### Pyrrhon - Doug

#### 22/05/14 || The Duff

Pyrrhon are like Gorguts, and along with Ulcerate, Nero di Marte, Baring Teeth and Artificial Brain seem to be riding the popular surge of ambient/drone/black-death as popularised by the Canucks but otherwise never so cleverly mastered by other outfits as until most recently. Their last record “The Mother of Virtues” is a huge undertaking of whizzing guitars and intense drumming, caustic vocals, sublime musicianship but foremost anger, atmosphere, a calculation of the senses – here we talk to Doug of the band’s coming of age style, new album and rising success.

GD: Please tell us about Pyrrhon – how you got started, beginning and major influences, bandmembers and outlook on life, what made you write this kind of music.

Doug: That’s a lot of different questions at once. The short version is that we all met through happenstance during our college years. Our influences are pretty easy to suss out by listening to our music: lots of weird extreme metal, dark ’70s prog, some jazz, some harsh noise and modern classical, ‘80s/’90s-era noise rock, and hardcore. We ended up playing the kind of stuff we do because weird, dark music resonates with us and because it’s the kind of thing we’d all listen to. There’s no grandiose story behind it.

I have never heard of you guys, yet you have already released two full-lengths prior to this new record due later in the year – how do you feel the three records compare, what have you learned since your beginnings and what have you bettered from the debut?

The album we just put out is actually only our second full-length, not our third one. We’ve also done an EP and two demos. It’s all on the internet, dude.

I’d say that we’ve gotten substantially better on every recording we’ve done. We’re fairly young, and since the kind of music we play is so demanding, it’s taken us a while to get up to speed as musicians. We’ve also become gradually more interested in mixing non-death metal influences into our writing and more confident in our ability to do so, and we’ve become more effective at that kind of thing over the years as well.

How would you personally describe your latest album to people who had never heard you?

I usually just send people the link to our Bandcamp and tell them that they might like it if they’re into weird metal, honestly. Trying to describe our music accurately is more trouble than it’s worth, given that anyone with an internet connection can listen to the entire album for free.

The production on “Mother of Virtues” is unusual – it reminds me of something like These Arms Are Snakes, fluffy and muffled. Was there a reason to go with such a docile production to represent music of such a disharmonious, caustic nature when it is so much sharper on “An Excellent Servant…”? Was this in reflection to a shift in material? It does not after all differ all that much.

I don’t agree with “fluffy” or “muffled” as characterizations of that production — it’s much clearer and more intelligible than many death and black metal recordings. It sounds like what you’re really talking about is the fact that you can actually hear the bass on this album, which was definitely deliberate. Bass guitar is a much-underused instrument in the metal world, and given that Erik is an incredible player, we would’ve been remiss not to highlight his performance.

Tell us about the artwork – I can draw my own conclusions, it is like say a grunge version of Defeated Sanity’s “Passages into Deformity”. Who did you hire for the artwork?

We’ve actually worked with the same artist, Caroline Harrison, for every piece of Pyrrhon-related art to date. She’s an incredibly gifted draftswoman, and she’s also not really a metal person, which means that her work for us usually falls outside the standard metal-imagery box. That Defeated Sanity album is sweet, but Caroline probably hasn’t ever listened to them, much less seen that album cover. It certainly wasn’t an influence on the art for our album.

The basic notion of the album cover was to combine archetypal religious motherhood/fertility iconography with some of the more disturbing imagery from the lyrics. Since a lot of the lyrics on the album deal with the human body and organic objects more generally, it made sense for Caroline to borrow colors and textures from medical photography. The texture of our lovely cover model’s skin is based on photos that Caroline found of a certain type of rat tumor, for instance.

How are Relapse treating you? Would you consider them alongside Nuclear Blast as the leaders in underground extreme music?

