{"id":10559,"date":"2015-04-16T12:14:45","date_gmt":"2015-04-16T19:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=10559"},"modified":"2015-04-21T10:50:46","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T17:50:46","slug":"so-let-it-be-written-a-look-into-the-lives-of-those-documenting-hard-rock-and-heavy-metal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2015\/04\/16\/so-let-it-be-written-a-look-into-the-lives-of-those-documenting-hard-rock-and-heavy-metal\/","title":{"rendered":"So let it be written: a look into the lives of those documenting hard rock and heavy metal"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve spent a lot of time thinking about the documentation of various forms of hard rock and heavy metal. It sounds wildly specific, but it\u2019s become a passion of mine to document bands and eras of times past to make sure their significance is not forgotten. I\u2019ve done it in my writing, I\u2019m working on a documentary film about a specific record label, and I just think about this stuff a lot<\/em> while I\u2019m walking from point A to point B.<\/p>\n

Across all genres of music there are people working hard to document very specific eras and subgenres within hard rock, trying to preserve them for the ages. We tracked down an American diligently documenting the history of one subgenre of extreme metal and a local who is making sure that early Canadian hard rock records are staying in print.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not glamorous work, and it\u2019s certainly not going to pay the rent; most months it probably won\u2019t even pay the bills. Heck, let\u2019s be honest: people doing this are often losing money in the process. But it\u2019s a labour of love, because for those doing this work, the burning desire to make sure these musicians are remembered comes before anything else.<\/p>\n

Echoes from decades past<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here in Victoria, Jason Flower releases archival recordings from very early proto-metal and hard rock bands from Canada (and beyond\u2014he\u2019s received a grant to document the history of post-World War II contemporary music in the Republic of Georgia) on his Supreme Echo record label. Flower\u2014who has been actively involved in the music scene for much of his life, as a musician, recording engineer, record label owner, and other various music-related pursuits\u2014has issued archival recordings by bands like early Canadian metal act Triton Warrior and proto-black metal\/power-poppers (!) Twitch.<\/p>\n

\"20141125-DSC_6734\"<\/a>
The members of Triton Warrior today with Victoria local Jason Flower’s reissue of their 1972 EP (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important to me to see historically innovative musicians documented and recognized for their achievements,\u201d says Flower. \u201cI see it as ethnomusicology and to contribute to the documentation of seminal arts movements, retrospectively underlining their cultural relevance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flower, who also runs the Supreme Echo record store on the corner of Government and Bay, says that his aim is to promote interculturalism and counterculture, \u201cbecause the world\u2019s mainstream art milestones are often an appropriation of their true origins.\u201d And he does this through his work, which, he\u2019ll be quick to point out, is more focused on archival work than reissues.<\/p>\n

\u201cReissues are easy to do in comparison with a documentation of something that should have been but never was,\u201d he says.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s a meticulous knack for detail required; you must find the truth within multiple interpretations of the past, hunt down long-lost audio and imagery, and be as neutral as possible to present something just as it was when it existed.\u201d<\/p>\n

With all his archival work, sometimes taking massive amounts of time, energy, and money to put together, it\u2019s easy to think that Flower is living in the past, something that he acknowledges can get a bit odd at times.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suppose it can get weird trying to dig back 40 years and write out a clear oral history while filtering out ego and imagination of aging musicians,\u201d he says. \u201cOften people are looking back on a high point of their lives, and occasionally there are bad memories, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ken Ambrose played drums for Triton Warrior, whose 7\u201d of 1972 recordings Flower released on Supreme Echo. Ambrose admits that he \u201cjust wasn\u2019t interested\u201d in Flower\u2019s initial offers to reissue the record \u201cmany many years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no idea who he was and why he wanted to get involved,\u201d says Ambrose, \u201cbut due to his years of persistent contact I finally sent him one of my last records that I had saved. To my surprise, he\u2019s put in countless hours and research to verify every last detail.\u201d<\/p>\n

But despite his initial reluctance, Ambrose is very pleased with the end result of Flower\u2019s work. He says it\u2019s a \u201cbetter package\u201d than the original release from back in the \u201970s.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s brought life to a record that was already in the grave and made it better,\u201d he says. \u201cJason worked non-stop to achieve this result. The band is so grateful, and it\u2019s a souvenir for my daughter to have as a keepsake. Bravo, Jason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only death remains<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, over in Philadelphia, Albert Mudrian is hard at work juggling many different projects involving extreme metal. When I give him a call he\u2019s dealing with his normal duties as editor-in-chief of Decibel<\/em> magazine, North America\u2019s only remaining monthly heavy metal mag, and he\u2019s also ironing out last-minute details for Decibel<\/em>\u2019s annual tour and preparing for the release of the expanded re-release of his 2004 book Choosing Death<\/em>, which documents the origins and history of death metal and grindcore.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe impetus for doing the original version was just making sure that those bands, that their importance wasn\u2019t lost,\u201d he says of his book. \u201cI never imagined there would be not only a recognition of how important they are, but a celebration, really, of it, which continues to this day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"choosing-death-revised-and-expanded\"<\/a>
The reissued version of Albert Mudrian’s Choosing Death<\/em> features cover art by legendary death metal artist Dan Seagrave (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The celebration that Mudrian speaks of involves legendary death metal bands like Carcass and At the Gates (the latter of which headlined this year\u2019s Decibel<\/em> tour) reuniting, performing, and recording new albums, sometimes to more acclaim now than they received during their initial run. This changing face of death metal is something that Mudrian wanted to address in an expanded edition of his book. But he says his motivations for writing (and re-writing) Choosing Death<\/em> are pretty simple.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a fan, ultimately, at the end of the day,\u201d he says. \u201cFor me, it was definitely not out of any motivation other than, man, I love this stuff and want to make sure that people know where this stuff came from.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mudrian knows one of the potential pitfalls of doing this kind of music documentation is having a fan\u2019s perspective and falling down a rabbit hole of outrageous minutiae that only the most severe obsessive followers would care about.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can go as deep as you want,\u201d he says. \u201cIt comes down to how much can you handle and then how much of this can you include while maintaining some kind of cohesive story, not losing focus or flying off on too many tangents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mudrian\u2019s been working on the reworked version of his book for around a year. While that seems like a long time to be working on a project that is, primarily, focused on the past, he says that living in the past isn\u2019t really a worry for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, not really,\u201d he says. \u201cI hadn\u2019t really started Decibel <\/em>yet when I first started writing Choosing Death<\/em>. It might have been harder if I started Choosing Death<\/em> right after I started Decibel<\/em>, then it\u2019d be like, \u2018Where am I? Am I looking forward? Am I looking back?\u2019 But to me it didn\u2019t seem like that it was necessarily a bad thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the fan in Mudrian, the process of interviewing the bands he talked to for his book was certainly not a bad thing. He describes the interviews as being \u201csuper exciting\u201d and a huge learning process for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen that process began of doing those interviews, it was great for me,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d get off the phone with somebody, and 80 percent of the conversation were just things that I had no idea that\u2019s how they happened. I was a pretty big fan of this stuff growing up, so that\u2019s when I knew that this was something cool, this is a story that hasn\u2019t been told, this is going to have information that people can sit down and really get into and learn about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the bands featured in Choosing Death<\/em> is Cretin, a grindcore-leaning death metal group from California. Marissa Martinez-Hoadley is the band\u2019s guitarist\/vocalist, and she says that because she\u2019s excited by this music and its history, she\u2019s excited by anything that accurately tells its story.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe music appeals to a very small segment of society, so I imagine that the book’s overall significance is pretty minor,\u201d she says. \u201cBut, it’s a great resource for those of us who are into the music, whether to reminisce on \u2018the good ol’ days,\u2019 or for those who are new to grind to learn about the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A couple weeks after I interviewed Mudrian, we had an email exchange chuckling over a double-CD reissue collection of demos and rehearsal tapes from an obscure extreme metal band from years past who, even back in the day, weren\u2019t met with much regard. The record label reissuing the collection referred to it as \u201cessential,\u201d which touched on something Mudrian said to me: it\u2019s important to remember that not everything is classic just because it\u2019s old. Just as they do today, some bands sucked then, too. We had a quick laugh over the absurdity of it and went back to our days.<\/p>\n

Of course, immediately following our email exchange I went and got the collection; even if I never listen to it, it\u2019s filed away in my own personal collection, one more piece of weird-rock history documented, for better or for worse. I couldn\u2019t resist. I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if Mudrian did the same, and I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if Flower mentioned this exact collection the next time we chat. The archivists never stop archiving; the documentarians never stop documenting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve spent a lot of time thinking about the documentation of various forms of hard rock and heavy metal. It sounds wildly specific, but it\u2019s become a passion of mine to document bands and eras of times past to make sure their significance is not forgotten. I\u2019ve done it in my writing, I\u2019m working on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-webexclusive"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10559"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10564,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10559\/revisions\/10564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}