Interview with vocalist/bassist Nicholas McMaster and drummer Lev Weinstein
By Christopher J. Harrington | Photo by Nicholas Palmirotto
Through layers of abstraction, intricate quadrants, and grueling visions, vocalist and bassist Nicholas McMaster and drummer Lev Weinstein of the New York City based avant-garde technical death metal band Geryon combine to forge the darkest and most fearlessly progressive drum-and-bass tandem this side of the Milky Way. As half of the experimental black metal band Krallice, the duo knows a thing or two about reformist extreme metal. Their crushing brand knows no limits, blackening souls through a unique partnership that is as creative as it is menacing. Geryon released their second record, The Wound and the Bow, April 8 on Profound Lore.
What kinds of new paths have been traveled for The Wound and the Bow? How was the process and experience creating this album? There seems to be much more depth and ambience within this record compared to the last.
NM: Thank you for saying so. Honestly, the overall concept is the same for both records: bass and drum compositions with 60 second ambient electronic interludes between each metal song. But there are more songs and therefore more slots for interludes, so maybe they make a stronger impression. And I’d like to think our writing has improved, if only from the experience of making the first record—and making Krallice’s Ygg huur over the same time period. Hopefully, that means more depth. I certainly think my performances were better overall.
One thing that happened on this record is that we explored going off the grid in terms of tempo and feel. I write all the songs in a music notation program and, while we don’t record to click tracks, we end up sticking to the mental tempo grid very faithfully. Lev and I are into through-composed music. That’s just how we work. Unlike a lot of our peers, neither of us does gigs where we perform improvised music. But when I was working with Nick Podgurski on the drums for “Dioscuri,” he had lots of ideas for messing with feel, just playing a phrase and not worrying about the count. That sort of infected my thinking, and in the bass breaks for “Legion” and the title track, I started deliberately warping the tempo and adding little improvs. It felt very freeing. Working with scores is very powerful, because you can compose something you can’t play at the time and then have to improve to be able to conquer it. But it’s also a cage; your thinking adapts to that tempo grid. And music is just what you play, whether it came from a score or an improv. So, even though these are minor parts, just a couple minutes here and there, I felt like the scope of our writing broadened significantly.
LW: For me, I think in most significant ways, the process was quite similar to the first record. I think, if anything, I developed a sort of formulaic method of developing my drum parts from the extremely thorough work Nick would do before bringing me the songs. I would start from having Nick walk me through the song, measure for measure, noting things like time signature changes, as well as where his emphases and accents fell. I would then begin to construct a skeletal drum part based either around heightening those bass accents or playing in the negative space between them. I think I started working in this way on the later batch of material for the first record and developed it further on this one. I think most of the ambiance and depth you suggest are present comes from the bass more than the drums, but if I provide any, it’s in the ultimate subversion of the above formula once past the skeleton phase, as we’d continue to work on the song.
You guys are the rhythm section for Krallice. How does Geryon compare in terms of structure? Do you feel a sense of freedom playing in this band?
NM: Structurally, the music is honestly pretty similar to Krallice; a lot of the same compositional tricks and overall ideas about organization are used. Sometimes, I’ll play a bassline in Krallice that doesn’t sound like much on its own but works against the guitar. That isn’t an option here: I feel a pressure to always keep the song going with what I’m playing, because I’m the only melodic element. In that sense, it’s less free!
LW: I think what Nick said about the two bands being structurally similar is probably largely true. However, given the simplicity of working on a song between two people, I tend to have a much more concrete sense of the intricacies of a Geryon song earlier in the developmental stage of creating a drum part. It’s also worth noting that in terms of creating the structure of a drum part, I’m often not universally responsible for doing so in Krallice. Sometimes, [guitarist] Colin [Marston] has created a pretty thoroughly composed part already, and often, when that’s not the case, there’s still a generally greater democratization of my parts.
