Eugene Robinson (Oxbow) interviews Locrian & Mamiffer for Brooklyn Vegan

Link here.

Thanks for Eugene and Fred!

Locrian &Mamiffer Interview at Blackened Slugs

Link here.

There's also an article about us in the new issue of Rock-a-rolla.
Apparently we're in the one with Corrosion of Conformity on the cover. Check it out!

Horseback Vs. Locrian Interiew at Cvltnation

Today, CVLT Nation is ultra hyped to share with the world our artist to artist interview series, featuring Jenks Miller of Horseback interviewing the all of the members of Locrian. I’m impressed at the depth of this interview – both parties really opened up. I know that Horseback and Locrian have both recently released projects that have reshaped music, so to be able to hear where they are coming from is awesome! After the jump, check out the many different thoughts that go through the minds of Locrian, and the kind of energy went into creating their new album, The Clearing!

More here.

Hour Commutity Canada On Locrian

Here's what they say:

"Locrian began their musical lives making music for themselves. The duo of André Foisy (electric, 12-string, and acoustic guitars, bass, tape loops, effects) and Terence Hannum (synthesizers, vocals, tape loops) first jammed the jam in their town of Chicago back in 2005, but it wasn’t until a few years later that they emerged as Locrian. While the early portion of their career saw them concentrate on the recorded medium, often with a slew of local musicians along for the ride, the pair were eventually lured to the stage to unearth their once-in-a-lifetime sonic thunderstorm. Painfully assembled and acutely constructed, Locrian’s melodies run the gamut of aural tolerances, from hushed minimal electronics to metal moods, interwoven with nods to pop, noise, experimentalism, rock, drone and the avant-garde. The addition of drummer Steven Hess has taken the band to new heights, as heard on this year’s incredible The Crystal World."

More here.

Locrian Interview and Rare Items for Sale

A great new website cvltnation.com just posted a Locrian interview (minus Steven) here.

We added a new "Territories" package to the Land of Decay shop as well as copies of the Locrian/Colossus c50 tape that we found. The recording on the tape is from a live set on WLUW in 2008 (maybe 2007?). Regardless, it's one of the earlier Locrian recordings. Check it out here.

Locrian Video Interview at "The Inarguable"

Link here.

Russian Interview and Review of "The Crystal World"

Link to interview here.
Link to review here.

Locrian Interview at Audiodrome (Italy)

You can read an interview (in Italian) with each of the three Locrian members here.

You can read Audiodrome.it's review of "The Crystal World" here.

Locrian Interview with I Heart Noise Blog

Link here.


Locrian Interview Hosted by I Heart Noise

Pitchfork - "The Out Door" Interviews Locrian

Link here.

Territories, the new album by experimental Chicago duo Locrian, is a kaleidoscope of grays and black, where suffocating sustains and piercing feedback swirl deliberately with crippled blastbeats and mangled shouts. For several years, the music of André Foisy and Terence Hannum-- who first played together in the quartet Unlucky Atlas, with their wives-- consisted largely of dark, mesmeric drones, made menacing by Hannum's lacerated roar and noise textures. This time, they recruited a tell-tale list of collaborators-- Nachtmystium's Blake Judd, Yakuza's Bruce Lamont, Bloodyminded's Mark Solotroff, and Velnias' Andrew Scherer-- from the worlds of electronics and metal to, in effect, darken their darkness.

And so, Territories plays like a study in both instability and intensity: The album's centerpiece, for instance, is called "Procession of Ancestral Brutalism." An 11-minute, feedback-and-static-damaged black metal marathon, it teeters constantly on the brink of auto-destruction, a system bound for sudden failure. That's appropriate for an album that builds so heavily on themes of accidental ruination, where humans force themselves into scenarios that render doomsday outcomes.

Foisy and Hannum both work at Columbia College in Chicago, where they teach at night and assist with student development and long-term university planning by day. Despite the malevolence of their music and, to an extent, the despondency of their world views, they spoke candidly and humorously about their musical development, Locrian's creative process, and the premonition that we've got some troubling days ahead.

MP3:> Locrian: "Ring Road"

MP3:> Locrian: "Procession of Ancestral Brutalism"

Pitchfork: Where did you come to Chicago from?

André Foisy: I lived in Buffalo, but I'm from northern New York state, near the border of Ontario and Quebec-- kind of in the middle of nowhere, the northern Adirondack Mountains. It's about an hour's drive to Montreal.

