The Dear Hunter: "Deny It All"

Ambition is a funny thing. Calling someone ambitious can be made to sound skeptical, or dismissive, or snide, but it also can be used to describe work that harnesses exceptional effort and ability to achieve remarkable ends. For The Dear Hunter, the theatrical, prog-pop project of Casey Crescenzo, these ends include producing multiple multi-album concept cycles as well as reconsidering the way that the music industry promotes its musicians and engages its fans.

The Dear Hunter began as a side project for Crescenzo, formerly of post-hardcore group The Receiving End of Sirens, and blossomed into a band, a character, and now a fan club. It was intended for the progressive rock concepts that didn’t fit The Receiving End of Sirens’ sound, but it quickly transformed into a full-time endeavor, using a six-act story arc to explore the life of a child born at the turn of the 20^th Century who becomes a combatant in World War I.

“When I first thought of doing it,” Crescenzo says, “it didn’t need to be in a realistic band setting, so I was free to make it really ambitious. I didn’t think I’d have to back it up by playing it live; I could do it in my free time, not concentrating on touring or selling. The first demos I did of it, I made ten copies and gave them to close friends and the other band members. They passed them on to friends, and they were posted online and people started downloading them.”

In September of 2006, Crescenzo released Act I: The Lake South, The River North, the introduction to the series and the story of The Dear Hunter’s birth and childhood with his mother. It was essentially a solo project, though Crescenzo enlisted the help of his family: his mother sang, his father played organ, and his brother Nick drummed. “I had relationships troubles — extreme relationship problems,” Crescenzo notes. “And instead of writing about myself, instead of writing songs that were kind of complaining, I wanted to write a story.” In 2007, he released Act II: The Meaning of, and All Things Regarding Ms. Leading, which tells the story of The Dear Hunter’s doomed love for a prostitute. In the summer of 2009 came Act III: Life and Death, about The Dear Hunter’s life in the trenches of World War I. Both albums were massive, bombastic, dense, outsized, and outstanding.

Following the third act, however, Crescenzo announced the band’s intention to put Act IV on hold indefinitely. Instead, the group shifted gears to tackle another aspiration of large scale — the nine-EP Color Spectrum project, released in 2011, that is inspired by the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) plus black and white. On its own, it’s an ambitious project, made audacious when one considers that The Color Spectrum is only a palette cleanser between installments of the original six-album series concerning the birth, childhood, manhood, and death of its titular protagonist. Yet whereas The Dear Hunter has a fairly contained story arc, The Color Spectrum is wide open.

“Anything we think of, we can do,” Crescenzo says. “Humanity’s idea of colors is too broad. This needs to me be more personal, because ideas of colors vary from person to person. Even for people who have synesthesia, the specific images or sounds they hear attached to colors vary from person to person. And that just reinforces the point of doing the project, to produce our interpretation of color, the way we feel about colors or are inspired by the colors — how we hear them or see them.”

The unfinished material from the The Color Spectrum project is as assorted as its inspirations. Black is sonorous, martial, deep, and reverberating but also playful, confident, and determined. White is ethereal and hymn-like in places, but also doggedly cheerful like a self-help seminar. Blue is playful, youthful, and driven, churning and giddy; Green is ebullient, relaxed, and expansive; Red is sexy and insinuating as well as aggressive.

None is particularly obvious. It’s easy to imagine an album based around colors and their pat emotional pairings — red is angry, blue is calm — but these tracks only use those familiar associations as jumping-off points to explorations of greater complexity. Tonally, too, many of the tracks start off focused, driven, and narrowly rhythmic before opening into an expanded sense of space and possibility. There is room for the unexpected.

In addition to reconsidering the perception of color, The Dear Hunter is rethinking the traditional music industry model. “We need to stop thinking so linearly about the way that we do things,” Crescenzo says. “We have established a boutique kind of identity, and we have a group of very dedicated fans. We are not focused on selling as many albums as we can, but [rather] on depth, and on offering our fans something unique.” One of the band’s initiatives is a 250-person, limited-edition fan-club package. For $125, a fan gets lifetime seats to The Dear Hunter concerts plus extras like vinyl boxed sets and a hand-written note from the band. “It sold out in three days,” Crescenzo says. “[It] gave us the confidence to do the color projects and self-release them.”

Judging by past their past enthusiasm, fans of The Dear Hunter will anxiously await the band’s take on the color spectrum. If colors are, as Crescenzo says, perceived differently by every person, his band’s interpretations will merely be the beginning of an extended conversation. It’s an ambitious undertaking, but one that feels natural and attainable for the band. After all, The Dear Hunter isn’t just making music about color; it’s coloring the way that music is made.

Ratatat: "Bilar"

The pseudo-genre most frequently associated with Ratatat’s music is “instrumental.” It’s true that the band does not write lyrics, choosing instead to communicate through densely layered electric and electronic pastiches. Yet it only takes a brief encounter with the duo’s music to see this generic catchall term as reductive. And if Ratatat can’t be accurately described as vocal or instrumental, then perhaps, surprisingly, its MySpace genre labels are the most revealing. Ratatat categorizes its own music as “visual / visual / visual.”

Despite the absence of a significant vocal element, Ratatat’s music does not fail to evoke an emotional response, particularly when it’s paired with a dynamic visual accompaniment. During a live performance, neon strobe lights pulsate, as mercurial as the band’s melodies, and projected video clips feel like the subliminal-message experiment of A Clockwork Orange. Frequently, these projections are culled from Ratatat’s official music videos, some of which have collected a seven-digit viewership on YouTube. The video for “Mirando,” produced by synth player / bassist Evan Mast, turns the movie Predator into psychedelic war porn, looping some of the film’s most explosive moments. It’s an apt analog to the music for many reasons, but primarily for the way it subverts a violent thriller through its own devices. That’s what Ratatat is so good at doing: deconstructing that which we take as normal — rock, hip hop, dance music — and turning it on its head to produce something new, self-conscious, and mildly absurdist.

Ratatat’s oversized riffs, courtesy of guitarist Mike Stroud, beg for an equally over-the-top live performance. And, indeed, everything about its live performance screams “stadium rock” — everything, that is, except for the mid-sized venues in which the band performs. All of the elements are there: heavy fog and laser-light components, head-banging guitarists in power stances, and even a cadre of backup dancers and musicians — albeit as holographic projections. Flanking the duo are two tall projection screens, upon which holograms of dancers in tutus, Victorian string players, a rotating statue of Venus, a bust of Beethoven, and other Ratatat-related iconography are projected. The effect is twofold: it makes the band seem much bigger, and it highlights the individual layers of the music by dynamically adapting to the individual parts of a song.

