Vassar-born Genghis Tron discusses style of album

Mike Newmark Columnist

When metal act Genghis Tron played its first shows at Vassar, nobody had heard anything quite like it. Its approach was wholly unique, a quirky grindcore-meets-electronica rubric that sounded like Ratatat’s party being crashed by The Locust and Atari Teenage Riot. Now, the trio of Hamilton Jordan ’06 (guitars, programming), Michael Sochynsky ’05 (keyboards, programming) and Mookie Singerman ’06 (vocals) has a brand new album, Board Up the House, on the revered Relapse label, and is currently supporting metalcore heavyweights Converge on a nationwide spring tour. Board Up the House, Genghis Tron’s sophomore LP, is the band’s best record yet, assiduously fusing its rock and electronic sides together for an aural experience simultaneously terrifying and dazzling. In honor of Genghis Tron’s quick rise to success both on record and in the musical community, Arts Columnist Mike Newmark spoke with keyboardist/beatmaker Michael Sochynsky about Board Up the House, the jump to Relapse Records, what it was like to record with Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou.

The Miscellany News: How did Genghis Tron—both the band and the idea—come about?

Michael Sochynsay: It all started one drunken night at the TH’s when myself and Hamilton—the guitarist—were talking about our common musical interests and how it spanned a whole wide range of genres, and how we were both into lots of death metal, and also things like Boards of Canada and hip-hop and things like that. So we jokingly said, ‘oh, wouldn’t it be funny if we programmed some beats on the computer and, you know, put it all together.’ And eventually we actually sat down and did it. I bought a keyboard, which was my first synthesizer, and we wrote a song, and it was pretty ridiculous. And then we put it on the Internet. This was before Myspace or whatever—we put it on Purevolume, which you may or may not be familiar with. People were really receptive to it, people got a kick out of it, and so we made some more songs. We weren’t really thinking about an audience or anything, we were just kind of doing it just for fun. And once we had three songs, just to see what happened we sent them to like 10 labels, and, shockingly, one label wrote us back, called Crucial Blast. Said they wanted to give us money to record it for real and actually do it, and this was before we’d even played a show or anything. And then, I was roommates with Mookie, who’s now the singer. We were trying to do vocals and stuff, but we couldn’t because we were sucking at it, so we asked him to come and give it a whirl. And that’s how it kind of came together.

MN: Is that first song still available?

MS: Yeah, it’s called “Ride the Steambolt.” It’s the third song on our first EP. Pretty much everything we wrote during that first period while we were at Vassar went onto that first EP called Cloak of Love. Those songs were written all during a couple-month period in the beginning of 2004. It definitely wasn’t our intention to tour on those songs or have a large amount of people hear them or anything.

MN: How did you go from Crucial Blast to Relapse?

MS: While we were in the studio or just before we were going into the studio to record [debut LP] Dead Mountain Mouth, Relapse approached us, said they were interested in the band and wanted to sign us. At that point we’d already agreed to do the full-length Dead Mountain Mouth with Crucial Blast, and we wanted to sort of focus on that, so we basically told Relapse that we were interested but that we weren’t ready to do anything. So maybe about a year later we came back, and they were still interested. You know, it’s a huge step up, it’s a world of difference. They’re both awesome labels, but Crucial Blast is just one person working really, really hard on sort of an underground level, and then Relapse is, you know, a big corporation. So it’s been different but totally awesome to be on Relapse.

MN: How is [Converge guitarist] Kurt Ballou involved in all of this?

MS:He just recorded our last two albums.

MN: So no affiliation with either Crucial Blast or Relapse, per se?

MS: No, I mean, Relapse put out a split record that Converge did, but that’s about it. We were the ones who chose to work with Kurt on the record.

MN: So how did you get hooked up with Kurt Ballou, and was he able to give you the sound that you were looking for?

