It's
a question I've been asked a lot in the two years Column of Heaven has been
playing sporadic live show (we may have played 20 times at this point, possibly
less, certainly not much more); "why don't you do the noise stuff
live?"
One
answer is that I didn't want this band to be seen as exactly the same as The Endless Blockade – the line up is 50%
different after all and despite the fact that I'm an unrepentant tyrant and
control freak I don't want to diminish Dave and Mike's valuable role in the
band.
The
main answer is that I want to purposefully move away from the contemporary
wisdom that the public performance of a composition somehow has to measure up
to or mirror exactly to the recorded version.
The
noise in Column of Heaven manifests differently than it did in Blockade.
Blockade's records were slightly noisy; but because we were always at the mercy
of other people recording us we never really developed it in a way that we
wanted. Our live performances, particularly in the last year of the band when
we added Bloomer to the line up, were pretty noisy though. In the last five
years of the band we had zero silence live; we'd play a block of three to six
songs and then we'd use noise to fill the space whilst we retuned. Sometimes I
felt the audience didn't really know how to react as we never gave them a space
to do something as simple as applaud (or yell "you're a bunch of dicks,
fuck off") and the vibe would often seem strained. Or maybe we were just
horrible.
In
Column of Heaven we don't allow anyone to record us; two of our unbreakable
rules are we release everything ourselves on cassette first, and no one outside
of the band is allowed to record us for a release. Because of this I get to
spend as much time as I want sandblasting everything in noise and generally
making releases flow exactly how I want them to flow. My recording skills are
not particularly great, but hey, if someone's going to not do full justice to
your intent, it may as well be you.
Music
and Where it's Consumed
In
Blockade I was using the noise primarily to accentuate the dissonance already
present in hardcore. It was used to push to breaking point the implied chaos present in the music I'm
influenced by.
In
Column of Heaven it's used for those purposes as well, but something I've been
interested in of late is how the mechanics of consuming music influence the
production of it. Stadium rock sounds like it's meant for stadiums, certain
types of hardcore sounds like it's only meant to be played in basements with
kids piling on top of the band as they play.
The
venue of music consumption I've been interested in is related to the ever
onward advancement of downloaded music. A quick look at my Mediafire and
Bandcamp stats tells me that Column of Heaven has been downloaded around 3-400%
more times than we've sold records and tapes, and those are just the stats I
have access to. In terms of where people consume music I suspect most people
listen to a significant amount on their phones as they're travelling during the
day.
In
my own listening experiences – there was a span of close to two decades between
my last walkman and my first iPod – the leaking through of environmental sounds
into my "private" listening has made me reassess how I make music.
Walking past a construction site and having the sounds blend with what I'm
listening to at the time has made me think in different ways about non-musical
sound, which was something I was always interested in anyway. I've lost count
of the amount of times I've paused something to figure out if that sound
(frequently sirens or a strangely sonorous subway train) was an intentional
part of the music I was listening to or not.
Old
Punks Don't Die (They Just Record at Home)
When
I see a band I don't want a perfect transcription of their records. If they're
a hardcore band I want it to be in someone's packed and broken basement and I'd
rather the bass player got pushed through the drums mid-song, or I have to duck
as the singer throws a mic stand at me than hear a perfect recreation of their
7".
Most
Column of Heaven is not consumed by people seeing us play live, we don't play
live very often and that isn't going to change. I'm a 40 year old with a
mortgage working towards my PhD, employed in a management job in the social
services industry. I don't have the time or energy levels to be touring much or
playing 90% of the shows I'm offered, even the local ones.
With
that in mind I don't actually want to only compose and release music that's
suitable for live replication; it just doesn't matter at this point. The
original goal of the band was to be a two piece and not even playing anything
remotely grind sounding anyway. Somehow I got tricked into doing another band…
The
Holy Things are for the Holy 7" due out on Iron Lung Records pretty soon
(I mean it) is an example of a record that's not meant to be played live (we
couldn't if we wanted to because it wasn't written or recorded that way) and is
influenced by my experiences of hearing other sounds filter through into my
private listening experiences.
some wolves and some religious shit, AKA Column of Heaven artwork 101
The
Future
We
aren't going to stop playing live, well, I hope not, I actually quite enjoy the
experience, we play so selectively that it's not something I feel is a burden
or an unwelcome necessity. But we are going to be releasing more records and
tapes that aren't really for live consumption. This does not mean we will release
a bunch of noise records with vocals over the top under the banner of Column of
Heaven, we're conscious of the fact that we're first and foremost related to
hardcore and grindcore and getting too far away from that for too many records
is going to make us an inconsistent experience for most people.
Some future releases
will be under the name Wolves of Heaven; I have a release under that title I've
been slowly picking away at for a while now that's too removed from Column of
Heaven to be released under that name, despite it being the exact same four
people involved. That being said there are going to be more releases that don't
fit as grindcore records.
As
for touring we're currently committed to heading to the eastern US next spring
to drink fine beers and meet interesting new canines at house shows.
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