Ratatat’s light show is reminiscent of an era when showmanship and spectacle were paramount, and it threatens to steal the show entirely. The stage’s backdrop is filled with hypnotizing LED Xs that seem to be powered by each heavy guitar stroke. Showers of light cascade down each projection screen, and a thick, polychromatic fog envelopes the stage. It’s not a show for the epileptic or the faint of heart; it’s like playing a rave in a collapsing iron-working factory. To the band’s credit, not all is smoke and mirrors; Mast and Stroud are just as active as their visuals and as intense as their colors, frenetically playing as many parts from their albums as they can, in real time.

Swaths of multi-layered guitar melodies and hip-hop-channeling blips, beeps, and clicks highlight Ratatat’s 2010 collection of tunes, simply entitled LP4. Aesthetically, LP4 is consistent with the band’s previous works, but it features many additional flourishes of novel composition. And though the band makes very danceable music, that’s not necessarily the goal. “There’s a lot music that’s just about a real steady beat so you can dance to it, or it’s about textures,” Mast says. “But for us, those things are on the side. It’s about creating something that’s melodic, more like a pop song.” Still, songs such as “Bilar,” with its mechanized, assembly-line crunch juxtaposed with orchestra-string classicism, or “Sunblocks,” with its field recordings of crickets and harmonizing electric guitars, are not what some listeners would consider typical pop-song fare.

The songs do not spoon-feed the audience with concrete ideas. There are no adjectives, metaphors, or otherwise descriptive language to attach one’s emotional response. “Words aren’t huge in our repertoire,” Stroud says. Instead, Ratatat’s music is a “safe haven from that kind of thing,” according to Mast. “We don’t really work with concrete themes,” he says. “I feel like it’s more about the palette than the style of songwriting. It’s something that’s difficult to put into words.”

It was with this seemingly vague approach that the two looted Old Soul Studios in upstate New York, a space filled with a treasure-trove assortment of instruments, to produce their most robust album to date. With the capability to play or record almost anything they could imagine, Mast and Stroud went wild. Japanese strings, bass harmonica, talk boxes, harpsichords, and even a string quartet combine in a tight aural fabric, with a professional polish that was only hinted on previous albums. The result is a sound that manages to walk the line between the minimalism of classic hip-hop production and the increasingly frequent product of instrument overload. “People tend to think that we sample things a lot, taking old records and looping out sections, which is something we never do,” Mast says. “I’ve had a lot of conversations with people where they ask, ‘Where do you get your samples?’ and I have to tell them that we don’t use samples. We are actually in the studio and record everything live. It doesn’t seem to make sense to most people.”

It’s unsurprising that most people would suspect sampling; the sheer volume of sounds that Ratatat produces is staggering. One might even suspect that the lack of vocals has led the band to overcompensate with an army of instruments and a bombastic visual style — if not for every carefully selected and artfully woven element forming the foundation for Ratatat’s distinctive “voice.” Though it’s never sounded like this, Ratatat makes pop music, trading the traditional sing-along for a decidedly futuristic see-along.

Jónsi

Jónsi: "Animal Arithmetic"

On February 1, 2008, one of Paris’ most cherished stores burnt to the ground. When the sun rose, it shed verdant light onto the gray, smoldering shell of an oddity-filled taxidermy shop called Deyrolle. Inside were hundreds of animals, among them a zebra whose stripes dissolved into a black, charred mass and a lion whose disfigured snout gave it a dark, Victorian-era mask. The tragic beauty of the scene caught the attention of a photographer named Martin d'Orgeval, who got permission to shoot the now half-burnt curiosities that had awed generations of Parisians since the mid-1800s.

D'Orgeval published his photos in a book called Touché par le Feu (Touched by Fire), which was purchased as a Christmas present the following year for one Leo Warner, the director of a group called Fifty Nine Productions, which was rapidly altering the landscape of theatre and opera with its video and set-design work. Now the company was working on a new type of project — a music tour.

The Fifty Nine team — which includes directors Mark Grimmer and Lysander Ashton — had been approached by Sigur Rós front-man Jón Þór Birgisson, better known as Jónsi, about designing the upcoming tour for his debut album, Go. “You can only imagine what it was like to get a call from Sigur Rós’ management, saying, ‘Jónsi from Sigur Rós wants to talk to you about doing a show,’” Grimmer says. “That was one of those pinch-yourself kind of moments.”

The Deyrolle photos, which captured a number of elements on Jónsi’s record, became the inspiration for the design. “Jónsi knew that animals were going to be involved from the very beginning,” Grimmer says. “Although we knew that we wanted the aesthetic of that taxidermy shop and this slightly strange, mysterious, burnt-out look…it needed to go from that decay and darkness into light.”

Concerning this light/dark dynamic, Jónsi comments, “A lot of stuff on the record is either about achieving great things through force of belief or the inverse of not getting anywhere because you let doubt into your heart. The colour, lack of colour, and images of growth represent these concepts.”

The role of color was crucial. Grimmer can’t say where exactly color first comes in, but it’s designed in such a way that there’s no colored lighting at the start. “We knew that we wanted to make an arc to the show, so that it starts out in quite a dark, mysterious, gothic place and ends in this triumphant celebration,” he says. Jónsi structured his set to match this narrative arc, putting the churning “Tornado” toward the beginning and ending with “Grow Till Tall,” a piece that builds slowly into an epic, exultant refrain.

Though visual images and music have been paired together since the advent of both, the work that Fifty Nine did for Jónsi is unique in that the lighting styles, narrative animation, and set design all are synced up to reinforce a single aesthetic. “Jónsi has this cinematic quality to his music,” Grimmer says, “and his imagination lends itself so well to a show like the one we did for him.”

The production team had agreed to the project. Inspiration had been handed to them in a book. They had the basic arc of the show. Now to create what they saw in their heads. They decided early on to use intelligent glass — milky white panes that become transparent when an electric current is added. “It’s a liquid crystal polymer,” Grimmer explains of the glass in the roughly six-foot-tall boxes scattered throughout the set design. “We were able to turn them transparent and light through them but also have them opaque and project onto them when we needed to.”

As ideas were born, they sometimes fell quickly to the cutting floor because Jónsi had only begun writing the album when Fifty Nine began designing. Though incredibly valuable from one point (“It’s really, really great to be involved at a very early stage,” Grimmer says), it also forced the team to adapt to the rapidly evolving record.

“The first recordings we listened to…in Reykjavik were acoustic-guitar tracks,” Grimmer says. “They were early demos, and it wasn’t really until [Jónsi] started making the arrangements with Nico Muhly…that it turned into the pop record that it became. So we had to keep up with that; our ideas developed alongside the music. We kept getting sent new versions of the tracks, and they were getting more and more complex.”

