Wolf Eyes had better get their shit together

MP3: Wolf Eyes - Village Oblivia

At least, that’s what most people might think upon hearing one of their numerous releases. Impatience is probably the most common initial reaction to the wall of noise, filter washes, and sonic detritus that tends to populate the audio landscapes that are produced by the band. And yet, if a critic were to look for a single concept to summarize the band’s aesthetic, patience would be it. It takes time for musicians to elicit and manipulate authentic emotional responses. Sometimes, the patience of a master sadomasochist is required to get through it all. With this in mind, Wolf Eyes are preparing to make pain-dependent lovers of us all with a visit to Hamilton’s famed Underground this week.

Typically, a Wolf Eyes album will set the stage for bursts of sheer audio terror with docile and pleasingly enigmatic mechanical and electronic sounds. You might at times recognize a cymbal, guitar, or saxophone, but do not assume that they are fed to the mix unaltered. Meshes of frequencies play in and out of the sonic field, disturbingly and menacingly encircling the listener like Custer’s Last Stand. Bursts of distortion expand and plume over sparsely-arranged electronic percussion and thumping tape loops, invoking the audio equivalent of the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll: destruction as beauty, and beauty as destruction. On top of everything sits a distorted and anguished human voice which mouths guttural words that are largely unintelligible. All of this sonic information is performed in a loose, quasi-improvisational setting that ensures maximum sonic assault and a minimum of pre-packaged sentimentality. If the artist meeting that you have in your head is early industrialists Throbbing Gristle exchanging words with post-punk godheads Suicide on a DAT processed by laptop terrorist Kevin Drumm (a meeting curated by Sonic Youth, by the way), then you’re getting somewhat close to the mark.

The cacophony began in 1996 with the recorded solo experiments of Nate Young, who was looking for a vehicle to pursue a passion for electronics and sonic catharsis. Fiddling with a variety of homemade and stock-modified instruments, Young realized a means for making his hobby a productive act. Aaron Dilloway began jamming with Young to provide “guitar posturing”, but added tape manipulation, mouth, electronics, and sax upon becoming the group’s second full-time member. When the band relocated back to Michigan from New York in 2000, multi-instrumentalist John Olson was incorporated, and has proved himself to be the most volatile member in a live setting. Olson quite infamously clocked himself in the head with a mace(!) during an opening spot for Sonic Youth; the show did not stop despite the musician’s near-blackout from a gaping head wound.



I asked Olson about their emotionally-charged and uniquely aggressive sound. “The key is using low-fi equipment, shit that’s about to break anyway. Primitive devices allow more of a variety in sound, and you don’t have to worry about your gear when you play. You can just work with it better. It’s more immediate.” He stressed that their walls of noise and punk-antic live presence is not a macho thing, with the antics having everything to do with “a celebration, not a powertrip.” The setup is different on each tour, but always reflects a personalized edge. “We like to strip it all down to the basics. I don’t really like using pedals or whatever, but we make sure to treat our gear like instruments, not electronics. It’s more primal that way.”

Despite the seeming randomness of sound to the uninitiated, Wolf Eyes are anything but a free jazz collective. “We don’t want the stage to be exploration. Ideas emerge from practise, and we go over sections until we find what works together. We don’t go into a jam with a sound in mind though, or somewhere we want to be. It’s not complete freedom – you know how many free-jazz jammers end up sounding the same? Like they think that they are doing something new, but it’s been heard before. We don’t want to be charting a course on a well-known sea.”

Important to this process is the band’s unrelenting attitude to recording, where nearly all of their jams and live shows find themselves on tape. This work ethic has resulted in a massive discography of releases. After over 100 releases on a variety of the indie scene’s most prolific avantgarde labels, including Olson’s American Tapes and Dilloway’s Hanson Records, SubPop has given the band a high degree of media exposure by releasing their 2004 triumph Burned Mind. “It was a drunken joke, actually,” quips Olson. “They were wondering what they should release next, and this guy mentioned us. He got them some records, and they went for it”. When asked about the band’s expectations for their success, Olson was quick to ignore the bullshit of media attention. “It’s all about community, not us as a band or them as a label. It’s nice that more kids will hear us because of SubPop, but we have no contract with them. It was a one-off.”



This art-minded attitude is what maintains the integrity of their music. There is never a point when the band thinks that it has succeeded, but rather the point of the whole process is the challenge of renewal. “Half the jammers today play to the converted, they don’t want to play to empty rooms or to crowds that they know won’t like them. They don’t want to play what they might like, and nobody else.” More importantly, “the underground scene revolves around respect, not personalities but actual output. We don’t really want to be a band that is known by everyone, but it would be nice for a band or a label to be a figurehead for even more activity in the community.”

Listeners will find themselves happily disoriented when Wolf Eyes find themselves with an exceptionally rare Canadian date at The Underground May 19th, with openers Lullabye Arkestra (founded by Do Make Say Think member Justin Smalls) and local noise proliferators OFNSVORNGé. Nothing can be promised as to how the show will aurally progress, but I can be sure of one thing. Wolf Eyes invite all of the sonically dispossessed into their aural landscape; both chin-strokers and hardcore kids alike will weep with delight as their world gets deliciously imploded before their very eyes.