Nathaniel David Utesch, the guiding light that illuminates Metavari, has taken one of those travel-routes on his way to his present sound that are full of odd detours and strewn with photos that are better left undiscussed. What he has related along the way, over the course of years, is every bit as good as enough for a narrative. Except where noted, all quotes derive from an e-mail exchange conducted with Utesch.
And the band is appearing on 29 September at Rozz-Tox for Year Two of All Senses Fest (9:30 to 10:15PM). So, there’s that.
A native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Utesch was into punk and metal, initially — enough for him to audition as a vocalist in a local metal outfit. He didn’t get the gig, though he made a lasting acquaintance with the band’s synth-player, Ty Brinneman.
Unbeknownst to Utesch, on an unconscious level, where ideas cross the blood/brain barrier and insinuate themselves into one’s imagination like spirochetes, and spread out from there, his musical tastes were also being influenced by the music of various late-night film-fests: the works of David Lynch and Michael Mann, with their soundtracks furnished by Angelo Badalamenti (Lynch) and an array of pop musicians (Mann), influenced him.
The previous February, Utesch discussed with Brett Alderman for Musical Family Tree how important the visual element was to his creative process [http://www.musicalfamilytree.com/blog/230157]: “I love movies and film. The movies I gravitate towards favor form over function. I love David Lynch and surreal filmmakers and just stuff that is maybe hard to watch, either violent or absurd. It’s really stimulating to me and inspiring on an emotional level, more than a linear plot. When we’ve written records in the past, Ty [Brinneman] and I have always sat together and come up with the story, even if it’s not obvious. It keeps us honest in the writing. Like, ‘Okay, if the story is this, than maybe this track should go ahead of this one,’ based on whatever ridiculous thing we’re talking about. I like writing like that and keeping the bizarre, surreal visual component in the back of our mind. Especially when we’re getting to do things live with the projector and pairing things in a more literal way…”
“All upside down and backwards how it came to be” is how Utesch characterized this struggle to reconcile these seemingly diametrically-opposed aesthetic impulses. Rather than flinging his arms around a horse being flogged by its owner, collapsing in the street, and waking up singing Wagner, Utesch started Metavari in 2008 with Brinneman, who had switched instruments to bass.
Neither punk nor metal, Metavari’s sound was post-rock, with the instrumental emphasis placed on a realm of electronic gear in lieu of guitars and more guitars, and moods and textures valued over guitar-noodling mindlessness and verse-chorus-verse song-structures. The aesthetic shone through on both their self-released prefatory 2008 EP Amblingand their 2009 débutalbum Be One of Us and Hear No Noise, released on Crossroads of America Records. Later that year, they released an extended version of the same album on Friend of Mine Records, confusing no one.
The sound seemed nailed in place by such material as “Kings Die like Other Men” (set against a calm keyboard and a stream-manipulated acoustic-guitar line, featuring samples from a John F Kennedy/New Frontier speech juxtaposed with a scientist prevaricating past some vague bit of unpleasantness over which JFK might have preferred you not get too hung up)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCHsSAINsfo) and “Pacific Lights” (the album’s concluding track, with its multiple layers, suggesting a less-medicated Sigur Rós)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lD0X78gWhk). Had Utesch chosen to chase that vibe across a couple more albums, no one would have accused Metavari of self-cannibalization — or, if any did, the rest of the room would have mailed their happy butts to Vladivostok, COD.