Relapse has been one of my favorite metal labels since I was a young kid. It doesn’t get much better than them. If you’d told me that I’d end up in a band signed to Relapse when I was a 15-year-old, I would’ve laughed. Life is funny sometimes.

This, despite excellent musicianship, could be described as ‘scrappy’, I believe the intent – like say bands Eyehategod, you seem to trust the ugliness and disproportional qualities of life. Are you fans of any extreme metal bands of a more ‘focused’ nature?

The loose, live feel of the album was very much intentional. We’ve all come to find flawless, robotic-sounding performances tedious, so we opted to record almost all of the album live, rather than instrument-by-instrument. This tactic produced performances that sound way more like our live sets than some quantized punch-in festival would. We’re humans and we make mistakes, and I prefer when bands embrace that fact, rather than try to cover it up.

All of that being said, I listen to a lot of metal bands who go for the super-sterile ‘perfect’ thing. It’s not a dealbreaker, but we didn’t think that it’d be appropriate for us or for the music we play.

Lyrically, you tend to make each track thematically unique, yet there is a thread tying everything – was this a concept record, or are your views of humanity generally ugly? Are the lyrics based on personal experience and if not, how are you inspired?

I definitely wasn’t trying to write a concept album, lyrically. Organic/body imagery is its most consistent recurring theme, just as technology was a recurring theme on the first album, though I wouldn’t describe either of them as concept records. A lot of the lyrics are rooted in my personal experience, but not all of them; certain songs on the album are explicitly written from someone else’s perspective.

Even more than the whole flesh theme, the unifying thread on both this album and the first LP is a focus on the real world. A lot of metal has this escapist fascination with supernatural stuff like Satan and Lovecraft monsters, and that kind of lyrical theme just doesn’t have much appeal for me. Most metal fans and bands treat it as a silly style of music, which it definitely is in many respects. Still, I think it has the potential to be totally serious and fulfilling, so I aspire to write lyrics that have some reality and gravity to them.

Didn’t you guys say you disliked the lyrics in your review? This was a strange question for you to ask.

How and where are you promoting this new record? You are on the same label as Ulcerate now, undoubtedly the two of you are heavy appreciators of Gorguts. Are you likely to play with those guys any time in the future? Are you fans of their work?

Ulcerate are an excellent band whom we’re all fans of to one degree or another. They’re touring the States in May, but we weren’t asked to play any shows with them. You’d have to ask them why that is.

Did you hear what happened to your compatriots Di Morte, likewise on Relapse? Are you fans of the band? Would you consider helping them get back onto their feet with a Relapse Disharmonic Bonanza Tour across Europe?

There’s no band by that name I’ve ever heard of. You’re probably thinking of Nero di Marte, who are on Prosthetic, not Relapse.

Assuming that’s who you’re talking about, it’s really fucked up that they were robbed. We’d definitely tour with them if the opportunity arose — they shred and it’d be a good match.

Which bands do you think are doing something truly original in the metal scene today? Which albums are you most looking forward to this year?

There are tons of original metal bands out there, though there’s also a lot of redundant dreck out there. Some of my favorite releases to date this year include Artificial Brain, Thantifaxath, Jute Gyte, Tombs, Noneuclid, Yautja, Psalm Zero, and Gridlink. I consider all of these bands fairly distinctive; I don’t often bother with generic-sounding stuff these days. I’m not sure off the top of my head who else of note has an album coming out this year, but I’m sure there will be more good stuff coming out than I can reasonably keep up with. This is a good time to be interested in metal.

What are your plans in the future – any new songs written yet? Tell us about the Pyrrhon songwriting process.

We’ve actually already booked time to record some more music in July — a batch of short tunes for a split or EP. Our songwriting process is pretty standard, I suspect. One of us will bring in a skeleton of a song, and we’ll collectively develop it, write individual parts, and mess with the structure or arrangement during band practice. The only unusual thing for us is how long it takes us to finish a song. They can take months to get right; I feel like we’re still getting better at most of them.