Irreducible: Colossamite live (finally)

I've been on an Alice Coltrane kick lately (working my way through the Impulses right now) and also going back through some of the late Coltrane material from when Alice was in the band (Stellar Regions, Expression, etc.). It occurred to me — esp. given how much great footage there is out there of the classic quartet — what a huge loss it is that there's no high-quality extended footage of that final group with Alice, Pharoah, Jimmy Garrison and Rashied Ali. (This brief and fragmentary footage from Newport '66 is all we've got, as far as I know.)

The truth is that, in the YouTube era, we as fans are incredibly spoiled, in that we can dial up pretty much whatever we want at any moment, whether it's the Cecil Taylor Unit live in Paris in 1969, or Zeppelin live at a tiny teen club in Denmark that same year. It's incalculable how much this circumstance has enriched my musical understanding in the past 10 years or so, giving me the chance to lay eyes on countless bands — from Last Exit to '84 Black Flag, the Stanier-Bogdan-era Helmet lineup and Sabbath in their absolute prime — that whether due to age, geography or circumstance, I never got to see in person.

That collective archive extends about as far into the underground as you want to go — all the way to, say, a 1996 Karate show in my hometown of KC, where I was one of maybe 30 people in the audience. But somehow some bands seem to have slipped through the cracks, and for the longest time, it seemed like Colossamite was one of those. If you've heard of them at all, chances are you're about as obsessed as I am; if not, you're in the great majority. Though they put out two mind-searing releases on the great and relatively visible Skin Graft label in the late '90s — All Lingo's Clamor and Economy of Motion — they're barely remembered these days, even among those who might be die-hard fans of prior or later bands involving some of the same musicians (Dazzling Killmen, Deerhoof, etc.). 

Among a few friends and me, these records quickly became legendary for their combination of the calculated fury of bands like the Killmen and craw with the chaotic blurt of free improvisation and hints of esoteric and offbeat humor. In short, in my eyes, this was some of the most challenging, original and inspired music of its time. But the band sort of came and went and I never found myself near any of their performances during their too-brief lifespan.

All throughout the YouTube era, as the fossil record, so to speak, grew more and more comprehensive, I kept waiting for the day when some Colossamite footage might surface. When I had the pleasure of interviewing Colossamite guitar masterminds John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez — who first came on my radar via their participation in this band and then went on to well-deserved renown as members of Deerhoof — for my Heavy Metal Bebop series in 2012, we talked at length about Colossamite (see here and here), and Ed mentioned to me that he knew of a single show that had been recorded, and that he thought he might have a VHS copy stashed away somewhere. Well, apparently the person who filmed that gig recently dug it up and deemed it worthy of posting because — as Ed has just informed me in an email — it's now sitting there on YouTube for all to see. 

 

As I type this, I'm only about halfway through it but I wanted to take a second to document that feeling of joy and enrichment that comes with laying eyes on something you truly never thought you'd see, of witnessing a band in performance that you assumed you'd only ever hear. I tell you, friends, it's as awesome as I could have ever hoped for. Considering the vintage, the quality is excellent and, though John is sadly out of frame for a lot of it, the video really clues you in to what a fearsome organism this band truly was. 

Being a drummer myself, and having had the good fortune to see Colossamite vocalist-guitarist Nick Sakes play many times in later years in the outstanding bands Sicbay and Xaddax and guitarists Dieterich and Rodriguez play together in the mighty Deerhoof and separately in a handful of projects, a major focus for me watching this is the drummer, Chad Popple. Chad has been (at least to me) a bit of a shadowy figure in the years since Colossamite ended. From what I understand, he's been living in Europe since that time, and though he's been active this whole time in various experimental/uncategorizable contexts (including the great and underrated Gorge Trio with Dieterich and Rodrigez), he's been a bit harder to keep tabs on than his ex-Colossamite bandmates. Anyway, my first exposure to the Colossamite records came before I really had a grasp of the free-jazz/free-improv continuum but over the years, especially as I heard drummers like Han Bennink, Tony Oxley and Paul Lovens, it started to become clearer to me how ingenious Popple's style really was: the way he combined the startling aggression of the best post-hardcore and metal drummers of the '90s with a turbulent flow that seemed to have more in common with the Euro improv greats mentioned above or, say, Drumbo circa Lick My Decals Off, Baby. (Regarding the latter quality, it's interesting to note that my old friend Kevin Shea seems to have been thinking along similar lines around the same time, as heard in Storm and Stress and, later, Coptic Light.)

