The Heavy Metal Bebop Podcast #9: Pyrrhon

A really fun interview with a truly avant-garde band, and a great bunch of guys, to boot.


Please check out their music here.

Fun fact: Pyrrhon vocalist Doug Moore is also an excellent writer. Check out his take on the resurrection of craw here. He also wrote the bio for the recently released Skryptor album; scroll to the bottom here to read. And if you've ever been a death-metal fan, you need to read his classic 2013 treatise on Death Metal English.

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

Guest post: Doug Moore on craw

"Meet Craw, the Greatest '90s Noise-Rock Band You've Never Heard"
by Doug Moore
[See the end of this post for context.]

In many ways, the story of the '90s-era Cleveland band craw is a classic tale of monastic devotion and unrewarded work. But it's also a triumph of stubborn individualism, a "toxic cultural stiff-arm," as vocalist Joe McTighe put it in an email interview. Though unrecognized in their time, the band's four albums constitute a vital piece of the bedrock from which modern underground metal and hardcore now proceed. A new deluxe reissue from the Brooklyn labels Northern Spy and Aqualamb, 1993–1997, aims to bring this influence to light.

Craw emerged from a fertile period in the American rock underground. At the end of the '80s, when the band formed on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, many of the barriers that had previously constrained rock's artistic expansion had fallen. Weird stylistic mutations like post-punk, No Wave, math rock and thrash metal thrived via DIY recording and touring methods. Eventually, these styles began to interbreed.

One byproduct of this mix was a frightening expanse of shifting time signatures, blaring amps, shrieking chords and yowling singers, known variously as post-hardcore and noise rock. Many of the bands that first explored it—the Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Today Is the Day, Neurosis, Helmet—achieved surprising renown. And most of these acts shared bills with craw.



But comparing craw even to these oddballs does a disservice to the specificity of their sound: a staggering, weaving keen-roar; a relentless improvisational churn, by turns sinister and poignant, anthemic and ambiguous. Their music combined metal heft and layered noise; jazz chords and compound rhythms; insane structural ambition; and McTighe's swerve-throated antisinging, in which he incanted elliptical yarns informed by contemporary science, politics and literature, leavened with snark. (Asked what contemporary writers best capture craw's lyrical concerns, McTighe responds: "Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow and some of what J.G. Ballard wrote. Both writers create worlds in which the social systems overwhelm and transform the individuals inhabiting them.")

In order to achieve the technical mastery required to execute their staggeringly detailed songs, craw subjected themselves to a brutal discipline. They practiced together incessantly, sometimes daily, while living in privation and working crappy jobs to get by. The gritty details of these gigs would creep into McTighe's lyrics; a gutter-cleaning job that both McTighe and guitarist David McClelland held inspired the 12-minute epic "Days in the Gutter/Nights in the Gutter."

Craw's efforts produced three dizzyingly inventive '90s LPs, but never translated into a large following. Their demanding approach—too feral for hipsters, too shredding for punks, too ragged for metalheads, too smart and weird for virtually everyone—made them difficult to market, and thus difficult to sustain. The lengthy tours craw undertook were especially taxing; McTighe remembers his frustration well: "At the time I romanticized it as doing my bit in the marketplace of ideas. This self-delusion continued until poorly attended shows burst that bubble."

By the time craw connected with renowned art-metal label Hydra Head for 2002's Bodies for Strontium 90, the exhausted band had begun to drift apart. The members went their separate ways shortly after its release.

Craw's grueling run won them scattered but devoted admirers, though. Among them was noise-rock prime mover and recording legend Steve Albini, who worked on their first three albums. ("They never imitate," said Albini of craw in a 1997 interview. "Other bands imitate them.") Also in Craw's corner were the artist Derek Hess, who provided them with album cover and flyer illustrations; and Hydra Head label boss, and former leader of acclaimed avant-metal outfit Isis, Aaron Turner. "Their appeal was pretty black and white—people either fell in love with it or just didn't know what to do with it," says Turner of the band.


But craw's biggest fan is almost certainly the Brooklyn-based writer and musician Hank Shteamer, who admits that he's tipped into full-on obsession at times. "In terms of my own listening, I hold these albums up alongside the work of John Coltrane, Led Zeppelin and other acknowledged masters," says Shteamer of craw. He first encountered them in the mid-'90s while growing up in his native Kansas City, and has since become their unofficial historian and chief public advocate.

Frustrated by craw's lack of critical recognition, Shteamer recently recruited the indie record labels Northern Spy, Aqualamb and Hydra Head for a crowdfunded campaign to reissue Craw's first three albums as 1993–1997, a vinyl box set with a companion oral history. Thanks in part to the success of the release, craw will play two reunion shows—one at the Grog Shop in their native Cleveland on March 11th, another at Brooklyn's Saint Vitus on March 12th, with both shows featuring all seven members who appeared in various combinations on the band's four albums.

Craw have reappeared in a heavy music landscape that makes their prescience obvious. Freewheeling stylistic alchemy has become commonplace; dissonance and dense rhythms have infected every corner of the metal world; wild dynamic shifts garner applause rather than confusion. In short, metal has become highbrow, just like craw. Even McTighe's lyrical themes—technology run amok, the invasive creep of surveillance and corporate power—now scan as predictive, though their author credits his found sources ahead of his own foresight.

Both Shteamer and Turner agree that craw would more readily find fans today, and this consensus was part of the impetus for Shteamer's reissue campaign. But ultimately, such questions are immaterial to the band's members and always have been. They were concerned solely with pursuing their wild, withering vision—a purity for which their struggles were a small price to pay. And those struggles produced the kind of memories that nobody would give up.

