Russian Circles

185 Clingman Ave,Asheville NC 28801

01 November, 2022

Description

Russian CirclesPresented by The Grey Eagle and Worthwhile SoundsALL AGES Russian CirclesPresented by The Grey Eagle and Worthwhile SoundsALL AGES Russian Circles REZN - 7PM DOORS / 8PM SHOW - ALL AGES - STANDING ROOM ONLY RUSSIAN CIRCLES Across the span of their previous seven studio albums, Chicago-based instrumental trio Russian Circles traversed a diverse topography of sounds, moods, and approaches with their limited armory of drums, bass, and guitar. It’s difficult to chart an evolution in their sound when their records have always felt like well-curated playlists. It wasn’t uncommon to hear drone-heavy meditations, dazzling prog exercises, knuckle-dragging riff-fests, haunting folk ballads, and tension-baiting noise rock all within the span of one album. Still, it’s difficult to ignore the progression from the pensive and intricate melodies of Enter (2006) to the layered distorted dirges of Blood Year (2019). It’s been a gradual sonic shift owing to the band’s rigorous tour schedule and a predilection towards playing their more authoritative material on stage. But with their latest album, Gnosis, Russian Circles eschew the varied terrain of their past work and bulldoze a path through the most tumultuous and harrowing territory of their sound. As was the case for so many artists in the age of COVID, the obstacles of geography and isolation forced Russian Circles to reevaluate their writing process. Rather than crafting songs out of fragmented ideas in the practice room, full songs were written and recorded independently before being shared with other members, so that their initial vision was retained. While these demos spanned the full breadth of the band’s varied styles, the more cinematic compositions were ultimately excised in favor of the physically cathartic pieces. Gnosis was engineered and mixed by Kurt Ballou. Drums and bass were tracked at Electrical Audio in Chicago to maximize the natural room sounds of the rhythm section. Guitar and synth overdubs were conducted at God City in Salem, MA to take advantage of Ballou’s vast inventory of amps and effects pedals. Despite the entirety of the album being written remotely, the songs were recorded with the full band playing together to retain the live feel of the material. Owing to the climate of the times and a new writing method, Russian Circles created their most fuming and focused work to date—an album that favors the exorcism of two years’ worth of tension over the melancholy and restraint that often colored their past endeavors. REZN The music churned out by Chicago quartet REZN somehow manages to convey both crushing mass and cosmic weightlessness. The seed for the band’s megaton riffs and psychedelic journeys was planted when guitarist Rob McWilliams and bassist Phil Cangelosi began jamming together at age twelve in the DC commuter town of Leesburg, VA. They relocated to Chicago in 2015, recruited local sound engineer Patrick Dunn to bash on the drums, and set about recording their debut album—the molten amp worship service Let It Burn—after playing just three shows together. They invited their friend Spencer Ouellette into the studio to round out their bottom-heavy sound with the hum-and-squall of modular synth, and the added textural component immediately became a key facet to their sound. REZN quickly established their footing in the heady-and-heavy Chicago rock community, playing around town with esteemed riff barons like Bongripper and Oozing Wound, as well as landing coveted slots for touring acts like Conan and Acid King. The 2018 sophomore album Calm Black Water continued the band’s penchant for molasses-thick guitar-and-bass punishments with soaring minor key vocal melodies, but Ouellette further pushed the dreamscape envelope by supplementing the synth duties with blissed out saxophone passages. REZN hit the road, and with little more than a few short Midwest and East Coast under their belts, their reputation had festival promoters in California, Mexico, Netherlands, and Denmark adding the band to their prestigious line-ups alongside acts like Melvins, Fu Manchu, Earthless, Black Mountain, and YOB. REZN’s newest offering Chaotic Divine continues their melding of gargantuan heaviness and lysergic calm. Additionally, it continues the band’s penchant for tying the music to a visual landscape. Let It Burn revolved around a cosmic and volcanic terrain inspired by the vastness of space; Calm Black Water conjured the deepest trenches of the ocean; and Chaotic Divine presents an endless desert world inoculated by spores from extra/intra-terrestrial beings. The conceptual element is buoyed by the continued cover art contributions from Allyson Medeiros, whose post-apocalyptic landscape for Chaotic Divine recalls the epic fantasy spirit of Roger Dean’s classic ‘70s album art. The album was engineered by Dylan Piskula (DEN, Bruges) at JAMDEK in Chicago in December 2019, mixed by Matt Russell (Bruges, Moral Void), mastered by Carl Saff, and pressed as a 2xLP at Chicago’s Smashed Plastic vinyl plant. All facets of production were done in Chicago with the band’s oversight. Chaotic Divine opens with the seismic meditation “Emerging,” a thrilling embarkation for the double-album’s journey through cataclysmic riffs and sublime sonic haze. “Waves of Sand” saves the big-riff payoff until the final third of the song, using a slow tension-building sprawl to color the aural environment with hallucinatory saxophone lines and helium-grade ethereal guitars. REZN albums have always focused on the big picture, with songs threaded together to form one epic composition, and that approach is visible in moments like “Garden Green”—with its Pink Floydian unorthodox melodicism and tempered reserve—fluidly segueing into the hammer-fisted pummeling of “The Door Opens.” Across the second half of the album, the band continues to employ psychedelic elements to give the heavier moments a more somber and meaningful presence, while the big pay-offs provide room for the narcotic and hallucinatory moments to breath and come into their own. This tactic is especially noticeable when instrumental synth-driven passages “Clear I” and “Clear II” morph into the King Crimson-on-cough-syrup psych-folk and guitar-and-sax riffage of “Optic Echo” and “The Still Center.” The result is an album of textural delights and organic evolutions, all rendered in the studio with the band tracking the music live as a full unit over the course of six days. REZN’s reputation has already quickly spread like wildfire through the ranks of doom aficionados, tone chasers, and psych junkies, but with the next-level toke-and-dirge odyssey of Chaotic Divine, the Chicago ensemble is poised to raze the Earth with even loftier cosmic heights and gnarlier bottom-feeder lows. — Brian Cook