom, all of these draw from the blackened wellspring of Iommi and co, each being magnifications of specific elements of the early Sabbath sound. Bands as varied as Solitude Aeturnus, Cathedral, Sunn 0))), Unearthly Trance, Saint Vitus, Corrupted, Sleep, Confessor and Reverend Bizarre owe their very existence to these hallowed masters of misery. Whether they focus on atmosphere, thematic grandiosity or simply slow, downtuned riffing, the shadow of Sabbath hangs heavy over these acolytes of doom.
But if it hadn't been for a factory accident that left riffmaster general Tony Iommi without two of his fretting fingertips, doom as we know it might not exist at all. Unable to comfortably play a conventionally-tuned guitar, Iommi opted for a lower tuning which elicited a deeper, heavier tone from his SG (Geezer Butler also downtuned his bass in order to play along) while the looser strings made pitch-bending an easier option. Filtered through a post-Hendrix/Yardbirds prism of volume and distortion, Iommi's fluid, jazz-inspired playing took on new extreme qualities ranging from the queasy and vertiginous to the oppressively monolithic, setting Sabbath apart from their contemporaries on the British club circuit and proving massively influential on the doom generation to come. As veteran UK rock critic Simon Reynolds points out, “Even in manic mode, Sabbath always sound depressed. Tony Iommi's down-tuned guitar, in tandem with the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, creates sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, viscous terrain, the weight of the world on your shoulders.” This serves by extension as an accurate description of the physical and psychological effects of doom. Like codeine, weed and alcohol, doom is a highly addictive depressant. It enables the listener to let themselves go, but not in the accepted sense of disinhibition and party-hearty positivity. Rather, it offers an opportunity to discover just how low as you can sink without hitting rock bottom, to wallow in the negative aspects of life without the risk of self-annihilation.
When discussing Black Sabbath's influence on the doom metal genre it is absolutely vital to acknowledge the insane howl and gonzoid presence of one John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne. An ex-burglar and all-round delinquent, Osbourne made a rather unorthodox rock star. No tousled sexbomb in the Robert Plant mould, and by no means the best singer in the world, Osbourne was nevertheless blessed/cursed with an untutored yowl that mirrored the band’s capacity for fearsome intensity and cosmic gloom. Ozzy's voice was sick, weird, baleful and defiantly unsexy, a sharp contrast to from the priapic yowl of the typical ‘70s hard rock frontman. His lugubrious tones achieve an especially chilling effect on the band's darkest, doomiest songs. When Osbourne screams "No, no, no, please God help me!" on ‘Black Sabbath’, he expresses one of humanity's deepest and most persistent 'irrational' fears - that of eternal damnation - with a conviction few contemporary death-grunters or emo-screamers could ever approach. Osbourne was also adept at playing the part of Satan, as such in-character songs as 'Lord Of This World' and 'N.I.B.' illustrate. Ozzy delivers the cautionary lyric of the former with diabolical glee ("Your world was made for you by someone above/But you choose evil ways instead of love") while the latter, Geezer’s tale of redemptive love between Satan and a mortal woman, indicates one of Ozzy’s greatest achievements as a vocalist; that of locating the human in the uncanny, making it even more terrifying in the process. Many a doom wailer has sought to emulate Osbourne's distinctive style, including Bobby Leibling (Pentagram), Scott 'Wino' Weinrich (Saint Vitus/The Obsessed/Spirit Caravan/The Hidden Hand) and Messiah Marcolin (Candlemass). All these singers have their individual merits and are influential figures in their own right, but it’s impossible to overstate their debt to the original Voice Of Doom.
So, what compelled Ozzy and his compadres to make such an unholy noise? In order to answer that question it’s necessary to look at the context from which the band emerged. Black Sabbath formed during a period of cultural flux, the point at which the colour began to drain from the psychedelic ‘60s. Coming from Aston, a grimy suburb of Birmingham blown apart by German bombs during World War II, Sabbath had little truck with the facile ‘peace ‘n’ love’ platitudes of the hippy dream. As Ozzy told biographer Steven Rosen, “We got tired of all the bullshit - love your brother and flower power forever, meeting a little chick on the corner and you’re hung up on her and all this. We brought things down to reality.” The late ‘60s and early ‘70s presented people with the flipside of the hippy dream, a brutal era of disappointment and distrust encompassing Altamont, Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and rock star corpses left, right and centre. Sabbath were one of the first bands to capitalise on the new pessimism and amplify the despair of their beloved blues to cosmic extremes. Although the occasional glimmer of hope shone through songs such as 'Children Of The Grave' and 'Sabbra Cadabra', Sabbath’s response to this world gone wrong was typically disengagement ('Sweet Leaf', 'Tomorrow’s Dream', 'Hole In The Sky') or outright disgust ('War Pigs', 'Killing Yourself To Live', 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath'). This uniquely slothful brand of misanthropic angst runs like a stagnant river through the six albums spanning the period 1970 to 1975.
'Black Sabbath', 'Paranoid', 'Master Of Reality', 'Volume 4', 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' and 'Sabotage' are considered by the majority of Sabbath devotees to represent the real Black Sabbath, and rightly so. Over the course of these albums the band redefined what it meant to be ‘heavy’. Previously this was a vague term employed by hippies to describe anything meaningful or intense. In this sense, ‘Heavy’ might encompass anything from Pink Floyd and Yes to Traffic and The Grateful Dead. But Black Sabbath made music that was devastatingly heavy in form, content, execution and effect. The churning guitars and piledriving rhythms were more powerful and focused than anything else rock ‘n’ roll had to offer at that point and the utter despair of the lyrics contrasted sharply with the tales of topographic oceans favoured by the flouncy art-rockers of the time. Although the debut album constituted a formidable opening statement, their metallic sound would become fully realised on 'Paranoid', released later that same year. Extended instrumental jamming gave way to tighter songs written around slow, repetitive riffing and simple melodies. 'Iron Man', 'Hand Of Doom' and 'Electric Funeral' further refined the proto-doom of the previous album’s title track, reigning in the band’s excesses yet maximising their apocalyptic heaviness.
1971 saw the release of the third Sabbath album, 'Master of Reality'. Often considered the definitive blueprint for all doom metal, it’s also the band’s most consistent collection of songs. What self-respecting doomhead could argue with the descending stoner-riff of 'Sweet Leaf', the galloping charge of 'Children Of The Grave', the demiurgic belch of 'Lord Of This World' or the intergalactic trawl of 'Into The Void'? Tony Iommi has since expressed reservations regarding the album’s production, but in truth Master Of Reality sounds utterly astonishing to this day, a thick, muddy quagmire of majestically dragging riffs, head-smacking rhythms and unhinged prophet-of-doom vocals. Perhaps one of the reasons it sounds still sounds so contemporary is that it has been so ruthlessly plundered by countless doom metal bands, most of whom could only dream of achieving similar levels of cosmic melancholy.
1972’s ‘Volume 4’, though worshipped by many, seems something of a retreat from the troglodytic momentum of the previous record. Hints of jazz, blues and boogie creep in here and there, recalling the syncopated swing of the Earth years. That said, the tracks in which these influences are most conspicuous -'Tomorrow’s Dream', 'Supernaut', 'St. Vitus’ Dance' - are awesome pieces of music featuring some brilliantly infectious riffing from Iommi. The doom element of Volume 4 is provided by 'Snowblind', 'Wheels Of Confusion', 'Cornucopia' and 'Under The Sun', tales of pain, insanity and drug abuse set to riffs of ludicrous weight and girth.
Perhaps understandably, having sold doomloads of records, toured the world and gained access to ever more sophisticated recording facilities, Tony Iommi felt the urge to branch out. This desire may also have been inspired by the fact that with the exception of US legend Lester Bangs and a few others, rock critics hated the band, viewing them as somewhat retarded in comparison to the more cerebral likes of Yes and King Crimson. Hence 1973’s 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' saw the introduction of mellotrons, moogs and orchestras in an effort to expand the band’s musical horizons. It worked. If there was ever a metallic equivalent to the ornate 60s pop of late-period Beatles and Beach Boys, this was it. Not only that, but Sabbath had managed to retain their crucial heaviness. The title track, 'A National Acrobat' and 'Killing Yourself To Live' are key doom texts, the latter featuring the single most depressing lyric of Sabbath’s career (“Just take a look around and what do you see/Pain suffering and misery/It’s not the way that the world was meant/It’s a pity you don’t understand”). Curiously enough, the album’s most audacious experiment was written by Ozzy. The slow, grinding tempo and insistent riff of 'Who Are You' were nothing new but the substitution of moogs for guitars was an unexpected stroke of genius, predating the synth-based space-doom of Italian mentalists Ufommamut by over 30 years.
1975’s Sabotage continued in this experimental-yet-brutal vein, with Iommi piling on the synths and keyboards and even embellishing the industrial-strength riff of 'Supertzar' with a Russian choir. But there were also a couple of future doom standards amongst the kitchen-sink excess. The rabid retreatism of 'Hole In The Sky' would inspire a deranged cover by North Carolina eccentrics Confessor in 1992, while the bruising opening riff of 'Megalomania' harked back to the primal sludge of the ‘Paranoid’ album. Though not strictly doomish - in fact more reminiscent of The Who at their most symphonic and progressive - the stately pace and skull-crushing heaviosity of closing epic 'The Writ' illustrated that Iommi’s growing eclecticism did not necessarily entail any loss of power.
Sadly this wasn’t the case with Sabbath’s final two albums with Ozzy, 1976’s 'Technical Ecstasy' and 1978’s 'Never Say Die', records seldom referenced by anyone, let alone doom metallers. Although both deserving of critical reappraisal if only for their frequently mind-buggering strangeness (Funk? Horn sections? Bill Ward singing?) these records were the sound of the Black Sabbath’s original line-up unspooling. On Technical Ecstasy, the opening riff of 'You Won’t Change Me' carried all the dread and foreboding of earlier works, and 'Dirty Women' would become a staple of their live set upon reuniting in 1997, but these were isolated links to a glorious past. Similarly, 'Never Say Die' would have been a great rock album by any other band, but it completely lacked the combination of punkish aggression and skin-crawling atmosphere which had made the earlier albums so enthralling. Before long Ozzy was out and the nightmare was over. For a while, at least.
As with most influential groups, there was more to Black Sabbath than just the music. Doom metal’s visual aesthetic - skulls, crucifixes, religious iconography and gothic imagery - also owes a great deal to the band’s gloriously morbid image, masterminded by Geezer Butler. The band had been labouring under various names including Polka Tulk Blues Band and Earth until, as legend has it, Geezer clocked the title of a Mario Bava film and suggested a name and image change to his bandmates. His contention was that people paid good money to be scared shitless by horror films, so why not apply the same logic to rock ‘n’ roll? This idea was not entirely without precedent - Screaming Lord Sutch and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins spring to mind - but the embryonic Black Sabbath embraced the grand guignol aspect in a much more substantial manner, dressing in black, posing with skulls for publicity photographs, playing songs with occult themes and cultivating an atmosphere of darkness that established doom metal’s ongoing flirtation with all things morose and macabre.
Despite the fact that many Sabbath songs explore the character of Satan and deal with themes of death, madness and torment, lyrically, Sabbath were far from 100% evil. The sentiments expressed in songs such as 'After Forever' and 'Lord Of This World' are entirely consistent with Christian philosophy, and may even sound a little preachy to modern ears. It's therefore no coincidence that doom metal is similarly preoccupied with sin, repentance, redemption and damnation, as the works of Candlemass, Pentagram, Cathedral and Trouble illustrate. Pentagram's 'All Your Sins' is an almost parodically pious warning of the bad shit to come if one refuses to repent ("You're gonna BURN now!"), the early work of Christian doomheads Trouble is awash with titles such as 'Psalm 9' and 'The Tempter' and Candlemass even attempted their own account of the Old Testament with 1989's 'Tales Of Creation while vocalist Messiah Marcolin pranced around in a monk’s habit. Fear of God and Devil form an important ingredient of the doom worldview. Whereas death and black metal often concern themselves with the pros and cons of antisocial behaviour such as mutilation and church-burning, doom is more concerned with the relentless torment of existence and the terrible punishment that awaits at its end if you fail to bear the weight of wordly misery with good grace. Doom is therefore a deeply moral strain of metal. As Sunn 0)))’s Stephen O’Malley points out, the word ‘doom’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘dom’, meaning judgement or law, referring to an unavoidable fate. Or, more specifically, punishment from God.
Black Sabbath's early work is permanently enshrined in metal legend. But can any of Sabbath’s later albums be said to have had any influence on the development of doom? Most attempts fill Ozzy’s platforms have drawn sniffs of derision, especially on albums where Iommi is the only link to the classic line-up. But while the Dio era receives recognition for such doom-defining artefacts as 'Children Of The Sea' and 'The Sign Of The Southern Cross', there are also occasional echoes of former glories in Sabbath’s post-Dio, pre-reunion wilderness years. 'Zero The Hero' (from 1983’s 'Born Again') is perhaps the finest example of this, featuring two of Iommi’s finest, most cataclysmically evil doom-riffs, as well as a crazed performance from Ian Gillan. The Glenn Hughes era is perhaps best ignored ('No Stranger To Love'? No thanks) but skipping ahead to 1994's 'Cross Purposes' we find the dejected dirge of 'Virtual Death'. The single most impressive product of the Tony Martin-fronted era, this eerie crawl sticks out like a severed digit amongst the disappointingly uptempo numbers that characterise the rest of the record.
Jumping back a couple of years, 1992’s 'Dehumanizer' is possibly the most overlooked entry in the entire Sabbath canon. This ultimately failed attempt at a reconciliation with Ronnie James Dio is notable for being the most doom-laden album the band had released since the Ozzy era. 'After All (The Dead)', 'Letters From Earth' and 'Computer God' all boast monstrous riffing and Dio singing in a more aggressive style than usual, even letting loose a couple of Ozzyisms now and then (check his “Allll-riiight!” on 'Letters From Earth'). However unsatisfactory for the singer, the experience seemed to provide his solo career with a much needed shot of adrenalin. Dio’s subsequent 'Strange Highways' and 'Angry Machines' albums were to be the heaviest - and doomiest - of his career.
Instances of latterday greatness aside, it cannot be denied that the fundamentals of doom metal were established by those first six albums and the dark magic created by Iommi, Osbourne, Butler and Ward. Better musicians may have passed through the ranks, but the chemistry between those four stoned and angry young men from Aston has never been equalled. Are Black Sabbath the spiral architects of doom metal? Without a doubt.