Terence Hannum: I came from Florida. I moved here pretty much as soon as I finished college.

Pitchfork: I grew up in a rural town in North Carolina, so I always wonder about how people who came from similarly somewhat isolated areas found their way into a musical world bigger than that of their classmates. Modern country, for instance, ruled my school.

TH: For me, it was my dad. Whenever I said I liked something-- he still does this to this day-- my dad would say, "Well, that was done in the 60s," and he will pull out some record-- Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, whatever. I quickly kind of realized that most of the crap in the late 80s that was being fed to my demographic was just that-- crap.

So it was a gateway. You start listening to Black Sabbath, and you start wondering, "What's heavier? What's around now?" You might get into Metallica, and I think it was quick into punk and underground, self-made music that, in the D.C. area, was pretty easily accessible even when I was 10 or 11.

AF: I got interested in different music when I was in my early teens. The strange commonality that Terence and I share [is] we had a shared background in what used to be the hardcore scene. Growing up in northern New York, I didn't love that place-- or everything about that place. I didn't identify with a lot of the people I went to school with or were around those communities. I would try to get out of northern New York as much as possible, so I'd be going to shows in Ottawa or Montreal and seeing bands that Terence and I really bonded over-- like One Eyed God Prophecy and Ire.

TH: [Union of] Uranus...That pathway led into the 90s, where hardcore and the youth culture of that time was still kind of active-- pre-Internet-- and creative. Not everything was handed to them, and people had to generate these interesting networks. Most of those bands that André mentioned were around an area or a record label. You'd get one 7", and you can get the next one and you'd be like, "All, right this is a scene! It kind of has a sound! It's kind of dark…"

Pitchfork: That seems to relate to your discography, which is pretty diffuse-- LPs, CDs, 7"s, 3" CDs, eight-tracks, tapes. Is that a pretty conscious homage to that scene, a direct continuation of it?

TH: Maybe subconsciously. I've always listened to vinyl, and I've always collected vinyl. I don't buy CDs. I've always made tapes. I've never not made tapes. I was looking back, and every year, I've made some kind of tape. I've always made a cassette, since I was 14 or whatever, of my own music.

AF: Growing up, the ultimate thing-- if your band was cool-- was you got to release a CD. That was better than an LP even though, with an LP, the artwork looks cooler. I guess there's just never been this happy medium with me. I don't feel like there's any format that's perfect for anything.

We're finishing a CD right now, and we're playing with a percussionist, Steven Hess. He's got his drums tuned to this frequency that's really, really low, and you can't hear them on certain speakers. That frequency is going to come off perhaps better on CD, even though I like that format a lot less. It tends to have a better bass response than vinyl, even though there are certain nuances on that record that are going to sound a lot better on vinyl.

With MP3s, they're good for some things, but as far as giving the artists control, it's not very good. We're not going to be able to control who hears this new record: People are going to be listening to it on their computer speakers, and they're going to be missing a big section of it because the frequencies won't work on those speakers. Or even on Territories, some frequencies are not going to work on those computer speakers. Some of those are pretty abrasive frequencies, so maybe some people are thankful for that.

Pitchfork: Collaboration is somewhat new for Locrian. At what point did you decide that was where you wanted to head next?

AF: We've been playing together for a few years, and I think we felt comfortable as a duo. That definitely made us more open. In the noise scene, it's like everyone collaborates all the time, and there are a whole lot of collaborative splits, all this stuff. Some of them are great, and some of them are total duds. I think we were really wary of making a dud-- or overdoing it, like where you have a "CD-R leak" of some collaboration that you've done. Not to disparage that, it's just that we really wanted it to make sense and not be just because everybody else was doing it.

Pitchfork: You said "noise scene." On Territories, you play with noise and metal musicians, and I think this record will find laurels and criticisms on both sides. Where do you consider yourself?

AF: This project has always been an avenue where Terence and I explored a bunch of common interests and both of our common interests in music are so-- I think there's definitely a unity to them, but it's also all over the place. For instance, we're both into Krautrock or more experimental stuff-- early-90s death metal.

TH: A lot of our motivations when we started dealt with our frustrations at that time. There was no Kuma's Corner in Chicago [a metal-themed burger joint-- Ed.]. Any metal scene was really small and really marginal.

AF: I think we both felt there was this provinciality to the music scenes we were around-- that's still prevalent. You think about, I don't know, Earache. Earache used to be a record label that would put out some really challenging stuff, and then they kind of stopped.

