A friend, or an acquaintance, depending on how you define things, died unexpectedly yesterday. Since I found out, I've been thinking about two things: legacy, and boundaries of friendship.
Legacy
People often create things as a means to be remembered. It frequently comes from a self-absorbed place, a need to feel relevant in the vast span of human history, a desire to feel like their time breathing meant something. And that's fine. Keep doing that if that's you. But this note is for the people who doubt their creative output, the people who hesitate to give it to the world for whatever reason. I urge you to share whatever you make, because it might be all someone has to cling to when you're gone. The people who love you will treasure whatever you've left behind. And you may not realize how many people love you.
Friendship
The definition of "friend" is vague and varies from person to person. As someone who was a teenager in the late 90s, I made a lot of friends online. I've met a handful in person, and am still friends with some of those people, as well as the ones I haven't met. Older generations, and even some people my age or younger who didn't grow up in chat rooms and on message boards likely wouldn't acknowledge some of these relationships as friendships, simply because there's been no physical meeting. But what is a friend? Isn't it someone you connect with, for whatever reason, over something you both hold in your heart? What's your definition?
Here's a song my friend, Daron, gave us. It definitely won't be for everyone, but give it a listen if you have a minute.
It’s not as if collaboration over distance wasn’t a thing before March 2020 (it very comfortably and significantly predates the Internet, for one thing), but it quickly became a lockdown (and post-lockdown) truism that COVID accelerated and to some degree normalized that form of collaboration. Nadja’s Aidan Baker already had a lengthy track record of teaming up with all sorts of other artists (both solo and in is his duo with Leah Buckareff), and when everything changed he’d already been contemplating doing a series of trios. A live performance? An installation? When any sort of everyone-in-one-room affair quickly became impossible for the foreseeable future, the idea got adapted into the Trio Not Trio series, which combines both in-person and remote playing with a number of different collaborators, casting a wide net and then creating a series of groups with Baker and two other musicians. For each, Baker and one partner would get together in the studio, work improvisationally, and then send the tapes to the third to add what they would; then each set of recordings were tweaked and rearranged slightly so that all five came in at around an hour apiece.
Even the number of instalments is a mark of the project’s success; Baker originally planned on three trios and got so many positive responses he had to expand. Baker plays guitar throughout and always includes a drummer, but sought to recruit differing instrumentation for the last spot. Each Trio Not Trio release has track names corresponding to the ordinal numbers matching the position of the tracks (so first, second, third, etc.) translated into a different language; the album titles also take this pattern (so first, second, third, etc. but in different languages). Befitting the wide range of playing styles, genres and backgrounds that all of the collaborators brought to the series, the results are varied enough it’s worth looking at each entry in turn.
Yn Gyntaf
Welsh for “firstly,” the initial entry in the series features Oneida drummer John Colpitts (aka Man Forever) and vocalist Stacy Taylor (aka Sarff). It’s also the only one where the drummer of the trio wasn’t the one present for the initial recording. Colpitts is a powerhouse and Taylor’s wordless singing packs its own punch, but for the first five of the seven tracks here, the trio keeps things spectral and foreboding. It’s only when Baker’s guitar splits open the beginning of “Chweched” with two tracks to go that all that potential energy is converted into roiling catharsis (admittedly those two tracks do cover a solid half hour between them). Both halves work well on their own, but the collision of the two is the strongest part of Yn Gyntaf, suggesting the series’ reluctance to settle into one predictable mode even on a trio-by-trio basis.
Siguiente
The second instalment brings in My Disco drummer Rohan Rebeiro and baritone saxophonist Sofía Salvo. All three play this hour loose, spacey and abstract, with all instruments frequently making sounds pretty far away from their standard expressions. Whether it’s the sparse, alien, clicking and droning soundscape of “Primeras (Pts I y II),” the prowling baritone sax haunting “Cuarto,” or the slowly accruing damage of the closing “Septimo,” it is immediately clear that each group is going to bring very different sensibilities and possibilities to the work.
Trzecia
Baker frequently works in various genres in and adjacent to heavy metal, and fans of that side of his work might have their ears perk up seeing that Trzecia brings in Khanate/Insect Ark drummer Tim Wyskida and Pinkish Black’s Daron Beck on keyboards. “Pierwsza” isn’t very brutal at all though, starting with Wyskida’s skittering taps, Beck adding graceful piano accents, and Baker mostly staying subliminal/droning. It’s the closest the series comes to sounding like, say, the Necks. Most of the hour stays in this kind of exploratory mood, with Wyskida frequently leading the way. Only on the closing sixteen minutes of “Szósta” does the hammer come down, Baker and Beck grinding in tandem while Wyskida propels them.
Yonbanme
The fourth entry also includes the series’ second singer in the form of Ayami Suzuki (who also provides electronics), as well as journeyman drummer Tobias Humble. Whereas on Yn Gyntaf Stacy Taylor’s voice was central, giving an element for the listener to follow through the hour, here Suzuki often hangs back, with her voice almost merging with the wash of sound on the ethereal “Nibanme” for example. But then on the more heavily layered title track she also provides the closest thing the series has to discernible lyrics (good luck transcribing them though). The instalment with the fewest tracks (five) and so the longest average track times, Yonbanme may be the only trio to (almost) replicate the instrumental setup of a previous one, but that only highlights how distinctly each collaborator adds to the proceedings.
Letzte
The title here is “last” (not “fifth”) in German, and for the closing trio Baker brings in Berlin’s Jana Sotzko (Point No Point, others) on drums and Melissa Guion (aka MJ Guider) on guitar/bass/electronics. As you might expect from the rest of the series, that setup does not mean we are about to get anything at all like a conventional power trio. Guion frequently laces Baker and Sotzko’s in-the-room interplay with drifting atmospherics, from the gradual haze of “Erste” to the cavernous echoes of “Fünfte.” The closing title track sends the whole project off with a fuzzy, surging valediction, a fittingly satisfying end for a project that demonstrated significant sonic and emotional range within the various modulations of a deliberately specific format. Maybe Trio Not Trio could have five-not-five entries someday?
This was shown at Daron Beck's memorial this past Saturday. It brought back all of the magic I felt the first time I ever saw them perform, and that song in particular. He is truly missed.
Listen along with me and put yourself in a trance.
Sure, the last couple years were anything but normal. You could go so far as to say abnormal. I gleaned onto anything I could that would offer some kind of escape from the global pandemic; be it books, films, tv shows, long walks, and of course music. 2020 saw some albums drop that allowed such escapes. The Behind The Sky comp Portals, Zombi’s 2020, the great Azure Vista Records dropping some…
Zombi & Friends : Song Covers I Never Knew I Needed Till I Heard Them
Zombi & Friends : Song Covers I Never Knew I Needed Till I Heard Them
There’s something quite magical about the recent covers series that Steve Moore, AE Paterra, and Daron Beck have been cooking up in these troubled times. Who are Steve Moore, AE Paterra, and Daron Beck you ask? Well Moore and Paterra are the guys behind the prog/synth duo Zombi. They’ve been making progressive horror/synth music for nearly 20 years now and continue to evolve and expand their…
My first question just kind of concerns your journey as a musician and specifically with regards to music that’s considered dark or heavy. How do you see your growth as a person and as a musician from when you had that initial creative desire to where you are now?
Well, I started playing music when I was ten and started out with guitar. And really, my first bands were just typical high school punk and sort of borderline goth bands or whatever. Then I started playing sort of space rock, psychedelic Butthole Surfers-type stuff in the 90s before I moved to my previous band before this one, Pointy Shoe Factory, and that’s really when things just started to get darker and darker. It’s just kind of gotten darker since. [Laughs]
I feel like the music’s kind of gone in almost the direction that I’ve been trying to get at since I started playing. I’ve always been a fan of darker stuff. I’m not a big fan of heavy music, but I do like loud music. I like stuff that’s more emotionally heavy, whether it be the mood that it sets or the themes. I think some songs by a group like The Four Tops can be just as dark as something that any metal band has recorded. It just depends on how you interpret it.
What is it about that dark or emotionally heavy music or that specific aesthetic that allows it to be the perfect conduit for what you want to create?
Really, I think things have just gotten darker and darker, and in a lot of senses, life has just gotten darker and darker as I keep living. Not to be morbid or anything. There’s plenty of happiness in my life, but I don’t feel like I need to write songs about how happy I am. I don’t feel like people really can relate to that. [Laughs] They might like to try, and I guess there’s a lot of people that feel like they can actually relate to that, but I can’t. It’s never been an issue for me.
At one point I was writing really heavy music when I was in this band called Thorazine Dreams, or maybe not heavy, but it still had this underlying darkness, even though we weren’t trying to put it there. I think that that just happens naturally in life. Ever since I’ve been playing, I don’t think I’ve been an extremely happy person, and it’s just been a way of exorcising demons. I’m not suicidal, either, because I have something to put all that negativity to, which is my music. People pay five dollars to come hear me be negative. [Laughs] That’s turning therapy into a profitable business, at least in some sense.
So it’s safe to assume you guys won’t include any Pharrell covers on the next release?
Nah. [Laughs] You never can tell, though. Back in The Great Tyrant we covered Phil Collins, so you never know. We used to cover “I Don’t Care Anymore,” and that’s a very dark song. [Laughs]
It’s always interesting to see how eager metal fans and even some critics are to compartmentalize the music they’re hearing, and obviously that’s nothing really new, but on a broader scale how have you personally seen the evolution of the heavy music scene since you first began listening or creating it? What do you see as a possible reason for the recent growth in popularity the genre seems to be experiencing?
I think just with the technology that we have now, people don’t have to just be force-fed whatever the industry wants them to have. People have more of a voice as to what has attention paid to it now more than they used to, but really I don’t hear a lot different now going on than what’s gone on for the past two decades. I think it’s just kind of amalgams of a bunch of different things. I don’t think that what we’re doing is that extremely different. I think it’s just a kind of natural progression of where music is supposed to go. You’ve had heavy bands, and you’ve had dark bands. You can have a million different types of heavy, and a million different types of dark. It’s all in how you interpret it.
But I don’t think that there’s a whole lot going on. I think the stuff that the crazy world of Arthur Brown was doing back in the 60s and 70s with Kingdom Come was just as far out as a lot of shit that’s going on today, maybe even more so. But you take a band like Pallbearer, for example, and I don’t think they’re any heavier than anything that’s happened before. Their use of harmony and melody and things like that are different than some things you’ve heard before, and they use that differently than a lot of bands have in the past. Like I said, it’s an amalgam of things you’ve heard in the past.
The first time I heard them, I told them that they sounded like a Journey 45” played on 33”. Their melody just reminded me so much of something that Neil Schon would play in Journey but slowed down. And they don’t sound a thing like Journey, but that’s just how I interpreted it because I could hear melodies that I don’t normally hear in music that’s that slow and heavy. I just think music is naturally progressing the way that it has to go. I don’t think it’s gonna ever do anything that drastically different at this point. But I don’t know. I don’t do anything on computers as far as music goes, so I don’t know what all you can do there.
With what you guys are doing in Pinkish Black, that idea of originality or newness is something you’ve experienced as well. It’s not heavy metal, but it’s heavy. What does the compositional process look like for Pinkish Black, and how do you and Jon come together from that first creative spark to the finished product or song?
A lot of how we write is based on improv jamming and stuff that we just do at practice. We write most of everything together. Sometimes I may bring in the initial riff of a song, but when it comes down to it, it’s basically that we’ve never gone into it with anything specific. Some bands, I feel like they have a model for writing like ‘We’re gonna be a band that sounds like Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and Iron Maiden,’ and I think that we do that to a certain extent, but it’s so far reaching, and we both pull from different areas.
It’s like ‘Okay, this is gonna sound like Cocteau Twins, Shub Niggurath, and Magma.’ Those three bands don’t get put on the same page together in musical lineage, but we don’t even think of it that way. I may be thinking those three bands, and Jon’s thinking something completely different. So it’s not so much about what it sounds like as much as it is how it makes us feel. We know when we’re onto something that we like. We’ll record it, and see how it sounds, and play with it, but a lot of it’s just very much based on what we come up with in jamming. We don’t improv a lot or anything like that, but we write a lot of improvisation, and we have very defined roles in the band.
I handle the melodies and harmonies, and Jon handles the rhythms. It’s easy when it comes to that thing. We know exactly what the other one should be doing. We venture off into where he adds harmonies, and I will add rhythmic elements, so we both know what our own role is, and we both know what the other person’s role is as well. We just kind of assist each other along. Like I said, it’s not so much about trying to sound like anybody else. It’s more about trying to create a sound that’s enticing to us. We’re not set out to sound different. We’re set out to create a sound.
It’s interesting that despite the glaring differences with Pinkish Black, you guys are still associated with what’s considered extreme music. Do you find that the term “extreme” when it comes to art is largely irrelevant now simply due to the fact we’re exposed to so much information and art at a younger and younger age?
Not necessarily because a lot of people that would consider themselves doing extreme music have never even heard a band like Magma or Shub Niggurath or something like that. Those kinds of bands – they were really extreme stuff, but they’re not out there just screaming their heads off and pouring blood all over themselves or anything like that. A band like Magma, which is one of the headliners at Roadburn this year, is a bunch of people in their sixties. Their music is more extreme than any being made by these kids out there with makeup on or blood or whatever.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Screamin’ jay Hawkins and Arthur Brown, and I love some very shock rock stuff, but it’s just that in this day and age it’s very hard to be shocking unless you’re doing it at a musical level, and that’s even more difficult. Anybody can fucking go to Spencer’s Gifts and buy some fake blood. What’s hard is sitting down and trying to come up with an original idea. I listen to anything and everything, and I download just as much as the next person and was very excited when that became a possibility in life.
Because I remember the way that I found out about Brian Eno was by listening to a Bauhaus album and seeing ‘Oh, this band covers this song “Third Uncle” by Brian Eno. Who’s that Brian Eno guy?’ Well, I had to wait until my mom would drive me to the record store, so I could go check out a Roxy Music album, and then it was like I had to wait until I had money to afford it. Now, the convenience is great for people, but at the same time they don’t understand or they don’t appreciate how convenient they have it. I don’t feel like exposure to anything is bad to a certain extent. I feel like we should have the availability to be exposed to anything and everything that’s out there, but I think it can make you take certain things for granted.
A lot of kids now will not sit down and just listen to a record. They pull it up on YouTube and skip through the songs to see if it does anything. They basically give songs about a five second listen. Back in the old days, which I haven’t been alive that long, but if you liked this one song by a band, you would have to go buy that record and take it home and listen to it before you knew if you liked the whole thing. Now, they already know what they’re getting into. They have a million things that they’re getting into now, and I might have listened to one album back then for six weeks after I would buy it.
I don’t think that that’s so much a thing now. A lot of music is more disposable, and a lot of people are making more disposable music, and there’s a lot more people making it now than there ever has been. Any kid now can have Garage Band on his computer, put up a Facebook page, and all of a sudden they’re a band. It didn’t work like that when I started. Real music will prevail regardless of how much saturation of music or how many bands are out there. You’re always gonna have some people who are doing something different than the people who are just trying to catch on to the next bandwagon or fad or whatever. There’s gonna be other people that don’t really give a shit, and they’re just doing it for themselves.
The erosion of attention span or listener absorption is something that’s definitely fascinating and somewhat troubling to see when it comes to music and art that’s being created now as opposed to ten or twenty years ago.
Exactly. That’s one of the reasons I really appreciate putting out our stuff on vinyl. Listening to an actual vinyl record is just so much more of an interactive listening process than just pulling up something on your playlist in your iTunes or whatever. You have to sit there, and you have to listen to the record, and you have to get up, and you have to flip the record, and you have this big piece of artwork to look at while you’re listening to the record. That’s how I grew up listening to music, and that’s how I remember those most impactful musical moments in my life were made. Kids need to get back to that definitely, because it’s good to have all that exposure, but at the same time, so much exposure makes things seem more disposable, and you appreciate them less.
What’s next for Pinkish Black in 2014?
As of right now, we’re going on tour with Goblin, which is just like a dream come true that I never knew could potentially even be a dream. Dawn of the Dead was one of the first VHS tapes my mom ever bought me because it was one of my favorite movies of all time, and I was probably nine years old when she bought it for me. [Laughs] So I’ve been listening to their music vicariously through horror movies since I was nine. One of the first special orders I ever put in at a record store was the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack. So for me to able to go on tour with four of the original members of Goblin and somebody that was in Zombi, Steve Moore, is just something I can’t believe and neither can Jon, and we’re just blown away.
Once we do that, we’re gonna come back and do a couple of shows with our friends from Baltimore called Curse. They’re a really awesome two-piece band. It’s drums and keyboards just like us, but they do similar music, but it’s almost like they do it the opposite way than we do it. It’s the only way I can describe it. [Laughs] We fit very well together, but they’re just a different shape puzzle piece than we are.
After we finish up with them, we’re doing three dates with Floor, and we’re playing the Houston Free Press Festival. Once we’re done with all that it’s gonna be summer time, and we’re going to try to get overseas just as soon as possible. That’s our next goal is to try to tour overseas, because we think we’ll do a lot better there. Not that we’ve done bad in America at all. We’ve done much better in general than we ever thought we would do at this point in our lives. You don’t normally have a lot of stuff start happening when you’re thirty-six. A lot of my friends that are in bands and stuff have been on ten tours by the time they’re twenty-six. I just went on my first tour ever at age thirty-seven.
So, it’s exciting to be this old and have exciting stuff happening that you never thought would happen. But we wanna tour, and wanna go back in the studio as soon as we can. We’re over halfway through writing our next album, and we’re in talks to get the final Great Tyrant album put out, which was recorded in 2009 and has been sitting on the shelves since Tommy died. It’ll include a Magma cover that we did. We were really excited to be doing that kind of music that’s on that final Great Tyrant album. That’s the stuff we were writing before that band turned into Pinkish Black. It’s pretty much the bridge that gaps those two bands together, for sure. So yeah, we’ve got a lot of stuff in the works.