Municipal Waste

2008-06-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

"We love partying, we're very serious about that,” affirms Ryan Waste, guitarist/vocalist/hairy hottie with Richmond, Virginia thrash reanimators Municipal Waste. “We're serious about the music, man. And we're serious about the paycheque, hahaha! We're serious about fun. How about that?"
Municipal Waste are perhaps the third or fourth best thing to death in terms of escaping the sickening realities of life and embracing chaos. For all its communal nature, partying is a form of denial, inevitably so, because what is there to party about really when one takes in the constant bomb threat modern life has become? Partying is about denying reality you’ve been handed and creating your own, a responsibility-free zone. Selfish? You bet. It isn’t party for your right to fight, as Public Enemy once detourned their labelmates, The Beastie Boys. It’s party for your right to party. Harder than ever. Til it hurts.
So as the world gets shittier, the grimily hedonistic hi-energy buzz of thrash metal is understandably enjoying a criticial and commercial resurgence. The surprise about this revival is that it seems to be throwing up a few bands who sound vital and venomous enough to survive the fickle attentions of the music media (ourselves included). Nottingham’s Earache have smartly bagged three prime movers; Huddersfield’s Evile, Merseyside’s awesome SSS and the big bros of them all, Municipal Waste. The latter’s three full-length albums to date, Waste ‘Em All (2003), Hazardous Mutation (2005) and the new The Art Of Partying may bring to mind the spotty, split-ended Metallica that recorded Kill ‘Em All, the DRI that unleashed Dealing With It and Crossover and especially the Exodus of Bonded By Blood, Pleasures Of The Flesh and Fabulous Disaster, but they hardly sound like a tired, money-minded re-run of something that worked better twenty years ago. And in person, they seem 100 per cent sincere - these dudes shit metal, which is probably uncomfortable, but they seem happy enough, considering.
"I think metal got pushed over the edge,” says vocalist Tony ‘Guardrail’ Foresta, a likeable fellow whose face habitually forms what can only be described as ‘a shit-eating grin’. “Like in the past five to ten years, it got shitty, and then it got shittier, now you got dudes dressed as girls wearing fuckin' make-up playing fuckin' screamy breakdowns, and all these people who grew up listening to Priest and fuckin' Slayer look at it and it's like, 'What is this bullshit?' Y'know?"
"I think a lot of those bands, they write the music and it's just kind of accepted that you write lyrics about violence and dark imagery,” states bassist/vocalist Philip ‘LandPHIL’ Hall. “They're just like, 'Ok, whatever...' and just pump out a bunch of lyrics. It's just kind of accepted if you have a death metal band then you write about gore, y'know? So they're just like, 'Alright, we'll write about gore...'"
"The funny thing is,” continues Ryan, “when we write about gore, people just laugh at it. Our shit's gory as hell! If you really read the lyrics it's like, 'Damn, that's kind of negative!' But everyone's laughing about it, because we're just having fun with it."
At this point in the interview, I think about what I’ve heard from other music journalists about Municipal Waste. Apparently, some interviewers have found the band hard work, too boorish for their delicate sensibilities, too keen to proselytise on the joys of cheap terror, good beer and nice tits. I can see why some might find all this a little lowbrow for their tastes. But would it be too blunt to suggest they pull the baguette out of their arse and loosen up a little? Let’s look again at that list: cheap terror, good beer, nice tits. Fuckin’ hell. What’s the problem here? Now, beer is righteous (hmm... kinda) but why talk about it when you can drink it? I decide to skip over that and aim straight for the terror and tits. Priorities, right?
So what films inspire the lurid goo-spattered vistas of Municipal Waste tunes?
Tony: "Repo Man."
Ryan: "We sample that on one of our old records. It's a classic."
Have you seen Tarantino and Rodriguez’s ‘Grindhouse’ double feature yet?
Ryan: "I like ‘Planet Terror’, the first half of it. That one smokes the other one.”
Tony: "I like them both. I think the second one, the Tarantino one could have been edited by about 20 minutes."
Ryan: "The dialogue was just annoying. It's a man writing women's dialogue and he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about."
LandPHIL: "Totally."
Ryan: "The first one was just so over the top. If we could make a Waste video that looked like 'Planet Terror'... I mean, the toxic element's there."
LandPHIL: "Lots of green, lots of gore, hot chicks!"
Ryan: "Choice use of cursing like in old '70s movies... 'Shee-it!' Hahaha!"
Dave Witte: “Those dudes are in love with the original ideas, the history. Which is kind of close to what we're doing. Everything has been manipulated and bastardised, but we go to the roots of it. A lot of people don't recognise the start - it gets lost. Then the bands get shitty, people get bombed out. It's all cycles."
Drummer Dave Witte (ex-Discordance Axis/Burnt By The Sun) is vaguely reminiscent of Jeff Bridges’ character The Dude from the Cohen Brothers’ ‘The Big Wachowski’. His manner is similarly laidback yet authoritative, and he clearly commands respect from the rest of the Waste. However his attempt at steering the interview at least part-way towards music is only partly successful.
Ryan: "We wrote a song about ‘The Thing’. 'Blood Hunger' on Waste 'Em All is about 'Blood Diner', a bad movie that I just can't stop watching."
LandPHIL: "'Leprechaun In The Hood'."
Um... what’s that about?
Ryan: "A leprechaun's in the hood and he's hanging out with rappers, he's doing bong hits and he kills someone with a bong, he gets locked in the fridge and he just smokes weed..."
Tony: "They did 'Leprechaun In The Hood' as part five of the ‘Leprechaun’ series and it was so popular that they did a sequel to it... so it's like a sequel of a sequel, hahaha!"
Ryan: "And you forget it's about a leprechaun, man, it's just like a hood movie or a gangster movie. But then it's like, 'Woah, a little leprechaun! And he killed somebody!' Hahahaha!"
Given your collective interest in cinema, what are the chances of a Municipal Waste feature film?
Tony: "I was talking to Ryan about that a little while ago, I said, 'I just think we should write a fuckin' script!' It would be awesome."
Ryan: "We might work with [infamous Troma founder and cheapo filmmaker extraordinaire] Lloyd Kaufman for a video. He's interested."
Tony: "There won't be any CGI in that shit! Hahahaha! 'We got ketchup...' Hahahahaha!"
LandPHIL: "Man, the cornier the better when it comes to special effects and shit. To see Tony, like, rip out his guts, even if it looked bad, it would still be so badass."
Tony: "I'll rip out your guts! Hahahahaha!"
Something at this point - can’t quite recall what - leads me to believe that it would be a good idea to admit that I have repeatedly masturbated to Stuart Gordon’s supremely trashy 1988 Lovecraft adaptation, ‘From Beyond’. Whatever the reason, it does seem to steer the conversation towards tits, as planned. Result!
Tony: “He jerks off to ‘From Beyond’! Hahahaha!”
LandPHIL: “Did you ever masturbate to ‘Basket Case’ too?”
To ‘Basket Case 2’? No. Never seen it.
LandPHIL: “Horror movies were where I saw my first titties as a kid.”
Ryan: “You know it’s good if there are tits in the first or second scene. That’s a horror rule.”
Tony: “Our next video’s gonna have tits. I insisted on it.”
Ryan: “Our last video, there were tits after the shoot.”
Tony: “Yeah, there were.”
LandPHIL: “There are titties on the new album.”
Tony: “They’re gross, hahahaha!”
Ryan: “We poured blood all over them.”
I think I’m growing my own right now. It’s a bit of a worry, really.
Tony: “Hey we’ve been in Europe, man. That beer’s thick, dude! It’s killer.”
LandPHIL: “We saw this band in Australia and all of us were like, ‘Woah!’ This one dude was playing bass and he had the biggest tits I’ve ever seen on a dude. Everybody in the audience was like, ‘Look at the tit meat!’”
Tony: “But he didn’t give a fuck, man, he took off his shirt and he had man tits. Wear the man tits proud. Juggle ‘em out, man! Show ‘em what you can do with those things.”
Thanks, Tony. I will.

Electrelane

2008-06-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

“Luminessence/Essence of the will/Time and fire/Turning burning still/Upon the hour table /Dreams of light are laid/But I’m not sleeping.”

- ‘Light’, Meat Puppets

I know a guy who loves Electrelane. That's understandable. I mean, what’s not to love? Thing is, the guy’s a misanthrope. He seems to have little faith in human nature, or the concept of love, or the redemptive quality of random acts of kindness. He is ‘into Crowleyian magick’ yet fails to divine the magical properties in a smile or a kiss, or even sex. All the world is merely grist to his dark Satanic mill. So here’s what I don’t understand: he dwells in darkness, whereas Electrelane largely trade in...
LIGHT! The same light eulogised by the Meat Puppets on their neglected 1989 classic, Monsters. The blinding flash, the eternal flame of illumination, the white-out, the O-mind. Sunshine through stormclouds, the silvery glint of a Greyhound bus, the shimmer of the sea in mid-July. Y’know, that kind of thing. How, then, can a misanthrope love Electrelane? Their music may have undercurrents of darkness, of mystery, but it’s so alive, so free and so fucking optimistic. It travels. It gets out a bit. It makes new friends. It feels a tug of remorse when it has, inevitably, to leave town. But it stays in touch.
Electrelane’s new record, Axes, is for me characterised by the sheer joy it radiates. Not dumb joy, if there is such a thing, but joy at being alive and able to feel not only happiness but pain, loss, absence, fear and all the rest. And sadness doesn’t equate with darkness, by the way. It’s just a different kind of light, like the stroboscopic light that dapples your face on a long train journey in summer. I put it to Verity Susman, Mia Clarke, Emma Gaze and Ros Murray that the sheer amount of travel involved in being part of this band (originating in East Sussex, they now live, variously, in Berlin, Prague, London and Brighton) must contribute to the feeling of perpetual motion that characterises much of their music.
“I don’t think it’s a conscious idea,” replies Mia (guitar). “But I mean, we were travelling a hell of a lot last year. We were away a lot.”
Verity (vocals, guitar, keyboards) elaborates. “When you’re just sitting there staring out the window, with things going past... it probably stuck, it got lodged in our heads somewhere.”
There’s the sound of the train on ‘Gone Darker’, too, which you join in with as the song builds at the beginning. Do you enjoy all the travelling you do?
“I love it,” claims Emma (drums). “It’s my favourite thing.”
I mumble absently about the melancholy nature of travel, the feeling that you’re constantly leaving something or someone behind. This strikes a chord with Ros, the band’s new bassist .
“I was talking to someone the other day and they were saying that the saddest object is a suitcase,” she relates. “Which I thought was really funny, because I saw it a different way. Whenever I think of a suitcase I think of being really excited and happy. Then they said that, and...”
They ruined it for you.
(Laughs) “It depends on what colour it is.”
I wonder if I’m wrong to hear so much exuberance and delight in Axes. Perhaps I’m hearing what I want to hear, screening out the parts I’d rather not confront, like I know I often do in the ‘real’ world outside of music. Is mine a wilfully inaccurate impression, then? Could it be the side effects of the Cipralex? Or perhaps it’s the upside of all this motion: constantly in the process of getting somewhere and thrilled by the prospect of never actually arriving. I used to want to live on a train. I was only put off by the fact that even trains have to stop sometimes.
“It’s like you were saying about travelling, that it’s where sadness and happiness kind of cross, and yeah, I totally agree with that, ‘cause it can still be sad and celebratory at the same time,” says Verity. “I think we get a kick out of when it’s quite sad, and then making it really happy; like, how can you get out of that minor bit into the happy part again.”

Axes was recorded largely live, in one room, the band able to look each other in the eye as they played. If Electrelane weren’t so active in rewriting rock, this would come across as somewhat clichéd, the kind of thing tired old hippies, punks and vinyl obsessives love to harp on about. But Electrelane make it all seem so new and inviting, and no, not because they’re female but because they’re still growing as a band. They’re still seeking and striving on their third album, the point at which most bands find themselves apologising for their recent past and going back to basics in an altogether less becoming fashion.
“Because we were all recording in one room, it was impossible sometimes to replace one part, so most of the time we kept the basic tracks, the live take of everybody playing together even if there were mistakes here and there. In the past we’ve been more neurotic about ironing any little inaccuracies out. This time we didn’t really think about that and I think the freedom in the songs is much stronger than on the last album.”
This may have something to do with Verity coming into her own as a lead vocalist. On ‘Two For Joy’ she conveys pure emotion so forcefully and unaffectedly, you’re knocked back for a moment; you don’t quite know how to react. Her delivery is blissfully uninhibited, flawed and unaffected in its soulfulness. When the song reaches its peak and Susman’s excitable whoop (possibly the most rock ‘n’ roll thing you’ll hear this year) gives way to a final, valedictory burst of Farfisa organ, you’re finished. There’s a new confidence there, but also something greater, an open-heartedness that transcends the vagaries of that most elusive yet overrated of commodities, ‘cool’. Which means that while Axes will kick your arse no problem, it’ll kick you even harder in the heart.
“I think the vocals this time were easier to do because we toured so much last year, so I just got used to singing a lot,” Verity states. “And then when I went in to record I had a much clearer idea of how I wanted the singing to sound. I tried not to do too many takes and it was normally the first one that would be the one that I’d keep. With singing, more I think than with anything else, once you start repeating it over and over again it starts to become laboured.”

From listening to the records and talking to the band, it seems that Electrelane’s methodology revolves more and more around the removal of the unnecessary, anything that could be interpreted as contrived, or as Verity puts it, “laboured”. But in paring back the components of their sound to the bare essentials, they are able to maximise the emotional impact of what’s left in. In keeping with this, all additions are made judiciously, not frivolously (like the hint of klezmer that suffuses the giddily romantic ‘Eight Steps’) In Mia’s words, Axes is “clearer” than their previous records. The sound is still dense, but it breathes. This breathing space is clearly precious to Electrelane; Verity frequently uses the word ‘freedom’ when expressing her happiness with the new material. Given that improvisation forms the basis of Electrelane’s aesthetic – all the songs on ‘Axes’ started out as jams – I ask whether the band intend to pursue this freedom even more when they play live.
“I think we’re gonna improvise a lot more on stage than we have done in the past, just because we’ve done so many tours,” she states. “I think we’re probably more confident now, playing together and playing live, to be able to risk something completely messing up (laughs).”
But would you ever consider doing something completely free?
“I think that’s what we wanna get to. Yeah.”
“But not totally improvised. I would shit myself!” laughs Mia. “Like, we played in Austria with Tony and Andy from The Ex, and obviously we hadn’t rehearsed or anything, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we’d really love to come on and play’ and it was like ‘OK, cool!’ [nervous laughter] I mean, I enjoyed it, but only after the fact. While they were on there, ‘cause you’re so used to just hearing three other people...”
“They have very distinctive ways of playing,” says Emma.
“...so I’m trying to listen to the band, and then Tony and Andy were like, ‘Eek! Eek! Eek! Eek! Eek!’ with screwdrivers and everything...it was like, ’What’s going on?’ [laughs] It was fun, but it was very frightening.”
That Electrelane can admit to this fear makes them even more valuable. After all, fearless people are either mad (not their fault), stupid (not their fault either, but you can blame them for the success of Razorlight) or just plain fake (unforgivable in most cases). Fearless people are also rather dull, as they have little to lose and less to talk about. Electrelane are none of these things. Their music expresses humanity, frailty and the strength that comes from clinging onto light even in the darkest times. Perhaps that’s why the misanthrope loves them. And perhaps that capacity for love will ultimately redeem him. Here’s hoping.

Gescom

2008-06-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

Although many assumed it to be the case, Gescom were never a mere dangleberry hanging from the hairy backside of Manchester anti-dance duo Autechre. Or were they? It's hard to tell, given that the exact personnel behind their frequently anonymous releases remains a closely guarded secret, or at least one its keepers can't be arsed to make public. Perhaps it's more productive to speak in terms of what has been suggested. In which case, it has been suggested that Gescom is a collective involving up to 30 individuals including Autechre's Sean Booth and Rob Brown, noise terrorist Russell Haswell, Darrell 'Bola' Fitton and Rob Hall of Skam Records.
Minidisc was originally released in 1998 on the OR label and was the world's first Minidisc-only release. One of the selling points of this shiny new technology was that there was 'zero seek time' between track flips, something that now comes as standard on most digital media. It was Gescom's intention to exploit this feature, so they came up with 88 tracks designed to be played at random, theoretically offering the listener a brand new listening experience every time they pressed 'Play'. It reads like a smug contrivance, a clever-dick irrelevance. But when you listen to Minidisc in sequence it's impressive but ultimately really fucking dull, an interminable trudge through chops, bits and bytes seemingly designed to show off just how crazy a few geeks can get with a jolly bit of DSP. It's soulless, shallow, tiresome.
Use Minidisc in the manner its makers intended, though, and the project instantly comes alive in your ears. The juxtaposition between industrial drone and chopped-to-fuck hip-hop beats, twisted metallic klang and flatline hum creates something utterly compelling in its rapid-fire weirdness. Each of these 88 fragments work so well as random elements (rather than constituents of a fixed, finished whole) that the result forces a revision of how we listen to music, perhaps also foreseeing our culture's current predilection for Party Shuffling brief tinny bursts of digital sound. Of course, you could pull the same trick with any album. The crucial difference with this one is that you're meant to. And Minidisc is remarkable because it only becomes a coherent, cohesive piece of music when chance is allowed to configure its pleasures.
Hmm... did I say pleasures? Minidisc is much more noise than electronica, more Whitehouse than Boards Of Canada, and digital is perhaps the ideal format for noise lovers of a masochistic bent. Whereas analogue synthesis is generally mimetic of the sounds of the human body, the clean crackle of digital is alien and therefore instinctively threatening. When it doesn't sound sharp, brittle and invasive, it sounds crushed, fibrous and itchy. There are times when, listening to Minidisc, I recall the sting of fibre-glass on my hands from years ago, the tiny fragments stuck beneath my skin and the angry irritation that resulted. Digital isn't malicious or capricious, as analogue often is, it's merely uncaring and austere, a robot reconstruction of how things should be. This, of course, makes it fascinating, especially when users give up attempting to humanize its null flow and instead focus on the very lack of nourishment at its centre. Those seeking pain from their noise may have found a perfect, distant dominantion in its cold embrace. One of the things that characterises Gescom's - and Autechre's - music is an interest in sound as object in itself, rather than conveyor of meaning or emotion, which itself is suggestive of the dissociative nature of fetishism.
But there is poignance as well as blind sensation to Minidisc's constant flux, a layer of melancholy attributable to the fact that this album has been reissued on the very same format the Minidisc was designed to supplant. It's an acceptance of failure. Minidisc therefore enters a second lease of life as a requiem for futures past, a hymn to obsolescence.

