Poetry and Power Electronics: BLOODYMINDED Discuss Their New Album

In a time where interest in heavy music seems to have grown larger than ever and has become part of mainstream-ish cultural discourse to the point that for a while it seemed black metal (by way of gifs, YouTube videos, and NY Times articles) was a staunch contender eclipsed only by kittens, porn, and Justin Bieber in achieving Total Internet Domination, noise and power electronics have remained on the fringes of underground music since they first emerged several decades ago; true outsiders among outsiders, and extreme by the standards of many music extremists.

Take tonight for example, where at Cobra Lounge in Chicago, BLOODYMINDED is arguably the most caustic, disturbing band on a bill where depraved sludgelords EYEHATEGOD are headlining. The band's set of blasting analog synth, combative, gang-style vocals screamed through multiple microphones per member and obscured only by near-deafening feedback and distortion, and uncomfortably vivid lyrical imagery in songs with titles like, "Visiting An Ex-Girlfriend In The Hospital - AIDS Ward," demands a visceral reaction from its audience—even if that reaction starts as the deer-caught-in-headlights variety.

At the helm of BLOODYMINDED is Mark Solotroff, who founded the group in 1995 following the disbanding of his influential, pioneering industrial band, Intrinsic Action. Along with Solotroff, the band includes Xavier Laradji, James Moy, Isidro Reyes, Pieter Schoolwerth, and new recruit Will Lindsay (Indian guitarist and former member of Nachtmystium, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Middian). To say the list of album credits and other noteworthy artistic endeavors attributed to these guys is "long" is like saying "China has a large population." It's no lie, but it hardly depicts the magnitude of the subject matter. For his part, in addition to BLOODYMINDED, Solotroff currently fronts Anatomy of Habit, collaborates with Reyes in dark ambient band, The Fortieth Day, and performs with Wreckmeister Harmonies, among other musical projects. He also runs Bloodlust! Records, the noise/metal label he started in 1994.

This month, BLOODYMINDED will release Within the Walls, its fifth studio LP and first full-length in seven years. The album, which was recorded with Chicago metal producer Sanford Parker, finds the band stepping away from some of the raw brutality that characterized its 2005 album, Gift Givers, and its even more scathing 2006 album, Magnetism, into an atmospheric force that attacks more like a tidal wave than a machine gun (my "atmospheric" scale under heavy electronics terms), with evocative, picture-painting vocals layered in both English and Spanish.

Solotroff and I met up later on at Cobra Lounge and spoke about BLOODYMINDED's latest musical direction, how the band continues to create as a unit while its members reside in several cities from Chicago to Toulouse, France, and the continuously polarizing nature of power electronics.

Stream "Disintegration" from Within the Walls below…

Noisey: I remember you telling me you thought BLOODYMINDED might be an unusual fit on a bill with EYEHATEGOD, but it's not really that weird considering you've been working with some of those guys on projects for years. Can you tell me a little about how long you've been working together and about some of the projects?
Mark Solotroff: I've known Mike [Williams] since I lived in New York in the mid-90s. He and I both wrote for Metal Maniacs. We've always stayed in touch, and about seven years ago when we were working on our album, Gift Givers, we had come up with a song, and it just kind of clicked to have him collaborate with us on vocals. The song was "Ten Suicides," and it took on kind of a life of its own. We recorded the album version, then about 3-4 years ago we did a remix he used on a 7" that he had coming out on Chrome Peeler Records. Then the last time EYEHATEGOD came through town, about three years ago, we did a collaboration. It was Mike and Joey [LaCaze], and Ryan McKern who Mike has been recording with and I had put out a CD by, and James, Isidro, and I. We did a live show at Reckless Records and just focused on "Ten Suicides," in extended twenty-minute version. We're going to release a vinyl version of that. Reckless was filled. It was kind of an amazing one-off, cool thing. So Mike and I are always in touch, so it was great to be asked to do this show. At the end of the month we're going to open for Corrections House, which is another thing Mike is working on.

The last time we did an interview [in 2011], you had just finished recording Within the Walls. Can you tell me a little about what's been happening since then, and how you think the songs have held up since you recorded them?
I guess we were in no rush to get this record out. I wish it had come out sooner. It took a while to get it mastered and get the artwork done. I couldn't be happier with how it sounds. How have the songs held up? Great! It's a very different record for us, so sonically, there are going to be very familiar things for people that know our music, but I've already had people comment on the lyrics and how they're not confrontational in the same way. It's definitely taken a different turn after the last couple of records, particularly the last record, Magnetism, which was a super personal record for me. This is definitely a more poetic record. I don't know how that's going to come off when people hear it, but Isidro and I co-wrote the lyrics. They're bilingual in English and Spanish, and they are very pretty lyrics, in a way. It's definitely a different approach for us.

