We’re pleased to bring you the premiere of Ecce Shnak’s music video for their song “Dingleberry III, One On Tito: Trite Song” (watch it below). The track is taken from the band’s forthcoming EP Joke Oso, which is scheduled to be released on April 5, 2019.
David Roush of Ecce Shnak commented on the video:
This music video is a tragicomic study of psychosis, nascent fascism, and the madness of the modern day. The protagonist of the piece, the fellow in the white dress-shirt known as Brian, has been overwhelmed by this madness, and so his soul has split into so many fragments of himself, so many ‘Otherbrians.’ These fragments represent several sources of physical and psychological violence: the military-industrial complex, white supremacy, corporate totalitarianism, and the broken and even destructive (‘iatrogenic’) system of social services as they operate in America today. In the last moment of the piece, Brian finds his liberation from this madness through a reimagined sense of his own selfhood. However, the exact nature of his reimagining, dear audience member, is his own business, and we do hope and trust that you wish him well as he skips away from us at the video’s end.
Tour Dates:
Feb 16 – Philadelphia, PA – Johnny Brenda’s
Mar 21 – New York, NY – Rockwood Music Hall
Apr 05 – New York, NY – Pianos
Apr 06 – Boston, MA – Democracy Center
Apr 07 – Portland, ME – Blue
About the band:
“The present-day composer in America refuses to die,” was a famous statement from French avant-garde musician Edgar Varese quoted by Frank Zappa on the Mothers of Invention’s 1966 album, Freak Out!
New Haven, CT-born, now New York City-based David Roush is living proof of that adage with his own musical project Ecce Shnak (pronounced Eh-kay Sh-knock) – the name taken from both Frederick Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (“ecce” meaning Latin for ‘Consider” or “Look At”) and a word derived from the Yiddish schnockered, meaning inebriated, but repurposed as a teenager
for nything he needed it to describe.
That may well be the best way to describe Ecce Shnak’s unique mash-up musical universe, a world of his own design he describes as Chamber Punk — “one part popular music, another part classical and a third part punk” with songs “about love, death, sex, change, bravery and food.” Having established Ecce Shnak six years ago with fellow students at Temple University, lead singer and creator Roush now has a steady, seven-person outfit – two guitarists, two “chamber singers,” a bassist and drummer – to play the music he composes almost entirely note-for-note. This musical mash-up offers a host of influences, including Gogol Bordello, Bjork, Deerhoof, Bad Brains, the Clash, and the Roots. He dips is toes in grindcore and metal here and there, and also counts some titans of classical music as his teachers: Claude Debussy, Franz Schubert, Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Leo Brouwer, among others.
Roush has been working on new material since 2013, when he released the EP, Letters to German Vasquez Rubio with previous personnel. He is about to release the fruits of that labor with two new efforts, Joke Oso, scheduled to come out in April, and Metamorphejawns, slated for July.
“One of my bandmates has joked, pretty accurately, that there might not be another group in the world who has a larger gap between what they have yet to release and what’s available online,” admits Roush, but that’s now about to change.
Joke Oso and Metamorphejawns were recorded and produced by Philadelphia-based engineer Jeff Lucci of Mo Lowda & The Humble in his living room, then remixed, respectively, by Bryce Goggin (Pavement, the Apples in Stereo, Luna, Swans, Antony and the Johnsons) and John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth, Alvvays, Dinosaur Jr. Andrew W.K., The Hold Steady), with Fred Kevorkian (the White Stripes, Sonny Rollins, Iggy Pop, the National, Ryan Adams) mastering the former, and Greg Calbi (Interpol, Kacey Musgraves, Yo La Tengo, David Byrne, The Breeders, The National, The War on Drugs, Arcade Fire) mastering the latter.
Roush calls the 10-song EP Joke Oso “sort of a sequel to 2013’s Letters. Both EPs share two kinds of Ecce Shnak songs, “Harassments” and “Dingleberries,” he explains. “The Harassments are short, jocular, moody pieces; the Dingleberries (pardon the yucky nomenclature) are slightly longer and the most furious of Ecce Shnak’s songs.”
Roush has collaborated with several Brooklyn-based film-productions studios to create five music videos, including the first single, “Dingleberry III, One on Tito VII: Trite Song.” In a short blurb about the piece, Roush states that it is a “tragicomic ‘study’ of psychosis, nascent fascism, and the madness of the modern day.” Regarding the composition of the song itself, he acknowledges a “slightly more-than-half-embarrassing, middle-school-era” influence: “System of a Down! Eek! Don’t judge me! I, like you, have an undying snotty/kind of cool/wise-in-his-own-silly-way teenager in me. Don’t judge us!”
Roush’s tongue-twistingly long song titles include homages to friends who inspired his songs, or even obscure references to riffs by the former Sigur Ros drummer, Orri Páll Dýrason. If you haven’t already gathered, Ecce Shnak offers the astute listener an endless rabbit hole of arcane references, in-jokes and a bit of sincerity in the most unlikely places. Their music ranges from the Weezer-oid of Joke Oso’s “Larry Sleepover Friend,” the 1st-wave-ska of “Spooky, Ruudplaad Homegirl” and the Clash/DEVO/Rancid pop-punk hooks of “Liberty Bell Forever Stamp” to more experimental jawns (Philly dialect for joints/jams) like the fantasia-like art-rock stomp of “Gringodante Bingochampion” or the musique concrete aural collage of the three-part “Three Laughghirmations” (pronounced La-firmations).
Roush took up drums as a youngster, which explains the durability of his rhythmic nature. His rhythmic focus is evident in: the pointillist b-boy quickie, “Harassment IX, Epilogue: Automaton Mailman Jawn;” the frenetic looniness of the 5th Harassment, “18-Second Song” (which, confusingly, clocks in at 30 seconds; I bet he has some funny reason for that untruth. The avid Shnak fan will look around and find it); and the lazy-but-grooving, scattified Bell and Sebastian-inspired strophic pop-song, “Xtina: a Foolish Little Prayer for the Broken-Hearted, the Over-Pious, and Queer Kids worldwide.”
And now, with two new releases about to hit, Ecce Shnak will shnak you, and imminently, through these albums, music videos, and in their live set.
“The ideal Ecce Shnak live experience is one that inspires bodily delight, something like a catharsis and a wish to dance, or at least nod and smile,” explains Roush. “There’s a way down the rabbit hole, but hopefully, a way out, too. We hope to be a Virgil your Dante, dear audience member, but hopefully through an even wilder landscape than the one those two trekked through.”
Listen to David Roush’s music and take a journey from light-hearted to gravely serious, from order to chaos back to order, a meticulously constructed music universe that can only be described in its own terms – Ecce Shnak. Once heard, it will be impossible to unhear it. Ecce Shnak takes its panoply of musical, literary, personal, and other references, and allows us to connect the dots.
Connect with the band:
Official Website | Bandcamp | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Top photo by Averie Cole