Blue Oyster Cult

2008-06-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

"The clock strikes twelve and moondrops burst/Out at you from their hiding place" - 'Astronomy'

I remember embarking on camping holidays with my family in the late 80s and early 90s and a cassette of Imaginos (along with Secret Treaties, Spectres and a compilation entitled Career Of Evil) provided the perfect soundtrack to our inevitably rain-soaked trips to the south coast, or Wales. When you're young and susceptible to parent-induced boredom, music can add the necessary perfume to an imperfect situation, tranforming your predicament into something with the scent of adventure. The rain, sea and stars begin to whisper their secrets. The veil lifts a fraction. Magick is afoot.

"The Oyster boys are swimming now/Hear them chatter on the tide" - 'Blue Oyster Cult'

The concept of Imaginos was originally formulated in 1967 by Blue Oyster Cult manager, producer and lyricist Sandy Pearlman, and detailed in a collection of poems collectively titled 'The Soft Doctrines Of Immaginos'. Fragments of this concept surfaced in early 70s BOC songs such as 'Subhuman', 'Astronomy' and 'ETI' before its eventual shoring up into the album released in 1988. "Basically, it's an interpretation of history," explained Pearlman to Kerrang! magazine in September that year. "An explanation for the onset of World War I, or a revelation of the occult origins of it. Imaginos is the main character, and is what I call 'an actor in history'. He plays different roles in history and was born as a modified child, modified by an alien influence, and his mission is to present the human race with the challenge of evil. The aliens are playing with our history as if it's a game, and he motivates the game and presents the choices to the human race. They react as they will."

"The writing in the notebook/Notation from the stars" - 'I Am The One You Warned Me Of'

The narrative thread of Imaginos - described in the sleevenotes as a 'random access myth' - makes reference to the Spanish conquest of the New World, Haitian Voodoo, the reign of Elizabeth I and her counsel by occult advisor Dr. John Dee (who claimed to converse with spirits using a 'magic mirror' fashioned in Mexico from black volcanic stone), Lovecraftian gods, Egyptian fertility rites, hallucinogenic cacti ("Do the Don Pedro" - 'Les Invisibles'), the discredited Sirius myth of the African Dogon tribe as documented by Robert Anton Wilson in Cosmic Trigger, and the gothic literary traditions of Europe and America. Pearlman weaves a rich tapestry of truth, half-truth and out-and-out fantasy to spellbinding effect, and it is this rigorous dedication to the weird that makes Imaginos possibly the most literate and intelligent rock concept album ever devised. Enigmatic and often wilfully obtuse, Imaginos nevertheless lives up to its billing as "A bedtime story for the children of the damned." The cover image, perhaps harking back to the 'Black & White' trilogy of Blue Oyster Cult (1972), Tyranny And Mutation (1973) and Secret Treaties (1974), is a monochrome photograph of San Francisco's Cliff House Hotel, built in 1863. The hotel glowers on the cliffs, ghost-lit against a skyful of cumulonimbus. If I ever visit San Francisco, that's where I'd like to stay.

"Where witches went mad more than once" - 'Magna Of Illusion'

The unsavoury aspect of Imaginos becomes apparent when one considers its origins as a projected solo album by ex-drummer Albert Bouchard, and what appears to have been the wholesale hijacking of the project by Pearlman and the remaining members of BOC. Bouchard worked on the project with Pearlman after leaving the band in the early 80s, and BOC's label CBS showed interest, but allegedly requested that it be released as under the Blue Oyster Cult name. BOC broke up and the idea was eventually abandoned, but revived following the band's reformation - without Albert - in 1987. The released version of Imaginos contains basic tracks recorded by Bouchard and selected session musicians, with some elements overdubbed by Pearlman and Oyster boys Eric Bloom (vocals, guitars), Donald 'Buck Dharma' Roeser (vocals, guitars) and Allen Lanier (keyboards). Having been shut out of his own album project, Bouchard has expressed disappointment and anger at his old bandmates and manager. It's extremely unlikely that the original line-up will ever work together again.

"I've lived upon the edge of chance/For twenty years or more/And this is what my friends all mean" - 'Del Rio's Song'

Sonically, Imaginos is fucking odd, a disorientating blend of overblown pomp rock, AOR, metal and sea-shanty power pop. 'I Am The One You Warned Me Of', 'Les Invisibles', 'Del Rio's Song' and 'Magna Of Illusion' strike an uneasy balance between the sinister mysticism of Blue Oyster Cult, Tyranny & Mutation and Secret Treaties and the radio-friendly gloss of the group's post-'Don't Fear The Reaper' incarnation. This was clearly no formula for mainstream success, and the album effectively wiped itself from history. But it's the story within the story that makes Imaginos so fascinating. A narrative spanning 200 years of myth and magick, it stands as testament not only to one of America's greatest bands, but also the unsung imagination of Sandy Pearlman, a maverick conceptualist convinced that rock music could be a vehicle not only for atavistic gratification or the expression of utopian ideals... but also for the starry wisdom glimpsed in fever dreams and wild hallucinations.

"So ladies fish and gentlemen/Here's my idle plea/See me in the blue sky bag/Meet me by the sea" - 'Blue Oyster Cult'

Giant Sand

2009-04-02T04:04:00.000-07:00

"Interesting timing," says Howe Gelb.

Two words and an Arizona burr; it's a recipe for intrigue. I ask Howe to elaborate. He kindly obliges.

"Well," he begins, drawing me closer to the phone, "it must have been embedded in my subconscious. However, I completely forgot about the advent of this scenario and happened to be sitting here completely still and almost ready for anything. I'd poured a stiff glass of my favourite scotch that I keep stashed at my favourite restaurant that I can't afford, and just like some old guy weathering on a splintered chair, waiting for my demise, the telephone rings… and it's my heart attack friend, that I've never met."

A little bit of background: this interview was due to occur exactly 24 hours earlier, but had to be postponed due to a little personal trauma, a health scare, that had taken place three days previously. Sitting at my desk following a cigarette that represented all the bad ideas I had ever had or ever would have, I noticed a tightening, dead centre in my chest. The tightening quickly solidified into a solid fist of pure discomfort. I tried flipping it off, but it wouldn't go away. At this point I started to sweat. My breath became laboured. I checked my face in the bathroom mirror and it was a sickly shade of grey.

I picked up the phone.

Roughly ten minutes later, I was in an ambulance. Thirty, and I was at the hospital with electrodes attached to my chest, and out of view (my choice) an orderly sucking out my blood through a needle in my arm. Ten hours or so, and I was on the street in Whitechapel with my intended, wearing a green hospital shirt, safe in the knowledge that I had not experienced a heart attack, but an artful imitator known as an oesophageal spasm. It could, the doctors told me, have been brought on by stress. I knew exactly which rat bastard – thanks Hunter – to blame for that, but that's another story for another day, comrades.

Oh, I say to Howe, you heard about that?

"Man, it's all over Denmark [Howe's current location and his wife's country of birth]. What happened exactly, you had an anxiety attack?"

No, I've had those before. This was different.

"Did you have the left arm go?"

No, just a chest pain. I started sweating, I turned grey…

"Your hair or your skin?"

Just my skin, my face. The hair would have been more distinguished. When your skin turns grey it's more like…

"…extinguished."

It might seem a tall order, but if the Angel Of Death is coming for me, I hope he's warm and funny and avuncular like Howe Gelb. It'd make things a whole lot easier.

For those who don't have access to the one-sheet, Arizona's most enigmatic sons, Giant Sand, have shimmered back into being and their new album is called Provisions. If 2004's Is All Over The Map was a dog-eared scrapbook of freakshow postcards, Provisions is more like a night drive on the way to a clandestine burial. Giant Sand always travel, smoothly or otherwise. This one's on the smooth side, but then 'smooth' is just a surface texture; there's no guarantee that what lies beneath won't draw blood. Ever since 1985's Valley Of Rain, Giant Sand have maintained a personable veneer while concealing a finely-tuned taste for chaos, using parched, countrified rock as a vessel for the exploration of inner and outer space rather than a refuge from the ravages of modernism. The only real constants have been Howe's voice and obvious enthusiasm for language, fusing to create a formidable cerebral superweapon, and his sensualist's attitude to musical texture.

"My work is totally scattered," confides Howe, who always sounds like he's confiding, no matter what he's actually saying. "At some point I bundle it all up and call it a specific thing, and the thing right now is this new Giant Sand record, I guess…"

How do you know when it's time for Giant Sand to re-emerge, as opposed to something that flies by any other name?

"It's in between something seasonal and something rotational, like a comet. It just kind of comes in and out of the atmosphere for a spell. It's like an atom, that little electron zipping around, and it's Giant Sand time in the nucleus when it gets close. Then this other electron zips around and it's 'Sno Angel [Howe's gospel-influenced 2006 project] time, then this other electron zips around and it's Gypsy Flamenco time.

Does Giant Sand dictate the style of song you write, or vice versa?

"No, it's not the songs. That's why we've changed songs every night… in the early days, for the first two thirds of this run, my run, I would change songs around every night, just because they were fucking asking for it. So I would mess with them, we'd make 4/4 songs into waltzes and see if that would fit, just to excite ourselves, we were playing to make this game out of it. By doing that, you bring this element of excitement into it, because you don't really know what's happening and everybody's in it to make it happen and see how far we can make it happen and to go to that place that makes it a little bit dizzy with it as opposed to making it tried and true and stale. It's not the songs, I don't think; I think it's more the flavour of the camaraderie. When you have a certain camaraderie it lends itself to a certain sound. That's what Giant Sand has always been."

Howe speaks of Giant Sand in a manner which reminds me of '60s and '70s counter-culture science fiction. It's entirely fitting, too; one can easily imagine the loose protagonists of Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly gulping back handfuls of Substance D to 2000's Chore Of Enchantment, or shoving a tape of 2001's Cover Magazine in the car stereo on the way to a pick up. This is something that separates Giant Sand from their lesser peers in Americana, perhaps attributable to Howe Gelb's considerable speed-of-mind; they disorientate. They knock time out of joint. They're everywhere and nowhere (baby).

"I think every artist – I use the term loosely… let's call 'em plumbers – every plumber has a sensitivity antenna that allows them to pick up signals at least 12 minutes into the future. So he just smells the smoke of the fire coming, and that's usually his smoulder, y'know, that's the sound he's making. So sometimes you come up with a record that'll need 20 years for people to find acceptable, sometimes it's only 20 minutes."

There's a sudden disturbance at Howe's end of the phone line; I hear an lightly accented voice. While the words are unclear, the meaning is unmistakable.

"Ah, they're closing! So I'll just sit out there with this? No, I'll sit on the wooden part… all right. The restaurant's closing up."

Oh, right, I say. I ask Howe what time it is in Aarhus. Ever polite, he conducts two conversations simultaneously, one with me, the other with the staff of the restaurant he's being asked to vacate.

"It's like 10:30 or 11:00… this is? You did? It's a nice bag. I love this little place. No, I'm good, it's good. Keep me young. You know, Friday night in Aarhus… yeah! I look a little weird here? Can you sit on these boxes? No, someone will take the chair, won't they, they'll throw it through the window. No, don't worry about it. Don't… I'll just sit right here and I'll be good [laughs] I don't need a chair!"

The thought of a concerned Danish restaurant worker attempting to force a chair on the reluctant-yet-well-mannered American makes me smile. I picture Howe sitting outside the restaurant, a single wall-mounted, wire-meshed exterior light cocooning him in its glow. Holding the night at bay.

Asva

2008-06-23T16:36:00.001-07:00

“The appeal of drone stuff for me is that it’s a heady, 'real' experience, internal, meditative. It could be a really good drug, and drone certainly compliments certain drugs. If you’re into that kind of thing.”
The music of Asva reminds me of the one and only time I took DMT. Up on a hill above Hastings, I saw constellations knit themselves into vast scorpion-like starships, a village in the distance take on the appearance of an illuminated medieval castle, control cables descend from the cosmos and the space directly above me solidify into a ceiling, through which a tunnel opened and I was drawn upwards into what I recognised as The Invisible College. Asva similarly cause one to ponder the the hidden geometries of magick and science. The title of their debut album, Futurists Against The Ocean smacks not so much of a genuine opposition as a juxtaposition or superimposition, the rubbing up or lamination of the immersive and mutable against the angular and monolithic. Of course, G. Stuart Dahlquist, Asva leader and avant-metal veteran (ex-Sunn 0))), Goatsnake and Burning Witch) offers his own interpretation...
“The visual and poetic art that resulted directly from the Futurist movement that occurred in Russia in the early part of the last century seems similar to Asva's contribution to our vast ocean of humanity, of listening choices,” he says. “Theres so much crap floating in that water! My hope would be that Asva and like-minded musicians, artists and writers could move to create a different level of listening... not trying to play the heaviest riff or rip anyones head off with some killer show, quite the opposite. Part of Futurist thinking (if I'm getting it right) is making something that hits you differently than smack in the face. Meaning is found through pondering, absorbing whats in front of you with mind, more so than eyes.”
Like his old bandmate Stephen O’Malley and the growing number of kindred spirits operating in the twilight zone between metal and drone, Dahlquist is acutely aware of his music’s capacity for physical and psychological transformation.
“Frequently, when done playing, my ears will pop, like coming up from a deep dive,” he explains. “The sound is what gets me off. Waves of bottom end just pushing right through me, Trey (Spruance, guitar) and Troy (Swanson, Hammond Organ)’s subtle juxtaposition, Jessika (Kenney, vocals)'s shrill screams, her beautiful lyric, B.R.A.D. and his skeletal drumming. I used to meditate a lot... I left my body, got scared, and now I've got Asva. So many times while playing shows, I've had to choke back sobs, the music just hits me so squarely in my emotional core.”
Asva: metal that moves.

Devo

2008-06-23T16:37:00.000-07:00

The Devolutionary Oath:

1. Be like your ancestors or be different. It doesn't matter.
2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one.
3. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display. It's all the same.
4. The fittest shall survive yet the unfit may live.
5. We must repeat.