TH: Not just them, specifically. When you think of someone like Earache, or Relapse, you think, "Wow, that record, when I was a teenager, was really challenging." You look back, and it still holds up as an intense record with its subject matter, its speed, its aggressiveness, or whatever. And then you kind of listen to what they're doing now, and it's like, "What are they doing?"

There was this momentum, this creativity, this kind of feeling that you're pushing boundaries. In a similar way, we looked at Chicago and the metal thing, and maybe that's why we gravitated to people like Blake and Bruce and people we felt were trying to challenge that scene. Nachtmystium's Instinct: Decay-- I still put that record on. I think it's brilliant. I think the guitar playing's really amazing, really dense. It kind of begins to transcend that black metal tag in a positive way. Likewise, Bruce, with Yakuza.

That was a reaction that we had, that it was a small enough scene and there weren't enough people really pushing things. Now I think the metal scene is a lot healthier and the same thing with the noise scene. It was much more marginalized, pre-Wolf Eyes on Sub Pop. I think kind of post-Wolf Eyes on Sub Pop, it's gotten really big. Everyone has a band and a tape label, and now this healthy process has happened where some really solid musicians are coming out and are doing really interesting things with noise and power electronics and experimental music.

AF: If you have people from the metal audience who are picking up this record, I hope they're listening to the non-black metal tracks. I hope they are kind of taken aback. We have these more direct parts on this record, but both of us are like, "We should make people wait to get to those direct parts, really kind of suffer." If anyone's picking up this record because they read that Blake from Nachtmystium's on it, they're going to have to wait through some…

TH: Some ambient stuff. I think there will still be some middle passages, I think, that can act as some kind of a buffer, a purgatory or whatever. I'm really proud of those passages.

Pitchfork: That's a concept I've always loved-- putting a litmus test up front, to see who's really into the record for the long haul. What's the downside of that, though?

TH: People are going to like what they like. There's plenty of white guys playing guitars and making pop music that you can listen to. When we play live, there's a lot of other things we have to think about and consider. A lot of times, when we play live, we start out pretty low key because we have to build up a lot of stuff normally, especially if we're playing just the two of us. We have to build up a lot of loops and brin g in other instruments.

Our key phrase to each other is "take our time." We like to take our time, especially with a live set, and we spent two years or so before we went into the studio to record something. Most of our recordings from before then were from live or radio shows. Pacing and timing were really important. Whether to draw someone in, like a story or narrative of some kind, I think that's a common thing in our releases. Maybe that would give people more patience.

Pitchfork: The song titles on Territories seem very deliberate, maybe even didactic, in relating to structures-- barrows, roads, columns-- and decay. Are song titles a convenient way for experimental acts to convey a message?

TH: They're all kind of based off of architectural descriptions and this kind of bleak world. There was this architectural movement, the New Brutalism movement, and that was a really big influence, all of their ideas. The whole first song came from this screed from the 19th century, in England, about industrialization. I thought it was really poetic when you kind of edited it down-- things hadn't changed that much. I really doubt most progress. I think that's really behind a lot of the lyrical content of the record, this doubt of this direction. Both André and I were kind of raised around hardcore music that felt that they had all the answers and kind of whacked you over the head all the time with…

Pitchfork: A message?

TH: How to fix your life and judge everybody else's lives and all that great stuff. I think we reacted to that. Maybe it made us more cautious about some kind of stance or something like that. That's what U2's for.

AF: Yeah, and all those ranting about ways to change your life and fix the world. They're like, "Hey, I'm going to go vegan, and that's going to make the world better!"

Pitchfork: You could argue it's the same, in a way, as religion. It's something that makes you think that tomorrow will be better, that there is progress.

AF: It's just that we live in a very disturbing world. The fact that we're putting out vinyl records that are extremely pollutive to the environment, that's a contradiction I think about when we release records. I think, "Oh, we're causing some pollution, but at least it's limited to an extent." We're both trying to grapple with maybe that hardcore scene we were part of that gave us the answers but disturbed us and made us more critical of things, maybe more cynical. Maybe part of our output is finding a balance in that. Maybe it's our way of trying to deal with that cynicism.