Anyway, all of these qualities discussed above, namely both Popple's terrifying force and precision and his warped, destabilizing eccentricity, are on full display in this video. And all of it is also evident in the entire band. From what I can tell, the material comes mostly from Economy of Motion, so we get the diseased lurch of "Mr. Somebody Does Something" along with the surrealist spoken word of "The Eagle and the Seal" and the tense build of "Arkansas Halo." (Listening further, I'm thrilled to hear "No Entran Moscas" from All Lingo's, with its endlessly unspooling chorus riff.) It's such a pleasure to watch the band tear into every aspect of this material, absolutely raging through the loud moments and relishing the wobble and fragility of the freer passages, and then smiling and joking nonchalantly between songs. 

I love how willing Colossamite were to send their audience mixed signals, never aligning themselves with any subset of metal or post-hardcore or the conventions of free improv or of more well-established avant-rock practices. They were just a thrillingly weird band that honed a beautifully organic writing style that implored the listener at every second to buckle up for what might be coming next. In my own mind, they certainly helped to redefine what a "band" could be, and helped to further drive home the idea that some of the music that would hit me the hardest and stick with me the longest would be the most personal, the least relatable to known styles or pursuits, but at the same time, the most carefully and meticulously engineered. I'm reminded a bit here of something that Dazzling Killmen bassist Darin Gray said to me when looking back on first encountering craw in the early '90s:

[From a 2015 Noisey interview; emphasis mine]

"…I think probably at the time, live, [craw] was the most unique band I had ever heard. There really isn't another band like craw. They're a completely unique entity. And I remember just thinking, like, 'Wow, someone has worked as hard as we have on a completely different thing.' It wasn't that craw sounded anything like Dazzling Killmen, and quite the contrary, really nothing like it. I could tell, I could hear that they had honed it and worked on it to the highest level. And at the time, there weren't a whole lot of bands out there touring that were like that, that had honed something to that high of a level. … The only reason I felt that they did hone their craft the way they did was because they felt they had to; they felt compelled to be great. And to be the best they could be. And for no other reason. There was no gain. There was absolutely nothing to gain, and I could tell they knew that." 

I feel the same things watching this, and am reminded why I was so drawn to this area of music — whatever you want to call it — in my youth and still am now. There was a compulsion to be great coupled with, not a desire to alienate any potential audience exactly, but a distinct refusal to pander to one either, to put up familiar signposts of genre that might orient a casual listener. If you were dealing with this music, either on record as I was, or in a tiny venue, as was the case for these lucky attendees at this Knoxville, TN, Colossamite gig more than 20 years ago, you were dealing with it full-on. That, to me, is one of the great pleasures of underground music — that you might be standing in a room with, say, 15 other people and — as the idle drift of a pre-gig lull snaps suddenly into the crush and overstimulation of the show itself — suddenly have your consciousness forever altered by some shockingly powerful and carefully honed statement. 

I love bigger shows; I love more universal and relatable aesthetics (in addition to the Coltranes, I've been listening to a ton of late '70s and early '80s AC/DC lately); but I will always hold a special place in my heart for a band like Colossamite, who developed and refined such a personal language among themselves that it's essentially irreducible and incomparable to anything other than itself. As it is on the records, that achievement is frozen in time on this live video, and I'm thrilled that even after all this time, it still feels utterly alien, invigorating, and alive.

Join us: Skryptor's first shows

This coming weekend marks the live debut of a new band I'm in called Skryptor. The lineup consists of Tim Garrigan on guitar, David McClelland on bass and myself on drums, playing music we've written as a group, plus (so far) one cover.

This is a significant project for me, and not just because I'm excited about how the songs are shaping up. If my 15-year-old self could somehow read the first paragraph of this post, his mind would be blown. Tim (formerly of Dazzling Killmen, You Fantastic! and other projects) and Dave (also of craw) are musicians I've looked up to for more than two decades. It's no exaggeration to say that the music each of these men helped to create in the early '90s significantly influenced the direction of my life from that point on — as a musician, I consider myself to be a product of an unofficial movement they were each an integral part of: progressive Midwestern post-hardcore, if you want to put a name on it (see also: Season to Risk, Colossamite, Cheer-Accident and many others). I've collaborated with both of them before — with Dave in the band Bat Eats Plastic (originally known as Today) and with Tim backing him in his solo singer-songwriter work — but never at the same time, and never as what I'd consider to be a mature (or at least maturing) musician who has significant experiences and ideas of his own to bring to the table.