Fifty Nine’s ideas were growing more complex as well: the projection of an animated storyline would be fully integrated with the musical set, creating what the team saw as a visual score for Jónsi’s music. Though the band needed some flexibility and freedom, moments where two things — musically and visually — happened at precisely the same time were crucial to the experience. Devising ways to sync everything up was a challenge; the team commissioned a full orchestral score of the set so that, on tour, a video operator can follow it bar by bar. For certain pieces, drummer þorvaldur þorvaldsson cues video elements with a drum pad. The show inevitably needed a great deal of rehearsal time.

“In Sigur Rós, we scarcely rehearse at all — two days before a tour, maximum,” Jónsi says. “And even then, we are probably done halfway through the second day. This time, we rehearsed for a full week, and the production had been plotted and worked out for a week before that.”

“Taking what we were doing out of the equation all together,” Grimmer says, “this was still a really big deal for [Jónsi]. It was his first solo tour, and…all of a sudden this is new material people haven’t heard before, and he’s singing in English quite a lot of the time, and it has a very different feel than Sigur Rós. It was a lot of firsts for him.”

In fact, it was a year of firsts for everybody. It was also a year of minor catastrophes. “The whole year was full of ‘oh, shit’ moments, from beginning to end,” Grimmer adds. “You kind of just come to a point where you accept that that’s the way it’s going to be.” Even Jónsi’s costume requires constant attention; he sends it regularly back to Iceland for repairs.

The tour, which would stretch from April of 2010 almost to Christmas, traversing North America, Europe, Australia, Japan, and back again to Europe and North America for a second round of dates, was also unique in that Jónsi’s band included collaborator and partner Alex Somers on guitar and keyboard. “Alex is great,” Jónsi says. “He’s so hardcore and fastidious about everything that most things become honed to a peak of perfection.”

The need for perfection reached fever pitch just before the opening date in Vancouver. Grimmer, having worked 18-hour days until then alongside his team, recalled knowing that it was out of their hands: “The set was shipped to Canada…and we hoped it would all be all right when it arrived.”

Opening night at the Vogue Theatre was the zenith of the project’s own narrative arc. The lights dimmed over the ashen shell of the set, and the band began its sprawling, musical story. The response was visceral and has been so after almost every show — concertgoers have repeatedly posted their responses online, almost all of them paeans to the show’s emotional and visual power. Jónsi loves when that gets translated back to the band during the show. “The best moments have been when you feel a real, tangible energy coming back at you off the room,” he says. “That doesn’t happen every night, but when it does, it can truly drive you to new heights.”

The people at Fifty Nine Productions didn’t expect the crowd’s response that first night. “It got to the point where the focus was so much on just making things work technically, that I think we kind of lost sight of the fact that this was a show and there was going to be an audience there,” Grimmer says. “We were all quite overwhelmed at the reaction, because we’d forgotten about that human element. We all really needed that. It meant it was ready to go.”

Rotting Christ: "Aeolo"

For Sakis Tolis of Rotting Christ, "There is darkness everywhere." It's hardly a surprising statement from a man, and a group, synonymous with the Hellenic black-metal movement of the early 1990s. From its first full-length release, Thy Mighty Contract, in 1993, Rotting Christ has defined the Greek metal sound. Today, the band continues to revise that definition. Aealo, the band's 2010 release, delves further into the progressive elements showcased on its previous release, Theogonia, while utilizing the vocal talents of a traditional Greek choir.

Rotting Christ isn't the only metal band using traditional folk or choral elements. Hate Forest included traditional Ukrainian elements in its 2003 release, Battlefields, and Blind Guardian added classical choral music to mixed effect. Tolis and Rotting Christ, however, have made something unique and compelling. In their hands, the traditional Greek choir becomes the groundwork for Tolis’ dark compositions. The choir on Aealo specializes in threnody — songs of mourning performed to memorialize the dead. This style is closely related to the concept of Aealo: the feelings that a soldier has when he "faces victory or death," according to Tolis.

Yet Aealo is not a war-glorifying metal album. The record is littered with the inescapable fear of war and stories of individuals married to duty or religion. Death is not portrayed as noble sacrifice, but as a sacrifice to a corrupt state. Aealo rails against the Church, globalized, homogenized states, and all of the other unwelcome incursions that force individuals to take up arms.

The trend of black metal as an outlet for an ancient historical nationalism, as with the Norwegian black-metal scene, has had less effect on the band. It is not burning churches or calling for a return to Greek pantheism. But an anti-Christian, anti-globalization thread runs through the history of Rotting Christ, and Tolis places much of the blame for our current global condition at the feet of religious institutions.

The song “Thou Art Lord,” on Aealo, is a Laibach-esque epic featuring Nemtheanga of Primordial on vocals. "Our cause is heaven's cause,” the chorus calls. “Soldiers be prepared, prepared / Die for an absurd law." It is a direct indictment of Christianity as a controlling and warlike institution. "Religion, a part of globalization or not, just…sucks," Tolis says. "It puts a limit on your dreams and is against human nature. That's enough to be an enemy of it. I'm sure future historians will see religion as the most insecure period that humanity faced in its history!"

Aealo ends with “Orders from the Dead,” part cover, part collaboration with fellow Greek native Diamanda Galas. Galas wrote the lyrics "the world is going up in flames," and within the context of the album, this message encapsulates the untenable, violent, and helpless world depicted on Aealo. Tolis says he had been a fan of Galas for almost two decades before the collaboration. "When I first listened to ‘Orders from the Dead,’ the idea to cover the song was stuck in the back of my mind,” he says. “When I had to compose the last song for the album, I said to myself, 'Now is the time. ‘Orders from the Dead’ will fit perfectly with the whole concept of the album.'"

Aealo was recorded, mixed, and mastered by the band in Greece at the foot of Mt. Olympus, particularly fitting for a group so involved with the occult history of its homeland. Up to Theogonia, Rotting Christ has made its albums with the help of producers like Peter Tägtgren, for Khronos in 2000, or Fredrik Nordström, for Sanctus Diavolos in 2004. Since then, Tolis has become a highly competent producer in his own right, as evidenced by the level of production on Aealo. The low-fi quality of the band’s early black-metal releases is replaced by strong sonic clarity that maintains the immediacy and power of its purely black-metal releases. The band's move away from its classic sound has made some fans unhappy, but Rotting Christ is still touring and making the music that it wants to make, never content to merely reproduce a sound nearly two decades old.

Though now proficient in production, Tolis finds composing to be a difficult process. Oftentimes, when a rock or metal artist is involved, composing means getting drunk and jamming until a song comes out. For Tolis, it is a process rooted in self-reflection, sometimes finding things he would rather have kept in his subconscious. "I don't hide my dislike of the composing process,” he says. “Many times, I'm forced to face parts of my character that I would have preferred to keep hidden. I stay isolated for a long time, searching myself, and if I have something new to say to people, I come up with a new album."

