Photo by Thor Brødreskift

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Aggravated Assault





Here's my take on Oscar Bettison's Breaking & Entering (With Aggravated Assault).

I grew up playing really loud, really fast music with my most excellent friends in Sofakingdom, a band started in high school that graduated to playing about a gazillion sparsely attended shows in Minneapolis and mounting a handful of unbelievably fun (if not lucrative) smelly-dudes-in-a-van tours.  So when I first peeked at my Breaking & Entering drum part with it's expertly-notated blast beats I laughed out loud at the fact that I'd get a chance to use those skills I developed in beer-soaked basements and scummy dive bars for the higher call of "contemporary music".  However, it resulted in a personal highlight when I took the stage with my colleauges at the 2010 Bang on a Can Summer Institute marathon concert (with Brad Lubman conducting!) and proceeded to play this piece.  Loud.  Really loud.  I was told the janitors had to use extra mops that night clean up all the melted faces.  OK, not really, but you can imagine.

Give a listen from that night.


Yeah, I know, it's all about the "genre busting" these days, but I never expected a collision between my two worlds of "classical music" and full-on thrash attacks.  My friends from one never really understood the other.  So thanks, Oscar.  But hey, who's supposed to play that part anyway?  There just aren't many people schooled both in Darmstadt and Cannibal Corpse.  I mean, David T. Little of Newspeak just happens to be a composer extraodinaire/rock drummer with good taste in metal and he had to learn double kick pedals just for this piece.  And admirably; the Newspeak recording rocks [B&E was written for them, and they play it like it was].
Either way, I guess I missed playing with my sofakingdom dude-lifemates so much I just relished the opportunity to make an unholy racket and channel my inner Dave Lombardo once again.

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