For a little preview of the music — concise yet complex instrumental rock that falls somewhere between prog and punk, and sounds (to me, at least) not all that much like anything any of the three of us have done before — check out the clips posted on our Facebook page.

Here's all the info on our first two shows, taking place in Kingston, NY, on Saturday and in Queens on Sunday. Joining us for both will be the awesome Xaddax, featuring Tim's old Dazzling Killmen bandmate Nick Sakes. Ultraam — a psych-meets-jazz improv band featuring members of Mercury Rev, Luna and Trans Am — will top the Kingston bill and maniacal local avant-death-metalists Pyrrhon (featuring onetime DFSBP contributor Doug Moore) will headline in Queens. More info below and at the FB event pages I've linked to.

Saturday, March 4
@ BSP Lounge, Kingston

Ultraam
Xaddax
Skryptor

9pm, $8 

/////

Sunday, March 5
@ Trans-Pecos, Queens

Pyrrhon
Skryptor
Xaddax

8pm, $10

The misery/mastery of Asphyx and other recent raves

A busy spell has kept me away from DFSBP for more than two weeks. Here's a top-heavy summary of what's been on my mind, musicwise.

Asphyx
In my Maryland Deathfest round-up, I mentioned some new friends my wife and I made that weekend, a metal-obsessed couple from Wisconsin. During the whirlwind "Dude, you need to check this out" discussions I had with H.S. (the male half of the pair) at MDF, he was more fired up about the Dutch outfit Asphyx than any other band he recommended. I'd heard samplings of their stuff in recent months—material from the new album, Deathhammer—but hadn't yet spent good time with any of their records. A few weeks after the fest, I received a package in the mail from H.S. containing a few old-fashioned mix CDs, one of which featured a whole bunch of Asphyx songs, including a few from their 1991 debut LP, The Rack. These tracks sent me into a delirious Asphyx obsession. I respectfully took temporary leave from the mixtapes and went burrowing into their discography, not coming up for air for something like two weeks.

While the early stuff hit me hard, it was the more recent material—Deathhammer, which came out this past February, and 2009's Death…the Brutal Way—that really ensnared me. As DFSBP readers may have noticed, old-school death metal—or more specifically, recent work by old-school death-metal bands such as Obituary, Cannibal Corpse and Immolation— has formed a major pillar of my listening over the past few years. A lot of what I've been craving this sort of gruesome primitiveness, expressed most purely in Obituary's work. It's an anti-evolutionary stance, a commitment to improving as a band without "progressing" in obvious, easily quantifiable ways. (I also touched on this in my recent Unsane review.) It has something to do with becoming more and more one's self as a band without messing with the core formula. Having stacked the old Asphyx records up against the new—and I'm specifically talking about the work they've done with their signature frontman Martin Van Drunen, i.e., two early-’90s LPs, and then these two latest ones, made after he rejoined the band in 2007—I can say that they are a perfect example of this. The latest Asphyx records sound a thousand times crisper and more hi-fi than the band's ’90s output, but they also have this unquantifiable x-factor that I also hear in recent Obituary. I can only describe it as the weight of years. Like Obituary, Asphyx thrives on the concept of anguish. The simulation of pain and suffering and ponderous psychic weight is their bread and butter. These new Asphyx records are among the most sheerly pained I've ever come across in the realm of death metal. Even at fast tempos, the band—and especially Van Drunen, who has one of the most genuinely dire, soul-vomiting deliveries I've heard coming from a death-metal frontman—sounds like its being driven against its will through frozen wastes, the music serving as a "Why have you forsaken me?" outcry.

The Asphyx songs that hit me the hardest were the slow ones, grim death marches like "Minefield" from Deathhammer. Like much of Asphyx's recent material, this song deals with a horrors-of-war theme. Martin Van Drunen (along with current Asphyx guitarist Paul Baayens) also plays in a World War II–themed metal band called Hail of Bullets, and he's funneled that same obsession into Asphyx. Here's a stream of "Minefield"—play it deafeningly loud, I implore you—and a sampling of lyrics:

Crawling through barbed wire
Into no-man's land
Soil soaked in blood
The crying of men
Terror unveiling
In between the lines
They scream mutilated
Detonating mines