Who knows, then, what form the next release from Rotting Christ will take? For now, the only certainty is the prevalence of darkness. As Tolis says, "It is in everyone's heart, even if some people don't want to accept it." And even though Rotting Christ no longer sounds as it did on Thy Mighty Contract, the band’s greatest strength is still intact: its ability to illuminate the darkness in everyone.

Yawn: "Acid"

“Yawning opens up the spirit core,” says the mustachioed faux-Zen master in Yawn’s public-access-style video for “Kind of Guy.” He continues in a satisfied, new-age lilt, urging viewers to “just give into the trance” before a strobe of rainbow-colored waves washes over the screen and the scene shifts to outer space. Glowing dancers, whose patterned figures are outlined by neon tubes, float, gyrate, and play instruments in unison with a tribal beat as kaleidoscopic lights pulsate.

The video is a perfect representation of Yawn’s aesthetic sensibilities — slightly off-kilter, totally saturated, and completely fun. “Colors are essentially just musical tones vibrating at a frequency that is visible to us,” says the video’s director, known only as Druid Beat. “Colors are another note to play.” The concept for the video stemmed from the playful mood of the song, yet there is an underlying progression taking place amid the flashing lights and bouncing rhythm. “The two dancers in the corners are composed of simple shapes; they are pure light, pure energy,” says Druid. “The middle dancers are more complex, lower entities, but still not pure matter. They combine into the human in the middle. From pure energy — light — comes matter.” Meanwhile, the members of Yawn oversee the procession, and the viewer is reborn through a “glowing, gloopy, neon vagina…witness to a light-show nirvana made out of the laser gods,” the director says.

Despite the brief existence of the band, Yawn’s avant-pop jams have garnered a considerable amount of buzz. Prior to becoming Yawn, the Chicago-based quartet performed and recorded under the name Metrovox, wielding an aggressive, guitar-driven setup. When asked where the new name and direction came from, multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Adam Gil explains, “We were just throwing names around. I forgot who came up with it. It doesn’t really sound like a genre or anything — or a type of music. So we can constantly change and Yawn would be a fitting name for what we do.”

The five-song EP that followed is a meditation in layers, a game of tricking the listener to make it sound bigger than it really is. “Kind of Guy,” which features lyrics about bassist Sam Wolf’s late cat, dangles playful harmonies over a smattering of reverberated shower-curtain pulls, drum-rim clicks, and chopstick key jabs. Avoiding the potential cacophony, the track exudes chilled-out vibes, as African wind instruments weave about the rhythm. And “Empress,” Yawn’s darkest song, shakes out the last bits of the band’s Metrovox days with an assertive guitar push and an explosion of bright, sweeping synth lines.

As a relatively new band, Yawn is still establishing its style, musically and visually. The video for “Kind of Guy” is a bold aesthetic statement, one that sets the tone for future visuals. And because it was a jumping-off point, a great deal of work went into its creation. “There was a very conscious effort to actually build as many of the elements as possible,” Druid Beat says. “The [light tents] were actually as tall as people. The band's costumes were constructed using a lot of EL wire. We hand-soldered all of it ourselves. The glowing element on the dancers' costumes was created using mason's twine and black light.”

David Beltran, who goes by the name of Starfoxxx, created the artwork for Yawn’s EP, which shares the vibrant visual aesthetic of the “Kind of Guy” video. A young, sickly girl is illustrated in reds, purples, and yellows in a scrawled, notebook-margin style, complete with faux paint drips and bubble graffiti letters. It’s a slightly more refined style than the band’s mix-tape cover, which is a frenzied collage of disparate elements.

On this cover, alongside drawings of a “huge red shark” and “motherfuckin’ Starfoxxx,” is a monolithic blender. Besides evoking the obvious implications of a “mix,” it serves as a visual metaphor for the band’s own style, which blends the organic with the digital effortlessly, as drum machines and rain sticks keep time in polyrhythmic coexistence. And with an acute sense of melody and pop-song convention, Yawn makes its signature blend with ingredients and influences from The Avalanches, Ariel Pink, and Brian Eno.

With its sophomore single, “Acid,” Yawn hints at another transformation, from happy psych to impending darkness. Stretched out in minor keys, the song echoes the heavy angst of Pink Floyd and displays shades of MGMT’s path — from Oracular Spectacular ecstasy to Congratulations freak-out. However, the end attraction still bubbles with some seriously liberating hypnotic pop.

The band’s full-length record, due in the first quarter of 2011, “[is] very much like a mix tape,” sampler/guitarist Daniel Perzan says. “Some tracks touch on the sampling nature of The Avalanches and Tough Alliance-style beach sounds, and others are mostly organic that ride drums with synths and guitars. It’s come to be a mishmash of song writing that really isn't like the typical album that keeps to one idea — which we fear may not exactly be the best thing. But that’s kind of what we are as a band.”

With a vague, elastic name and an equally pliable sound, the band is poised to do just about anything. And although much has changed since Yawn’s high-school days as Metrovox, its creativity and DIY passion have remained constant. The Zen master would be pleased; by “giving into the trance,” Yawn is just beginning to realize its potential.

Chrome Hoof:

Chrome Hoof: "Crystalline"

Despite the sparkly silver cloaks and the monochromatic moniker, sterling is not the word that brothers Leo and Milo Smee use to describe their music. When asked where they would place themselves on the disco-chamber-doom-prog color spectrum, Milo chooses “an unpleasant magenta.”

Known for their flippant jokes, the Smees don’t apply an overly cerebral context to Chrome Hoof, their London rock ensemble of sci-fi sounds and occult vibes. Instead, the brothers direct serious energy toward producing a theatrical, stimulating live show. “We need to keep it fun and moving forward — especially with our low attention spans,” Leo says.

Originally formed as a duo with Leo on bass and Milo on drums, the Smees performed with a tape machine and a sampler to fill out the sound. Now a sprawling live incarnation of ten of more musicians, Chrome Hoof maintains a core of Leo and Milo with singer Lola Olafisoye of electronica funk band Spektrum. The logistics of coordinating such an impressive production can be trying, but they manage to pull it off with a deep roster of musicians.

“As long as me, Milo, and Lola are available, then we can make it work,” Leo says. “We’re not huge on rehearsals, but we for sure have to put work in. Most of the members have jobs, and with having so many members, if certain people can’t make shows, we either draft other floating members in, or just cover the missing instruments with synths.”