Devo started a joke which started the whole world crying. Okay, that isn't actually the case. What really happened was, Devo started a joke that eventually came true, a joke which reflected the outwardly vacant smile and repressed urges of the culture that produced them. Nowadays James Murphy may warble about 'North American Scum' to the delight of would-be ironists everywhere, but he's merely producing a comfortably numbed variant - minus the true horror - of the original manifesto originally developed by Ohio students Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis as far back as the late 1960s. Inspired partly by pseudo-scientific objections to Darwinism and, one suspects, partly by their own status in hometown Akron as sexually invisible egghead geeks, the manifesto of De-evolution is an ever-shifting collection of ideas, a satirical prism vital to the dissemination of Casale and Lewis’ cynical world view; Jungian psychology, Reichian Orgone theory, Crumb-esque sexual dementia, Church Of The SubGenius pranksterism all filter through, unified by the central idea that the human race has ceased to develop and is now sliding back towards its primitive origins. It isn't a world gone mad. It's a world gone stupid.
Devo started a joke which became serious at the precise moment Casale witnessed the murder of some of his fellow students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, during a protest against the invasion of Cambodia launched by President Nixon on April 25. Four students were killed, nine were injured.
"It changed my life completely. That was the defining trauma. When you see people shot, when one bullet goes through a 19 year-old that you know, the hole, the exit wound that it leaves, all the screaming, the crying, the slow-motion like in 'Raging Bull'... within hours the university was closed. There were bands of deputised locals roving around in cars with shotguns. And the evening paper put out a false headline, 'Students have shot guardsmen'. So people were looking to kill students."
William Burroughs explained the concept of the 'Naked Lunch' as "the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". The Kent State massacre would seem to have been Casale's own frozen moment.
"You watched a complete lie unfold. You watched the hatred. It was basically like a civil war. You've got to remember the people that shot the kids were the same age as the kids, they were national guardsmen, they were 19. And it was at the height of the protests over the Vietnam war, and the illegal extension of that war into Cambodia, without an act of congress, back when people were informed about their government and the constitution and they cared. Today obviously everybody just goes, 'Uh, give me my Frappucino and I'll put it in the cup holder of my SUV.' One lie after another, one cynical piece of misinformation after another, from this moronic junta that rules our world – nobody even turns their heads. It was a different world then. Ideas mattered, and the constitution seemed to matter to millions of Americans. It was real, it wasn't senseless killing, it was directed political hatred."
Casale and Lewis responded to this shocking absurdity with yet more absurdity. Fellow Kent State art student (and now highly successful soundtrack composer) Mark Mothersbaugh soon entered the fold, introducing the pair to the highly entertaining 1924 anti-evolutionary pamphlet ‘Jocko-Homo Heavenbound’ by one Doctor BH Shadduck. Devo was gradually reconfigured from a Dada-esque arts lab to a more focused audio-visual collective, adopting uniforms and embracing pop music as a possible means to an end.
“We were openly subversive in the beginning. But no-one was paying attention, that's the beauty of America – no-one pays attention at all. By the time it gained some kind of traction and got on the radar then certain people would write about it. As soon as we had any success we were viciously attacked as clowns and fascists and anti-humane. Completely misunderstood. People missed the irony and thought we were all for conformity.”

In 1974, Devo made ‘In The Beginning Was The End: The Complete Truth About De-Evolution’. Essentially an extended music video for two songs, ‘Secret Agent Man’ and ‘Jocko Homo’, the film introduced characters that embodied the concept of De-Evolution. Played by Mothersbaugh’s father Robert, General Boy symbolised 1950s-style paternal authority while his son Booji Boy, played by Mothersbaugh Jr in a plastic child mask, represented the tendency towards poop-playing regression Devo had observed in Western culture. An unmasked Mark in lab coat delivers a lecture to an audience of Jocko Homo (‘ape-men’) who later riot and stab Booji Boy to death. ‘In The Beginning...’ provided Devo with their first big messy splash, winning an award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. This led to the vocal support of Iggy Pop and David Bowie, which in turn secured the band a deal with Warner Bros.
The film remains an uncomfortable experience. Not exactly funny and not quite serious, it aims for the guts of the audience and succeeds in inspiring a kind of creeping nausea. This queasiness is central to Devo’s aesthetic both musically and conceptually; satire exists to bring sickness to the surface, and songs like ‘Soo Bawlz’, ‘Be Stiff’, ‘Shrivel Up’, ‘Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin’)’, ‘Penetration In The Centrefold’ and ‘Buttered Beauties’ act as conduits for the repressed urges of the American male. If Robert Crumb’s cartoons offered an exploded view of unfettered masculine sexuality reigning over its own uncensored kingdom, Devo’s frantic meditations on mongoloids, vaginal discharge, horny pre-teen mentally-handicapped girls and midgets who “play underneath... mama’s skirts all day” were their musical equivalent. And while their song structures tended towards an uptight jerkiness suggestive of a punishing, panicked bout of masturbation, the frequent squirts of analogue synth (especially dominant on the 4-track recordings collected on Rykodisc’s essential yet sadly deleted Hardcore Devo 74-77 compilations) are rudely redolent of bodily (mal)functions, the burp and squelch of messy sex, flatulence and diarrhea.
The synthetically-minded end of America’s noise underground owes a huge debt to Devo’s dirty-minded emissions. This band set the standard for angry male geek energy and prurient sexuality, and led some commentators to accuse the band of misogyny. It has to be said, they have a point - Devo songs often essay a gynecological curiosity that often spills over into cruelty, prodding and poking at the unfamiliar with a combination of lust and disgust. However Casale sees the band as victims, hapless undersexed outsiders without any hope of copping a feel, let alone subjugating the opposite sex. This seems disingenuous at first - as we all know, geeks can hate women too - but the perverse honesty of Devo’s sexual politics counts in their favour, and if it proves repellent, well... it is. What can you do?
“I don't think it was misogynistic at all. We were more like the Three Stooges, whenever they have girlfriends in one of their episodes they're being brow-beaten and pushed around and man-handled by the woman, you know, pussy whipped. We were passive males of tender tails in Ohio and we were on the short end of the stick when it came to women. What we noticed in culture though, was the complete hypocrisy where on the one hand sex is being sued to sell everything and on the other it's always being presented as bad.”
Something to be feared?
“Exactly. So when Mark wrote 'Penetration In The Centrefold' it was because some big magazine, like Penthouse or something had for the first time ever shown penetration in the centrefold. So he was like telling the news, he goes down to the store and… it was just reportage.”
“We used to put up these satirical and ironic statements that people took at face value, as serious manifestos. We said that ‘Rebellion and individuality is obsolete in corporate society’ and ‘Your mission is to fit in’. And they were like ‘Wow, these guys are fascists!’ You know, that's how Rolling Stone felt. Ridiculous. Clowns, Nazis, you know. While the real clowns and real Nazis were being put on the cover.”
Were the American rock critics a constant adversery?
“From the beginning, absolutely. They did not like what we were doing, it didn't fit in to the whole thing. All the radio programmers were like fake hippies who wore the satin jackets and were getting paid off in whores and cocaine and still liked The Eagles and just hated Devo.”
You mean you never got the opportunity to be paid off in whores or cocaine?
“No. We paid for our cocaine.”

At roughly the same time in England, Genesis P. Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti were launching their own offensive against the hypocrisy of decency, first as COUM Transmissions, then as Throbbing Gristle. It’s interesting to compare the two outfits. Like Devo, TG were lapsed hippies with an artsy background, they were inexorably drawn towards taboo subject matter, exhibited a love of synthetic texture and harboured a secret obsession with E-Z listening. They too, attracted accusations of fascism. It’s perhaps even more fascinating though to consider the ways in which the two groups diverged - brought up with pervasive American ideals of success, Devo briefly became the truly subversive pop group by way of their acute observation of such pop conventions as harmony, melody and damnably catchy toons. If this combination proved initially offputting to American ears, it quickly won the group a dedicated European following.
“Europe is where we first gained success. England got us in a big way right away, totally got the irony, the humour. Loved the performance quality of Devo and the multimedia quality. You know, the message was like ‘Ok we get it, great.’ and then they were on to the next thing. We actually probably lasted a little longer in terms of popularity in Germany, and believe it or not, Italy. Up to '84 we were very popular in Italy, so I think that in general the European audience was more informed, more sophisticated.”
But then, Europe was better prepared. There were obvious parallels between Devo and the streamlined epiphanies of Krautrock, especially Kraftwerk - the uniforms, the repetition, the steam-piston rhythms, the mannered, robotic method of playing - and no-one of great significance in America was using synths in such a goddamn European - or ‘faggy’, because in Europe we are all ‘fags’ - way. Devo’s 1978 debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was almost an honorary krautrock document, having been produced by Brian Eno at Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne. Although it’s now accepted as a post-punk cult classic, in truth it’s a little too clean, a little too Enossified, and as a result lacks the rough robotic energy and effluent electronic splurge of the band’s pre-Eno material. Casale and the band reputedly tried to convince Eno to perfectly replicate the sound of their demos, leading Eno to brand the band ‘anal’.

The Hornbyite drones of the mainstream music press will tell you that Q: Are We Not Men?... is the only truly essential Devo album, that Duty Now For The Future (1979), Freedom Of Choice (1980), New Traditionalists (1981), Oh, No! It’s Devo (1982) and Shout (1984) are little more the desperate splutterings of a novelty band outstaying their welcome, perhaps grudgefully admitting that motivational S&M anthem ‘Whip It’ from Freedom... is a pretty good tune. This news may shock some of our more sensitive readers, but guess what? They’re wrong. Over the course of these five albums, Devo dispensed with guitars in favour of gleaming, hi-definition (if frequently haywire) synthwork, while the lyrics swung wildly between pitch-black pessimism and pisstake perkiness. Post-debut Devo did not only give us ‘Whip It’, but also ‘Freedom Of Choice’, ‘Girl U Want’, ‘Gates Of Steel’, ‘Through Being Cool’, ‘Peek-A-Boo’ and ‘Beautiful World’. The latter, a bitterly poignant assault on the asinine positivity of the Reagan administration, is Devo at their angriest and most honest. It’s surprising and a little disappointing, then, that Casale considers the end of the true Devo to have taken place as early as 1978.
“I'm trying right now to make a feature film about us. It would start in 1974 and end in 1978 when we go on Saturday Night Live, and were a big hit that night. It's called ‘The Beginning Was The End’ and the way you watch the movie, you know that it’s over that night. That Devo, the real Devo, is over.”
So what was the Devo that came after that?
“Then you get to the corporate meat grinder, and all the things that come with it, both the good and bad. The pressures and the insanity, because basically your fate isn't your own any more. Because you can't really do that many things to control it.”

Of course, the news on every spud’s lips is that Devo are about to tour the UK for the first time in over fifteen years. Good news, right? A ‘legendary’ band returning to our shores, a chance to see something many of us were too young to experience the first time around. Yeah, great. Yawn. But wait - can this world really be as dumb as it seems? Could it be getting even dumber? And could it be that somehow Devo are more relevant now than ever? Maybe.
“Devo was a serious joke. We didn't even really believe things would get this bad. Now we see that we were unfortunately very right, beyond our expectations. De-evolution is real and we're all living in a de-evolved, corporate, futile world. Run by morons, and run by ideologues written by greed and religion of every stripe – it's not just the Muslims, it's our guys right here. They're itching for a fight because they're fundamentalist Christians. Your own guy Tony is in on that, and it's horror. A normal rational person that pays their bills, minds their own business has a high IQ just sits back in horror and watches the world be hijacked by morons and creeps. And pays the price. Nobody cares because there's a mass of sheep out there who are just consumer conformists, who have been turned into an audience. And they download ‘content’. And it's awful. And that's it. There's informed focus group who check an opinion poll and it's all moronic, a circus.”
Still, do we need another ‘legendary’ band clogging up the circuit? Not really. Fortunately Devo are hardly your average legends. Even when they’ve done the right thing, they’ve done it beautifully wrong, and as fellow Plan B writer Emily Bick remarked to me, they’re never going to be an easy hipster sell. Feel a bit queasy buying tickets for the nostalgia show? Good. It’s part of what it means to be Devo. And we’re all Devo.
“When I was in college, I would go and see John Lee Hooker or Howlin' Wolf and it was kind of like a war movie where I was scared but I loved every minute of it. It was intense and kind of threatening. But they were so good at what they did, and you couldn't believe they were doing it as grown men. I think when Devo walks on stage and can still do this stuff aggressively, it's kind of scary.”
Yes, Gerry. It sure is.

Slayer

2008-06-26T02:05:00.000-07:00

If you’re ever desperate for a concentrated hit of anti-fun, I recommend you attend a photoshoot with Californian metal legends Slayer. Today, we’re down a grubby, piss-stained London alley watching four stern, mirthless men in their forties lean against a black metal gate. Plan B photographer Cat Stevens is attempting to get them to loosen up and act natural, but I honestly don’t think they know how. “Do you guys talk to each other?” she jibes. “Ever?” Cue a ripple of subdued laughter, spiked with a subtle pang of discomfort. She hit a nerve there.

“I put our longevity down to compromise,” confides Tom Araya (bass, vocals and greying beard). “And in all honesty, I think I’m the one who’s been doing the compromising. This could have been through a long time ago. It’d be really easy to break this band up. People ask me, ‘How have you managed to stay together for so long?’ It’s because I’ve allowed it.” Guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King are men of considerable girth, if you take my meaning. They wear sunglasses all the fuckin’ time, even in their luxurious but actually rather drab and dispiriting hotel rooms. Together, they stride around like the finalists in a Big Bad Wolf contest. Araya and drummer Dave Lombardo are impeccably polite and cheerful. That is, when they’re not around Hanneman and King.

“Another thing,” adds Araya, “is that you’re bound by obligations. You have contracts. At the beginning it wasn’t like that. But now everything is paper and signature. ‘This says here that I own you. Until you’ve met your commitments, you’re stuck with me.’ So, you learn to avoid all that rather than shoot yourself in the foot and have people start telling you, ‘It’s your fault this is all going to hell – you gotta pay!’

“But,” he sighs. “I really believe in this band. That’s the biggest part. I believe in the music we create.”

“I live it every day/Don’t know another way” – ‘Catalyst’

Slayer’s new album Christ Illusion is being hailed as a ‘return to form’ for the band. Those transmitting this particular meme may have missed 2001’s utterly savage God Hates Us All, but more about that later. In any case, Christ Illusion isn’t a return to form, nor is it a case of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ laziness, as suggested when it was reviewed in September’s Plan B. Listen to the ouevre from 1983’s Show No Mercy onward and two things become evident. First, Slayer never lost their form. Second, no two Slayer albums sound alike: the AC/DC of thrash they ain’t. Christ Illusion represents yet another shift in the band’s sound, being blunter and more claustrophobic than any of its predecessors. Everything sounds a little too close for comfort, a little too real. If, as Plan B’s George Taylor states, “The real magic has left the stage”, then it’s perfectly consistent with where Slayer are right now. In 2006, they have no use for magic. No time for illusion. No mercy.

Constant throughout all this mutation has been the furious howl of vocalist and bassist Tom Araya. Much of the attention devoted to Slayer has concentrated on King and Hanneman’s riffs and their wayward, almost harmolodic soloing, or Lombardo’s formidable drumming. But Araya’s vocals are an indispensible element of Slayer’s sound, hidden in plain view, yet immediately recognisable and distinct from the generic ‘cookie monster’ style that predominates in the world of extreme metal.

“When I go back and listen to Show No Mercy, Haunting The Chapel and Hell Awaits,, you can hear that I’m trying to sound really angry and aggressive,” Araya smiles. “But on Reign In Blood, I started singing differently. It just came naturally. I guess it became very distinctive. I’m amazed I was able to sing the way I sang on those first three records, because singing that way can really fuck up your voice. Maybe in the studio I was doing that, but when I sang the songs live, I was belting them. So when people say, ‘You’re a singer!’ I say, ‘No, I’m more the screamer in the band. I scream in key’.”

He’s also a consummate character actor, inhabiting each lyrical role with genuine conviction. Songs concerning serial murderers are a staple of metal, but few are invested with the humanity and empathy Araya brings to ‘Dead Skin Mask’ (an ode to Ed Gein) or ‘213’ (a tribute to Jeffrey Dahmer). On putrescently psychedelic numbers such as ‘Seasons In The Abyss’, ‘Bloodline’ and their cover of Iron Butterfly’s ‘Inna Gadda Da Vida’ it is Araya that brings the weirdness, his multitracked vocal lines slipping and sliding over King and Hanneman’s riffs with queasy lubriciousness. Lombardo graciously acknowledges Araya’s contribution to the band’s rhythmic impact.

“When Tom sings,” remarks the drummer, “the guitars become just a floating sound. It’s not something that I follow. But there’s something between me and him, the vocals and the drums, that sets this pulse. It’s amazing. I heard a recent live recording, it was one of the slower ones like ‘South Of Heaven’ or ‘Dead Skin Mask’ and man, we were just dead on! Tom’s vocals were locking into the drums and it grooved so well, I was just blown away. I kept playing it over and over again, telling my kids, ‘Listen to that! Listen to that! Listen how he locks into the drums!’ Everything else didn’t matter. What mattered was the vocals, and the beat.”