TH: I'm also totally comfortable with the fact that the human race will cease to exist at some point, probably because of its terrible decisions. I'm okay with that now. And I don't really have much hope that we're going to turn things around in some way. Our tendencies to self-correct, we've kind of marked ourselves out of any way that we're actually going to right that course. The idea that we can is really funny to me, that we have any say in how this planet functions. We can certainly affect it, but it was here before we were here, and it'll be here after we're here. It'll regenerate in some way. I know it's fatalism. I don't really have much hope for humanity, I guess. Sorry. -- Grayson Currin

Locrian Interview w/ Scott McKeating (Foxy Digitalis)

Thanks to Scott McKeating for the great questions.

There's a link to the interview here.
-----------------------------
Locrian
by Scott McKeating

Chicago’s Locrian have just dropped their first vinyl LP, “Territories”, and it’s a split release across 4 excellent labels – any of which alone would be a strong enough indicator of the records quality. With guest appearances from Andrew Scherer (Velnias), Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), and Blake Judd (Nachtmystium), this moves away from their drone source and into a more black metallicised and noisier ‘territory’.


Can you sum up Locrian with a current genre tag for the real lazy bastards out there?
Terence: I call it obsidian-gaze.


You’ve got links to Bloodyminded, but where they come across as in extremis you guys seem a little more mysterious?
André: We’ve been friends with Mark Solotroff for just about as long as we’ve been playing together. I guess we initially played with Bloodyminded and then we played on some of Mark's shows. He’s been really supportive of us and we’re really big fans of the stuff that he does now and the stuff he did before we were friends with him.

Terence: That is good that it is mysterious, even if slightly. Good.


What’s your relationship with black metal as ...as a style?
André: I generally like black metal as a style a lot of the time (when it's done well), but I can’t think of anyone that we’re directly influenced by. I grew up in northern NY state, on the boarder with Quebec and a lot of the music that influenced me in my development was hardcore music that bore a lot of similarities to black metal, though I’m not sure that the music that I listened to at the time evolved in response to black metal. I tend to think that this music developed in parallel evolution to the black metal that was coming out of Europe at the time rather than from any direct black metal influence.

Generally though, I don’t listen to much black metal. As with any style, there are people that do it well and people who don't. I like groups that are doing really creative stuff with the genre, like Menace Ruine, but at the same time there are some groups that are doing things musically that I'm interested in, but that I can't listen to because I can't really get into the message behind it.

Terence: I do, I would definitely say that first Abruptum was a pretty big epiphany for me, or how intense Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse is with the keyboards.


...as collectors?
André: I really don't own much black metal. I try to keep my belongings to a minimum so I really try to keep my music collection to a minimum.

Terence: I have really enjoyed the new Ruins of Beverast, Skagos and other things.

André: If you mean black metal releases as objects, then I think that it's interesting what some black metal bands are doing lately in order to remain 'kvlt' and different from more wider known black metal bands. In a lot of black metal, there's this emphasis on individuality, anonymity, and not-being-like-everyone-else. I'm interesting in how these ideas come across in different black metal releases. There are a few current black metal bands that I'm familiar with that only release music on tapes. The reason behind this, I think, is to reinforce this idea of the inaccessibility of their music.


...as an ideology?
Terence: We're not satanists, or even trying to push any of those cliched buttons. I would say sonically we're very negative and we seek to generate a lot of that blackened aura around what we do. There are a lot of black metal bands who do that well, but there are also a lot of 'kosmiche' bands who can do that as well.

André: These are big questions and ones that I could write extensively about. I like a lot of themes that pop up in some black metal. I don't know if there's any one ideology. You have all of these flows between different scenes, perhaps you could call these ideoscapes. Some of the ideoscapes I'm interested in: an emphasis/worship of nature; prophecies of the future; and the bleak outlook of the world that's typical of a lot of black metal.

I'm not really interested in black metal bands that utilize satanic themes since it seems pointless to me to write another song about satanism, paganism, or religion. I just find those topics to be really overemphasized in metal in general although I'm sure that these themes are important to some people, not me though. On the other hand, I'm not interested in artists who incorporate ideas about race or nationalism into their music. For instance, I liked Akitsa musically until I read an interview with them and found out about their Quebecois nationalist stance. It would be a longer conversation if we wanted to analyze why nationalism and race pop up so much in black metal, and the noise scene.