Performances include a wardrobe of the aforementioned glittery-hooded, cultish cloaks, dancing girls adding a touch of chaotic energy, accompanying lasers and fog, and, for a time, a seven-foot metallic ram. The spectacle of a Chrome Hoof show is almost as important as the music itself. “Having a visual aspect increases the experience — and helps us to get into character,” Leo says. “You have to be there one time to see what it’s about. A YouTube video can’t transmit the two-way energy that being at the show does.”

When making comparisons to their over-the-top performances, the brothers agree that there are plenty of theatrics in the rock arena. “We just saw Gwar,” Leo says, “but the idea of being on stage and entertaining seems to have dwindled. There’s a proliferation of four-boy outfits with trendy tattoos and tight jeans.”

Chrome Hoof’s third album, Crush Depth, released in May of 2010 on Southern Records, also bucks trendiness, garnering comparisons to iconic bands like Funkadelic, Slits, and Slayer. So what to make of such a disparate group? Though the band borrows liberally from a pool of eras and genres, to call them derivative or simply a musical collage would be missing the point. “I’m not sure there would be any band you couldn’t apply that [theory] to,” Milo says. “Everything has its roots in stuff that went before, but hopefully it’s apparent that we are trying to push forward in our own way.”

Questioned as to whether it is even possible to make music that isn’t derivative of something, Milo is honest and realistic: “I’d like to say yes,” he responds, “but I can’t think of anything to back it up. It’s our thing. The power of music is undeniable; that doesn’t apply to rock music any more than anything else — or any more to 2010 than 3009.”

Take Crush Depth’s seven-minute “Sea Hornet,” easily the most incongruent track on the album. Opening with a low cackle of voices, a bass line emerges aping the riff from Rush’s “YYZ.” A half-melted synthesizer line combines with a 16^th-note hi-hat beat to turn the heavy throb on its head and into a loungy, Tortoise-style groove. Then triumphant strings and an ’80s whip-crack snare effect combine to form a pumping anthem. While the song fades out, unintelligible, whispered vocals hover over an extended cool-down. Though bordering on exhausting and indulgent, its clever calculations and undeniable sense of fun make “Sea Hornet” a standout track, incongruence and all.

Sharing a progressive, experimental approach to music, the band had the opportunity to play Magma’s 40th anniversary show with French composer Jean-Pierre Massiera in October of 2009. This led to Massiera’s contribution to the track “Towards Zero” on Crush Depth. Leo explains, “We wanted to do a cover version of ‘Visitors’ ages ago, so when we were asked to do a collaboration with Massiera, we jumped at the chance. We had a couple of rehearsals prior to the gig, but the only problem is that we had little knowledge of the French language, and Massiera [had even] with less English. He couldn’t remember a lot of his old tunes and had to be guided through the songs. He’s a live wire for sure, which only added to the feast. As we were working on the album, we thought it would be a cheeky opportunity to capture this legend on record. He was more than happy to shriek some guttural poetry on top of our music.”

Recording Crush Depth took about a year to complete. Over that period, Milo and Leo had quiet times where decisions could be delayed, which they say was useful in the process as parts were recorded at 50 locations with 70 people. “There was a 12-piece choir, harpist, maybe 10 people doing a bit of engineering here and there, back-up parts recorded to double certain lines, obviously the whole band, and quite a few guest musicians,” Milo says. Those guests include German experimental group Cluster on “Deadly Pressure,” an ominous Cthulu-rising space jam.

“[Songs] changed according to environments, availability of personnel, credit status, et cetera,” Milos says. “It was a fluid process. The time that we had meant we could try a lot of things out.” The long process also meant that the band was able to borrow lots of keyboards, a Mellotron, and “the overrated Moog Taurus.”

To explain the result of the extensive cast of collaborators and the amount of time spent creating Crush Depth, Milo uses a snack-cake analogy, comparing it to the band’s previous album, Pre-Emptive False Rapture: “It has more layers, like a foul Sara Lee cake. Pre-Emptive is more digestible — like a Mr. Kipling Almond Slice. Crush Depth is like the title — whatever you make of that. It’s more of an album to be played as a whole.”

Though the United States has waited for a proper release of Chrome Hoof’s material, it may take much longer for Americans to see Chrome Hoof in the flesh. After all, bringing together the sheer multitude of musicians, dancers, instruments, and props for a cross-Atlantic tour will only be resolved by a Herculean scheduling effort. But there must be hope for such a journey, because the band has proven, through its recordings and its legendary performances, that it is willing to go the extra mile.

NewVillager: New Villager (IAMSOUND, 8/16/11)

New Villager: "Lighthouse"

As a captivating yet mystifying merger of music, art, performance, and color, NewVillager is an otherworldly project that centers on an elaborate mythology that drives the collective’s creative process. The group’s still-unfolding allegories revolve around three main colors — red, green, and blue — representing past, present, and future, respectively, while black and white signify catabolic and anabolic forces.

With these as background, the project’s principals — Ben Bromley and Ross Simonini — use a large cast of contributors to depict different aspects of its creation myth via songs, videos, and installation art. One such song and subsequent video, “Lighthouse,” depicts a fantastical vision that features a set of ornately costumed crimson- and sapphire-hued characters. Like many NewVillager creations, this piece draws inspiration from multiple disciplines — in this case, Papua New Guinean tribal aesthetics, Robert Smithson’s art installations, and Sergei Parajanov films.

Bromley and Simonini (who is an editor at The Believer) have played together in other bands, but NewVillager has allowed them to merge their interests in music and art. The self-proclaimed “musical omnivores” glean influences from Walter Murch, Foley sounds, folk melodies, and electronic beats and mix in elements of installation art to create distinctive performances, which incorporate the project’s mysterious narrative in some fashion.

“NewVillager mythology is the primary medium in which we work,” Simonini  says. “We’re interested in approaching the relatively abstract idea of the mythology through as many possible senses, ideas, and mediums as a way of making it more concrete.”

In January of 2010, NewVillager partnered with fellow artists, writers, and filmmakers to create Ecotone, an art installation exhibit at Lowerdeck, an under-the-radar gallery in San Francisco. The concept of Ecotone, defined as a transition between environments, centered on the shifting perception of home, with each artist offering his or her personal perspective via art and video installations. NewVillager’s contribution successfully blurred the lines between art installation and music performance and barraged viewers with a visual and auditory feast. The Ecotone show is one of many ways that Bromley and Simonini have forged connections with fellow artists and have brought them into the creative fold of NewVillager mythology.

“We’re always reaching out for collaboration opportunities,” Bromley says. “The mythology was designed to facilitate collaborations, to create a language that multiple people can use.”