Dave Lombardo rejoined Slayer in 2001 after a nine-year absence, but Christ Illusion is the first album to feature his unmistakable double-kick work since 1990’s Seasons In The Abyss. During his time away from the band he established himself as one of the world’s leading avant-rock drummers, working with John Zorn, Mike Patton and DJ Spooky. While his replacement Paul Bostaph did a fine job of keeping the heartbeat of Slayer speeding into the (blood) red, Lombardo brings a non-metal dexterity and suppleness to their music, incorporating the exploratory zeal of the dedicated improviser. “I always wing it,” he nods. “I make it up as I go along and even live, I try to add a little bit more. Because I’ve learned the songs so well, it’s like, ‘Wow, I should have done this in the recording session!’ But I can never go back. It’s an increased courage. I’m more positive and more confident about what I’m doing now. It’s good to be back.”

Lombardo’s stupefying, rapid-fire battery was instrumental in making 1986’s Reign In Blood a serious contender for the title of The Greatest Metal Album Ever Recorded. Around 28 minutes of concise brutality and relentless morbidity, Reign In Blood is the album most owned by people who only own one Slayer album. And perhaps rightly so.

But while Reign’s place in the canon is secure, I’d argue for God Hates Us All as Slayer’s greatest achievement on their own terms. A grand dramatisation of Kerry King’s bitter disgust at everything, God Hates Us All essays alienation on a galactic scale. It’s a sonic invocation of the secret part of us that identifies with the suicide bomber, the serial killer, the extremist…The part of us that wishes the whole world would just fuckin’ burn, because that’s all we deserve. We’re all complicit in the endless cycle of human misery, whether through inaction, malice or plain human weakness. It doesn’t matter. We’re all the same. Guilty as fuck.

“I hate everyone equally…just me in my world of enemies” – ‘Disciple’

It isn’t solely a case of Slayer – or Kerry King – versus the world. The band’s rage is equally capable of turning in on itself. But while the internal conflicts experienced by contemporaries such as Metallica and Megadeth have resulted in dismembered lineups, substandard music, or both, Slayer are peculiar in that the antagonism that lies just beneath the surface seems not only to fuel the band’s creativity but also ensure their continued survival. During our interview, Tom Araya implies that his unhappiness with King and Hanneman’s tight grip on the songwriting credits almost led to his departure. However he claims to have learned how to use this dissatisfaction as a motivational tool. It sounds debilitating in theory, but check the guy’s track record – it works.

“I have to find an outlet for it,” chuckles Araya. “And it seems to work well for me. It’s that constant drip of oil, fuelling the fire.”

There’s no better indication of negativity fostering creativity than ‘Supremist’, the last song on Christ Illusion. It’s a damn near perfect illustration of why Slayer are still a vital creative force after 20-odd years. ‘Supremist’ is a musical scourge, a purge, a holocaust. Sure, you’ve heard that before. But this song is genuinely horrifying, more so than anything death metal or grindcore has to offer and on a par with the rampant nihilism of Norway’s black metal elite, minus the cartoonish Satanic posturing. Beginning as a waspish hardcore speed-fest, the song warps through various riffacious permutations until it bursts into the final movement, at which point everything just goes off. Tom – frenzied yet excruciatingly human – intones, “Must maintain control of the weak/Must contain the minds of the free”, while Kerry and Jeff lay down an electric hellscape somewhere between classic Celtic Frost, Godflesh and early Swans. Shards of feedback descend like fire from heaven and guitar strings whine like the human spirit crushed under the yoke of tyranny.

I tell Tom that this is the most chilling song on the album, and add that its effect is less to do with velocity or heaviness, but the creation of an atmosphere that is uniquely Slayer-ish.

“When you hear a riff, it’s not a question of whether it sounds like it should be a Slayer riff or whatever,” he agrees. “It’s about creating an atmosphere. It’s got nothing to do with speed, it’s got nothing to do with the cookie monster voice. It’s got everything to do with the mood that you’re creating.”

That old chestnut from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four about a boot stamping on a human face, forever…Well, it’s been a little overused. But fuck it, it applies here. ‘Supremist’ is a stark vision of humankind’s final subjugation and subsequent extinction. In a world where you might be worried about stepping on a bus, train or plane for fear of being blown to bits by homemade explosives, or about the increasingly stubborn weirdness of American foreign policy, or about the stifling climate of fear that we’ve been plunged into over the last few years, this is potent, relevant stuff.

Meanwhile, the rictus grin ‘culture of the monoform’ as described by filmmaker Peter Watkins (Punishment Park, The War Game, The Gladiators) grows ever more firmly entrenched. As the world collapses around our ears, we’re encouraged to keep smiling, keep fucking, keep shopping. Yet also to be afraid. Very afraid. It’s a mad world, for sure. And if any band articulates that madness more accurately than Slayer, I’ve yet to hear them.

Ghost Box

2009-04-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

Britain still has its surprises, its secrets. On a recent visit to Broadstairs in Kent, this writer stumbled across a book entitled Ghost Stations in a dusty old second-hand booksellers. The book comprises barely-credible 'true' stories of haunted British airfields written in a stilted, untutored style. Yet it's still a compellingly eerie read, the fact that it was discovered in a town which seems decidedly more Pagan than Christian, its charity shops full to bursting with occult tomes, only reinforcing its weird energy.

It is precisely this energy that Jim Jupp and Julian House, founders of Ghost Box, have been tapping into for the last five years. The pair cite "library music, folklore, programmes for school and colleges, British horror movies, lost soundtracks, haunted landscapes, defunct educational establishments and weird supernatural stories" as key influences, while the label's design aesthetic (credited to House, an in-demand graphic designer) adds a further dimension of authenticity to the project, evoking Op Art, 60s-style abstraction and the celebrated house style of Penguin Books.

The music itself often relies on a similar collage-based aesthetic. By turns the work of Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, The Advisory Circle and Eric Zann recalls the library cues of the KPM company, the pioneering experimentation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the electro-nostalgia of Boards Of Canada and the sinister, site-specific ambience of Brian Eno's On Land... although the label's latest release, From An Ancient Star by Belbury Poly, incorporates elements of disco and dub, illustrating that the Ghost Box aesthetic is malleable, adaptable.

"Through each release we like to expand on the Ghost Box world and rediscovered films, TV, records and books constantly feed into this process," enthuses Jupp. "A book that Julian and I have both recently read which seems almost to have come from the Ghost Box world is Kingsley Amis' The Green Man, and personally I've been enjoying the soundtrack music of Richard Denton and Martin Cook [composers of the theme tune to cancelled BBC pop-science show Tomorrow's World] which has influenced the latest Belbury Poly release."

Jupp and House aren't simply indulging in nostalgia, however; their fascination for the hidden, lost and forgotten sheds a mysterious glow on Britain's past, present and future.

"Part of what we try to do with every Ghost Box release," explains Jupp, "is to recreate the feeling of stumbling across an intriguing and mysterious old book or record in a junk shop, giving that sense that these mysterious artifacts could somehow be windows into a whole hidden world."

Given Ghost Box's fascination for the hidden, haunted Britain (metaphorically and otherwise) have Jim or Julian ever been haunted, spooked, bedeviled, bewitched or otherwise supernaturally affected?

"Unfortunately not that I can remember," replies Jupp, "although if you ask any of the other Ghost Box artists I think they'll all agree that by working on the label and each release we're often surprised by bizarre coincidences and connections. I think my own interest in the supernatural goes right back to experiences of sleep paralysis, out of body experiences and waking as a child. All that strange stuff that happens between sleeping and waking has always made me suspect there is more to reality than ordinarily appears to us."

Of Montreal

2008-06-23T15:48:00.001-07:00

To twist the words of Sir Chuck of D, Kevin Barnes is a hero to some, but he never meant shit to me. I never set much stock in all that 21st century US indie bullshit, all those bands hanging on the coat tails of Neutral Milk Hotel, singing in weedy, whiny voices about papier maché helicopters and mermaids or whatever. The music always made me feel like I had overdosed on Wham! bars - not as much fun as it sounds, believe me. And now that the Elephant 6 collective’s influence on US indie rock seems to be at an all-time high, with the enforced jollity of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Tapes ‘N’ Tapes compelling impressionable young people to ejaculate their entire nervous systems with sheer excitement, I care even less.

So how come I’m writing about Of Montreal? The band I had previously ranked alongside Paris Hilton and Coke Zero in terms of their usefulness to mankind. The band whose last album cover - let alone the music - actually made me gag (2005’s The Sunlandic Twins). The band whose name is derived from an ex-girlfriend of songwriter and singer Kevin Barnes, who came from - oh, work it out for yourselves.
Um, I don’t know how to say this, but...Of Montreal. Have made. A record... I like.
Has the world finally gone completely and utterly crazy? Have I? Or has Kevin Barnes?
“I was going through difficult times I guess, in a pretty heavy depression zone. So I really used the music as a sort of therapy, to get myself out of that downward spiral. I wasn’t really thinking so much of making a record for an audience, it was more self-centred; to help me get out of this... darkness I found myself in. The record is pretty much chronological, because I was writing and recording in the moment, almost like a journal of my life then.”
The enduring cliché of the tortured artist, the idea that only those in emotional and psychological turmoil are capable of producing anything approaching ‘real’ art, and the greatest thing these troubled individuals could ever do is splatter their brains all over a canvas for the human race to pick at for eternity. It’s a bunch of crap. I know that. I also know that a desperately unhappy Kevin Barnes has made a record that the blissfully happy Kevin Barnes couldn’t have made in a million years. Hissing Fauna is the sound of panic, loneliness and claustrophobia, the sound of feeling trapped in your own head, unable to relate. It’s also the sound of trying to break the cycle of obsessive morbidity, of trying to communicate, of groping for something that might make you feel normal again. Because, romantic notions be damned, when you’re depressed the one thing you want more than anything in the world is to be normal again, and if you can’t be normal again, perhaps dead will do.
“So much of it was created by my life being split into two directions. My daughter had been born, and a few months after that I had to tour, so that created serious tension between me and my girlfriend. I was trying to balance that with my professional life; the pressure of being a father, just trying to navigate stuff, all these issues were just eroding my mind. I couldn’t deal with anything, because I couldn’t resolve it, so my mind just shut down.
“I didn’t become numb though. I was more acutely aware of everything in a conceptual negative way. Then my girlfriend and I split up and she went back to Norway and took my daughter while I was on tour and I felt emotionally stranded. Anyway we got back together and sorted it out, and I’ve created this new persona to write for, this character called Georgie Fruit. I don’t really know how I came up with this idea, but it’s a black she-male in his forties, he’s really into late seventies soul music and the theatrical glam Prince stuff. It kind of gave me a new perspective and attitude, like it’s not me anymore. I just needed a new persona for everything to become revitalised.”
The resulting album isn’t a Tonight’s The Night/Sister Lovers-style trudge through some dark night of the soul. It’s too anxious to assert its existence to fully succumb to the darkness at its centre. And too busy; but what might seem novelty trappings designed to attract the floating listener - the fizzing synths, the Prince-ly rhythms, the shrinkwrapped harmonies - are as vital to the record as the songs themselves. Sonically, Hissing Fauna doesn’t so much beg your attention as wrestle it to the ground, pin it down with its deceptively wiry arms and plant a big black kiss on its forehead.
It’s delightfully funny in places too. ‘Gronlandic Edit’ relates Kevin’s fruitless search for a suitable belief system: “Oh, the church is full of losers/Psycho and confused,” he observes (correctly). The song abruptly segues into ‘A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger’ featuring Kevin’s confession that he “spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway/I felt the darkness of the black metal bands.” Meanwhile, the song is quoting merrily from George McCrae’s ‘Rock Your Baby’ and any listener with a functioning heart is falling hopelessly in love.
That said, many listeners haven’t. In fact, Of Montreal’s increasing sonic vivacity has attracted a fair amount of criticism. Web-vultures bitch about the scarcity of actual band input on Hissing Fauna, decrying it as the product of one man’s hubris. They also complain that the vivid hi-gloss production is evidence of Barnes’ ruthless careerism. It looks like Of Montreal might lose some fans with this record. Fine, I say. Cut loose the dead weight. Then again, it’s not my band. Or my life.
“I realised pretty early on that there’s no way to please everyone. What upsets me though is that people don’t really understand how much heart is put into everything that we do, or most artists on our level in the indie scene. It’s never motivated by commercial desire; it’s just about exploring your creativity and trying to create something exciting.”
Allowing one of your songs to be re-recorded for an Outback Steakhouse TV ad [as Kevin did with ‘Wraith Pinned To The Mist (And Other Games)’ in 2005] could be viewed as selling out...
“Yeah, that was our greatest sin, a colossal error. I can’t even imagine what I was thinking. I think we did it just because it was so absurd. I think I was kind of also duped into it by the ad agency, because they didn’t make it clear it would be so huge. It was on once every hour, between all the football. It definitely has become a bit of a nightmare. I don’t take myself that seriously though, so it’s not going to destroy me. But the concept of that idea, that if you’re a sell out once you’re a sell out forever... I mean, I could say I sold that song, so for that moment, I sold out. But I don’t go into the studio and think ‘God, I really have to make a record that a steakhouse will like’...”
What about the allegations that Hissing Fauna and The Sunlandic Twins are solo albums in all but name?
“Well, the band has gone through different phases, where people are collaborating or contributing musical ideas a lot more. In the very beginning it was just me and my 4-track at my parents’ house, just getting lost in the creative process. For a couple of years people were writing their own basslines, keyboard lines, drums, counter-melodies, stuff like that. But for the last three records, I’ve gone back to the way I used to work really, just myself.
“If you have a lot of ideas and you really want to realise them, it’s difficult to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to put down this counter-melody because I have to wait for Dottie [Alexander] to come and play the keyboard line, or Matt [Dawson] to play the bassline.’ That can be really restricting. I think it’s more important to just keep producing stuff and keep working. Because it’s so much a part of my life and helping me to feel positive about living.”