How much of the lyrical content is personal, and how much of it is looking at things in a greater sense?
It's still very personal, but I didn't want to write lyrics in the same way I had, or approach it the same was as with Magnetism. Separately from BLOODYMINDED, for the last six years or so, Isidro and I have worked together on another band called The Fortieth Day, which is really steeped in plague imagery and medieval imagery, the name of the band coming from the 40-day quarantine period people would go through. We were writing Within the Walls around the time we were launching this thing, and we didn't know where either thing was going to go.

There's a lot of imagery of being in a cell and watching the world outside.
Yes, like if you were locked into your home during the quarantine period, but there is still a very literal aspect to it. There are definitely still references to friends we've lost and to some pretty different times, but I didn't want it to be as literal as it had been before.

To me, Magnetism is just so stark and in-your-face. Sometimes when you're living through something awful, it can help to see your life as a series of news clips or something.
At that time, I had to write it that way. I had to get it out of my system and put that chapter behind. Gift Givers has some very personal stuff there as well, things about people I had been close with. Certainly, there were some fictional twists to it, but it was a period of a couple of years of getting a lot of those images out of my head. This does some of the same things, but it's a different world right now. We wrote some of these lyrics a long time ago, but to sing some of them now and listening to the record a lot as we're getting ready to put it out, because it's not written in that same, first-person style, and because we took some poetic license with it, it doesn't feel as cloyingly personal, and it's kind of nice to have some distance to it.

I noticed there are some more melodic parts to it.
Yes, well, especially the last song, the Locrian song ["Inverted Ruins"], which I sang on their Territories record. It was shortly after we had written this album, and it seemed like it really fit. We started playing around with it a bit, and when we were in the studio with Sanford, I asked him to play synths on it. We tried to be true to the song. Isidro and I have recorded some tracks that are more melodic for Wierd Records in New York that are more melodic in a broken-down way. We thought, "Why not?" We wanted to take another step and evolve a little with the record. There's plenty of full-on harsh feedback.

I liked the diversity. Listening to it is more like waves, where the last one was more like…
One after another. Yeah, so this needed to be different. We had our friend David Reed, who I've toured with in Nightmares and put out records by under his Envenomist name, do that long intro, and Blake [Edwards], who used to be in Anatomy of Habit, do some metal scraping sounds on there, and then Isidro and I did some BLOODYMINDED shows in Mexico City and I did some recordings out on the streets and on the subway and incorporated some of those sounds on there.

Photo: Carmelo Espanola

There are recordings from a number of locations on the record. Are those also field recordings?
The field recordings on this record are all from Mexico City, but there are bits of shows mixed into this new record. A New York show, and then we played a couple of crazy shows out in Boston, so there's a little that's mixed in. I think a London show… At the beginning and the ends, you'll hear these distorted screams and clapping. It's not so much us playing as it is the crowd reacting, which is such an important part of our shows.

So, when you said listening back gives you a totally different feeling, it's because you've mixed in these really good moments with everything else?
Yes, these are important memories. Knowing there are field recordings from Mexico City is great. Mexico City is a really important place to me because of my wife and because of Isidro.

With the members living very different lives and in some very different places, how to you all come together to do a record like this?
We're able to do it because we're friends. The amazing thing about BLOODYMINDED is that these are some of my closest friends in the world, so we make the time. Xavier flies in from France, and when James and I were in England, he was able to meet us and and do some recordings. Pieter in New York and I are back and forth to see each other all the time. James is up in Milwaukee. We make the time because we're friends and we want to hang out with each other anyway. It's a very different approach to a band because first and foremost we just like hanging out and spending time with each other. These guys are incredible because they make an effort. I'll have an idea and they support me and do what it takes to make the record.

Did everyone come into the studio at the same time?
Isidro, James, and I did all of the work with Sanford, and we took in recordings from Pieter and Xavier. Sometimes we're all able to be there, sometimes we're not.

Are the overarching themes to the record mostly your vision, or does everyone contribute?
This record is predominantly Isidro and my vision. Other records are more of group collaboration. Magnetism was just a thing I personally had to get out of my system and they indulged me in that, which was great. This was a nice opportunity to work with Isidro to really pull the songs together, then everyone kind of dove in with ideas for sounds, and we extended that out to David Reed, and Blake, and Sanford.