NewVillager also has taken its innovative performance style on the road and has created off-the-cuff shows in some otherwise mundane locations, such as a tunnel viaduct along a Chicago interstate. Not all passers-by were amused by the group’s antics, but one woman pulled over to find out what all of the commotion was about. She quickly joined in the fun and morphed into Bright Man, one of the characters in that night’s performance.

Though NewVillager’s performances and art shows are incredibly varied, Bromley and Simonini reference distinctive rituals and symbolism to create a sense of cohesiveness throughout their projects. One consistent element of their work is a set of ten symbols that signify the various transformative stages of the creative process that informs NewVillager mythology. The final symbol in the set, which appears in the group’s art and in the opening sequence of “Lighthouse,” encapsulates the complete revelation of the NewVillager mythos and signifies the creative transition between the end of one endeavor and the beginning of another.

The symbols also act as a common thread throughout the duo’s video for the catchy tune “Rich Doors,” which documents the culmination of NewVillager’s “rich door ritual.” Bromley, Simonini, and about 30 of their friends held the event at Red House, NewVillager’s studio space in San Francisco, and the video takes viewers on a dream-like journey of the location before ending with an impromptu dance party on a San Francisco freeway overpass. The cast of characters passes a green ball back and forth and introduces the 10 elements of NewVillager mythology in various scenes throughout the house, basement, and backyard.

Additionally, this symbolism manifests in an auditory fashion throughout the tracks on NewVillager’s self-titled debut album, which was released in the summer of 2011. Each song focuses on one of the ten aspects of the mythology’s transformations, and to reference this, Bromley and Simonini recorded each song ten times while focusing on different melodies and tempos, leading to rich, multi-layered results.

Bromley and Simonini, who often oscillate between the East and West Coasts, are constantly seeking new ways of configuring their work into new mediums. The pair is detailing its mythology through a 1,000-page book, planned for 2012 with a companion CD, that will further illustrate creative principles through narratives, photography, drawings, collages, and diagrams while complementing NewVillager albums, videos, and performances. As the group’s creative output manifests with new collaborations and extraordinary, multidimensional projects, its mythology, which remains the essential element behind the art, will continually be revealed in innovative ways.

“It’s a method for creating a connectivity between all of our work,” Simonini says. “We try to make everything a part of a larger idea, as opposed to a lot of little ideas."

São Paulo Underground: "Jagoda's Dream"

"The sound you do not hear but see, and the visual you cannot see but hear, is the work,” says Rob Mazurek. “The rest is up to the imagination." That sentiment shouldn’t be surprising to fans of the prolific cornet player, composer, and Chicago-based avant-garde luminary. His entire two-decade career has been an adventure in experimentation, and he serves as a gravitational hub around which dozens of bright talents orbit as members of his various ensembles. At present, Mazurek is the leader of the compact duo and trio versions of Chicago Underground; its antipodal counterpart, São Paulo Underground; the expansive, sprawling Exploding Star Orchestra; and the nascent Sound Is Quintet. Though his various projects all offer unique perspectives on sound and structure, they’re all propelled at some level by Mazurek’s fascination with the visual and often seek out new sounds through the expressive manipulation of color.

Imagination is an important part of Mazurek’s methods. His compositions exist in a dreamy world that incorporates elements of jazz, post-rock, electronic music, and noise, drifting, floating weightlessly in a limbo that practically demands the listener to dive deeply into the piece and create form in the spaces and gaps left open. Mazurek isn’t content to let the listener have all the fun, however, and facilitates imagination not just in the consumption of his work but also in its conception. On many of his albums, he uses unorthodox methods of composition and conducting to imbue his sounds with new passion and flavor, and color plays a significant role in that mission.

“Recently, I used a sequence of square paintings with a very specific layering of color ― graphite, white, red, and green,” Mazurek says. These paintings were to serve as visual prompts for his ensemble, in lieu of a traditionally written score or set of instructions. “Written music is very much what it is,” Mazurek says, with an air of exasperation. “These experiments push the player to imagine what could be there, what's behind the obvious. It's exciting. The top color, green, was pushing out from the painting, while the other colors were barely seen — as if inaudible. The suggestion of the reds, graphites, and whites could only be read as interpretive projections of imagined colors and textures and shades.”

Such exercises conjure sound using color and visual treatments as an input, but Mazurek’s belief in the malleability and interchangeability of the aural and the visual has led him to work from the other end, with sound as input and color as the output. "I did a work called Music for Shattered Light Box and 7 Posters where the sound from a CD player played very specific shards of my compositions,” he says. “The sound goes into a light box and affects the light source. You do not hear the sound; you only see the effect that the sound has on the light and the shards of that light being projected through the shattered glass.” For him, the lights and colors emitted by the box is the performance. Whether or not one actually hears the music is an afterthought for him; it’s practically irrelevant. “You can take the CD and play it and hear what the sound is,” he says, “but only afterward, if you're interested enough [by the lights]."

Given his interest in manipulating sound and color, it’s no wonder that Mazurek considers himself a visual artist as well as a musician. "I paint,” he says. “It flows quite naturally. I see my work as a visual artist and a musician as the same at times, and at other times, completely different.” His paintings deal with bold color and shape, in their rawest forms. Highly evocative of the chromatic abstracts of Mark Rothko, these works appear simple at first glance, but closer inspection reveals layers of details and subtle inflections. Some of his work has served as album art on his Chicago Underground records, such as Axis and Alignment (2002) and Synesthesia (2000).

“The paintings I made for these records are special,” he reveals, “in the sense that they are not quite what they seem. They seem like large-format paintings, when actually they are very small and done with small brushes over a long period of time.” Mazurek named the latter album for a neurological condition that can affect a person’s perception. Senses become crossed and combined in strange ways. Numbers and words can have a taste to a synesthete; months can acquire personalities, and sound can suggest color. It’s a peculiar syndrome that often results in creative, artistic types. Mazurek doesn’t claim to be a synesthete, but his belief in the intimate connection between color and sound certainly make him sympathetic to one’s worldview.

“I especially enjoy the painting on Synesthesia, where I used linseed oil under the whites to make it crack a bit and reveal underneath,” he says. “This was probably my first discovery of this idea of not revealing too much of what is underneath and to let that power shake the foundation of the painting.” These vibrant, nuanced covers are indicative of Mazurek’s artistic philosophy. All his work, regardless of medium, is geared toward discovery, and for him, music and visual art are two sides of the same coin, two ways of achieving the same goal, inexorably intertwined with one another. "Color, form, texture, power,” he says. “These ideas all seem to be applicable, in sound and in plastic."