You guys where both in Astomatous. The telepathy and familiarity with each other must be pretty tight? Is it a lot of fun being in Geryon?
NM: Yeah, I mean, I think of the two bands as expressions of the same impulse. When I/we were 18/19, we started playing together with the goal of doing death metal, and it was just bass and drums for a while until we found our guitarist, Foy Scalf. When we moved back to N.Y., we wanted to do Astomatous, but never found the right person, and—given that we have a pretty much ideal two-guitarist situation in Krallice—it eventually made sense to have a band to showcase the dynamic solely between us. It does feel very comfortable playing in this band, as it’s really, like, our 15th year of playing music together. Certain kinds of locking in and stuff doesn’t really have to be thought about explicitly as much anymore, which leaves headroom to think about more interesting stuff like manipulations of feel and tempo.
LW: Holy fuck, 15 years? Jesus, we’re old. But yeah, I think we have a pretty good psychic synchronicity at this point. When we’re rolling in songwriting mode in this band, we’re able to produce content at a rate I feel pretty damned pleased with. Being in this band is a total pleasure.
You guys are part of a pretty unique and adventurous collective in New York City—Krallice, Behold The Acrtopus, Dysrhythmia, Batillus—that is almost reminiscent of the early Beats and the foundations they built toward approaches, methods, and art. It must be really cool to be a part of it. Do you guys feed off the other musicians and artists in the area?
NM: Well, first of all, thanks for the somewhat grandiose comparison. There’s a lot of pressure involved in living in N.Y. in general, and that applies to musicians as well. Those bands you mentioned—and many others besides—aren’t slacking creatively or in terms of work ethic, and it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind. I’m a pretty high-strung guy, so I enjoy that motivator. I specifically feel shaped by bands I’ve worked with or just observed closely: I feel I learned about space and “off the grid” rhythmic thinking from my time in Bloody Panda. I’ve been introduced to a lot of new bands and learned new approaches to composition from the whole lot of musicians I’ve worked with. It never ends—and I’m grateful for that.
LW: I used to be entirely dismissive of any sort of notion of a “scene.” More recently, however, I think it’s become undeniable that there’s been something pretty damn cool and possibly special happening here the past few years. I’m still less interested in analyzing that as opposed to putting my head down and playing, but it is exciting, and it’s incredibly pleasing to see so many of my friends creating challenging, interesting and above all, good music.
In Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” Geryon, the four-winged giant, shows up. Does literature and visual art factor into the band’s mindset and the various approaches you use?
NM: It does. The lyrics for the first record, [2013’s Geryon], for example, were all inspired by the poems of Georg Trakl. Geryon is actually originally from Classical Greek literature, specifically the labors of Hercules. Hercules kills him for his cattle, the retrieval of which constitutes one of the labors. In some versions, he’s a giant with three human bodies fused together; in others, he’s a serpent with a human face. Dante took that interpretation to make him a symbol for deceit. I like the idea of Geryon as a loser, a victim who fuels Hercules’ glory, and as the symbol of lying. It’s worth noting Anne Carson’s contemporary novel [“Autobiography of Red” from 19998], in which Hercules and Geryon are gay lovers and the “slaying” of Geryon is Hercules breaking his heart.
Death metal, for me, is not about empowerment. It’s not the soundtrack of victorious warriors descending from Valhalla. It’s about decrepitude; about sickness; the festering, stinking wound on Philoctetes’ foot; the lover who lies to your face; the losers. It’s about those aspects of existence, to exorcise those demons. So Geryon, with his multiple manifestations throughout the ages, is a good conceptual framework in which to make this sort of music.
Nicholas, what kind of setup do you have for your bass? What kind of effects pedals and gear do you use to create your sound? What bass players have you found inspiration from? Are you a fan of legendary jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius?
