The Midwestern Doom of Aseethe

When you think of heavy metal and Iowa, you probably think of Slipknot. Brian Barr won't hold that against you.

Though his band Aseethe's punishing brand of doomy drone diverges significantly from those aggro-arena anthems, guitarist/vocalist has logged enough time in the Hawkeye State to accept that as an inconvenient perception people have about his home. "People joke all the time when we're on tour," Barr says. "That first record is pretty good, but I don't know if I'd listen to it now." Pushing 40, he recalls seeing Joey Jordison's early band The Rejects at Stickman's Bar in Davenport, even meeting the future Slipknot drummer at the gig. Aseethe's own drummer, Eric Diercks, was also at the show.

Befitting local pride, many of their friends back in the day were big into Slipknot. Barr's own interest in nu-metal, however, was mercifully short lived. "I heard Neurosis and Coalesce and Bloodlet and that stuff was immediately pushed to the side," he says. Citing influences from millennial screamo to the comparatively artsier metal of Swans, he played in a series of projects with his friend Dierks, a partnership that has lasted some two decades.

Rounded out by Barr's younger brother Danny on bass and vocals, Aseethe operate on a smaller, yet arguably heavier scale than the leaders of the Maggot Army. With a handful of records either self-released or done through small indies, the band have danced around genre, with riffs and noise making them difficult to pigeonhole. One project in particular, 2012's Red Horizon reinterpreted riffs from likeminded duo Barn Owl's The Conjurer into a work all their own, drawing attention from progressive Chicago label Thrill Jockey, which releases Aseethe's new full-length Hopes Of Failure this week. The four-song release showcases the trio's tremendous sound, one built through deconstructive self-restraint and a preservation principle that mirrors the members' deep interests and concerns about the state of our planet.

In advance of this, I spoke with Brian Barr about Aseethe's unconventional influences, creative process, and their shared vision of the coming environmental apocalypse.

Noisey: Listening to the new record I can extrapolate what I'd consider influences on its sound. Can you give me a sense of the music you grew up on?
Brian Barr: For Eric and I, being around the same age, high school was the grunge era. That's where I first started downtuning my guitar. Soundgarden was a huge influence for me. That's where I started delving into lower tunings and playing slower. I grew up on that. We discovered bands on Relapse like Today Is The Day and Neurosis. Through Silver And Blood is probably one of our bigger influences. We really got into hardcore in the early 2000s, a lot of Virginia and D.C. bands like Pg. 99, Majority Rule, that type of stuff. We used to play in a band that was more hardcore/screamo, early metalcore stuff. We've been playing together for like 20-plus years, so we've been in quite a variety of bands together. Then there's my brother Danny, who's younger than me. I think he was in middle school when I gave him a copy of Through Silver And Blood. His musical journey has been similar to ours, because I've always shared a lot of my tastes with my younger siblings.

As far as our musical influences in Aseethe, a lot of it has to do with hardcore and elements of doom, especially Neurosis. For me personally, I'm a big Khanate and Sunn O))) fan, harsh noise like Wolf Eyes. Those elements definitely come into play with the band.

It seems like a phenomenon that people who start out or have a tenure in the hardcore scene have subsequent projects that diverge from it in such a way that, while you can hear the influences, go in different directions. Hardcore for some becomes a first step, if you will, towards an artist's musical journey.
I think that's definitely true. When we got into hardcore, that's when we started playing basement shows, playing house shows. When Eric and I started doing tours, it was like Book Your Own Fuckin' Life. There was no Facebook. MySpace was not even existent at that point, or was on the beginnings of it. D.I.Y., everyone starts out and is drawn to that, then goes from there. I think that lends itself to how hard-hitting or how powerful we try to be live, being influenced by hardcore and how heavy it is, and by doom, and putting those together.

Aseethe originally started as a solo effort, right?
Eric and I's old band had split up and I was moving to the Bay Area. That band was a lot faster and I was trying to bring doom elements in. Those guys weren't too into it at that point in time. Plus I was starting to explore more drone music and wanted to add more instrumentation. So I started it as a solo project, using the computer to create, putting cello and piano in some of the music just kinda underlying, using synths. At that time, I had gathered a ton of gear, four or five guitar cabinets, a couple of heads. I had the equipment on my own to create this sort of devastating sound that was rolling around in my brain. Originally, I was just going to continue [with] drum machine and just me playing. But I kept trying to make it sound like a band. When I moved back to the Midwest it was like, do I want to make it a band or go even farther into the drone aspect? If I didn't get a band, I was gonna ditch the drums altogether. But I love playing with drummers, so that's what happened. [Laughs] 

So now that you've congealed into this trio, what's the songwriting process like? How organic is it?
We definitely tend to jam a lot. I record as much as I can. We pick riffs and parts we really like. I'll cut them into sections and share in Dropbox so those guys can listen to them throughout the week. I tend to try and arrange them myself and bring them together. Eric does that as well. Since we've been playing together for so long, it tends to work out. It's a collaborative effort. We tend to add a lot. A song really sounds less minimalist. If you heard a song when we first ever demoed it, it's not minimal at all. We start to strip it away to its basic sounds.

