That was an interesting evening, I’ve sent to Ed an interview with Booze Lords three hours ago, and look who’s coming here… Tim of Boneworm tells a story of psychedelic magic tricks wrapped in distorted tunes of doom; Portland is a very, very strange place indeed! Maybe there are bones of gods of doom hidden under Oregon’s mountains? Go and ask Uta Plotin from Witch Mountain! But read this interview before you go, it’s worth of your time my comrade in doom!
Salute Tim! How are you man? What’s new can you tell us about Boneworm?
[Tim]: I am doing excellent, thanks for asking. As for Boneworm, we are pretty new as a band. We have been playing some local shows, and working on new material, and generally just having a fucking blast.
Boneworm plays “psychedelic doom” and I see no reason to dispute this statement. Guitarist of Hollies (Gram Nash) told that those who play psychedelic stuff try to recreate an LSD-session without using drugs in itself. What is about you? I never did taste that stuff, so I’m not able to do any proper conclusion but admit that you sound hypnotic, crushing and bloody throbbing.
[Tim]: The term psychedelic doom to me just means doom with some psychedelic elements. Other writers have used this term to describe Boneworm, and it sounds like a good description to me. Psychedelic can mean different things in music, there is the psyche rock movement, The Black Angels come to mind, as well as heavier bands like Dead Meadow, both I consider psychedelic. To me in music, psychedelic means incorporating elements, in particular, sound samples and effects, that are for lack of a better term, strange, different from what you would typically think of with a guitar and bass plugged straight in to an amp or played acoustically. I think use of delay and reverb in particular, but also musically breaking away from all the instruments in alignment, playing in lock step, and also experimentation outside of the typical “rules” of music. I am reminded of one of my favorite Pink Floyd recordings, the Live in Montreux 1971, during the middle of Cymbaline, Roger Waters is playing back these foot step samples at a live show, in fucking 1971! Pushing the boundaries of what people normally do sonically, particularly with swirling sounds, is what psychedelic is to me. It is kinda of funny though, somewhat like the old supreme court ruling on porn, I know it when I hear it!
Also Gram was telling that playing such music is an effort to open a mind crossing all borders. What kind of effect your own music inflict upon you?
[Tim]: When we get a song together, and we are nailing it as a band, I get that shiver up the spin, this is awesome, musicgasm. The recorded material usually burns me out by the time the finished product is ready. We spent so much time writing, rehearsing, recording, mixing, and mastering the songs, that by the time they were finished, I needed a break from the recordings. Not the songs mind you, as we have been regularly performing the material from the ST album, but from the recordings themselves. I guess the effect our music has on me just depends on how I am feeling at the time I am listening to it, my frame of reference. Obviously the recording is a fixed point in time, a sound photograph if you will, it is the listener that changes over time. I have had experiences were seeing a band or hearing a band has opened my mind to elements of music that before have really turned me off. But people change over time, and a band’s music can sometimes open up a listeners mind and change their perspective. I can’t say that is what Boneworm is setting out to do, but if we can open up something new musically in listeners’ minds, then that would be a great achievement.
[Tim]: For me, one of the most important elements is playing slow and minimal. Every band I have been in, I have always felt the music get rushed and filled with lots of playing. I have always ended up accepting the tempo being faster, mostly because I don’t want to be always telling people to play slower. It gets old when you are wanting your band to do something different than the way it comes out naturally, and having to constantly harp on that. With Boneworm, Chaz would start playing even slower than I intended, and that was great for me. So many bands that claim to be doom don’t play slow and minimalist, and I think that is what sets true doom apart from the bands that are hopping on the doom bandwagon and calling what they do doom, because there does seem to be a resurgence in Portland anyway in doom, the least loved of all the metal sub genres. If your playing blazing riffs all the time, every song, your not a doom band. The other elements are organic playing and sounds. We reject click tracks, and we try to capture our live sound on record. We also play loud, not for the sake of being loud, but because it sounds right. You can’t make it sound right without real speakers moving the air, preferably driven by a quality tube amp!
By the way often first information which we receive about musical album is coming from it’s art-work, and an art-work of your Boneworm self-titled Ep just daze me! How did you come to such elegant solution with such simple yet intriguing graphics?
[Tim] Chaz is a graphic designer by trade, and we are lucky enough that he somehow musters the energy and enthusiasm to handle our artwork as well. He does great work.
[Chaz] Thanks for the art compliment. We’ve been getting mixed reviews on the cover. It was just a way to keep it simple yet be memorable and convey something bigger like “this wizard looks creepy”.
Oh, hello Chaz! :-) It’s a normal fact that art-works of many metal and rock bands bear some old clichés and therefore they work not so effective as they could, but I would like to ask you about your favorite doom or psychedelic covers – will you name some?