Utesch had another direction in mind for Metavari — one he couldn’t articulate right off the top, but would require some work in order to realize fully; unfortunately, he had to do this with the meter running. To finance the band’s second album, he set up a Kickstarter fund, in 2012. At the time, there were six songs completed. The crowd-sourced proceeds garnered amounted to around $6000. It seemed ample scratch toward finishing the album. Utesch then experienced a degree of stress over what the sound should actually be. The feeling caught on. The band wound up scrapping the existing material and starting over. Suddenly, the Kickstarter windfall seemed less ample to requirements. Utesch crowd-sourced additional funds to release Moonlesshimself, on Vital Shores Records, in 2015. After expenses, the album came in three times over budget. Nevertheless, there wasan album, behind which they could tour. It might take awhile to recoup costs; it was not inconceivable. What was worth celebrating was they had shifted aesthetic gears without alienating anyone. Moreover, although costs were considerable, they weren’t prohibitive, on the level of, say, Plush’s 2002 album Fed, which wound up being released on a Japanese label before it received a belated Stateside release six years later. The name “Metavari” now carried.
What distinguished Moonlesswas Metavari had eschewed traditional instrumentation altogether in favor of full-on electronics. Gone were the hinge-creaks such instrumentation brought with it: every note that landed sounded like it hadn’t been locked in Earth’s orbit, but had descended from the skies onto the track of its own accord. Previous producers had to sweat bullets to achieve the same level of sound-separation that Utesch delivered: one pictures Martin Hannett disassembling Steven Morris’s drum-kit to render every audible part of the drum a discrete unit — no matter how bruised Morris’s leg wound up, or how close to death the poor drummer’s spraying roach-spray in an isolated booth brought him. Metavari had gone post-post-rock. The effect upon their base must have been akin to Radiohead releasing “OK Computer” in 1997, playing ping-pong for three years, and then confusing the hell out of them with “Kid A”, before their fans decided, well, yes, this isquite superb: you just need to give the album some time to savor it, rather than treating it like a box of cereal, built to spill its contents immediately.
Utesch described this creative transition as feeling “very organic”, mid-wived amidst a “healthy tension”: “In those early days of Metavari, we each brought our own personalities and skills to the table. I leaned heavily towards synths and electronics, so as members have come and gone over the years, my proclivities have risen to the top, more or less.” The band eventually pared itself down to Utesch, occasionally Brinneman, and, less often still, drummer Andrew McComas: the set-up might have felt even moreorganic, as it had shed itself of its guitarists (Tommy Cutter, Simon Lesser, and Kyle Steury). After Utesch asserted his producer/composer status, they must not have felt there was much left for them to do in their secondary function (programming, synths).
“It’s certainly an interesting dichotomy at first glance,” Utesch said about the music’s evolution, “the DIY punk ethos up against a genre that most often is associated with dance clubs and disco. While Metavari certainly has songs that one might dance to, that’s definitely not where my heart is aimed. In the best way possible, this whole thing still feels like a dark, gloomy gnashing of teeth. Sorting out the balance between synth-pop and coarse abrasion. Harkening to the visceral moments in the music that carried me through my adolescence, but working through how to illustrate that without guitars.”
Those dark and gloomy sensations that surface in Metavari’s sound have also left their mark on Utesch’s life. The most devastating occurred around the making of Metavari’s fourth album, Symmetri, released in November 2017. Symmetritook twenty months to write and produce. Consider that it took Stanley Kubrick a little over fifteen months to wrap up Eyes Wide Shut… While composing the music for the album, Utesch’s wife, who was pregnant with their first child, miscarried. One is fairly certain that his mood at that point was not a happy one, and one did not feel impelled to press him on what seemed self-evident. It is common knowledge, however, that he finished the album just a little after the successful birth of his second child. "The record was drenched in an incredibly dark season of our life,” Utesch told One Way Static, [https://mondotees.com/products/symmetri-by-metavari] “and yet concluded at nearly the opposite. I quite literally finished the record with my newborn son in my arms.”
Utesch had spoken elsewhere about having operated previously under the false premise that, as summed up by Kris Kristofferson in “Songwriter”, the 1984 film directed by Alan Rudolph and starring Willie Nelson, Lesley Ann Warren, and Rip Torn, “Do you suppose a man’s got to be a miserable son of a bitch all the time just to write a good song now and then?” “I think for me,” Utesch said, “I had it in my head that if I was happy then I couldn’t write emotional, intrepid music. But, in fact, when I am most happy, I am most fearless. Most clear-minded. And even in a moment of ebb and darkness, simply recalling happier times invokes a level of motivation that I can’t muster by ‘suffering for my art’.” Would that all the latter-day Young Werthers laboring under similar misapprehensions might have done with such notions so they can get on about the business of art.
