Massachusetts and Heavy Metal

I’m new here, or about as new as things get in New England. This is the place where history and learning come from, which makes any attempt to explain or summarize things problematic. There is so much back story and baggage that no two people are likely to agree on the meaning of any one thing.

So let me ignore all that and tell you how things are.

The history of heavy metal in New England is roughly as old as the story of heavy metal in America. If we assume proto-metal has strong roots in New York City, then it didn’t take long for proper metal to spring up in Connecticut. By the early ‘80s, this trouble had spread to Massachusetts, a state of particular interest to me. Groups like Steel Assassin, Gang Green, Upsidedown Cross, and Sam Black Church all did important things to move the American underground forward. Unfortunately, they still played second fiddle to the accomplishments of groups from Connecticut, which dragged a step behind places like New York City, Los Angeles, Tampa, and The Bay Area.

And then the Great Metal Purge happened.

In 1991, a series of events nearly wiped out metal in America. For roughly a decade, there was something like a moratorium on the music. You could play metal, but you had to mix it heavily with punk, and couldn’t ever actually *call* yourself metal.

So there was a lot of hemming and hawing, and brand repositioning, and ultimately growth was stunted for a lot of bands. Most of this was done to win respect and legitimacy from the “cool kids,” many of whom were also hiding old Iron Maiden and Slayer t-shirts in the backs of their closets.

Hypocritical horsecrap aside, some important things happened. Bands like Converge, Cave In, Isis, Overcast, Grief, and Agoraphobic Nosebleed helped give new meaning to what metal could be. They found fun in the ruins of the old underground, and explored new possibilities within the old sounds. These groups expelled musical pollen that turned weeds into colonies, and (for good or ill) became an invasive species throughout metal.

And in the last decade, American metal achieved a resurgence thanks in no small part to these innovations. That is the environment I arrived in, circa 2010. Massachusetts still has metalcore and sludge bands (many of them now a putrid reheating of what was great 10-15 years ago), but there is also marvelous cacophony being done so many other exciting ways. You hear a whirlwind of filth, sucking up pig vomit and repressed emotions. I live in a metro area where virtually every dozen or so days, there is a venue hosting something exciting and abrasive.

These are hard times for America, and rather ugly for Massachusetts as well. If heavy music seeks to express the trauma of working class economic crisis and cultural schism, then Boston is a pretty good place to write that thesis.

Lament Cityscape is an atypical project, made by a distinctly different sort of person. Riffs echo in long and slow repetitions, subtly boiling and shifting like so much tectonic plating and magma. Percussion is often mechanistic and distant, recalling bits of Godflesh and Pitchshifter, though probably not using a drum machine. Tracks are entirely instrumental, which is often the case for drone metal, but this is not exactly in the vein of Earth or Sunn O))). It has just as much in common with the sludge of Yob and Graves at Sea.

Mike McClatchey recently reached out to me, kindly thanking me for playing this music on Undead in Studio Z. I figured an interview would be an appealing proposition, and the following resulted:

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1. You're listed as the producer, engineer, and mixer for a lot of the music that you play on. Do you have a home studio, and if so do you record your guitar directly into a computer or do you use an amp?
Man, I use Garageband with a couple plug-ins.  I twist digital knobs until things sound cool.  Most of the shit I've done recently was recorded direct.

2. Do you regularly write and demo songs for yourself, or do you only start that when you've got a project lined up with other people?
I don't ever demo anything, I just start writing and recording.  However, I'm constantly mixing shit, rearranging and adding new shit.  Somewhere along the line the first recorded tracks are still the ones being released, only after being butchered to hell from their first version.

3. I noticed you tagged Flood Peak as being from Portland. Was that a project done over the internet? If so, is it more difficult to revise songs or communicate ideas and expectations when you're working with someone who's hundreds of miles away?
Flood Peak started off several years as a project between Peter Layman [who has been my friend and writing partner in almost every band that we've been in] and myself, and he was living here, in the Bay Area, at the time.  We released an EP together [with our buddy, Jake Wright] and shortly after that Peter moved to Portland, taking the project with him.  Earlier this year he came down to Oakland and spent a week with me so I could record some demos for the new version of Flood Peak, hoping that it would spark some interest in finding members up in Portland to join the band.

4. Judging by your various bands, I've noticed that you like to mix hardcore and crust punk with extreme metal. This is a trend *mostly* limited to North America, and even then, it's something mostly limited to the past 15 or 20 years. You can still find older metal fans and punks who are disgusted and misanthropic over the idea. What do you think has changed in recent years, and perhaps why?
Honestly, I have absolutely no idea what this question means.  I don't feel that I connect with any scene.  I enjoy heavy and ugly tones, but my knowledge of bands is pretty limited.  I'm sure there are a handful of bands from every sub-genre that can write a song that I can connect with and enjoy, but music is music.  Bands will rip other bands off and find creative ways of disguising it.  I'm stoked to be part of a limited trend, fucking finally.

5. I've read that you drifted away from metal for some time. Is there any truth to this? Did you leave recording and playing altogether, or did you just move into other genres? Are there any particular reasons?
After spending a decade in rather active bands I DID take a couple years off of playing live shows so I can learn how to record and wrap my head around what I wanted to do within music.  I got burned-out on the traditional dynamic of a band.  Not sure that I left any genre, or was ever clearly a part of one to begin with.

6. Rumor has it that you were a founding member of Early Graves, who are also a pretty darned impressive band in their own right. why did you split?
I was never in Early Graves, but I was the last original member of Apiary.  I guess I was on that first album they did since we recorded it while under the name Apiary, but I'm not sure if anything I did made it to the released version.

7. Do you have a day job, and is it in any way connected to music?
I have a day job that has nothing to with music.

8. Are you originally from the San Francisco Bay Area? If so, how do you feel about it? If not, why did you move there?
Yeah, I was born here.  Lived here my whole life.  How do I feel about it?  I feel that it's home.  I didn't really know how much I appreciated it until I started touring.

9. Do you have a musical background in your family? Did your family encourage you to take up playing at all? How did they react to your interest in loud and abrasive music?
The only person in my family to play any music was my grandma.  She had a little Casio keyboard that I remember her playing.  I got into playing music rather late, around the end of high school is when I picked up my first instrument.  There was general support by my family, but they definitely didn't have to be subject to loud sounds for too much time.  Of course they were bummed that I wasn't writing music that was safe for parents, but parents aren't the "target audience" for anything within rock.

10. When you're writing music, do you think "know your audience" or "the most important person to please is myself?" Is there a way to strike a balance between the two, and should you ever want to?
When writing music I've never considered that there IS an audience.  I'm completely self-indulgent when writing.  There aren't any labels or investors backing anything that I release so that allows me the luxury to not care how the fuck anything is received.