With the drone influence, repetition is such a core part of your music. From a listener's perspective, tracks like "Sever The Head" give kind of a hypnotic quality. For you playing this music in the studio or live, what sort of headspace does it put you in?
It's definitely much more hypnotic when we're playing it. We play those riffs or those sections for so long, that you lose count. Is it supposed to be eight or twelve times? You lose yourself in it so much by playing it. That inner clock that goes off every four times I play something just gets lost. A lot of times, we face each other playing live or, to a certain degree, try to look at each other to see when the next change is. I feel like a riff, for me, starts to subtly change. I may be playing the same thing over and over, but I make small changes. We always try to give parts plenty of room to breathe.

You're releasing Hopes Of Failure through Thrill Jockey. How did you connect with them? What do you see as the benefits being on a label like that as opposed to a traditional metal label like Relapse or Southern Lord?
We played the first Gilead Media Fest in 2012, and that's where I met Bettina [Richards], the owner of Thrill Jockey. She bought a t-shirt and talked to me. For that festival, we did our Barn Owl cover. She'd gotten a copy of [2011's] Reverent Burden and was really interested in distroing it. So we kept in touch over the last four years. They distributed [2015's] Nothing Left Nothing Gained, our last EP. For this one, we recorded it and had it mastered and everything. I sent it out to three labels, just people that I'd had contact with. Bettina was the one that was interested. Otherwise, we were gonna do it ourselves. That's why we had it mastered and ready to go. I sent it to her on a whim, kinda jokingly like, 'Here's our new record if you're interested in distributing it and we're still looking for someone to do the vinyl HINT HINT.' [Laughs] She got back to me pretty quick and things rolled from there.

Out of those three labels, Thrill Jockey was my number one pick. There are so many artists on that label that are so good. Glenn Jones is amazing. [I'm a] big fan of Barn Owl, The Body, and Sumac, the heavier stuff like that. Being on a non genre-specific label to me is appealing, being eclectic, not just honing on on a metal crowd. The great thing is that we're not just doing this ourselves. It's helped with booking and getting out there. We're really bad at self-promotion.

A few months back, you had a limited edition cassette version of the album too, which makes sense given you'd already had it mastered.
That was kinda Thrill Jockey's idea. We were in Chicago playing a show and had lunch with them, going over stuff. We came up with the idea to do a limited run of cassette tapes. They did it so we could have something for that November tour, to help promote the record. I think we sold most of the 100 copies on tour, 60 or 70 copies. It benefitted us on the road for sure.

Thematically, the record focuses on societal decay. How does that play out across the tracks? Is it influenced by our contemporary political climate or other factors?
I would say more environmental than anything. That's probably one of the biggest influences, how we've detached ourselves from nature through our society and technology as we keep evolving as a species. It has political aspects as well, even before the current administration our battle with climate change. It affects the way I vote, the way I perceive politics. The lyrics are not on point, not driving it home. It's definitely almost like painting a picture. But they're apocalyptic to an extent, dealing with how humanity as a whole is destroying the planet. We realize this, but some of our leaders don't seem to have the courage to do much about it, against big business.

When you're presenting an apocalyptic vision like this, is there any hope for salvation in that vision or is it a foregone conclusion to you?
Danny might be a little more hopeful than me in the lyrics he's writing for new stuff. I might be more cynical, which is odd because I'm twelve years older than him. I think there's some hope. Worse [things] are going to happen before it gets better. I've been thinking about that with the next album, if there is some hope, some sort of light in this darkness we're heading towards. Maybe I'll explore that more.

Catch Aseethe on tour:

Feb. 24 - Ames, IA - The Record Mill
Feb. 25 - Iowa City, IA - Gabes
Feb. 26 - Dubuque, IA - The Lift
Mar. 4 - Davenport, IA - RME Redstone Room
Mar. 15 - Tulsa, OK - Soundpony
Mar. 16 - Austin, TX - The Lost Well - Austin Terror Fest *
Mar. 17 - Dallas, TX - Deep Ellum - Not So Fun WKND #
Mar. 18 - Columbia, MO - Cafe Berlin 
Mar. 31 - Milwaukee, WI - Quarters Rock and Roll Palace
Apr. 2 - Chicago, IL - Subterranean * w/ North, Pinkish Black +more
# w/ Thou

Gary Suarez is (sic) on Twitter.
Photo by Karlee Barr