"We got the songs," says McTighe of his years in craw, "The songs that are part of us by choice and by repetition, the songs that were ignored by most yet received as gospel by a few fanatics, songs that are a challenge for us to play well, songs that remind us of our time together—petty bickering as well as genuine friendship, songs that also remind us of the people we met on the road—the freaks, the outcasts, those beyond the pale, those with whom we immediately recognized as fellow travelers, those that helped us when we didn't expect help and those that took the air out of our tires (literally and otherwise), the songs around which our lives were shaped for many years."

Goodbye, Big Steeve

In the midst of Deathfest insanity, there was no time to report that the death-metal community lost a beloved innovator a few days ago: Mr. Steeve Hurdle, best known for his work in Quebec's Gorguts (specifically, on the awe-inspiring 1998 album Obscura) and in the spin-off project Negativa. My sincere condolences to his family and friends.

Despite all the amazing work he did during his lifetime (see above; that's Hurdle on the right, playing guitar and singing lead—in that inimitable anguished, sobbing style of his—throughout most of the song; the footage was posted by Hurdle himself, in tribute to Gorguts' then-drummer, Steve MacDonald, who had committed suicide in 2002), I can't help but think of a missed opportunity when I think of Big Steeve, as he was known. A little over two years ago, Steeve was scheduled to perform at the Stone in NYC, both solo and in a duo with Craig Taborn, but he was turned away at the border and the gigs never happened. I'll never forget how bummed I was when I heard the news. I was worried then that I'd never get to see Hurdle perform live (I got into Gorguts only well after he'd left the band and, as far as I know, Negativa never played in the U.S.), and it turned out to be true.

When I had the opportunity to sit down with Craig Taborn last year, I grilled him incessantly about his experiences working with Steeve. The two had met on MySpace, of all "places," and connected in person when Taborn played Montreal with David Binney in the mid-aughts; then Toby Driver of Kayo Dot booked the NYC Hurdle gigs, and Taborn visited Hurdle the week before the show was scheduled to occur. At that point, the two jammed. Taborn described the session to me in an e-mail:

"Steeve and I did not record that day, unfortunately; at the time, we were expecting to play the next week in NYC and I knew that would be recorded. It was fun, though, playing with him, especially [once] we got past the idea that i was a 'jazz' guy and so certain things had to happen a certain way. We fused immediately, maybe more because his way of playing sounded so comfortable to me, because I have really listened to those recordings for hours on end and learned everything, so it felt very home-like to me."

Of Steeve's work with Gorguts, Taborn said:

"Obscura really turned my head around about a lot of things compositionally and in terms of sound. Really a groundbreaking album and still full of secrets for me."

I corresponded briefly with Steeve himself after the Stone cancellation. I couldn't help asking him what he had been planned for his two sets. This was his reply:

From: Steeve Hurdle

Date: February 20, 2010 3:48:12 AM EST

To: Hank Shteamer

Subject: RE: sorry to hear about cancellation

Hello Hank,
sorry about the delay man...


What did i have planned for the stone concert was, an improvisation with Craig, we actually met the week before as Craig had a concert in Ottawa and the day after he just drive to montreal, to my rehearsal place and we had that really good improvised jam together.As for my solo set, i wanted to play the NEGATIVA album, all the songs that are gonna be on our first CD.....Unfortunately, this gonna be for another time...:S


I knew Craig from the internet, we've been writing to each other for the last 4 years.The first time i met him, he was playing, along with Dan Weiss in the David Binney band, back in 2007.


 As you said, Craig is a unique musician,lots of respect for him!


Thanks for writing and hopefully we will have the chance to meet one day...


Steeve

I remember feeling so disappointed and tantalized re: the NYC Hurdle show that never was. Now, it's hard to feel anything but sadness.

Steeve Hurdle's body of work is small but timeless. (It really just comes down to Obscura, an incredible three-song Negativa EP, some live material and early work with the band Purulence; speaking of the latter, anyone know if Hurdle appears in this clip? Hard to tell…) I have no doubt that open-minded listeners will continue to discover it and marvel at it. Hurdle showed me a new frontier in metal, something feverish, hallucinatory, terrifying at times, soul-plumbing, mercilessly extreme. Listening to, say, the excruciatingly drawn-out prog-doom dirge "Clouded" from Obscura (a track on which Hurdle was the sole composer; on much of the album, he collaborated with bandmates Luc Lemay and Steve Cloutier), you could tell that this was an artist who was going to keep pushing and pushing, whether anyone followed him or not. The grotesque array of squiggles, scrapes and squeals that made up Hurdle and Lemay's guitar vocabulary on Obscura and beyond—one of the most insular, unmistakable musical languages I've ever heard— screamed the message that metal was a limitless form of expression.

Whatever I could write here pales next to what you'll see and hear in the Negativa clip below. (Big Steeve is the first person that shows up in the vid, jokingly requesting that the viewer "Be quiet" when entering the studio; he's also the one starting off the song with the insane fretboard tapping.) Innovative technique in the service of unfettered imagination; from-scratch invention of form and content; willing something into being that has never before existed. There is no higher achievement. Genre is irrelevant here. It's simply creativity, and Steeve Hurdle was a master creator. Let us honor his memory.

P.S. Go here for some info on Hurdle's life outside of music.
P.P.S. Invisible Oranges has posted a moving Hurdle tribute by Doug Moore of the band Pyrrhon.