You wouldn't think twice about lyrics like this if you read them out of context. I guess that's kind of a "Duh" observation, but I think it's worth pointing out. More than many bands I could name, in any genre, Asphyx is about raw sensation. Formally, i.e., when it comes to the on-paper aspects of what they do, they could not be more straightforward or potentially dismissable. They play some of the most easily pigeonhole-able death metal I know; basically they pick a tempo, either crawling or galloping (in the hardcore-derived sense—no blast beats here), and just let Van Drunen loose over it. But the sensation they give off, this feeling that you get from "Minefield," of trudging depression, of men being ground mercilessly into dust by their own savage impulses, of the cold unforgiving-ness of the universe, is the furthest thing from commonplace. In terms of pure feeling, I can think of very few metal bands that sock me in the gut the way Asphyx do. I love the minimal structures of their songs, the way they only shift gears when they really mean it. The first 2:20 of "Minefield" is straight crawling-on-hands-and-knees molasses doom, and then at that point, they switch into this woozy, lumbering shuffle groove. I can't get enough of this relentless drive, the way the band gradually flattens you with one texture till you absolutely can't take it anymore, and then switches to another and does the exact same thing. Death metal should feel like this: endless, vast, utterly miserable. You should want to tap out because it's so unrelenting. It should make you wince, as if against a biting wind, and Asphyx at their best have that effect on me. Crucially, they can also bring me to the verge of tears. Listen to the downshift back to trudging misery that happens at around 4:25 in "Minefield." Here Baayens blindsides you with an incredibly majestic lead, an Iommi-worthy elegy that lays aside brutality in favor of epic sadness. This is some funereal, bell-tolling, hand-of-doom shit here, people. It sounds to me like an epilogue to the gruesome war depicted in the main body of the song; you imagine a surviving soldier standing beside a mass grave as the rain drives down on him, realizing he's no better off than the ones who perished. (I should note here that Asphyx named their second LP Last One on Earth.)

If these sorts of sensations appeal to you—maybe "appeal" isn't the right word; it might be better to say, "If you feel the pull of this cold, dark, gritty art the way I do…"—I encourage you to check out Deathhammer in its entirety. The great thing about Asphyx is that they're not a one-note band; maybe a three-note band, but definitely not a one-note band. Aside from the molasses-paced, war-is-hell-and-so-is-life vibe they're working with on "Minefield," latter-day Asphyx has also been digging into this meta-metallic theme, i.e., the idea of actually pairing death metal with lyrics about death metal. It's an idea that's no so uncommon in, say, hip-hop, where part of the point is to rap about how good one is at, well, rapping. Asphyx does something very similar on their two latest albums. It's important to understand that the titles Death…the Brutal Way and Deathhammer refer not simply to dying, but rather to the craft of death metal itself.

Here's how drummer Bob Bagchus (the only remaining original member of the band) put it in a Decibel interview:

Decibel: What is the Deathhammer?
Bob Bagchus: Deathhammer represents the book of death metal. Our view on real death metal. It’s like the rules of what real death metal was supposed to be. Death metal was supposed to be hard, raw, dirty, creepy, dark and brutal to the bone. Music to be scared of. Just listen to bands like old Venom, Messiah, Slaughter, Hellhammer, Possessed, old Death, Autopsy, Necrophagia, early Mayhem, Necrovore, Incubus (Florida) etc., and you’ll know what we mean. During the last decade, it seems that death metal has turned into this hyper-blast technical nonsense bullshit that they dare to call “death metal.” In fact, it’s a contest of who can play the fastest bpm or riffs (sometimes 10 in 1 single song) and they seem to forget about the song itself. I mean, where’s the song? Where’s the catchiness and where is the atmosphere? Nowhere! And this is supposed to be death metal? It’s a joke! We say, “Go listen to Hellhammer’s Triumph of Death and discover what real death metal is!” So we thought that there should be a sort of guide book to remind those people of the essence of real death metal. We, of course, don’t want to be arrogant—hell no—but since death metal is in our hearts and souls, we hate to see it destroyed by those technical-bullshit-musically-graduated-soulless bands, pretending they know it all. Death metal comes from the heart, not from the mind.