[Tim]: I tend to like hand drawn and painted art work on album covers. Intricate design that just look cool come to mind. While not doom per say, Jon Baizley’s art work for Baroness is really great. Baroness’s Red Album is so cool. I also like the artwork from Earth’s Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light. Actual doom bands, Conan Monnos is a really cool cover. Howl’s bloodline album, Thorun’s Chorus of Giants, Major Kong’s Orogenesis, White Orange’s self titled has a cover I like a lot. I agree that there is a lot of cliche in doom metal covers, but like with music, taste in visual art is subjective. Suum cuique.
Your Ep is a self-released and I see how skillfully and wittily it is decorated, for example that list with an old-school picture of “a score of men began pumping bullets at the space-bug”. That’s so fresh and cool, so I have to ask you about whole idea of album’s booklet!
[Chaz] Cool. Thanks again for the compliment. The lyrics sheets were a last minute thing I through together. I’m always searching for artwork for inspiration when making posters for upcoming gigs. The lyric sheet pics are just some items I found along the way.
A structure of Boneworm’s songs look simple from a first glance, yet this simplicity is effective, what kind of ways to development do you see for the band? Are you going to safe a core of your music the same or do you want to look beyond horizon of psychedelic doom genre?
[Tim]: Oh, we are all over the map in that we aren’t trying to stick to a formula or a narrow focus. We write music organically, and sometimes some songs come out sounding like, say psychedelic doom. Other songs have elements of sludge. Still others are more traditional doom. We don’t worry much about what labels will be attached to a song as we write them, it is more whether we all three like what we have come up with. We will always be a doom band primarily, but some of the newer stuff mixes in other elements that you don’t hear on the self titled. Our latest song I am at a loss for words as to what to call it, beyond fucking awesome. I can’t wait for people to hear the new stuff. We are a hard band to pin down as there are not many bands that are doing what we do, at least locally. Sure, we share some elements during various passages with other bands, but we mix things together in a way that I feel is unique. Even when reviews have compared us to other bands, I go listen to those bands again, listening for similarities, and often I find myself thinking, “well sure, that is similar to this passage(or song) here, but nothing like this passage (or song) right after.” I don’t know where that leaves Boneworm. It isn’t the safe path of writing pop music that doesn’t challenge the listener but has a wide audience.
I’ve found it onto your bandcamp profile, very clever… It’s said that you not only play guitars “but shoulder the burden of knowing exactly how everyone going to die”, Dave does play bass and he is like “a lich or a Roman emperor, only seems to be growing more powerful with age”. And Chaz, your drummer, he “hangs out with your Camaro-driving uncle”. Therefore I need to ask about the weekend they drove to Reno!
[Tim]: Chaz will be happy to detail the weekend in Reno. As for your death, I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
[Chaz] It all started when I was at Al’s Used Magic Shop and Hot Dogs over there on Main. Trading-in what was left of my old act after the night before’s terrible accident. Teresa, my part-time assistant and full-time girlfriend, was not supposed to arrive at the club until 7:30pm. She was early and ruined my illusion of making-out with Francene. “How much you give me for all this here, Al?”.....You know what? Let’s just say Reno is not the same now as it was back then. We’ll leave it at that.
[Tim]: Uta certainly has her finger on the pulse of the music scene here in town, I would not dispute her assertions. The music scene in Portland is gigantic and thriving. There are more bands in town than you would think possible. It is difficult to find an available practice space that is not completely full, let alone one that is decent. I pay a lot of attention to what is going on in music in Portland, and even I am surprised sometimes when I discover awesome local bands that are right under my nose, somehow escaping my detection. Living in Portland we are very lucky to have a diverse and thriving music scene, including a sizable metal scene. Portland itself does tend to attract a certain type of person, people that enjoy easy access to the outdoors, the dark woods, the waterfalls, the mountain peaks, as well as movies, art, food, and breweries that Portland has to offer. Yet Portland does not feel like a big city. While less true today than it was 12 years ago when I moved here, Portland is still a place where you can live relatively cheaply and that allows people to pursue their art full time. On the other side, you can have a 9-5 job and not spend 3-4 hours commuting like in other larger cities, so it affords working folk time to pursue their passions. That being said most of the music that gets attention in Portland is indie and folk focused, but there is so much more than that here.
Portland also is a special place in America. Possibly one of the most politically liberal cities you could find. Many younger people have moved here from elsewhere to find that place where they fit in, where rednecks don’t throw full beer cans at you when you ride your bike, were fluoridation and a sales tax are like poison, and local food and recycling are the norm. The Portlandia TV shows pokes fun and exaggerates, but many of those skits I find funny because they are based on reality. You put all these things together, and you get the kind of people here that want what Portland has to offer. The breadth and depth just grows out of the numbers, the conditions are right for bringing people here that want to make music. Thank you for taking an interest in Boneworm.
Interview By Aleks E
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