Opeth

2008-06-23T15:49:00.001-07:00

Oddly enough for a band who have been around for over ten years and with eight albums to their name, Opeth’s popularity appears to be increasing rather than declining. The latest opus 'Ghost Reveries' seems likely to snare a place in the upper reaches of 2005’s end-of-year polls, while the band’s gradual development continues to fly in the face of the music industry’s current practice of ‘breaking’ bands with their first album, only to watch them struggle to match their initial hype with a decent follow-up. Opeth are living proof that taking the slow and steady route to success can be infinitely more rewarding than taking the shortcut. Firmly rooted in death metal but heavily influenced by the prog, psychedelia and space-rock of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Opeth have carved out a unique space in the metal firmament, with each successive release offering a subtle twist on the band’s signature sound.
Backstage at the Forum in Kentish Town, London, Opeth’s Mikael Akerfeldt (guitars/vocals) and Peter Lindgren (guitars) are in good spirits, even as they acknowledge that a day in London for Opeth is inevitably chaotic and characterised by an endless round of interviews and soundchecks. Later this evening, they will perform a mammoth two-hour set to a packed-out crowd of adoring fans, featuring songs spanning their entire career and some typically sardonic stage banter from Mikael (“Can everybody feel the love in here? It’s okay if you wanna get naked...”). In the meantime however, they’re happy to wax philosophical over their status as a major fixture in the post-millenial metal landscape and make a few contentious - but statements regarding the current state of the scene.
“Extreme metal right now I think is quite uninteresting,” states Mikael. “These bands in the US especially. It's ridiculous what's happening. We just did a tour there called Sounds Of The Underground and I've heard of Gwar, Lamb Of God, Devildriver, Strapping Young Lad and Clutch but the rest of the bands I've never heard of!"
"They've all got three-word names," adds Peter.
“They move the same way on stage, the riffs are the same, their attitudes are the same, you talk about influences and they span maybe five years,” Mikael continues. “They don't have any history. It's almost like they're manufactured bands, because all of them are selling shitloads. More than us, you know? We've been around struggling for fifteen years! I'm not being bitter, but it's just weird that metal has become almost the same as pop music. It feels manufactured to me. Like, there are these guys and they all have this haircut (mimes slicking hair across head) and they are all like, cool and funny, and they all have songs that are the same! I can't believe it's just that I’m an old fart who doesn't go with the flow. It's the same shit, you know?"
Opeth have never really ‘blown up’ at any point in their career. Do you think this has been good for the band?
"I think it's good for all senses of being in a band,” nods Mikael. “It's good for your ego, it's good for your creativity, it's good for your professional personality. Obviously we are happy that we have success at all, but I think that gradual success helped us, because for some of these bands that are getting overnight success, obviously the pressure to make a better follow-up record is so immense that they always fail."
"They're also gonna be gone tomorrow," Peter remarks.
"Yeah, and nobody will remember. Whereas we started out with the first record pretty much alone in the scene doing what we do, and now after 10, 11 years we're still going. We're not the biggest band in the world or anything, but we have a fanbase and we do our thing and we're happy. The only pressure that we have from people and from record labels is that we just continue what we're doing."
Opeth’s history is liberally scattered with ex-members, temporary helpers and countless different permutations. When Mikael and Peter recount the history of their band they present a labyrinthine tale of humble, naive beginnings, constantly shifting personnel and the endless pursuit of perfection through good, old-fashioned hard work.
"It basically started out in 1990,” recalls Mikael. “I wasn't in the band when Opeth started. I was asked to join the band as bass player because I was friends with the singer, who started the band and came up with the name. The other guys in the band didn't like me joining, so me and the singer left - he wanted to be with me, I guess, maybe I had more of a musical vision - and started playing together as a two-piece. Anders Nordin joined, he was the drummer from my first band Eruption and then we had all sorts of different members coming in and out of the band.”
Like many a fledgling death metal outfit, Opeth’s early days were spent lugging equipment from bedroom to rehearsal room, hammering away at their instruments and studiously absorbing the music of their idols (Mikael cites “Therion, Candlemass, Bathory, Voivod, stuff like that.”). It’s endearing to consider the youthful Opeth bumbling through their formative years, especially given the finely honed touring and recording unit the band has since become.
“We were just having fun. We had no cash, no connections, nothing. Nobody really knew who we were. We never recorded demos because we didn't know how! We didn't know about studios or anything like that.”
The period 1991-1992 saw some major line-up changes that would form the basis of the band we recognise today. Peter Lindgren joined on bass (later switching to guitar) and founder member David Isberg left, citing ‘musical differences’. Mikael identifies this as the point at which Opeth really began to take shape.
“I took over on vocals, and I think the proper line-up started. Me, Peter and Anders. We started developing the songs that we recorded for the first Opeth record and spent years and years rehearsing. We didn't do any gigs, only a handful. Maybe five gigs."
Despite a worrying lack of live work, it was during this period that Opeth achieved a level of commitment and dedication verging on the ridiculous, but which would serve them well in years to come. Peter smiles as he recalls the intensive practice regime adopted by the band.
"For a year almost we did six rehearsals a week,” he smiles. “We even rehearsed with the lights out in order to be able to play perfectly! But we didn't have any contacts at all. All other bands did shows, but not us. We got offered three shows, I think, and we did them all, you know?"
"That was the case for a long time,” agrees Mikael. “Even when we did records we didn't get shows. But myself, Peter and Anders rehearsed, then recorded the first album, 'Orchid'. For that we had a session bass player, Johan DeFarfalla. He turned out to be good, so he became a member and did 'Morningrise', the second album, with us as well. We fired him later and the drummer Anders left because he wanted to make money. For him money was a sign of success, and we weren't making any.”
At this point, without a rhythm section or any clear path for the band, things looked rather bleak. Fortunately, a new rhythm section emerged from a rather unexpected source. Um, Uruguay[$italics]...
“We didn't get gigs, didn't have anything. I had a job, but when we were going on our first tour I got fired. Someone stole a guitar and I got the blame. So I had nothing and Peter was studying, the bass player was fired, then Anders wanted to move to Brazil, where he was born. The future looked quite uncertain. But we had one record left for Candlelight and we did that with Martin Lopez on drums. We put out ads around music stores for a drummer and a bass player and got a reply from him and Martin Mendez. They were buddies, they'd moved from Uruguay to Sweden to join a death metal band!”
At first, the two South Americans were not both accepted into Opeth. Lopez was asked to join, but fearing that the introduction of two friends would lead to the formation of two partisan camps within the band, it was some time before Akerfeldt and Lindgren contacted Mendez to offer him the vacant post of bass player. When he was finally asked to join, it was a decision born of necessity rather than preference.
“I played bass on the third record, 'My Arms, Your Hearse',” relates Mikael. “Then we got a gig in London with Cradle Of Filth. We asked Mendez because we didn't know any other bass players and didn't have time to audition anyone. So he became a member.”
This line-up went on to record 1999’s 'Still Life'. A transitional record, this release found the band exploring the 1970s leanings of previous records in greater detail while drawing up the blueprint for the twisted prog metal of 2001’s 'Blackwater Park'. By this time the band had jumped label to Peaceville Records, but there was more change to come.
"Music For Nations had a distribution contract with Peaceville,” Peter explains. “And when it ran out they said 'All we want is Opeth'. We said no at first, but we ended up on Music For Nations, which is probably a good thing."
“Once we did 'Blackwater Park' on Music For Nations things started to happen for real,” agrees Mikael. “We did our first tour in 1996, and between 1996 and 2001 we did maybe one or two shows. Nobody cared about us. But when we did 'Blackwater Park', we got our first US tour, we toured Europe... and the record sold. We got proper distribution set up in the US. Since then it's just been work, work, pretty much all the time."
He isn’t kidding. Opeth have spent the last four years constantly touring and recording with scarcely a minute to reflect. How is it possible to balance this constant band activity with the need for something resembling a ‘normal’ life?
"I don't have a life," states Mikael, bluntly.
"He's married with kids," laughs Peter.
"That's who I was talking to on the phone before the interview,” the guitarist continues. “I was saying goodnight to my daughter. It's rough. When we're touring we're away more than 200 days a year."
Touring has been known to take a hefty toll on the lives of working musicians, and Opeth are no exception. Mikael and Peter have both experienced the downside, having lost friends merely from the fact that they are rarely at home, and when they are, partying is the last thing on their minds.
"I had lots of problems with friends of mine who thought that I was big headed or something,” bristles Mikael. “Because I'm not at home and when I get home, I'm so fucking tired I just sleep. Then we're going out again so they think I'm a diva or something.”
In reality Opeth seem extremely down-to-earth and aware of their own good fortune. Mikael is admirably realistic about the pros and cons of being ‘in demand’.
“It's a rough lifestyle, but it's lovely at the same time. We're doing the things we love. Me and Peter were on a beach in Florida. We had a gig that evening and we were like, 'Do you remember those days when we were carrying all that stuff through the woods to do a rehearsal? Look at us now!' You know?"
Opeth are very much old-school death metal in their attitude towards their fans. However tired you may be, however much you may feel like collapsing in the van, you keep the fans in mind and you don’t act the spoilt rock star. Especially when those fans are as dedicated and critical as Opeth’s.
"It's rough,” admits Mikael. “Because sometimes you simply don't feel like playing that fucking song, or talking to you[$italics], or talking to the fans. That's the worst thing, because we have an obligation to talk to the fans. Some fans are very, very... special[$italics] with this band. If we don't do certain things, they might get very upset. So we always try to take care of our fans, and if we don't, we sure hear it."
Opeth have never been a band to spout holier-than-thou political rhetoric. For many their music represents an escape from the twists and turns, the ambiguities of modern life and the vagaries of politics, in the same way that the metal, prog and folk bands that influenced them (Fairport Convention, Uriah Heep, Steeleye Span et al) retreated from harsh reality into worlds of myth and magic. That said, Opeth are more than willing to take a stand against corporate greed when the situation demands it.
“One thing happened on the last US tour,” begins Mikael. “We had a signing session set up at this greedy company called FYE. They're probably going to talk shit about us but I don't care because they're fucking cunts. They wanted to do a signing session after every show and we were like, 'It'll be the middle of the night, we really don't wanna do it.’ Then eventually we said OK."
"Because they said they were not gonna sell our albums!" adds Peter.
"The first one was in Dallas,” Mikael continues. “We sat down, did it and it was fine. Next day, I checked on the forum and there was a guy who was extremely disappointed. He didn't get his stuff signed because he hadn't bought it at FYE. Obviously, I was like 'Fuck that! We're doing the signing session but everybody gets their stuff signed!' So the next day they pulled out. I think it was the greediest thing I've seen, it was scary that we were the subject of greediness to that extent. I felt horrible! If there's one thing that this band is not, it's greedy. We never went for the cash, ever. Corporate fuckers like FYE think that kind of thing is a good business tool and I guess it is in a way, but it makes us look like fuckin' dicks."
So we’ve established that Opeth are devoted to their fans - where would they be without them, after all - but to what does the band credit the devotion they inspire in their following?
"I think Opeth have that effect on people that once you get in, it's not just like a passing phase that will end in a month. I won't say 'lifestyle', but a lot of people tell me that once they get into Opeth, it almost ruins interest in other bands. I don't know if it's good or bad - it's always fun to hear things like that - but there's something in our music which they connect to. I like to think it's our honesty. We don't make music for anyone else but ourselves and the fact that we have fans at all is a nice side-effect."
"I think we're improving all the time,” offers Peter. “Trying to break boundaries and push ourselves to make our records interesting. Mostly for ourselves, you know? I think that shines through and people think it’s interesting because we're not always exactly the same. But there's an Opeth touch to everything we do, which is important."

SIDEBAR 1: OPETH THROUGH THE AGES

'Orchid' (1995)
Mikael: "It’s our most obscure record. I think we sold 10, 15, 000 copies. It consisted of material we'd been working with for years."
Peter: "We'd been rehearsing so much and this is what we'd done in the first four or five years of our career. We just put everything that we had on that album. We recorded it in about 12 days. There's basically no overdubs or anything. It basically sounds like a well-produced rehearsal."
Mikael: "I like that record better than the second one."

'Morningrise' (1996)
Peter: “Some people consider that our best album, but I think the production is the worst we ever had. It's so thin! No rhythm at all.”
Mikael: "I hate the snare sound. It's the worst. The drum sound on the whole is not good. The songs are as good as the first album, I think, but the production kinda makes you cringe when you listen to it. We were also quite pretentious. I brought a lute to the recording, like a minstrel! I might as well have brought an acoustic guitar but I wanted to have 'lute' in the credits. I was heavily into UK folk rock like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention.”

'My Arms, Your Hearse' (1998)
Mikael: "That's one of our best, I think. It's very dark and the sound is quite bad. It's very muddy.
Peter: "It's almost like a black metal album. It's hard to actually hear what's going on, it's just a mess! But it's a cool mess, in a way."
Mikael: "I had a cold when I did the vocals and the death vocals are really grim on that record. At first I was very dissatisfied with it. It took me some time to appreciate that record. It's a new style. We got tired of the whole 'twin guitar, Iron Maiden' type of thing. That album is more rhythmic."

'Still Life' (1999)
Mikael: "It's one of my favourites. The songs are very intricate and difficult to play but not in a negative sense. They're still good songs. The recording was very smooth and nice and we were a band again. Everybody played great. It was a new start, you know?”
Peter: "It's a little underrated as well, I mean, people talk about 'Blackwater Park' or some of our other albums, but nobody ever talks about 'Still Life'."

'Blackwater Park' (2001)
Mikael: "I love that record. It was our first time with a producer (Steven Wilson) and we were quite well prepared, most of the songs were finished beforehand. But we we didn't rehearse before the recordings. The only one who knew anything about the songs was me, and I wasn't sure myself. There are some really, really good songs on that album and, I think, some magic."

'Deliverance' (2002)/'Damnation' (2003)
Mikael: "Going into the studio I was worried because I didn't have anything done. The ending of the song 'Deliverance', that was the only thing we had rehearsed. It was a big project. An interesting idea, doing two albums at the same time, and two albums so diverse."
Peter: "We booked the studio where we recorded parts of 'Still Life'. It's an old prog studio with the perfect set up, it's cosy, but the guy who was running it was an alcoholic. The equipment didn't work. Things broke down all the time..."
Mikael: "He broke down. It was very likely to see him passed out on the floor."
Peter: "We had the same amount of time we'd have to record one album to record two. It was stressful and especially in 'Deliverance', you can almost hear the pain.”
Mikael: "We also had some personal problems in the band. I'm quite surprised we managed to do those albums. 'Deliverance' would have been better if we'd been well prepared and the band was in better shape. 'Damnation' on the other hand came out better than I expected. When I listen to 'Deliverance', it's like 'Aaagh!' But I'm very happy 'Damnation' came out the way it did."

'Ghost Reveries' (2005)
Peter: It'll probably take a couple of years for us to have some perspective, but now I think it's my favourite album."
Mikael: It's likely that we're not gonna think it sucks. It's not gonna be our worst. It feels weird to say it about your own stuff but when I listened to it the first time, I got shivers, which is a good sign. We were better prepared and we had learned from our mistakes."
Peter: "Jens Borgen engineered and mixed it, and he was pushing us hard."
Mikael: “As long as it sounds tight I’m fine, you know? But he’d look at the screen, listen on headphones and different speakers and say ‘That’s not tight. You have to do it again’. I’d say, ‘I can’t hear it,’ and he’d go ‘Just do it again. And tune your guitar!’ But it was a good experience.”
Peter: “It’s as close to perfection as we can come.”

SIDEBAR 2: OPETH’S UM, ALBUMS OF 2005...

Terrorizer asked Mikael and Peter - self-professed 'music nerds' - to list their five favourite albums of the year. This was their response...

Mikael: I didn’t discover anything this year. I might have discovered stuff that came out last year, this year.”
Peter: “The new Porcupine Tree album.”
Mikael: “Madder Mortem recorded this year. But that’s gonna be released next year. ‘Desiderata’, it’s called. Very good. I heard the new Katatonia record, also recorded and done but it’s gonna be released next year. I heard it once and it’s great.”
Peter: “I’m expecting that to be one of my favourite albums.”
Mikael: I can’t remember... the new Nile, I thought that was a good death metal record.
Peter: “There’s so much...”
Mikael: “I can’t remember anything, really.”
Peter: “Well you introduced a band to me called Euroboys...”
Mikael: “Euroboys... that’s old. It’s the guitar player from Turbonegro. That’s like, psychedelia. It’s very cool. They released an album last year I think called ‘Soft Focus’, it was a very nice summer-sounding record.”
Peter: There used to be a band called Sixteen Horsepower, who just split up. I bought the albums a while ago but I didn’t actually listen to them until this year. They had a new album out called ‘Consider The Birds’, but that’s probably from the last year.”
Peter: We always call ourselves music nerds, then we can’t come up with anything!”
Mikael: “No, it’s just that there’s loads! You ask me about stuff today and I’m like ‘Huh?’”