I'm also really bored with the fetishization of Norwegian black metal, specifically the hate crimes that were related to this scene in the 1980s. I think that all of the scholars, journalists, and fans have really exoticized the black metal culture in that area which has added to misunderstading of the issues fueling the violence of that era.
Terence: I think having been involved in such politically polemic scenes with hardcore I just because so skeptical of bands whose definition is around some certain ideology, it all reminds me of either a youth group or horrible young republicans gathering, where like you're supposed to forgive the unoriginality and horrid logic because of a supposed shared ideal.

André: Black metal to me is also interesting as an identity. It was great playing with Horna recently because we got to share a dressing room with them. Not that we usually get a dressing room, but they were these pretty normal metal dudes until about an hour before they played and they asked us to leave the dressing room. The venue put all the free beer for the bands in the dressing room and all the bands got sick of waiting for the beer so I politely asked them if I could come in the dressing room on the premise that I closed my eyes. So I ran in there and grabbed a bunch of beer, but the entire time I had my hands over my eyes with my fingers split so that I could see what was going on which was interesting: all these kind of macho dudes putting on each other's corpse pant. Apparently, they got really mad at some of the other band members who were supposed to be able to use the dressing room and it essentially came down to the fact that there's this liminal stage between when someone in a black metal band is a normal dude and when they are their alter-ego (not that all black metal bands have this alter-ego). It was really embarrassing for these dudes to show themselves to anyone in their liminal stage because of its inherent ambiguities: each person isn't really in their normal state, but they're not in their full corpse paint state either.

The promoters gave us food for that show too, so it was interesting to watch these dudes in corpse paint eating Doritos afterward.One of our friends got some cool secret pictures of those dudes doing that.

Also, it's interesting how far some of these black metal bands go in order to repulse people. Back to the Horna show we played, Horna and another band utilized rotting pig heads as part of their performance. These guys weren't getting a new pig head every night of the tour, they just put the rotting head in a garbage bag and left with it afterwards. I can't imagine having to ride in a van for two weeks with the same rotting pig head. I mean, some of these guys really make this idea of repulsion a part of their identity and they have to suffer for it.Of course, I'm just using Horna as an example, since there are other bands out there that are very similar.


Do you work on a release with a particular idea/concept in mind? Do the titles reflect what you were working towards or what you give birth to?
André: I think it’s different at different times.

In general though, we work really intuitively so it's usually a surprise what will come out.


Did Territories come together by accident in increments or was it something you were looking to work on as a project?
André: After we recorded Drenched Lands in July 2007, we started collaborating with Andrew Scherer quite frequently in our live performances—probably from September 2008 until early 2009. Unlike many noise musicians, we really haven’t collaborated with anyone else until we started working with Andrew from Velnias on drums. When we recorded “Territories” we had been performing with Andrew for a few months. We knew we wanted to record something with him and we had some other people that we wanted to collaborate with. We essentially had about two song ideas before we recorded that album.

We’d been fans of Mark’s work in his multiple projects and we knew we wanted to bring him into the studio for a collaboration. We essentially just recorded as much as we could for about two days and at the end we were able to convince our friend Bruce Lamont to come in to do some saxophone stuff and Blake came in at the end to record some guitar parts. For a while we weren’t sure that we were going to release it because it was really hell to record. We recorded it in January 2009 and we left with some rough mixes, but the mixes sounded so fucked up that we just wanted to scrap the sessions. It was probably in April or May that we finally got around to mixing this album and we ended up being pretty happy with it at the end.


Most of the stuff on the album is entirely improvised. When we recorded it we figured that we would just pick through later and put together like puzzle pieces.
Terence: In the end it really came together and had a certain flow from the harsh beginnings through ambient passages toward the more metal sections. It felt a lot like King Crimson's Islands to us so we wanted to pay homage to their massive influence over us through the title and some of the artwork, ours being more earth bound and decay laden of course.

-- Scott McKeating (7 April, 2010)

Locrian "Drenched Lands" Review from Meridian 9 Zine

Link here.

There's also an interview w/ Locrian inside as well as a track from "Drenched Lands" on the zine sampler.



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Locrian Discuss "Territories" in Zero Tolerance Issue 34

Purchase magazine here.

Locrian Interview w/ Special Interests

Here's the first page of a recent interview for Special Interests Magazine.

New Locrian Interivew at Transmission

Locrian interview in the first issue of Transmission, a beautifully produced on-line publication from Portugal.

The issue is free too.

Also interviews with Black Sun, P.H.O.B.O.S., Wolfskin, Steel Hook Prostheses, and Sparagmos.



Thanks to André at Transmission for doing such a nice job on this.