As if the album's title track weren't already a perfect summation of these principles, dig how van Drunen growls, "This is some death metal, you bastards!" during the guitar break around :37:



The point that Bagchus makes above might seem like sort of an obvious one, but the truth is, it's an important gauntlet to lay down. Over the past 15 years or so, death metal really has bifurcated to an almost absurd degree. You've got this staunchly primitive, slither-through-the-muck-and-bang-your-fuckin'-head aesthetic that reemerged old-schoolers like Autopsy (and, I'd argue, Obituary, though I'm not sure whether or not they'd have a place in Bagchus's death-metal "guide book") and a bunch of neo-old-schoolers (I'm not knowledgeable enough about that movement to name names) champion, and then on the other hand, you've got this noodly, absurdly intricate technicality, as perfected by bands like Necrophagist. Now I absolutely love Necrophagist, and I also love Atheist and a ton of other bands that I'd place in that latter category, but listening to a super-techy but, to me, hard-to-really-love band like, say Origin, or a million faceless typewriter-blast-beat outfits, it's hard not to agree with Bagchus's polemic. Fortunately, this is music not war, and no one has to take sides. I'm sure that whenever the new Necrophagist album drops, I'll be happily indulging the side of my death-metal brain that can't get enough speed, precision and virtuosity, but lately, my compass has been pointing straight toward Aspyhx's shaggy, mud-smeared version of the truth.

P.S. I leave you with a a further illustration of Asphyx's lovably nerdy death-metal orthodoxy, a lyric excerpt from the title track to Death…the Brutal Way, which actually narrates the band's 2007 comeback gig at Germany's Party San festival. (Note that "Vermin" and "The Rack" are Asphyx song titles.)

Krushing at the Party San, hear the hordes rejoice
Filth to feed the Vermin, 'n beer to oil the voice
We'll beat your eardrums useless, and tie you on the Rack
Bones and nerves are grind to pulp, we are fucken back
Again we set the standards, get the message clear
Leave the fucken stage bitch, no room for you here
Mercy won't be given, as we enter our domain
Endlessly you'll suffer, on the altar of pain

Merchants of brutality, death our only rule
The doctrine of true metal, gods of the old school
Die by fucken Asphyx, ultra loud we slay
Skinned alive you humbly beg for death the brutal way!

/////

Other recent raves:

Marc Ribot Trio
I adored the Marc Ribot Trio set I saw at the Village Vanguard last Friday. Thank you to Nate Chinen (and to G.G., who dropped me a breathless 2am e-mail the next night) for encouraging me to attend.


Rush's Clockwork Angels
The new Rush album is outstanding. I will always be a Rush completist, but I've been mixed on their most recent studio output; I love 2002's Vapor Trails but I find 2007's Snakes & Arrows a little ponderous. This new one, though, is a straight killer: brisk, muscular, extremely varied and catchy across the board. It might be my favorite since 1993's Counterparts, which I consider to be the gold standard for their late-period sound. The title track is a standout, combining the Police-style pop-reggae lilt of their '80s work with the ass-kicking power-trio-ism they've excelled at since the late '70s:


Nick Sakes
This man needs no introduction 'round this parts. (If I'm wrong about that, go here.) Just this week, I discovered a guest-DJ segment that Nick did for WFMU back in March, via the Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine program. Go here to check out an extended on-air interview and various musical picks from one of my favorite living musicians. (The Sakes portion of the program begins a little over an hour into the stream; WFMU's pop-up player allows you to navigate there easily.)

News: Ween and Frank Ocean
Ween breaks up! Frank Ocean is gay! I've been a little dismayed lately by the sensational treatment of stories like these, especially since said instances concern artists that mean a lot to me.

In the case of Ween, I think it's best to exercise a little patience before we nail the coffin lid shut. The facts are simple: 1) Gene and Dean have been pursuing separate lives/careers for a while now—you know of Mickey's Guide Service, yes?—and Ween has really been more of a sporadic touring project over the last few years. 2) Gene has recently sobered up, not for the first time. He's got a cool new solo record out, and he probably just wants to put a little space between "Aaron Freeman" and the drug-fueled caricature that the Gene Ween persona has become in the minds of a lot of fans. 3) Both men have families, and Ween live shows are presumably their main respective sources of income. It makes a lot of sense to me that the project would be taking a little breather right this second (and even that the hiatus might hold for a few years), but the idea that Ween will never perform/record again seems a bit far-fetched to me. It sort of bugs me how people fall all over themselves to write these grandiose epitaphs in such circumstances. Aaron Freeman is a troubled guy who's obviously developed a bit of a love/hate relationship with the band that made him famous, but that has also been his personal undoing in many ways. So he has no plans to record or tour with Ween for the time being—so what? Let's give the man some space to come to terms with his demons. If in, say, five years, Freeman's solo career is thriving, Mickey is still out on his fishing boat full-time and there's been no further word about Ween qua Ween, then yeah, maybe we'll have a clear answer. Right now, at least as far as I—a serious Ween enthusiast and devoted fan—am concerned, this "break-up" is still a temporary hiatus.