Khlyst

2008-06-23T16:13:00.000-07:00

Since first coming to prominence as the creative force behind legendary avant-grind outfit OLD, US multi-instrumentalist James Plotkin has been busily extending the perameters of extreme music, both as a solo artist and a serial collaborator with the likes of Scorn’s Mick Harris, Japanese guitarist KK Null and, of course, as a member of the now-defunct Khanate alongside ex-OLD vocalist Alan Dubin and Sunn0))) mastermind Stephen O’Malley. Though O’Malley is nowadays credited with kicking extreme metal into the avant-zone, Plotkin has been introducing elements of jazz, ambient and noise since 1989, constantly moving forward in search of new methods of expression.
This questing spirit is reflected in the smoky surfaces of Plotkin’s two most recent releases. One is a reissue of his 2005 solo recording, ‘Kurtlanmak’, now enhanced with new material and retitled ‘Kurtlanmak/Damascus’. The other, entitled ‘Chaos Is My Name’ and bearing the Khlyst monicker, is the debut of his collaboration with Norwegian vocalist Runehild Gammelsaeter, whose astonishingly guttral tones formed a major part of short-lived black/doom supergroup Thorr’s Hammer when she was only seventeen years old. For many, Gammelsaeter’s return to action after ten years of silence is something of a surprise, albeit a welcome one. According to Plotkin, the genesis of the project was more or less a case of ‘right place, right time’.
“We had discussed doing something together prior to the initial recordings,” he explains. “And when I heard she would be in New York City I asked her to come down to the Khanate space to record some vocals over a few tracks I had just done. The album progressed naturally from there.”
Gammelsaeter’s contribution to ‘Chaos Is My Name’ is a natural extension of her work with Thorr’s Hammer, and the intervening years have done little to dull the feral charge of her voice. As Plotkin hammers out seven shades of chaos on guitar and percussion, Runhild incants wildly, her strangulated retch giving way to meditative chanting before once again lunging at the throat of some grand kosmische[$italics] dilemma. Having worked with Alan Dubin, Plotkin is no stranger to unique, eccentric vocalists, and expresses admiration when discussing his latest muse.
“Her range is incredible and it has strength,” he affirms. “A lot of female vocalists fall short in terms of power, but she's way above the standard. Stylistically, there's a lot of variation and she's always ready to try new things.”
So how was the collaborative process between the two organised? Was it all in person, or a matter of swapping tapes or files?
“It was about 50/50. Once I had put together more tracks, we transfered recordings back and forth through FTP. Joergen Munkeby from The Shining engineered subsequent voice sessions and sent them to me, mixes were sent back and forth, etc. ”
There are moments of sonic accumulation on ‘Chaos Is My Name’ where Plotkin’s gut-churning guitar sound and furiously ‘out’ drumming combine with Runhild’s enraged roar to create the aural equivalent of a blackened tornado. All the while, the pair are swathed in reverb, like New York experimentalist Arthur Russell’s womblike ‘World Of Echo’ slowly succumbing to disease and entropy. There’s a sense that anything could happen, that even in the quietest moments there lurks a subliminal threat, whether to one’s preconceptions or general equilibrium. Plotkin denies that this bleak atmosphere is a contrivance, however.
“It's never my intention to create music that's dark, it comes naturally. I'm interested in extremes, but it's not the goal, it's more of a by-product. State of mind has a lot to do with what gets laid down, especially while improvising. There was a period mid-90s where a lot of what I was doing was very calming and meditational. This seems to have changed quite a bit since the millenium. It's possible this could be a subconscious response to the tension that is building around us, the anger that seems to be spiralling out of control across the planet and in my head. This is just one of many possibilities, of course.”
One of the great strengths of ‘Chaos Is My Name’ is its reliance on a relatively limited sonic palette. In the same way that Gammelsaeter contorts her voice into unnatural new shapes, Plotkin wrings maximum effect from minimal instrumentation, in this case guitar and percussion, the latter including gong.
“I don't feel the need to use too many instruments. You can get varied results with any one instrument if you put some effort into it. The gong was an obvious choice for the recording, it has a huge spectrum of sonic possibilities and a dark resonance that I really wanted to explore.”
Given its participants’ respective connections within the world of extreme metal, one could be forgiven for wondering about the relationship between Khlyst and genres such as black and doom metal. After all, there are surely some who will seek to lump the album in with one particular genre or another, having seized on elements they view as familiar to their own preferences.
“I don't see any relationship,” replies Plotkin. “The only shared aspect is the dark subject matter in Runhild's lyrics, which leans more towards the occult rather than the satanic or dismal. I'd rather not adhere to the formulas that are set by a genre, it's way too restricting. Pushing the music outside of these restrictions is something that I've tried to do in every band I've been a part of, without exception.”
As mentioned, Plotkin plays drums on ‘Chaos Is My Name’, and he does an excellent job of it too, his untutored yet enthusiastic approach rubbing up against the other textures to create an additional layer of tension and unpredictability. His assessment of his own talents in this area, however, is a modest one.
“It's a struggle, as you can probably tell,” he sighs. “I don't embody that ambidextrous ability that most drummers have. Sometimes I'm loose enough that I can pull it off, but it's a challenge. Everyone wants to be behind the kit at times.”
Plotkin admits that some of the inspiration for his percussive bursts derives from such pioneers of ‘free’ drumming as Sunny Murray, Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali.
“Playing free is much easier than keeping a tempo or using repetition. I've always been a fan of the more intense free jazz, mainly the 1960s artists from New York. The Impulse! and ESP-Disk school of raging, throw the drumkit down the stairs jazz. It makes black metal sound like fucking cartoon music.”
The ‘Kurtlanmak/Damascus’ reissue represents another facet of Plotkin’s creativity. ‘Kurtlanmak’ a documents a solo guitar and electronics performance in New York last year, while the newly added ‘Damascus’ was recorded in Buenos Aires and features processed and prepared drums, trumpets and gong. While these extended improvisations aren’t quite as oppressively dark as the music of Khlyst, they generate their own intensity through Plotkin’s obsessively explorative tweaking and emphasis on mood and atmosphere. The reception it was afforded by critics and fans alike necessitated a further, improved edition, as Plotkin explains.
“The demand well exceeded the 200 CD-R copies that made up the original edition. I had also recorded a short live set in Buenos Aires that was too good to let go to waste, yet too short for its own release. Keith (of the Utech label) was interested in releasing a factory-pressed CD so we decided to re-press it to make the release available to more people. ‘Kurtlanmak/Damascus’ is a good representation of what my solo performaces have become recently. I prepare a unique set for every solo performance I do, so expect more live releases in the future.”
How does working solo compare to playing as part of a group?
“It's not an easy thing to convey ideas to other people, especially when ideas are so well formed inside your head. Still, it's a challenge I welcome and some of the best music happens when different perspectives are combined. This is what made Khanate work so well. In regards to the music itself, I don't prefer one method over the other, but working with multiple personalities can make the logistics difficult. There's always something that will get in the way. You avoid these things by working alone, but in exchange are limited to your own perspective.”
At this point it seems appropriate to question Plotkin on his personal response to the end of Khanate, possibly the most successful - in commercial terms, at least - outfit the musician has been involved in thus far.
“It's a disappontment and a relief simultaneously,” he sighs. “Everyone has their own agenda, and some are more oriented towards art than others. It reminded me not to expect anything from anyone, as you'll just end up being disappointed. We had a good ride and changed the way more than a few people think about heavy music - that's enough to make it worthwhile to me.”
Despite the passing of Khanate into extreme music history, Plotkin continues to work with drummer Tim Wyskida, although he states that he is “not likely” to collaborate with any other ex-Khanate members in the near future.
“Tim and I worked together for many years before Khanate existed, and we'll work together on subsequent projects. He’s currently the drummer in Khlyst and we've had an improvisational guitar/drums/laptop duo for about a year now. We're currently booking a US tour for around April/March 2007, possibly some dates with Mick Barr of Orthrelm and Ocrilim. Hoping to take it overseas as well, we'll go any place that will have us. We just do what interests us at any given moment.”

Mike Patton

2008-06-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

It’s perhaps significant, if only in a ‘Gosh, what a bizarre synchronicity!’ kind of way, that polymathically perverse vocalist and musician Mike Patton grew up in a California town called ‘Eureka’. Okay, so that famed exclamation attributed to Archimedes may translate as ‘I am in the state of having found it!’ and refer to the discovery of a method of calculating the volume of an vessel, but because people are generally pretty lazy and superficial and Stephen Hawking has yet to bless us with an equally snappy catchphrase (“Just keep talking” doesn’t cut it) the word has come to be associated with smart stuff, cleverness, ideas, and all that good shit.
Mike Patton, more than most rock-affiliated musicians, is bursting with ideas. What’s more, the guy can’t seem to sit still for a fucking second. In the years following the dissolution in 1997 of beloved cheese ‘n’ ham merchants Faith No More, Patton has co-founded a record label (Ipecac), fronted several more bands (Fantomas, Tomahawk, and now Peeping Tom), performed with major figures in the worlds of rock and avant-garde music (Melvins, Merzbow, John Zorn, Dillinger Escape Plan, Rahzel, Amon Tobin et al) and generally made hard work look like the coolest thing on Earth.
Peeping Tom is Patton’s latest labour of love. Several years in the making, the resulting album sees the singer reigning in his naturally outre instincts and dabbling in some straight-up beat-driven pop music (albeit of a uniquely mean-spirited, obscene stripe) alongside such guests as Bebel Gilberto, Kool Keith and Norah Jones. This isn’t entirely without precedent. Faith No More were always more ‘sick pop group’ than ‘dumbo alt-rock outfit’ and recent releases such as Mr Bungle’s ‘California’ (their 1999 swansong) and ‘Romances’ (a 2004 collaboration with Norwegian composer Kaada) have featured Patton wrapping his elastic pipes around some truly gorgeous melodies. The guy can definitely ‘do’ pop. But what is pop to Mike Patton? And what is Mike Patton to pop?
“It’s been in me and it’s seeped out,” says Mike, sprawling in a hotel room chair. “I even think you can hear it in some of the extreme shit I do. Peeping Tom is me taking that kind of stimulus and running with it, seeing how far I could go within those boundaries. ‘Okay, let’s take some of these things that we’ve been playing with over the years and harness them into roughly three to four minute pieces that don’t stray too far from the path, that don’t have too much information in them, but just enough to be interesting. Verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, get out. That may sound easy or boring, but it’s not for me. It’s a difficult thing. I respect song form and great songwriters, and if I were to put pop in a box, it’s a big fuckin’ box, and that’s why I do a record like this. To play with it. There’s a lot of shit you can do. Even this stuff, as linear as it is in my world, there’s still quite a few levels of things going on. It’s really dense and still pretty provocative, I think. I hope!”
So you consider this album as much an experiment as anything else you’ve done?
“Well, yeah. I see it as on-the-job training, learning by doing. The weak links were mostly in the beat department. I realised it was probably not such a good approach to hire a band this time, but work with some guys who can do this with their eyes shut.”
Did you find that having recorded the album, you got all this pop out of your system, or is it something you’d like to revisit at some point?
“There’s... there’s more. One of the good things about the amount of time that it took and not focusing on it was that I kept writing shit, so now I’ve got a stockpile. I would say three quarters of the next album is done. That’s the good part of it. The bad part is you have to fuckin’ wait, y’know? And there’s a certain amount of ‘Yes, I’m glad I’m fuckin’ done with it!’ But realistically, it’s fuckin’ just starting.”
The night before this interview, Patton played a show (and it really was a show) with the Fantomas-Melvins Big Band at London’s Forum. It was, as my gig companion put it, fantastic to watch a band using their formidable expertise to make music that is essentially very wrong. The Big Band, comprised of Patton on vocals and electronics alongside drummers Dave Lombardo and Dale Crover, guitarists Buzz Osborne and David John Stone and bassist Trevor Dunn, were as well-drilled as James Brown’s Furious Flames, as devastatingly precise as Duke Ellington’s orchestra and as tight as Nelson Riddle’s...um, arsehole. Oh, and yes, they ‘rocked’ too. It was hard to take your eyes off Patton, a whirling, screaming, squealing ball of catalytic energy at the centre of a brilliantly choreographed storm of sound. This was what rock could be, we thought, something to be honed and harnessed, sharpened to a fine point and jabbed into the throats of the pitifully undemanding Artrocker generation, the kind of people who think ‘Avant-garde is French for shit, huh huh huh.’ Fuckin’ idiots.
Are you going to tour the new material?
“Think so. Yeah, yeah.”
There’s no way you’re going to be able to get Doseone, Norah Jones, Kool Keith and Bebel Gilberto to all commit to a tour. How are you going to fill in for the missing guests?
“Hire different guests! Hehehehe! More affordable guests! We’ll see. I think maybe two singers, two vocalists, a trio or quartet of organic players, couple programmer guys, maybe a DJ.”
You should get The Roots (Philadelphia’s live hip-hop supergroup).
“Good idea. In fact we’ve heard from them. They wanted Tomahawk to play with them, which I thought was really strange. Guess they’re fans or something.”
Well, you’ve already worked with (Roots beatboxer) Rahzel.
“Yup, he’s gonna be in there. We’re doing ‘The Conan O’Brien show at the end of May and he’s gonna be in that. Pretty funny...!”
Is that something you’re not looking forward to?
“It should be fun. But it’s a fuckin’ TV show, y’know? And I’m putting a band together really for one song, so... it is what it is.”
Mike appeared on the Conan show in the late 90s, when Faith No More were promoting ‘Album Of The Year’, a big, sad behemoth of an album which flopped on release. I tell Mike it’s my favourite FNM record.
“Oh,” he smiles. “Took the title to heart, huh?”

So, Mike. What’s the Peeping Tom concept? What’s the story behind the name? Sounds kinda kinky...
“Ahhhhh.... it’s a good name! Evocative, a bit ambiguous, a bit creepy. I also wanted to kinda accentuate the lighter side of it because this is a fun record, it’s not a dark, disturbing, perverted record. I don’t know if you’ve seen the final packaging, but it’s pretty juicy. I just saw the final version two days ago and I’m still kinda buzzin’ off it.”
Did you design it?
“Oh, yeah. I really can’t stress how important I think the artwork is, especially with some of the more difficult stuff like Fantomas or Maldoror (Patton’s 1999 collaboration with Merzbow). If you don’t have a seductive cover that actually is a part of the story, it’s that much closer to being meaningless.”
The most recent Fantomas album, 2005’s ‘Suspended Animation’ came packaged as a desktop calendar illustrated by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. The artist was credited on the cover of the album, above the band’s name, rather than in small print on the reverse.
“That was a great one,” nods Patton. “And y’know, without that, let’s just say that was a cardboard cover... sure, you’d figure it out, but would it be the same experience? No way.”
Do you think this is a problem with a lot of experimental music? That the packaging is almost an afterthought?
“I think it’s the case with music in general,” agrees Mike. “You have a blank sheet, y’know? Use it. But I think, especially with difficult music, it needs to draw the listener in a little bit, make it a little bit less abstract. A visual reference. Sometimes it’s a sensual thing. I’m a bit of a fetishist but I’m hoping other people enjoy that shit as much as I do. I think they do. There are enough nuts out there.”
Then there’s the issue of downloading. Is that a concern?
“Ummm.... no. I was into it before this craze, hehehehehe! Before these damn kids got into this, hehehehe! No, I always thought it was really important. It’s just that now, when I come to my partners with a crazy expensive package, I have a better excuse. I can say, ‘Well, man, do you want them to download it? The cooler we make it, the more it costs, the more desirable it’ll be!’ So it’s kinda funny.”
Of course they can counter that by saying if anyone wants to download ‘Delirium Cordia’ - Fantomas’ 2003 third album, a single 74 minute track - it’s going to take them about two hours.
“Yeah, hahahaha... and imagine THAT without the artwork! Totally. What reference point would you have?”
It’s a difficult album.
“Pfft! It’s a pain in the ass! Let’s be honest.”
Do you listen to your own stuff?
“Not much after it’s done, no.”
Just the initial playback and then on to the next thing?
“Sometimes, y’know, if I get a finished thing I’ll put it in, just to make sure the mastering’s okay, check the titles, but that’s more just kind of mechanical. Sitting down with a glass of wine, y’know, in my underwear, looking into the sunset, listening to my record? Doesn’t really float my boat, hehehe!”
I was wondering about Norah Jones’ part on the new album, her vocal on ‘Sucker’. Did she need much persuading to say ‘motherfucker’?
“She loved it. When I described the concept to her, I just said I wanted her to be a real bloodsucking man-killer. She said, ‘I can do that!’ It was really easy, a painless experience that could have been a total nightmare. She had a lot of people muttering under their breath, or behind her back, or even to her face, ‘What the fuck are you doing with this guy? There’s no money in it!’ She’s made, she’s paid, she doesn’t need me for fuckin’ shit! But she loved the music and wanted to do it. Not only that, she made it happen.”