Can you tell me a little more about your decision to do a bilingual record. You guys are known for using multiple microphones and I was wondering if there was a thread between that and including multiple languages.
Two records previously, Gift Givers, Xavier contributed more French language. It was the first record Isidro really recorded [with BLOODYMINDED]. It's kind of a combination of different sounds of voices. For instance, on this record, most of the vocals are me, Isidro, and James. We have very different styles and our voices are in different ranges, and I love the additional element of another language in there. I loved it on Gift Givers, with French in there, but this time since it was Isidro and I writing the lyrics, it seemed appropriate to just do Spanish and English. We wrote every song together. I've typically written everything, and then there was some contribution from other people, but this was the most true collaboration we've done and I wanted to make sure Isidro was really represented. James is on every song with these really distorted, feedback-y vocals too. It's a great blend.

Lyrics are very important to you, and you have very specific ideas you're trying to convey. What is the power for you in presenting that in multiple voices and multiple languages?
Part of it is I love the way it sounds. I think back to old grindcore records, Extreme Noise Terror or something where there are multiple voices. Then Crass, and really early anarcho-punk had a big impression on me. I love that assault of vocals. Then hearing it in a different language, if you don't know the language you hear the voice even more than the vocals at that point. I think it's just really powerful to hear this team of vocals coming at you. It's what I hear when I'm creating these records, so it has to happen. The same way that when I paint or draw and I have the image of the finished work in front of me, I hear these records ahead of time, so I hear them with Isidro's voice or James'.

So you kind of know because they're essentially different instruments in your band.
That's a great way to put it. For BLOODYMINDED, voices are absolutely on equal footing, if not greater than the synths. The synths are very important and the feedback is very important, but the power of the vocals is an aesthetic, and a delivery vehicle for the lyrics. And yes, lyrics are really important, and having them heard as opposed to most power-electronics bands and metal bands where you can't really make out the words.

How did you decide to bring Will Lindsay into the band full time?
Like I said, BLOODYMINDED is about friends. Will and I hang out a lot. He got drafted into Anatomy of Habit. [BLOODYMINDED] played a show last May and I asked if he wanted to play with us. He's really into synths and this type of music, so he was totally into playing the show. It sort of came up one day, "Am I in the band yet?" "You're in the band."

He and I had worked on synth parts for the new Indian record, and he really took the lead on that and kind of brought me in. I had already played live with those guys, and I like those guys. I love Indian. It's part of this city where everybody is doing everything together. Will has become a great friend and we share a lot of interests. He got sucked into the machine like Isidro in the past, and James in the past, like Pieter in the past. It's just the way it happens. I'm really pleased--the sound is really rich, and he gets along with everybody.

The noise scene in Chicago and elsewhere is really thriving right now, but even watching the crowd tonight, it still seems on the outside. It's interesting because what some of what used to be outsider genres like drone or black metal have found more acceptance, and genres like noise and power-electronics are so extreme that many extreme music fans are kind of freaked out by it. It seems like one of the last genres that can still freak people out.
It'll never…it's gotten close. Certain bands like Wolf Eyes or Prurient have made it a little closer. Wolf Eyes has a drum machine so there's a beat you can latch onto, and Prurient has added rhythms, and certain solo works that Dominick [Fernow] is doing embrace a minimalist industrial techno thing.

In pure power-electronics, there's no rhythm that people can latch onto. The subject matter is so off-putting for more people. People just don't know what to make of it because they can't find a point of entry to say, "I love that beat," or "I love the way the guitar sounds," or whatever. There's nothing there for someone who's not aware of it. At the same time, I was sitting at the merch booth tonight and people were coming up to me, "I've never seen you guys before. I've never seen anything like it. I've got to grab your new CD." Just when you think, "Wow, that really bummed a lot of people out,"… people have been coming up to us all night.

You're in so many different types of bands. Is it pretty cool for you that this group is still so polarizing?
We get less and less opportunities to play these kinds of shows, really, because we're just not playing as often. James and I were saying that the last time we did anything like this was five years ago when we played with Dropdead from Providence. It was a packed show at Subterranean, and people were really antagonistic. That was back in our leather phase and people were screaming at Dropdead, who are known vegans, "Why are you playing with these guys?" We love those guys and they've been so supportive of us every time we've been out to Providence or Boston.

It's great to be able to play a show where we don't know 90% of the people in the room and whether it is a super negative reaction or cold reaction, I would always rather play to an uninitiated audience than people who know what to expect every time.

Follow Jamie Ludwig on Twitter - @Jamie_Ludwig