|
Pulse of the Twin Cities Login |
|
If you do not have an account yet
Create One.
|
|
|
Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
|
|
|
|
Savage Aural Hotbed: Pounding, heaving and sparks, oh my
Wednesday 08 November @ 12:57:10 |
 by ANDREA MYERS
For years, the members of Minneapolis experimental industrial band Savage Aural Hotbed have toiled over shards of steel, pipes and barrels, learning to create sounds using instruments more common in a tool shed than a music store. After nearly two decades of fiddling and pounding and playing together, the group prepares to unleash a new album, The Unified Pounding Theory, that is rich with their signature metallic Brazilian-influenced beats and penchant for investigating and pushing the limits of sound.
 “It all started in 1988,” founding member Mark Black explains over the telephone. “In the beginning, we were more of an electronic dance/industrial band, with synthesized keyboard sounds, horns and samples. We would actually bring a computer on stage with us—and this was before people really did this like they do with laptops now. It was an old Atari, and we would play along with the computer rather than trying to get the computer to play along with us. It was really hard to work with in a live setting.”
The group didn’t transition fully into percussion until Black and then-bandmate David Sarravin attended an inspiring show together. “David and I went to a show that featured a Taiko drum group named Kodo (website: kodo.or.jp) and we were both impressed by their disciplined drumming. We wrote a song that was influenced by that experience, and we really liked it and it worked so we wrote a few more.”
Eventually, the band shifted into entirely percussion-oriented songs and drew influences from the Taiko drumming practices of Japan, the rhythmic pulses of Brazil and the industrial genre that has continued to grow here in America. “We started adding in power tools and combining it with the Taiko drum sounds,” says Black. “We are always trying to come up with new ways to think about music and go beyond the basic 4/4 time.” The current lineup includes Black and co-founder William Melton, along with Stuart DeVaan and Dean Hawthorne (who joined the group five years ago but is still considered “the new guy”).
Perhaps the most impressive element of Savage Aural Hotbed is the lengths to which they will travel to create an interesting noise. For example, as Black explains, in order to get a recording of a high-pitched whirling noise, Black and his fellow mad sound scientists obtained a 20-foot length of flexible metal tubing, cut it into different lengths, and then held the tubes out the car window while speeding down I-94 and capturing the sound with a portable recorder.
“We’ve trained ourselves to recognize what works,” explains Black. Other instruments and effects took even more of a deliberate effort to concoct. A stainless steel shelving unit was cut apart into different lengths and affectionately named “The Rack,” while another instrument, the Re-bar-imbau was cooked up from scratch out of metal and wire to simulate an industrial version of the Brazilian folk instrument the berimbau.
“I found some re-bar from a campaign yard sign that had gotten run over,” Black writes in an explanation of the song “Re-bar-imbau.” “I bent them into bow shapes, and strung wire on them to make something like a Brazilian berimbau. It has piezo pickups (a contact microphone) to amplify them instead of the more usual gourd resonator.”
Like most live percussion groups, Savage Aural Hotbed is an experience that needs to be seen to be believed, but the album provides listeners with a vivid mechanical landscape and translates the group’s passion well. Though the songs don’t have commonplace themes or hooks, the movement of the music is surprisingly accessible and trance-inducing, and it is hard not to get lost in the churning and swooning of metal-on-metal vibrations. The record has a bit more of a spontaneous feel than past albums, which is mostly due to the way that the new tracks were recorded.
With help from producer Matthew Zimmerman, the group recorded each track live (with the exception of the aforementioned freeway hoses as the liner notes are quick to explain) at Wild Sound Studio in Northeast Minneapolis. According to Black, “We were set up to play in different rooms, with windows so we could see each other,” which he says helped the players to be able to respond to one another better than if they had recorded each part separately.
At their CD release show this Friday at First Avenue, Savage Aural Hotbed will play the whole new album in sequence, with little variation from its recorded form, though the songs will likely be transformed when accompanied by sparking saws, whirring power drills and animated, ape-like Taiko drumming.
“At first it might seem weird or almost scary, with the sparks flying from power tools,” says Black. “But the music still reaches the same parts of the brain that make ordinary music rewarding. Once you get over the initial shock of it all, you can enjoy it as a good show. In a way, it is intriguing because of the spectacle of it—in the same way that a demolition derby draws crowds because of the danger element—we have our own element of danger. We like to joke that we provide cheap pyrotechnics with our power tools.”
 As Black explains, and as fans of Savage Aural Hotbed can attest, the group makes shows that are captivating and that affect “all the senses—visual, audio, smell and even feel—at some points you can feel the music moving through the room …We try to make a show that is exciting on intellectual levels and emotional levels.” ||
Savage Aural Hotbed play the CD release show for The Unified Pounding Theory on Fri., Nov. 10 at First Avenue with Batucada do Norte and Mu Daiko. 8 p.m. $6/$8.18+. 701 First Ave. N, Mpls. 612-338-8388. For more info on Savage Aural Hotbed, check out their official website at savageinfo.com.
|
|
 |
|
|
Comments -
Post Comment |
|
The comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for its content.
NO comments yet! Be the first!
|
|
|