Mike Patton has one of the most imitated voices in rock music, but almost every vocalist who has attempted to emulate his style is a complete and utter waste of oxygen. The imitators always miss the point, finding themselves unable to adequately simulate Patton’s morbid wit or the diverse range of musical inputs that inform his vocal experiments. I ask Mike, at what point did you first realise you could use your vocal cords for something other than, say, asking for a biscuit? When did you realise you first had a voice?
“Mmmm... I dunno. I’d been singing a long time before I started realising that I could play with it. Before that, I didn’t really think, ‘Gee, I’m a singer!’ I never took it that seriously. I’m really untrained, I just kind of did what I thought the music needed. It was usually something really straight up and boring, you know? Just kind of singing.”
That was with Mr Bungle, right? Your first band.
“Yep. But you know, the way we started, I was just screaming my head off. I guess that’s a funny place to start, but I went into singing from there, oddly enough. Just by goofing around and having the willingness to fall on my face on record and in front of people. If you do that enough times, man, you’ll try anything! Also hooking up with John Zorn, and him encouraging me to play improv gigs. In those contexts, y’know, a melody and lyrics are kinda meaningless. You gotta do other things, and when you’re forced to do that on the spot, at the moment, in front of people, you sink or swim. It’s a total immersion, y’know? It’s like learning a new language. You dive in, say ‘Don’t fuckin’ speak English to me’ and you know what? You figure it out.”
With that in mind, how much of a hassle is it to write lyrics?
“I’ve never felt that I was very good at writing lyrics. Sometimes I’ll have fun and laugh, ‘Oh, that’s pretty good!’ But it’s always a chore for me. It’s always a pot of coffee, the night before a session, and... it seems like the more I do it the worse I get, hahahahaha! I don’t know. The learning curve has not improved.”
He pauses for a second, thinking deeply. “Actually, maybe I just don’t like it? I used to love to write... I don’t know. For this record, I actually had a pretty good experience, because I didn’t rake myself over the coals, I didn’t worry too much, if it sounds good, if it flows, it’s in there. Meaning? Bleuugh! Even some of the titles are just kinda like, ‘Huh?’ Like ‘How U Feelin?’ It just sounds good! Hahaha! Some of the rappers on there, I don’t even know what they’re talking about! I don’t fuckin’ understand Doseone! ‘Gblalalbbalbalablabalababalbalab!’ God only knows what he’s talking about!”
Do you think you stop caring so much about lyrics as you get older? I rarely listen to the words anymore. The vocals just become a sound. You’re obviously more interested in pure sonics.
“Well, that’s definitely the case. And that’s not to say that the lyrics aren’t important but the sound of the lyrics is the most important thing. The way I write lyrics mostly is that I will do a babytalk version of a song, either singing or even yelling or whatever. From that, I figure out what I’m gonna do. I record it, listen to it a few times, ‘Oh, I’m gonna change that,’ and then I find lyrics or words or phrases to match those sounds or cadences. So in a way, the words are really the last thing on my mind. Literally! With Fantomas, I just left it at that stage. I didn’t bother to put words over it because I didn’t feel like it needed any. I left it in the oven, hahahahahaha!”
But it wasn’t burnt.
“No, no, no. It’s good in there.”
You’re known for being a busy guy, Mike. What have you got coming up in the immediate future?
He makes a flabbergasted, jet-engine sound with this lips.
“Buncha crap, yeah. The next month and a half are crazy. I gotta go to Italy for this classical thing with a choir for a week. Evvind Kang, interesting composer. He wrote a piece for choir and two soloists, and I’m one of the soloists. Then New York to play with the X-ecutioners, do something with Zorn, rehearse the Peeping Tom band, two more gigs with Eye from Boredoms and Makigami Koichi. It’s like a vocal summit, hehehe! Then I go to Canada, do a bunch of shit there at a jazz festival, three projects, I think, in three days. Then I go back to New York to do the TV show.
“Then,” he says, finally, “Home.”
Mike Patton, ladies and gentlemen. The hardest working man in showbusiness.

Khanate [2003]

2008-06-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

Stephen O’Malley is a prime example of the kind of multi-talented savant currently springing up all over the avant-metal underground. Through his work with Burning Witch, Thorr’s Hammer, Lotus Eaters, Teeth of Lions Rule The Divine and Sunn 0))) O’Malley has helped to redefine Doom Metal as a forward-thinking subgenre with much more to offer than hammy operatics and secondhand Sabbath riffs. He has also made a considerable mark on the world of graphic design, producing album covers for the likes of Emperor and Zyklon (check the awesome ‘cinema poster’ sleeve of the latter’s latest album, ‘Aeon’). In interview the restless intelligence behind this creativity becomes even more apparent, O’Malley seemingly more than happy to explain the concepts and ideas that inform his work. Rocksound caught up with the man in London to discuss ‘Things Viral’, his second album with Khanate, an extreme doom supergroup featuring O’Malley on guitar alongside the ex-OLD duo of Alan Dubin (voice) and James Plotkin (bass/synth) and Tim Wyskida (drums). ‘Things Viral’ is a devastating work, plumbing depths of abjection and disgust perhaps untouched since early Swans. It also indicates Khanate becoming less of a ‘project’ and more of a ‘band’, as O’Malley explains.
“The first album was recorded maybe two to three months after we formed and the second album is two years after that. It took us about a year to learn how to play with each other. We made the first album and started trying to do live gigs but we hadn’t really figured it out. By the time of the second album we’d become more focused on it as a band rather than a project. The concepts had developed a lot. We did a lot of gigs, too, which was really good for the band. That makes it a reality. Even if you are rehearsing and recording and stuff, it takes live performance to externalise it.”
With it’s reliance on basic sound blocks and rigidly structured composition, Khanate seems to suggest a new form of feral minimalism. ‘Things Viral’ isn’t much of a riff album – it pounds, drones and groans at a tortuously, gloriously slow pace, going some distance to proving the old adage that God – or the Devil, given O’Malley’s black metal affiliations – lies in the detail:
“We do a lot with very little. Well, not little, but few elements. If you take those and really focus on them, there’s an incredible depth to any single element, a certain instrument or whatever, that you can explore. I think Khanate does that. That’s not the main purpose, it’s more about time manipulation, but that’s definitely a really strong element to our music.”
O’Malley draws a clear distinction between Khanate and his other best-known band, the drone-rock majesty that is Sunn 0))).
“Khanate is more ‘human’ and ‘subconscious’ I guess,” he explains. “Sunn is much more about drawing up this force, this energy, this space in which time is bending a little bit, sounds transfer over from how you’d expect to hear them, how you’d expect to perceive them through your senses. Sound becomes a physical, visual thing. I like the sound to take your senses and override them by shifting them around from where your brain might think they should be. Khanate is much more of a unit. Sunn is almost a kind of open miasma. It’s structured too, of course, but the spirit is much more free.”
There’s a ritualistic, magickal edge to O’Malley’s work which is reminiscent of industrial pioneers like Throbbing Gristle and Coil. Like them, O’Malley is fascinated by the body-and-mind-altering properties of amplified sound.
“There’s an incredible quote on Pelican’s first CD from someone, I don’t remember who (it’s from American avant-guitarist Marc Ribot - JS), but it basically takes the parallel of sounds at high volume being poison, that the player acts as the filter for the audience, for the toxins coming out of the speakers. It’s a shamanic way of looking at it. I never liked that word, but music to me is really spiritual. I feel it allows my mind to work differently. It creates different states, different mindsets.”
O’Malley acknowledges that he is making explicit something that is present in pretty much every form of rock ‘n’ roll.
“These are the invisible things that happen with a lot of music but people don’t really think about. It’s like some kind of modern day ritual practice. I went and saw those first two Black Sabbath reunion shows in Birmingham a few years ago and I was just shocked. The entire place was chanting, there was a low line of fog on the floor, and it occurred to me that this was a temple, and there was some kind of ritual taking place.”

Khanate [2005]

2008-06-23T16:16:00.000-07:00

Why is doom metal so slow? That might seem a ridiculous question. Surely it’s something to do with the pioneering sub-blues-crawl of the very first Sabbath album, or the enduring influence of The Melvins' early dirges? In truth, there is a more subtle rationale informing the dynamics of the subgenre. The decelerated, detumescent sprawl of the best doom expresses negativity and woe better than its speedier metal relatives for the simple reason that bad times always seem to last longer and move slower than good times. As Albert Einstein put it when attempting to simplify his theories, "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity." The doom subgenre embraces the time-warping qualities of pain and unhappiness and alchemises them into artistic virtues, reflecting their drear effect on our experience of the passage of time. Khanate reject the heroic, mythological trappings of their forbears (and many of their contemporaries) and like 80s heroes Swans they maximise their impact by offering an amplified dramatisation of real human pain. The kind to which anyone who has been dumped, beaten, bereaved, taken mentally ill or otherwise victimised can relate. Khanate's new two-track mini-album ‘Capture & Release’ is a cathartic wallow in just such reactionary depths of despair, as James Plotkin (bass/synth) explains.
“It seems like most of Khanate’s themes have to do with very primal, destructive instincts and reactions of an aggressive/regressive nature.” He then adds, somewhat cryptically, “I have some experience with primitive, destructive behavior.”
Alongside Plotkin’s synth and bass, Tim Wyskida’s drums and Stephen O’Malley’s guitar, one of the most distinctive elements of Khanate is the voice of Alan Dubin. His vocals differ from those of the average black or death metal singer in that they are not so much trying-to-be-inhuman as all-too-fucking-human. His acidic retchings sound like expulsions from the blackest, loneliest recesses of the soul. “It’s cold/When I touch you,” he shrieks on ‘Release’, evoking feelings of lovelessness and solitude that are still taboo in a society that either drives unhappiness underground or co-opts it into a superficial culture of complaint. It is in defiance of this that Khanate deal with the abject, the emotional and psychological waste that emanates from our souls in times of dejection and humiliation. Dubin’s vocal style is also notable for simulating the derangement and petulance commonly associated with infancy and old age, extremes of human development equidistant to the concept of emotional restraint. Long-time friend and associate Plotkin (the pair previously worked together in OLD and Shadowcast) credits this partly to the singer's somewhat delicate grasp on reality.
“I've been aware of Alan's dual personalities and unstable psyche for quite some time, so nothing really surprises me that much,” he admits. “I may have been thrown a bit with the direction of his most recent lyrics, considering that 'Things Viral' was much more surrealist and open to interpretation. I'd say he's one of the most interesting lyricists I've ever come across.”
Like Stephen O’Malley, James Plotkin is a restless musical polymath who can often be found with a number of projects on the go at any given time. Given his work rate and obvious dedication to music, it is worth enquiring as to what motivates him as a musician. Is Plotkin creating music for the pure joy of it, or does he have a particular aim in mind whenever he picks up an instrument or sits at a computer keyboard?
“I try to let things happen as they will - usually the best music is the stuff that happens without too much thought. You can't really force art, it becomes way too obvious and impressionistic. It's something to focus on, I find it very therapeutic. I'd say music and art in general has been instrumental in keeping me out of serious trouble over the years. I could probably say the same for the other members of Khanate.”
Plotkin is a versatile musician, capable of performing a variety of different functions from bass and synth player in Khanate to guitarist in Atomsmasher/Phantomsmasher. He also works as a producer. Does he feel more comfortable in any one of those roles, or see them all as equal extensions of his creative instinct?
“These roles all have much different rewards as well as different levels of frustration. I have to admit that I really enjoy the clinical aspect of the technical work and being able to disconnect from the material itself to a degree. Nothing really compares to the satisfaction of creating art from the ground up though, and production work takes on a completely different form when you're applying it to your own material. The process can get really blurred when you're self-producing because it's all coming from the same place, but you have absolute freedom which to me is absolutely essential.”
Plotkin's first experience of this freedom came at an early stage of his musical development.
“When I was a kid learning to play guitar I found an old delta-lab delay unit in the trash outside a local gear shop,” he remembers. “It was one of the first delays that had the ‘infinite repeat’ function. This helped introduce me to the power of the loop and the possibilities of sound outside the typical song-based formula. Living just outside NYC I also had a good amount of exposure to late-night college radio programs that were essential for discovering new and obscure music. I was hearing stuff from artists like Brian Eno, Pierre Henry and Throbbing Gristle for the first time on the radio. This obviously had a major impact on my development of a sense of exploration in music.”
Around the time of Khanate’s second album, 'Things Viral', guitarist Stephen O’Malley claimed that what had begun as a collaborative ‘project’ had become more of a ‘band’ following touring and further studio work. Indeed, the easy assumption that Khanate is O’Malley’s baby – understandable given his status as something of a catalyst for doom/drone group excursions – is revealed as false by even a cursory listen to their music. Khanate is formed by four distinct personalities, each able to channel their respective histories into their joint creations.
“I think that when you start to achieve some results from your work you begin to take it more seriously, which was certainly the case with Khanate. Stephen and I had only just met when we had our initial sessions, so I suppose it was unclear at the time what would materialize. Personally, I think the fact that each member of the band contributes on a creative level is what defines Khanate as a ‘real’ band.”
The group’s almost dub-like use of space and silence also allows each band member to make his presence unmistakably felt; ‘Khanate’, ‘Things Viral’ and ‘Capture & Release’ do not flood the listener with torrents of suffocating drop-tuned riffing – movement is delayed until the tension becomes almost unbearable, increasing the devastating power of the downstroke when it finally arrives. In addition to the tortuously slow pace of their songs, these gaps between eruptions of noise bring Khanate’s music within kissing distance of drone or even ambient music, areas in which Plotkin in particular has shown a great deal of interest. Given the wide range of left-field influences brought to bear on their music-making, and the unique sound that emerges as a result, one might wonder just how applicable the 'doom metal' tag is to Khanate. Is it strictly relevant to use such a term when the subject is so engaged in exploring possibilities others would not even consider genre-worthy?
“That seems to be the genre we've been placed in," shrugs Plotkin. "Khanate are in the fringes, though - very marginal. I think that if the term is used as a really loose guide towards finding new music it can be helpful. It's when limitations and standards become attached to these terms that they become a problem. You eventually get artists that adhere to a strict formula in order to be authentic or true. I guess I just don't understand this need to categorize. Leave it to the obsessives.”
Listening to their records, it isn’t immediately obvious whether Khanate sculpt their songs from hours of exploratory jamming or adopt a painstakingly precise compositional approach. While the looseness and openness of their sound suggests the former, the elements of each song seem to be positioned ‘just so’ in order to achieve maximum effect. For his part, Plotkin views the songwriting process as mutable and liable to change at any time, although he admits that ‘Capture & Release’ is more ‘composed’ than the group’s previous work.
“The process is constantly changing. ‘Capture & Release’ is the first album that was entirely composed prior to recording. An idea or chord progression is used as a starting point, more ideas are brought in and thrown around until things start to solidify. I think everyone in Khanate brings something really unique to the table when composing, it's a really interesting combination of angles.”
So how would he describe the band dynamic? Is it based on mutual understanding or a degree of creative tension?
“I'd say there's a good balance of artistic intent and general motivation,” he explains. “Any tension inside Khanate would have more to do with personality and ego than creative differences since the creative process is shared really well. The chemistry between players has developed as well - recent live performances are a pretty good indication of this. Everyone seems open to trying different approaches which is going to keep things interesting. For the most part we all agree that limitations should be avoided as much as possible.”
How important is playing live to Khanate?
“Extremely important,” he confirms. “The maximum effect can really only be witnessed in the proper live setting. Certain gigs have provided some peak moments for this band and I don't think we could reach our full potential without the immediacy of live performance.”
As anyone who has attended a Sunn 0))) gig will attest, the physical and psychological effects of low-end frequencies combined with high volume can be devastating. As well as the short and long term effects on the hearing, this combination has been known to cause visual hallucinations, nausea and emotional disturbance. In Khanate’s case, it would be true to say that the group really do suffer for their art, as Plotkin explains.
“It can be a total release when the visceral effect is reached but it's also quite destructive. Everyone in Khanate has been experiencing tinnitus for the last year which has become a growing concern. Using the best available protection against hearing damage still doesn't have much effect when you're pushing 120db in a small club. Exposure to extreme bass frequencies can distort your vision as well. At times you can feel your eyes rattle in their sockets. I tend to feel tired mentally after playing with Khanate, although I could just be a bit banged out in general...”