NM: The bass is in standard 6-string tuning, but with every string down a whole step. The basic approach for the amps is to split the signal three ways for bass, middle, treble. It used to be the case that the treble amp, a fender twin, would have a metal zone—for those not in the know, a very heavy distortion—on it, but I didn’t do that on this album. The main distortion, going to all three amps, is from a Morley volume/distortion pedal—pretty light—though the mids amp is the high gain channel of a 5150 head. Bass is an Ampeg SVT through an Eden 4×10. So, in lay terms, there’s a clearer, less distorted tone to this record than to the self-titled.
For effects, I use boss chorus and delay pedals and an Electro Harmonix POG to get an octave up from the signal I’m putting in—[it] sort of sounds like an organ. There’s reverb at some key points in the album, but that’s just a logic plug-in. There’s also some fun stuff like an MXR Blue Box, which is a super heavy distortion along with an octave below pitch shifter, as well as a plug-in that simulated an old Leslie cabinet—where the speaker would physically rotate in the cabinet, creating a kind of vibrato—but those are just for brief sections.
When I was starting, I studied as much bass music as I could get my hands on, which in terms of heavy music, was not a lot. I have worked with the Bach cello suites for over 10 years; someone early on recommended them as pieces that adapted easily to electric bass. That is probably the biggest single influence on my writing for Geryon. I had a book of James Jamerson’s Motown basslines, which was very important for studying syncopation and overall musicality in bassline writing. I specifically studied the work of Francois Mongrain, the bassist in Martyr, not so much because they were my favorite band, but because they were pretty much the only extreme metal band that published their basslines at that time. So, I definitely have his approach floating in my head, but, actually, Francois’ playing is pretty conventional for the craziness of Martyr’s music overall—lots of root/octave interplay and other relatively standard bass player stuff. Of course, it’s a totally different proposition to be taking that approach against music like Martyr’s, which is what is so cool about it.
Though it might be obvious, I have to say that Colin is an enormous influence on my playing, because when I joined Krallice, I learned all his basslines for the first album—and he continued to write certain basslines, even full songs, up until Ygg Huur. So, I had to absorb parts of his style by necessity, and definitely see myself using his bass approach sometimes.
Jaco is fantastic. Obviously, he set the stage for bass to have a more prominent role and a more soloist vibe, and I did learn “Portrait of Tracy” and sort of had my eyes opened to the possibilities of natural harmonics in solo bass music. But frankly, I’d have to pick Jamerson’s perhaps more conservative, but utterly solid and highly musical style over Jaco’s pyrotechnics.
Lev, where do you find inspiration to play the drums? Does free jazz ever enter the equation?
LW: I certainly have a great deal of respect for free jazz, but frankly, that ethos couldn’t be further from what I’m pulling from in this band. This is microscopically scripted music, with very little room for improvisation. As I alluded to in my answer to the first question, I typically know exactly what I’m playing on each beat of each measure, in a way that doesn’t deviate—I hope!—from run-through to run-through. I draw inspiration, in terms of playing, from many of my peers, as well as the simple joy I find in immersion in a craft, practicing and refining, and constantly trying to improve my abilities and voice.
What’s the dynamic like of being a duo? How does it differ from playing in a larger band? Are ideas more easily thought through?
NM: I think maybe I touched on some of this earlier, but yeah, it’s a little easier to get stuff done both logistically and musically. And that improv or cue based stuff I mentioned earlier is easier to coordinate. The whole thing feels a little more easily deployable: just get us some amps and drums and we’re good. Setting up a Krallice show involves a lot of deliberation over the volume balance between the two guitars and the bass, and it’s easily ruined by either us or a sound person. So, that’s a level of stress that’s just not there, live or in mixing.
LW: In every logistic dimension that Nick discussed, this band is extremely easy. The little things like scheduling a practice are immensely easier between two people than three or four.
Any plans on touring for The Wound and the Bow?
NM: We would certainly like to, but there aren’t concrete plans yet.
Pick up The Wound and the Bow here.
