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Music

Crowhurst's Bleak New Video for "The End"Is an Exercise in Noisy Misery

LA-based creator Jay Gambit opens up about mental health, mood swings, and the darkness in Bob Ross' "happy trees."

Since 2012, Los Angeles-based experimental act Crowhurst has served as the primary vehicle for Jay Gambit’s creative impulses in any form they may take. While releasing an average of an album a month (or more), the project’s roots in noise quickly branched out to collaborations with grind and powerviolence groups like Sordo and Water Torture, long-form drone releases, and even an audio companion to Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism. It’s really no surprise that, after years of putting out all manner of compelling and exploratory noise, Jay decided to enlist other musicians to turn Crowhurst into a full band for a trilogy of records rooted far more in black and doom metal than any other genres.

With II slated to be released on August 30 through Broken Limbs Recordings and Dullest Records, Crowhurst walks an eerie line between the ominous force of mid-period Swans and the blackened industrial atmospheres of Blut Aus Nord’s more mechanical releases. The bleak sound is primarily due to Jay’s collaborators on this album: Andy Curtis-Brignell of Caina and Matron Thorn of Aevangelist. Bringing such forces of dissonance together makes for an album that goes to the darkest, most disconnected places possible, yet Jay’s voice brings a human element to the otherwise oppressive music.

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Noisey had a chance to chat with Jay about the different musicians on each of Crowhurst’s albums, the public domain footage used for the band’s new music video, and the overlap between noise and black metal. Check out the video for “The End” below and read on for our interview.

Noisey: You’ve assembled a unique band for each Crowhurst album. How does this come about?
Jay Gambit: I don’t know how to play guitar super well. I don’t know how to play bass or drums super well. I barely know how to play synths or program drums. There’s a shitload of stuff I don’t know how to do. I’m fortunate to have talented friends who understand when I say “Okay, this is what I want things to sound like” and I know that their particular style of playing fits what’s in my head already. It’s about the end product and I want the best guy for the job. If you work with a group of the same guys, you’d better make damn sure you’re all on the same page at all times. You’re not The Beatles. If your project isn’t rooted in those four or five same guys and is mostly about your own idea, you may as well bring in the best person for each idea.

The goal with this record was to make something cohesive with the first record, despite working with a new lineup. I want the trilogy to be something that can be heard from start to finish with an arc, but also an appreciation for each individual song on each individual record. I feel that if you can’t play a handful of a band’s records from front to back, then it really has less value. You look at Black Sabbath or Skinny Puppy’s work and you can just start with one album and keep going and have it work. Most great bands have their big three records where people unanimously can say they’re great start to finish. So my goal in having this trilogy is to make my three good records and then see if I’ve got another good metal album in me or not.

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My influences are often bands like Swans, where it’s one person’s primary vision and the lineup is going to shift from time to time as long as the albums are cohesive. The way Michael Gira took Swans’ work when the band was defunct and he paired the albums was really influential for me and my perspective on releasing things. I learned to view my albums as separate, but also as things that could be grouped to convey specific meaning.

Even the one album, Soundtracks for the Blind, is a matter of how well it’s packaged and pieced together.
That’s one of my favorite records of all time. That and Today is the Day’s Sadness Will Prevail are pretty much what I was aiming for with ([one of Crowhurst’s noisiest albums] No Life to Live. Ninety percent of what I do is trying to ape the music of folks who are more talented than I am. Because they’re more talented, their shit sounds radically different from mine and I just throw my hands in the air and say, “Well, this is what I do.”

It’s like a happy accident.
If Crowhurst were a painting, it’d be just a giant field of happy trees with a couple clouds by Bob Ross. There was that clip of him after his wife died: that’s the distillation of Crowhurst. The absolute bleak sensation where you just shrug and move onward and say, “This whole awful canvas is going to be just happy trees.” It’s just the sound of getting through it. I have a fucked up, desolate mind. The entire trilogy has a lot to do with my mental health deteriorating, addictions I have dealt with. The first lyric in “Fractured Lung” was a description of going through withdrawals. It’s like the morning after you overdose: you’re still alive and you’re in so much pain but don’t have the strength to alleviate it. All you can do is just lay there. It’s like sleep paralysis but you’re not asleep. It’s just life. That was the whole goal with II.

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Your struggle with addiction and subsequent growth are recurring themes in Crowhurst’s art and music.
Benzos gave me my withdrawals. I have severe anxiety. I’ll go four to six days in a row where I black out all the walls and windows and lay in bed unable to move or eat. The doctors overprescribed me with a ton of medication and I kept taking it. I couldn’t function without it and I spent two and a half years in a gray out. I was drinking, taking benzos, and it was irresponsible and I hurt a lot of people. It’s been two years since I’ve taken them, which is great. I’m “happy,” but it’s very much like the equivalent of taking a deep sigh and saying “how do I deal with this?” I still have the anxiety; it hasn’t gone away. I rectify it by going on tour where I’m too focused on what I’m doing to be able to fall into the anxieties that I get at home. I’m constantly moving.

So you managed to travel to the UK to record this album while living with anxiety. You went to another country. That’s huge.
As far as going there to make art, other than getting detained for nine hours when I first arrived in the UK, it was no different than booking studio time here in California with Jack Shirley. The studio was literally in the shadow of Strangeways [Prison]. You had to walk through the little underpass that connected the two buildings to get to the studio. It was a great old studio in Manchester with beautiful vintage synths and a great board. You couldn’t really ask for more. I have more anxiety standing still than I do moving and traveling, which probably explains why I’ve released so many records.

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That makes perfect sense. Since the majority of the lineup for II is based in the UK, will you be touring with a different live lineup in the States?

Most of the folks I work with have lives and they have things they can’t leave. With all these things, it was understood that other people would be playing these songs live. I brought this idea to the folks who run Dullest Records, and they offered to be the backing band. A lot of them were in the band Sovereign. They’ve been working with me for a while, and we see eye to eye on things. They have the right spirit. Same thing with the guys in MAKE [who are working on

III]

. You need to be a sweetheart offstage and a madman onstage. That’s important for me when picking folks to play live. You don’t want shit to clash in the van or onstage.

That was a big thing for why Andy and I work so well. Caina is Andy’s project. He’s got other musicians who are part of it now, but it’s his band and he gets it. I don’t want to be the Ramones and put out the same album nineteen times. I’d rather let the project grow and change entirely instead of just swapping out producers when I want to keep things fresh. I want to make Crowhurst records.

Almost everything you’ve done has had you hopping from label to label, but you’ve settled in with working with Broken Limbs and Dullest for a few releases. What’s inspired this change and more consistent label home?
I understand that this is a huge community, and I’ve always wanted to cast a really wide net. What I’ve wanted for the past few years, however, is a label that will be able to handle some heavier management and touring aspects so the project can grow even more ambitious. We partnered with Broken Limbs for this one and we’re hoping for something even larger with future releases.

There’s a large amount of negativity in Crowhurst’s music and lyrics. You say your life has improved, but your mental state is still deteriorating. Do you gain anything positive from creating something so intensely negative?
Absolutely. There’s a line on the record, “Every day is a new Hell.” Every day has its own set of struggles. Some days get better. Some days get worse. I don’t have the worst life. I’m a pretty introverted but relatively happy guy. I just deal with a lot of shit. I have a lot of mental health issues. I have physical health issues that are debilitating and prevent me from doing stuff. I get anxiety from standing still yet I have physical issues that impact my mobility. I still suffer from depression, albeit I don’t get the same raging mood swings that come from going on and off of benzodiazepine. Some of it changes with age. I’m still fucking miserable, I’m just older and it’s less acceptable to kvetch in the same kind of ways. I can’t say, “Fuck the world” anymore, now I’m just writing about being tired.

Tell me about the video for “The End.” What did you hope to convey with this spliced together footage?
The first bit of the video is a piece from The House is Black, a film about Iranian leper colonies. It’s a dark movie. The opening line that we used in the video is “There’s no shortage of ugliness in this world. If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more.” That’s a motif for Crowhurst. If you don’t look at it, it multiplies, and nobody discusses it, and that’s how you wind up with this silent majority supporting Donald Trump or people whose children kill themselves for being picked on. We remain willfully ignorant, and that’s how these things happen. I try to counter that willful ignorance and look at that misery. Things may get better in ways, but we have to acknowledge the weakness and the struggle along the way too. You can’t just pretend it’s not what it is.

I’m really into collecting art and I like car chases. I have practical archives of books, VHS tapes, records, and other trinkets. There’s a lot of my personality invested in this collage lifestyle. I’m surrounded by vintage amps and all sorts of music. I think that there’s a lot of film inspiring Crowhurst. I’m a big fan of the Mel Brooks school of thought where you spend time and energy to make tiny jokes and references that only a few people will get. You may not realize the reference until a friend does, but that’s half the fun. Everybody can enjoy it on one level or another, but there’s more stuff for people to dig into. It’s only even recently now, with a movie [called The Mercy] about Donald Crowhurst coming out soon, that people have even known what Crowhurst was in reference to. I’m sure that’ll give people context, but my Google search rankings are going to plummet now. I mean, it’s not like I’m in a position like Isis. They couldn’t even make music anymore with that name, so I’m fine.

Ben Handelman is staying bleak on Twitter.