In the case of Frank Ocean—who made my favorite album of 2011 and whose new one, Channel Orange, I can't wait to hear—why reduce such a beautiful and elliptical personal statement as this to a mere black & white revelation of sexual preference? The more important revelation is the continued intensity of this dude's self-inventory, and the fascinating methods through which he's seen fit to share that process with his ever-growing audience. I'm proud to be a Frank fan.

Sums of Parts: Nick Sakes from Dazzling Killmen to XADDAX

You often hear about artistic entities that are "more than the sum of their parts," as though it's somehow shameful or inadequate for something to simply be the sum of its parts. What if those parts are each excellent on their own, as in the Brooklyn band XADDAX (a duo with Nick Sakes on guitar/vocals and Chrissy Rossettie on electroacoustic drum kit, pictured above)? I would think that adding them together would be an achievement worth celebrating.

If you're not familiar with the work of Nick Sakes, let me try to put him into a context. There is a certain category of well-known (or even just "known") DIY-rock lifer who's been around forever and has been in a long string of bands. Folks like Ian MacKaye, Tim Kinsella (Cap'n Jazz, Joan of Arc), Geoff Farina (Karate, Glorytellers, etc.), Mike Hill (Anodyne, Tombs), Blake Schwarzenbach (Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil), J. Read (Revenge, Axis of Advance), Mira Billotte (Quix*o*tic, White Magic), Ben Weasel (Screeching Weasel, The Riverdales), Fred Erskine (Hoover, The Crownhate Ruin), Pen Rollings (Honor Role, Breadwinner), Tara Jane O'Neil (Rodan, The Sonora Pine), Dave Pajo (Slint, Tortoise), Jared Warren (Karp, Big Business), Walter Schreifels (Gorilla Biscuits, Quicksand), Rick Froberg (Drive Like Jehu, Obits), Mick Barr (Crom-Tech, Orthrelm)—even icons like Robert Pollard or Kathleen Hanna fit in this general classification.

That was a pretty long list and sort of an arbitrary one (I worship, say, Schreifels and Read but could take or leave a couple of the others). The point I'm trying to make, though, is that there is sort of generally accepted canon of these types of independent musicians: Everyone would include, MacKaye, e.g., but move down the list and you'll get a different set of names depending on whether the person you're polling happens to be into punk, post-hardcore, metal, folk, indie rock, what have you, and depending on where they grew up or reside. But if anyone's keeping some sort of master ledger of these sorts of folks and Nick Sakes isn't on it, that list is incomplete. And if you, kind reader, are into extreme/experimental-minded rock-based music of any kind and have not checked out Mr. Sakes's various projects stretching from 1990 through the present (including Dazzling Killmen, Colossamite, Sicbay and now XADDAX), you really need to remedy that. In terms of combining raw aggression with unconventional yet totally memorable form, Nick Sakes is one of the most potent musicians I've ever heard.

More than that, though, and this is where I circle back to my initial point about sums of parts and whatnot, Nick Sakes is one of the finest collaborators I've ever heard. I've been following his career since the early ’90s (just after the Killmen's demise), and in a way, my entire view of the American rock underground revolves around him. He's played in bands with some extraordinarily talented musicians—to name two of the more well-known ones, John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez (both currently of Deerhoof) were both in Colossamite—and in each of those bands, you can hear (A) a whole lot of Nick Sakes and (B) a whole lot of whomever else was working in the project. None of these bands is merely Nick plus Some Other Musicians. Each of them has been a true, start-from-scratch collaboration.

