Yowie, Yukon and the enduring gift of "aggressive progressive"

Reflections on 20-plus years in and around "math rock"

I’m going back through some videos I took at last Wednesday’s Yowie show at TV Eye in Queens, trying to recapture the peculiar, maybe even singular sensation their music evokes. The evidence is inadequate, and as this particular set of pieces is recorded but not yet released, I’m left with only sensations, the feeling of being immersed in some hyperactive blur, loping then lurching. Smearing, chattering guitars; drums thudding and zipping ahead; the whole thing sounding something like the Ruins performing on the Shaggs’ equipment.

One thing I remember well, though, is the feeling of simultaneous gratitude of astonishment and gratitude that washed over me as I stood in that room. Earlier that day, I’d read a beautiful collection of Coltrane reflections, part of the excellent “5 Minutes With…” series that I’m proud to have contributed to in the past, leading off with this account by A.B. Spellman, poet and author of the indispensable Four Lives in the Bebop Business:

“When at the end I compile the elements of my life into debits and assets, near the top of the assets list will be my many cathartic evenings spent in clubs listening to John Coltrane live. If you think that the recordings are powerful, imagine sitting 15 feet from that power as it was in the making.”

I feel the same way about my experiences with live music, that they really count among the true assets of my time on the planet. I never saw Coltrane, but I’ve been lucky enough to take a decent crack. And when I reflect on the totality of that, setting aside momentarily the wealth of extraordinary jazz I’ve witnessed, one subset that stands out is a musical zone that I’ve never really found an adequate label for, but that — for now, at least — I think I’ll call aggressive progressive.

Some have called it math rock (see the disclaimer that follows this post for a note on that phrase and its complications) or brutal prog, both useful in their own ways. (I believe it was Weasel Walter, composer and multi-instrumentalist par excellence, who coined the latter term.) But I think, after having made a fairly exhaustive attempt, many years back, at surveying this musical territory in an idiosyncratic and personal way, that I feel most comfortable with a more qualitative and less genre-tethered description.

Anyway, terminology aside, what I mean to say is that this area of music — i.e., the roughly 35-year tradition of underground rock that picks up where the harshest, choppiest elements of classic prog left off, amplifying and honing them into new forms — fascinates me. It has for around 30 years, and in that time, I’ve attempted to get as close to it as I could (15 feet or less!), as often as I could. And, much like Spellman had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time when it came to Coltrane, I feel similarly re: my own temporal and spatial coordinates as they pertain to the flowering of certain offshoots of this great tradition. I didn’t get to see Don Caballero (that still hurts), or Breadwinner, or Dazzling Killmen (that really hurts) but I have gotten to see craw, and then later Hella, Orthrelm, Grand Ulena, Cheer-Accident, Flying Luttenbachers, Fucking Champs, Keelhaul, Loincloth and others, as well as a slew of other expert practitioners — Archaeopteryx, Yukon, Behold… the Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, Little Women and Maw, to name just a few — who I got close to as friends and peers while making my own musical forays in this general style, first in the band ultimately known as STATS and later in Skryptor, with players who’d first sparked my interest in all of this to begin with.

It is a real home base for me, this stuff — where the intent is to find some harmony between bludgeoning force and daunting complexity. And it felt really good to be standing in that room last week among friends, some representing a handful of the aforementioned bands, as Yowie, a St. Louis trio who are without question one of the premier contemporary practitioners of the aggressive progressive ethos — and a somewhat legendary band in the field, given the mind-frying outrageousness of their music and their very sporadic touring history, esp. in my part of the country — held forth in front of us.

That familiar feeling of hyper-specific, profoundly insular ideas exploding into public space, overloading your brain and body beyond all possible comprehension, bringing about a sort of trance of pure sensory reception. Amazement at the flood of sonic information bombarding you, at the fact that these three musicians (drummer Shawn “Defenestrator” O’Connor, the sole constant member throughout the band’s roughly 20-year history, plus newly recruited guitarists Daniel Ephraim Kennedy and Jack Tickner) had access to all the same tools you do, are up against the same challenges related to time, attention, employment, etc. that you are, yet have somehow managed to generate this material, master it, get in a van and travel hundreds of miles to perform it. (I cannot wait for their upcoming album, but in the meantime, the back catalog is just stunning, particularly 2017’s Synchromysticism — their first featuring Chris Trull, who’d previously played in the aforementioned Grand Ulena and now plays in the outstanding Terms along with Danny Piechocki, also the current drummer for veteran aggressive-progressive visionaries Ahleuchatistas — and 2012’s Damning With Faint Praise, on which their sound really matured and took on this flavor of mutant funk that pairs perfectly with the core of deranged, discordant avant-rock. I can’t find any good video of the current lineup yet, so here, below, is some fantastic footage of the Synchromysticism era.)

It all impresses and inspires me just as much now as it ever did — and shout-out as well to the three great openers at TV Eye: Horse Torso, featuring former Little Women member and out-guitar maestro Andrew Smiley; PAK, guitarist Ron Anderson’s long-running underground-prog outfit; and the wild, new-to-me Sploot — just in that sense of: There is no other reward for doing this aside from the doing itself, and the opportunity to share it with a relatively handful of like-minded listeners. For me, playing in STATS, the greatest satisfactions came from a) building these songs up painstakingly along with my dear friends Joe Petrucelli and Tony Gedrich and b) experiencing a sense of mutual appreciation, respect and camaraderie with peers who I was, and am, as much in awe of as I am, say, the members of Black Sabbath.

I was talking to one of those peers at the show, my old friend Sam Garrett, who I believe I first met before he was a member of Yukon, and then later came to know as an extraordinary guitarist and composer when he joined that band. We were remarking on how everything about that night felt like some sort of throwback to the “peak math rock” years, lasting for maybe around a decade starting roughly in 2002, when I caught so many of the key acts mentioned above — Orthrelm circa OV, Hella circa Hold Your Horse Is and Grand Ulena circa Gateway to Dignity are three that really stand out — played a whole bunch of shows with STATS and its earlier incarnations, and at one point, in 2006, helped to organize a fest to showcase these sorts of sounds, bearing the name Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches (after a misheard Killmen lyric). Yukon played that event, as did Dysrhythmia, the always-staggering Zs, other great bands featuring close friends (including Clan of the Cave Bear and Kuru Kuru Pa), the mind-bending Calabi Yau (who we’d met in tour in Charlotte), the cutting-edge Normal Love and Knot Feeder, a band that included guitarist Mike Banfield, formerly of the legendary-to-us Don Caballero, who are something like the Led Zeppelin of this whole scene.

In the days after last week’s Yowie show, I spun a lot of Yukon, and marveled again at the virtuosity and precocious inventiveness of it — I cannot recommend these records highly enough if anything related to “aggressive progressive” is your thing; to me, their sound built brilliantly on the proggier, more intense end of the Dischord roster, including Faraquet and Hoover, later growing into some kind of refined, ornate underground answer to Genesis.

I’ll never forget the day circa ’05 that my band, a version of what would become STATS, randomly found ourselves sharing a bill in Dumbo with those guys and just feeling absolutely exhilarated and daunted by how advanced and commanding they sounded. The same thing had happened earlier with Archaeopteryx, then going under one of their several former names, leading to pretty much instant friendship and eventual collaboration. And in all cases, it’s been a joy to pay witness what these folks have gone on to do, including Nick Podgurski’s New Firmament universe, Voice Coils, World of Mirth, Uniform, Iconchasm and so on.

So, yes, assets of my life, undoubtedly, not just sonically but in terms of good, productive, stimulating time shared with like-minded people. We’re all lucky if we find a community like this to plug into. And we’re even luckier if we can reenter these rooms around 20 years later, and still find ourselves lit up in the very same way.

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Quick disclaimer:

I just want to add here that “math rock,” much like “emo,” is a term that has meant something entirely different to several successive generations. There’s a whole school of this stuff, the so-called “twinkly” era, that I’m much less familiar with than anything mentioned above. No slight on that end of things — it’s just not my forte. And this slippery terminology is one reason I shy away from that phrase somewhat. To me, math rock is, as stated above, more or less heavy, any sort of rhythmically and structurally adventurous underground rock, an umbrella description that can comfortably apply to the early-’90s, post-hardcore sound of craw or the Killmen, or the more insular early-2000s instrumental strains of Orthrelm or Hella.

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PS #1: For more on the history of math rock and its many varietals/eras, check out William P. Covert’s great, ongoing work over at Fecking Bahamas (with help from Nikk Hunter and Cameron Piko): parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

PS #2: For anyone interested in this general area of music, the labels Skin Graft, which released a good portion of the music cited above, and Computer Students are well worth checking out!

PS #3: If anyone has any recommendations re: newer bands in this general vein that I might have missed, I’m all ears. One I stumbled across recently that I absolutely love is Chicago’s Imelda Marcos, highlighted in the 2023 DFSBP end-of-year roundup.