AlthoughSymmetriis Metavari’s fourth studio album, it should be considered Album Three-A, given that the one that came before it, Metropolis, which appeared earlier the same year, was a two-disc “re-score” ofdirector Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis. (Gottfried Huppertz provided the original score.) An edit of that score, Symmetriwas in fact commissioned by Utesch’s home town, Fort Wayne, for The Cinema Center for Art House Theater Day, 2016. (The re-score was released worldwide on One Way Static Records for Record Store Day, 2017.) Amidst the repetitive, Steve Reichian loops, themes emerge with such suddenness as to register as tonal earthquakes. One is inclined to read Utesch’s music as an objective correlative to the film’s art direction (by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Kurt Vollbrecht) and the striking German-Expressionist cinematography of Karl Freund and Günther Rittau: that he was seeking to recapture some of the wonder that greeted audiences in the late Twenties. Others inclined to read biography into every possible artistic utterance have mentioned the circumstances under which Utesch was forced to proceed with his work. If such observations are indeed relevant, then they attest to Utesch’s seriousness as a composer, willing to work through trauma to convey meaningful sound. On the other hand, one listens to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 1983 score to the Nagisa Ōshima-directedSenjō no Merī Kurisumasu, and manages somehow to avoid the temptation to scour Sakamoto’s life story for evidence of The Big Hurt that made the music possible.
Future musicologists might find a more rewarding line of inquiry to Utesch’s aesthetic in his day job as a freelance designer. [http://nthnl.com/] Going back to the Alderman interview, which covered his 2017 EP Tetra AD, he also discussed his work on the Metropolisre-score: “Working on Metropoliswas incredible… because it was a silent film. It was two hours of footage, where we literally had every second of space to fill up. What the themes are gonna be and come in and out of the record and make sense with the footage.” The process wasn’t about making the space accommodate the theme, but the other way around. One felt compelled to ask him if he suspected he might have an aspect of synesthesia to his perceptions. If such were the case, how, exactly, would he communicate something like the mood conveyed by an image, a color, a line’s trajectory, to his fellow Metavarians? Would it be possible to develop such a pony for a non-synesthetic? To cite one of his influences: David Lynch described a horn part to Angelo Badalamenti for the song “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart” (sung by Julee Cruise for her 1989 album Floating into the Night) as “chunks of plastic”, and Badalamenti proceeded to knock out an approximation of Lynch’s vision that Lynch believed fit the song perfectly. For mere mortals like the rest of us, does a Great Wall of China run between these territories?
Utesch’s answer was along the lines of, well, six of one…
“I’m not sure I have any sort of diagnosed synesthesia,” Utesch said, “but I most certainly correlate visual references to every second of music I write. Narratives, themes, stories, visualizations. Granted, I can also assume that most composers who occupy an instrumental space do this, but I love how conscious it makes me in terms of the path a song is taking.”
And finally, for those whose lot it is to go through life notbeing Nathaniel David Utesch, one must consider that, of the two works Metavari has released on Mind Over Matter Records, one of them was a 2017 single, “Oh, Diane” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL0vFH21EZs), a tribute to David Lynch’s classic TV series, Twin Peaks, which appeared on the compilationThe Next Peak, Vol III(Vol Ihaving included synth-heavy covers and recreations of the soundtrack to Twin Peaks, with Vol IImore adventurous still, featuring ten reworks and remixes, put together by synth-wave producers, who applied Angelo Badalamenti’s original compositions to different cinematic contexts, or to existing pop works just dying for a Badalamentian makeover, such as Kalax featuring Lucy Black‘s “Lullaby for Lovers”).
Envious much?