The St. Louis–based Dazzling Killmen (active from the early-to-mid ’90s) was a whole band of master collaborators: the surgically precise rhythm section of bassist Darin Gray (Grand Ulena, On Fillmore) and drummer Blake Fleming (Laddio Bolocko, The Mars Volta), plus the uncategorizable avant-rock soundpainter Tim Garrigan (You Fantastic!, folky solo material) on guitar, along with Sakes's more riff-oriented guitar and bloodcurdling shrieks. Put all that together, and voila:



Colossamite, a late-’90s Twin Cities band, upped the post-Beefheart vibe in a major way, thanks to the free-improv/art-metal pedigrees of Dieterich, Rodriguez and drummer Chad Popple. (Rodriguez and Popple both played in the fascinating post-hardcore fusion band Iceburn around the same time they played in Colossamite, and all three of these musicians have worked together on and off as Gorge Trio for years.) Sakes in Colossamite was not at all the same as Sakes in Killmen; the former project brought out a loopier, more off-the-wall side of his personality. He retained the core of what he did (see: bloodcurdling shrieks) but added a major dose of cryptic humor. Check out his insane Spanish-language ranting on this track:



Sicbay (also Twin Cities, early-to-mid aughts), which made three incredible albums that I really wish were better known, was Sakes's most pop-oriented concern, a perfect channeling of his trademark seething tension into brief, super-melodic and super-memorable—yet still very unconventional—songs. (For a more detailed discussion, see my 2003 Dusted review of Sicbay's awesome second album, Overreaction Time.) Again, we saw a totally different side of Sakes here—his most overtly tuneful vocalizing to date, for one—and that's due in large part to the brilliance of his collaborator Dave Erb, whose guitar playing was sort of like if you took those gorgeous Thin Lizzy leads and scrambled them in a blender so that they were still every bit as gorgeous but also alarmingly jagged and disconcertingly shaded, a concept which, if I'm correctly recalling several conversations I've had with Erb, was very much coming out of a progressive-postpunk (e.g., XTC) sort of place. But again, it's also due to Sakes's willingness to meet his collaborators halfway. Like Colossamite, Sicbay was very much the sum of its parts, not just the Guy from Dazzling Killmen and Some Other Guy. (Sadly, YouTube only has one very blown-out, and nearly pictureless, live clip, but it'll have to do.)

Which brings us to the present day and the band known as XADDAX. Sicbay petered out a while back (’06 or ’07?), and about a year so ago, Nick Sakes from Minneapolis to Brooklyn. (It's probably worth mentioning at this point that I began corresponding with Nick on a fan level sometime in the late ’90s and that we've since become friends.) Right away, he began playing music with the drummer Chrissy Rossettie—who had been in a number of projects, including the Chicago-based My Name Is Rar-Rar (admirably batshit post–No Wave noise-punk)—and after a long gestation period, the two emerged as XADDAX.

It's been wonderful to reside in the same city as a steadily gigging Nick Sakes and to observe his latest collaboration up close. I saw XADDAX for the third time last night—my band STATS had previously shared two very fun Cake Shop bills with them—and I was newly struck by this whole Sum of Its Parts aspect of Sakes's musical career. I guess what I'm saying is that there's no typical Nick Sakes band. Everyone in the Killmen, Colossamite and Sicbay (I should give a shout-out here to that band's succession of drummers, Greg Schaal, Ed Rodriguez—yep, the guitarist from Colossamite and Deerhoof, plus the Flying Luttenbachers—and Jonathan Warnberg, the latter a fantastic and underdocumented player who was also in Signal to Trust) had an equal stake in what was going down, and the very same is true of XADDAX.

Since there are only two members of XADDAX, that division-of-labor vibe is right in front of your face: What Rossettie brings to the table is quite literally half of the band's overall presentation. More specifically, her contribution—as drummer and full-spectrum sound generator—is an inspired short-circuiting-cyborg vibe. As she discusses in this excellent interview, Rossettie plays a hot-wired electroacoustic kit, which she wields like a post-industrial orchestra. On the bottom, there are her driving hypnotic, martial, daringly lengthy patterns. The obsessive detail and emphasis on repetition in her playing reminds me a lot conceptually of what's going on in Obscura- and From Wisdom to Hate–era Gorguts. Go here (skip to about 3:57) to watch Luc Lemay discussing this concept: As he puts it, "The drum was like a riff itself, which loops with the riff." (This idea of a through-composed drum line, i.e., not just an accompaniment to a guitar riff but an actual part of a song's fundamental DNA, as it pertains to Gorguts specifically, came up in my recent interview with Dan Weiss.)