This mindset was not exactly shared by Mazurek’s idol and collaborator, free-jazz legend Bill Dixon. Like Mazurek, the trumpet legend also moonlighted as a visual artist and painter, and he created the cover art for Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra, the pairing’s 2008 collaboration. Though the art is abstract, the approach is markedly different than the one that Mazurek took on his Chicago Underground covers. Whereas Mazurek’s art uses fuzzy borders and bleeding edges seeping out from large blocks of bold color, Dixon’s cover is far more structured and precise, with heavy stripes and lines of dark hues falling on top of one another but never fraternizing, always observing clear definition and distinction. This difference in artistic manner between the two horn players carried over into their views on the relationship between their visual art and their music.

Dixon, who passed away in June of 2010 at the age of 84, considered his two domains to be separate. Mazurek sees things differently, however. "I could always make my own parallels to his music and paintings,” he says. “His golden tone and striking lines, the colored nuances in his dynamic flow, the intense brightness in his upper register of the horn and cavernous blackness of the lower end. His ingenious turn of a melodic fragment and bursts of sun-flare excitement — that's a painting right there! Anyone interested in the ideas of sound, color, and form should study his works deeply. He will be greatly missed."

Despite this ideological impasse, Dixon was game enough to engage in one of Mazurek’s imaginative scoring methods on the aforementioned album. The first six minutes of “Constellations for Inner Light Projections,” the album’s centerpiece, was composed using a video score that presented The Exploding Star Orchestra, which includes such notable Chicago musicians as Nicole Mitchell, Jason Adasiewicz, and Jeff Parker, with an array of colors to be interpreted by the players individually and transformed into music. The result is a curious olio of reactions that reflects the disparate emotional and sensory reactions of the musicians. "In the beginning, there was some general confusion,” Mazurek says, “but after their eyes and brains got used to the idea, wonderful things started to happen ― quite indescribable things. It has a kind of cloudy haziness, and when it breaks out of [the visual score], the piece has more of a hard sound."

On deck for Mazurek is a particularly ambitious project, even for a seasoned veteran like him: a 10-volume set of music for his partner’s new label, Sun Core Records, that further elaborates upon his theories on the link between light, color, and sound. "I have been working with the folks at La Grande Fabrique [recording studio] in Dieppe, France on this goal,” he says. “This is their area of expertise, and with their technology, I am creating video pieces and sound pieces built entirely on this premise, juxtaposing each on the other and creating a whole different universe. It's quite exhilarating.”

Mazurek calls the potential for such juxtapositions “endless,” and indeed, his inspirational compositions are drawn from a colorful palette that appears to be inexhaustible. As he delves deeper and deeper into the visible spectrum, pulling out shards of sound from little-investigated regions, we can only imagine what will follow — and that might be Mazurek’s true goal after all.

Tallest Trees: The Ostrich or the Lark (Other Electricities, 8/17/10)

Tallest Trees: "Alouette!"

In Nashville, Tennessee, a little way out of town, there’s an old log cabin built out of railroad timber. How long it’s been there is up for debate, but the sagging wood and dusty, discolored beams can’t help but invoke the history of the city where it sits. It’s a history so richly steeped in country and western music that the town and the genre are now almost ubiquitously known as one and the same.

Curiously enough, this same small cabin was also the spot where experimental electro-indie duo Tallest Trees holed up in the summer of 2009 to write and record its debut album, The Ostrich or the Lark (Other Electricities). An album of sprawling musical dexterity and openness, it’s a direct reaction to, and a far cry from, Nashville’s recognized musical staple.

Comprised of Thomas “Trees” Samuel and Dabney “Voice” Morris, Tallest Trees began life, as many personal and creative outlets do, as a side project. From Florida and Virginia respectively, Samuel and Morris met up in Nashville in 2004 while in a variety of bands. “There’s a ton of bands in Nashville—more than anyone knows what to do with, and all very talented,” Samuel says. “But outside of the country scene, it’s a kind of stunted group, if you know what I mean. It’s all very rock ’n’ roll, very straightforward. No one’s really reaching outside of the box.”

That is until now. Bored sick of the rigmarole, Samuel began dabbling in new sounds, invented effects, and off-kilter arrangements. At its inception, Tallest Trees was a solo experiment that could take the form of a nine-member big band on stage. Meanwhile, Dabny was deeply immersed in his own project, Human Voice, for which he played a cello looped through various distortions. Instead of simply supporting each other’s solo material at shows, the two artists combined their brash, revisionist aesthetics in a partnership of atypical pop dementia.

And so it was that the two found themselves inside that little log cabin, surrounded by a mishmash of every kind of noisemaker. As Samuel describes it, “We would sit there, staring at each other, sometimes for hours. We’d just pick up any random instrument and begin. Put it down; pick up something else.” For months this went on, as each track slowly and gradually took on a life of its own.

Multifaceted sounds and effects layer and crisscross throughout the record, so intertwined that the separate elements form one cohesive and accessible form. Found sounds and glitches are played with looping feedback and the duo’s expansive harmonies, so that a simple battery-powered children’s toy booms out like a cathedral organ and hand claps turn into a chorus line of percussion. “That was part of the fun,” Samuel says. “There’s a kind of mystery when you can’t quite pick out the pieces. We just wanted to see what we could produce, what kind of sound could come out. We deliberately did not listen to music much during this time; we didn’t want something to even subconsciously guide us that wasn’t our own.”

Of the myriad comparisons one might try to pin on Tallest Trees, whether the electronic altitudes of Caribou or the tribal tempos of Yeasayer, nothing sticks particularly well. And that’s because in their quest to create something different, they ended up with something original.

“You know, Dabny and I, we’re pretty different in a lot of ways,” Samuel says. “I have a fiancé and feel a little more settled here, while he’s more of the constant traveler. We’re just able to complement and add so much more with that. We’ve also got an amazing drummer, Art Quanstrom, one of the best names ever. He is insanely talented and can do anything. So it’s great working together with that dynamic.”

At times, Tallest Trees’ cacophony is almost overwhelming, with so many edges blurred together—the punctuated timing and unpredictable melodies. The group never lets this pounding energy overtake it, though, and it stands rooted in enough pop sensibility to craft picturesque songs.

“For me, this album is very visual,” Samuel says. “It’s very bright, very colorful.” Book-ended by an opening and closing echo, the songs on The Ostrich or the Lark feel like snapshots taken on a sunny day, every track invoking flowers and hands, streams and stars. Never settled, the album evolves like a cloud on a windy day. It paints a positively glowing, ever-changing picture.

The album cover is an accurate reflection of the music within. On the outside, a collage of leaves and sticks form the titular birds, indicating a simple and organic curiosity. Each separate piece carries its own shade and shape, but together those unique pieces are woven into complementary forms. Presented in front of a plain white background, the animals are almost like guides, meeting us at the beginning and seeing us off at the end. It’s only when the covers are lifted and the album itself, the guts of it, is revealed that we are immersed in a Technicolor prism washing away the formlessness that preceded it.

The fluctuating array of electronics that Tallest Trees employs is a virtual kaleidoscope of jubilant experimentation. With childlike wonder and inspirational passion, the duo is one of the most refreshing, unexpected gems in a city built on a brilliant musical identity. The Ostrich or the Lark is more than just a celebratory record; it’s a reminder of the lifting, liberating quality of music itself. Its reach confined only by imagination, not even the sky is the limit for Tallest Trees.

Judgement Day: Peacocks / Pink Monsters (4/13/10)

Judgement Day: "Cobra Strike"

“Artistic vision is a tricky thing,” writes Anton Patzner, violinist and de-facto spokesman for Judgement Day, in the opening notes accompanying the group’s latest album. “On one hand, a strong, clear artistic vision is the essence of ambition, guiding and pushing the artist to new heights of achievement. On the other hand, it can be a dangerous inhibitor, a boundary outside of which no other ideas are valid.”

With this auspicious introduction, Judgement Day traverses the fine line between its own boundaries and limitless ambitions to bring forth Peacocks / Pink Monsters, a work of truly monumental heights. Known for its unique brand of string-borne heavy metal, the instrumental Bay Area trio has gone from busking in the streets to sharing the stage with a wide spectrum of acts, all while trying to realize its perfect vision.

Without the use of any traditional rock guitars or rhythm section, Anton, along with cellist and brother Lewis Patzner and drummer Jon Bush, has crafted a wild, vivid record of classical instrumentation and masterful, often improvisational, composition. With a brutal, driving force, Judgement Day crafts hyperactive riffs, intricate arpeggios, and syncopated breakdowns. Peacocks / Pink Monsters, released in the spring of 2010, is the crowning achievement of a lifetime of work, made by wholly embracing the artistic endeavor.

Growing up with classically trained parents, Anton and Lewis Patzner were schooled in the violin and cello early in life. While still in high school, the brothers began playing on the streets in Berkeley, California, where they combined their classical instruments with metal and hardcore arrangements. Speaking with the band, it’s clear how much that experience has shaped the group. “I still go out regularly,” Anton says. “You get to meet all kinds of people; it’s always fun.”

In 2004, the brothers recruited Bush on drums to begin playing proper stage shows and released their debut record, Dark Opus. Filled with material “meant to be played on the street without percussion,” the record garnered critical praise and allowed the trio to tour extensively throughout the country. But the album itself was not a fully integrated artistic expression as much as a collection of the beginnings of the group’s collaborative process.

In the time after the release of Dark Opus, the trio made several sidesteps in its journey. Anton joined the ever-expanding Bright Eyes family, touring and experiencing a musical community unlike anything that private lessons and street-corner duets with his brother had afforded him. Lewis, on the other hand, went to study cello performance at the distinguished Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland, receiving his degree in 2007. Though the group still managed to play several shows a year when all three members were together, no new recordings were released for almost five years.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that these tangents were essential to Judgement Day’s growth as a group. After reuniting and agreeing on a new record, that tricky issue of artistic expression came out with a vengeance. Months into writing and collaborating, the group was still far from satisfied with its output. Barely half a record was complete when all three members decided to drastically change the manner of their art.

“At the time, I was listening to a lot of Eastern music — these Tibetan monks who meditated and played whatever came out,” Anton says. “I was scoring a film about Nepal, and I got really into that idea of letting a force take you wherever it goes.” Combine that concept with the group’s astounding musicianship, and improvisation comes naturally. “Every show, I was already taking parts and changing rhythms and improvising,” Lewis says of the trio’s live performances. “We had just never incorporated that into our recording process before. It gave us an even wider spectrum of sounds.”

Every day, the three friends would conclude their playing with a completely off-the-cuff improvisation session. Hitting the record button and abandoning its once tightly held structures allowed inspiration to take the wheel. “That was the goal,” Anton says. “To see what’s possible.”

Every track on the album contains some of this improvisation, and two tracks are made entirely out of it. Yet rather than feeling as though the music is searching for meaning, the sounds on this record are direct and dedicated. Though spontaneous, everything on this album belongs to an artistic vision that allows for multiple interpretations. “I think that our music is very dramatic,” Anton says. “We could fit in a science-fiction thriller pretty well. For us, this album was about the sound and experimenting with sound, but I think if someone wants to see a narrative or theme in the music, it’s definitely there.”

The album’s title, Peacocks / Pink Monsters, is actually the title of the painting that adorns its cover. And in the nearly 20-page “making of” booklet — a first-of-its-kind “tome-pack” that accompanies the music — Anton compares the painting to Judgement Day’s music. “With all the artwork in the past, I was really picky,” he says. “And at the end, it still didn’t come out just as I wanted.” Inspired by the success of their improvisations, the three members concluded that a spontaneous and collaborative work of art was required to best capture the essence of their own musical journey, and they enlisted the help of three artists to simultaneously descend on a single blank canvas.

Those three artists — Shawn Harris, Emilee Seymour, and Ryan Noble — are all exceedingly gifted. In 2005, Harris and Seymour formed the art group Oxen, beginning by illustrating album covers for Harris’ band, The Matches. All three artists have backgrounds in different mediums, and they came to the collaboration without a singular goal. “We had a party,” Anton says. “They worked, and we just stood back and observed.” The process took hours; several layers were painted, covered, wiped out, and covered once more. The artists dragged their fingers through the thickening paint, set down pieces of cloth and handfuls of sand, and constantly interrupted each other’s progress just to keep things fluid, ever-changing, and unpredictable. Anton compares it to the building of an ancient city, whose roads have been paved over time and again.

There were moments when the painting, guided only by the artists’ inspirations (and Judgement Day’s improvisational music playing in the background), became a vision so incredible that the artists were tempted to call it done. That temptation was repeatedly trumped by a mutual dedication to continue and grow. Ultimately, the life that emerges from the piece does so not from the limitations placed on it but from the allowance on the part of the artists to be limitless. Though one may want to cling to a particular color or corner of the canvas, the celebration and freedom of the art comes from the near-anarchy of the work. “I think that the art is great,” Anton says. “We just let it be what it is.”

At the end of the process, as the oils dried and shapes took form, Judgement Day looked upon this colorful and impressive work and aptly named it Peacocks / Pink Monsters. And though it is true that bright crimson plumage is displayed and yellow eyes glare out of fleshy creatures, the sheer intensity of the piece does not come from its recognizable features but rather by the unseen, the underneath, and the in-between. Like the music of Judgement Day, Peacocks / Pink Monsters is a work of vision — or, as Anton concludes in the album’s notes, “an infinite number of visions.”