One Track Mind What’s New in the Local Music Scene, a Few Minutes at a Time
Listen: Dead Violets
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Download: "Banish"
Read past coverage of the Dead Violets!
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Standout Track: “Banish,” the sole track on Dead Violets’ debut three-inch CD, is a brooding 19-minute work combining lo-fi record scratches and pops, eerie ambient explosions, and the words and moans of singer Bethany Moore. Her heavily processed voice makes her incantations sound like they were wept into a empty tin can.
Musical Motivation: D.C. experimental-music scene vet Jeff Surak has been collaborating with Thomas Ekelund since 2001. For Moore, who joined them in September, the trio is an opportunity to blend noise with female poets, womanhood, and activism. “I was always drawn to Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and feel influenced greatly by them both,” she says. “There’s a certain struggle felt in being a woman, in being a spiritual person, in understanding human relationships and emotions, and in being an activist for social causes that boils up from deep within and must be expressed.”
Atlantic records: Ekelund lives in Göteborg, Sweden, but the 4,000 miles separating him from his colleagues don’t interfere with their songwriting. “Making music with Thomas is a lot easier than you’d think,” says Surak, who didn’t meet Thomas in person until last year. Their synth- and computer-driven sounds shuffled back and forth via e-mail. “I’ll send something to Thomas, he’ll send it back, and when we’re happy with the sound it becomes the final product.” Moore’s contributions were a little more low-tech. “The vocals were recorded in her car,” Surak says.
Dead Violets performs Wednesday, Dec. 17, at the Red & the Black.
Comments
8:06 pm
Dead Violets is one of my favorites when it comes to US experimental music.
This release is one of the highlights.
8:16 pm
dead violets is a seventh-rate band and seven is a magic number!!!
8:33 pm
oh HELL YES. it rocks!
9:19 pm
I've known Surak longer than some of your readers have been alive, and I have charted his musical evolution like the behavior of alien sperm in a blackened petri-dish.... and this latest sonic cocktail is a magical thing indeed. The mix with Bethany and Thomas give the whole thing a great mix of space and density; intelligent noise music without pretention.
Four stars out of I'm not telling you how many... but two thumbs fully erect.
12:19 am
Yes it is terrible, this sounds like someone left an alley cat, in heat with a broken hip, to starve to death at the bottom of a well. The backing tracks although proposed to be "found sounds", sounds more like leaving a dictionary on a pad synth; or perhaps, the orchestra doing the score for "Aliens" getting stuck on one note for nineteen minutes at a frequency I believe they use to torture infants in Malaysia. This really made my day! Thanks, can't wait to hear more in the future.
9:54 am
This band put a spell on me like Screamin' Jay. Great write-up. This is THE band to watch in '09.
10:28 am
The sppoky ambivalence of Bethany Moores' vocal brings a new and welcome dimension to the Violet universe. It put in me in a similar frame of mind to that of Jarboe's 'Walls Are Bleeding' from the DRY LINGS compilation of many years past, but is not derivative of it at all. Catch up with DV at The Red & The Blank in DC on Dec. 17.
7:59 pm
We are displeased to announce that the Dec 17 performance at the Red and the Black has been canceled by the Red and the Black.
2:46 am
I'm not overly aquainted with experimental. That being said, I thought this was probably one of the most truly "experimental" tracks I have heard... Very surreal and disturbing. Well done.