The same sort of thing is happening in XADDAX, but rather than blast-beat-oriented death metal, here the concept of the through-composed drum riff is filtered through a perversely danceable postpunk or No Wave vibe. Furthermore, Rossettie has equipped her aforementioned cyborg kit with various electronic pads and triggers (being a totally acoustic drummer, I'm 100% unqualified to even begin to explain how this all works; see the Q&A linked above for details). Some of these produce "in time" noises, like you might hear coming from a MIDI keyboard (i.e., you press a key and you get a brief, rhythmic sound), but some of them seem to set off bursts of pure chaos (i.e., you press a key and you get a long, arrhythmic string of sonic INFORMATION, like a sample that doesn't loop, or something).

So you put all that together with Nick Sakes, who continues to abuse his vocal cords in various bellowing, hissing manners and contributes a kind of awkwardly-clanking-machine riffage—math-rock-ish in a way, but much rawer and looser than, say, the Killmen—and you get this:

Xaddax - Lives On Nerves by Xaddax

So after hearing that (incredible) track—look out for it and others on a forthcoming Skin Graft full-length—if you check out the various Sakes projects discussed above and check out My Name Is Rar-Rar (there are a bunch of tracks streaming on Bandcamp), you'll see that XADDAX is once again a deeply collaborative, sum-of-its-parts affair. There is no possible way that either Sakes or Rossettie could've or would've made this music without the other, and that no-element-is-replaceable specificity is the key ingredient in almost all great bands.

Again, Sum of Its Parts, simply that and not necessarily "More Than," isn't a negligible concept. It's quite enough for two elements to coexist in pleasing harmony—like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese's cup—or in inspired disharmony—like Rossettie's haywire beats and Sakes's dire guitar and vocals in XADDAX. There's probably a corny message about the give-and-take of all human relationships buried somewhere in here ("Can't we all just get along, or agree to squabble productively?"), but I'll just say that Nick Sakes's two-decade career, from the Killmen all the way through XADDAX, has demonstrated again and again the huge potential of strong musical personalities colliding in wholly fruitful and mutually respectful manners. You take those parts and you add them together, and that's more than enough.

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Check out XADDAX on SoundCloud, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Release me: New music from STATS

I am pleased to announce that STATS, a band I play in with guitarist Joe Petrucelli and bassist Tony Gedrich, has completed a new recording. It is called Crowned, and it comes out November 22 on CD via The Path Less Traveled Records, a great indie metal label based in Normal, Illinois. The cover art once again comes courtesy of the brilliant night photographer Remi Thornton. You can buy Crowned now as a $3 download from iTunes or Amazon, and you can listen to it here (in high-quality WAV format) via Bandcamp:




We will be celebrating this release on Monday, November 15, 2010 at Cake Shop in NYC, where we will be joined by three outstanding bands: Cheer-Accident, Inzinzac and Xaddax (the latter of which features Nick Sakes, formerly of Dazzling Killmen—DFSBP namesakes, as you might recall—Colossamite and Sicbay). The show starts at 8pm and costs $10. Listen, enjoy, and please do attend the show if you are able.

UPDATE: Go here to read a blurb about the show from The New Yorker.

Time machine and namesake: Dazzling Killmen, live '93

I've often pondered the ever-fun "time machine" query, i.e., what one band or artist whom I never got to witness live would I go back and catch if I had the chance. John Bonham and Walt Dickerson are both near the top of the list, but neck and neck are Dazzling Killmen, one of my most treasured musical entities.

Above is the next best thing. In a fortunate turn of events, a pristine Killmen bootleg vid that I've had on my hard drive for ages has recently found its way to YouTube. This to me is the ideal of rock music. Better than metal, better than prog, better than hardcore -- internalizing the lessons of all while avoiding their pitfalls.

This is probably my favorite Killmen track ("In the Face of Collapse," which starts at about 9:15 in the video above), the epic centerpiece of their 1994 desert-island masterpiece, Face of Collapse, which I was unlucky enough to discover just after the band had broken up. Now is as good a time as any to reveal that this song, "In the Face of Collapse," is the namesake of my blog. "Dark forces swing blind punches" is simply a misheard lyric from this song (listen closely around 13:10), which I liked enough to let stick. For the record, the line is actually "Don't force it / Swing blind punches," as verified by frontman Nick Sakes, currently living in Brooklyn and prepping his latest project, Xaddax. (Guitarist Tim Garrigan now works as a rootsy solo artist; bassist Darin Gray plays in On Fillmore and various other projects; and drummer Blake Fleming can be heard in Future by Now.)

Anyway, listen, watch and marvel, and as a bonus track, here's another recently surfaced Killmen vid from an earlier vintage, crazy cable-access style: