Alaska B and Ruby Atwood of Yamantaka // Sonic Titan
Yamantaka // Sonic Titan is not an easy band to classify. On its Bandcamp page, the Montreal art collective describes itself as “Noh wave,” drawing on influences including pop, J-pop, British prog, Japanese psychedelia, punk rock, Iroquois core, black metal, Chinese opera, noise music, and, yes, Noh theatre.
The band’s core duo, drummer Alaska B and lead singer Ruby Atwood, met as art students at Concordia University. After playing in several other bands, they formed Yamantaka // Sonic Titan in 2007 to experiment with making music that blended “Western ideas of black metal and Asian concepts of religion and tradition.” They released their self-titled album this fall on independent Montreal label Psychic Handshake, which has been featured on Pitchfork and even got the attention of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, who invited the band to play at the ATP Festival in March. With an upcoming Toronto show on Jan. 28 at the Garrison, not to mention presenting a drag opera as part of Buddies In Bad Times Theatre’s upcoming Rhubarb Festival, we sat down with Alaska and Ruby to talk about the band’s artistic and musical inspirations.
The A.V. Club: You incorporate so many different genres into your music. When it came to recording the album, where did you draw the line?
Ruby Atwood: Basically whatever doesn’t sound good to us we cut. Anything that we’re interested in that fits into our music we include. We’re not going for a particular sound, it’s just that because we’ve played with so many different members and we have these variant influences.
Alaska B: It’ll be like, “Hey, check out this hook in this Waka Flocka song,” and then one of us will be like, “Hey, have you heard this obscure prog album from Argentina in 1971? Only the first half’s good.” So we’ll listen to the first half...
RA: Then we’ll make dinner and listen to Rihanna or classical music.
AB: Then we’ll be drawing to Confucian rites. Whatever we’re interested at the time.
RA: The work is the diva that decides what goes and what stays. I think we’re both pretty hard on it.
AB: I find that one thing that gives us an advantage as a band is doing art critiques and being shamelessly brutal on yourself.
AVC: The two of you met at Concordia. Did you find that environment receptive to the music you were making when you first started out?
AB: What I remember from growing up in Edmonton is that we had a very vibrant punk scene as a teenager. There was an obvious segregation between the scenes, like, “These bands don’t play with these bands,” while in Montreal, everybody played such drastically different music and we all hung out. There’s not that really that much in common between those groups. College music is a polyglot of sorts.
RB: In one of our art classes, we did one project where our teacher was like, “Well, it’s just music, this is not art.” And so we were like... hmm, well can we still get a grade?
AB: We were caught in that weird point between the two. We had to promote our own shows, we had our own posters, and nobody wanted us to open for them.
RB: At the beginning, when we had a much more stripped-down approach, we’d ask people, “Hey, we’re doing this 15-by-20-foot paper installation and we have to do all the drawings and print them all out and then hang them all, and pay for the venue and hand-make the costumes ourselves, and so, do you still want to be in our band?” And they’d be like, “Uh, I already have a job.” It ended up being a very paired-down sound because no one wanted to do that much work except for Alaska and I.
AVC: Do you think Canada’s multicultural mandate has influenced the response to your music?
AB: I would say no. I think if we’d been like this 15 years ago and had been, “Oh, we’re mixed race,” people would’ve talked about it in a certain way and wouldn’t have been as comfortable with some of it. 15 years ago, it wasn’t even acceptable to admit that explorers of Canada didn’t just show up and it was here. It wasn’t that simple. Now, I feel that it’s easier to have that conversation about multiculturalism. But as far as accepting, I don’t think so.
AVC: You’re both practicing Buddhists. Can you tell me about how that influences your sound, either thematically or musically?
AB: I’m pretty into metal, so what really interested me at the time at Concordia, everybody at art school was tooling with the inverted cross, the hipster thing, it was so absurdly overdone. So I was thinking about the way black metal relates to Christianity and trying to take that same look at Buddhism. They show ignorance as symbolized by horrific gore, so I was like, what if you take the black metal aesthetic of being obnoxiously ugly about religion and doing it with Buddhism? Not against Buddhism, but as a way of exploring it. That was one of the first takes of incorporating Buddhism in our sound. Where we started [it was with] this idea of a punk rock re-imagining of Buddhism and just being like, “How punk can you get with just these sounds?”
RA: I think a lot of it for me has to do with the connection between repetition and pop music and chanting. I feel like a lot of meditation music has a lot of repetitive phrases, which through their repetition they simultaneously lose and magnetize their meaning. I also feel like that happens a lot in pop music, too, when you’re listening to the radio and you’re saying, “What the hell is going on?” and it’s like you are haunted by these melodies. You’re kind of inundated with a certain sound and I think that’s really fascinating in terms of language, because it’s through this repetition that you either interpret or put meaning to [it].
AVC: Is practicing Buddhism a prerequisite for being in Yamantaka // Sonic Titan?
RA: No, because Buddhism is a philosophy. You can really become hypnotized by music in a really basic way. I think that’s what draws people to any kind of show, that they’re there to experience something with other people and through sound.
AVC: Let’s talk about your shows for a minute. We heard that one of the bands that inspired your live performances was Quebecois death metal band Cryptopsy. Are there any other Canadian bands that influenced you in the same way?
AB: Definitely Skinny Puppy. When I was 12 years old, I made some cool friends when I was in junior high, and we went to the one cool independent record store downtown in Edmonton. I just remember going through the tapes because all I had was a tape player, I was just pulling out random bands and saw Skinny Puppy. My friend was like, “Oh my brother has that because he’s a DJ,” and so I bought the entire discography for like 10 bucks and took them home.
A year or two later, I managed to get a hold of a videotape with their music videos and I remember watching them and seeing the clips of them doing the stuff that Marilyn Manson was starting to do at the time. I remember telling my dad about these videos, and he said, “Oh yeah, we used to light the top of my organ on fire when I used to play in bands, and one time the roadie put gasoline in it because they ran out of kerosene.” And they didn’t tell anyone, so the top of the organ blew up and he’d just continue playing.
AVC: So pyrotechnics are something you’d like to incorporate in your set eventually?
RA: I hope so, because my parents were kind of eccentric. We owned a 100-acre farm, so every year for the weekend of May 24, my parents would spend literally months building these elaborate wooden structures that could be soaked in gasoline from afar and my father would invite people to come. Then he’d create these zip lines with cans of gasoline that would explode and lines of fire that would set fireworks off. So those are some of my earliest memories of parties.
AVC: You might have trouble finding venues that would let you get away with that.
RA: That’s our challenge. We have all these weird, old-school ideas. My uncle was a show promoter and I remember begging him to take me to a New Kids On The Block show. It was just a sea of girls screaming and there were fireworks popping out of the stage at the Molson Centre. I was so impressed and I remember thinking that kind of theatricality and energy was so interesting to me.
AVC: You guys also wear Kiss-style face paint when you perform.
AB: It wasn’t even originally a Kiss thing, it was originally meant to be Chinese and Japanese opera. But once we took it in that context, it’s corpse paint and it’s Kiss, we’re subverting it. Our early works, as much as we had these rock show influences, we were also really influenced by performance art and seeing the visceral side of performing. You see these people putting themselves in real danger performing.
RA: Like monks and self-mutilation.
AVC: What’s next for you guys? Any plans to tour outside of Canada?
RA: We’re putting out a short film as well, a stop-motion, 16-mm. It’s almost finished, we’ve been working on it since June, we’re just looking for a distributor and that’s going to be in art festivals. We have our musical at Rhubarb in a few weeks and then we have our full-time tour around the end of May. We don’t have the details yet, but we’re also working on our second album.
AB: We’re also hoping to get over to Europe this year. I want to tour the continent twice, because we have our work visa for a year. Basically when we think we don’t have anything coming up, wait three days.