MS: We just sort of e-mailed him before we knew him at all. We told him that we were fans of his engineering work and producing, and he wrote back and said he would do it. That was for Dead Mountain Mouth. That one—you know, I think we’re all happy with the end result, but I think we all also thought it could have been—it didn’t exactly come out the way we wanted it to. And with the new one we knew Kurt better, we talked to him a lot more leading up to the record, and we were much more friendly. Not that we were not friends with him, but we actually knew him at that point so we could talk to him about things, you know, hash out ideas and stuff. So the new one definitely is more reflective of the record that we ultimately wanted to make with Kurt. He makes very aggressive, powerful records—that’s his style, you know? And that works for us, and then sometimes it’s to our detriment as well, particularly on Dead Mountain Mouth, because it came out more aggressive and harsh than we had ever anticipated the record sounding. So I think we worked with him on the new one to sort of tone it back a bit, bring some more clarity to the record.

MN: I actually wanted to talk about the music on that new one, Board Up the House. I hear a lot of changes from Dead Mountain Mouth to this one. It does seem a tad quieter overall, and there are songs like “Recursion” that sound closer to hip-hop than metal. Finally, what I’m hearing are the rock and electronic elements fusing together a little bit more instead of staying separate. Were those conscious decisions on the band’s part or did they sort of come about naturally?

MS: I think it was both conscious and unconscious. It’s always been our goal since we recorded those first songs which are—we’re proud of them but they’re really ridiculous and over-the-top, and ever since we recorded those we’ve always been trying to sort of do what you said in terms of making the connection between guitars and synthesizers a little bit more cohesive, and making the transitions between loud and quiet more sensible, and things like that. So we definitely were conscious of trying to do that, but how the record ultimately ended up coming out was also kind of unconscious because it’s just sort of how we happened to write the songs. It was definitely a natural progression from the beginning of the band to where we are now. We couldn’t have written the record just now a couple of years ago, because we wouldn’t have been trying to fix the mistakes we had made in the past. So we’re definitely always trying to improve our songwriting abilities, and we’re trying to further define our style and make it really cohesive. And hopefully we’ll continue to do that.

MN: Another change I noticed is that the themes develop over longer periods of time on this record. The closing track is over 10 minutes long, and the song “I Won’t Come Back Alive,” one of my favorites, feels like a saga in miniature. Was this a result in any way of metal audiences becoming more patient after being exposed to bands like Isis and Pelican?

MS: I don’t know that writing those songs had anything to do with those bands necessarily being popular—I just think that it’s sort of like what I was saying about a logical progression. Any band that’s worthwhile to listen to is not going to repeat themselves over and over again. They’re going to expand their sound, improve it and evolve, because otherwise it wouldn’t be interesting; it probably wouldn’t be interesting for the fans and it definitely wouldn’t be interesting for the band. So we definitely knew we didn’t want to write another record of songs that were two minutes long that followed a particular structure of loud-quiet, fast-slow, grind-hip-hop, whatever. So I guess the songs that you’re referring to are the result of that idea. And it’s sort of like what I was saying earlier about how the starting of the band was a reflection of the fact that we all listened to a wide range of music, and that over the last four or five years we’ve been listening to the bands that—like you were saying, listening to Pelican and things like that. And you know, you’re influenced by what you hear, so I guess that’s part of it as well.

MN: Now that you’ve recorded this album, and you’ve mentioned how bands improve because they naturally progress and learn from what they’ve done and try to do something different, have you thought about anything else that you might want to do differently for the next record? Any sort of shifts?

MS: Oh man, we’re not even thinking about it yet. We’re still on our tour and now I’m in the van actually, and we’re not really thinking about writing right now. We’ve put together a few little ideas and stuff but we don’t have any grand plans for the themes of the overall style of the next album. So I really don’t know, but if I had to guess it will probably continue in the direction that we’re going. And you know, there will be long songs, and I can’t promise anything but if I had to guess it will be a more patient record, and a little more cerebral. And visceral. If that makes sense. It’s kind of stereotypical about bands, after a few albums, going through their Abbey Road phase where it’s more experimental and out there, but it just seems like a natural thing to do because the only way to keep things interesting is to not repeat yourself.

MN: If I’m not mistaken, you guys still don’t have a drummer.

MS: That is correct.

MN: Are you still using this Drumkit from Hell program I’ve heard about?

MS: Yes we are. That’s what we used on the last album for the live, acoustic-sounding drums, and I’m programming some of the other beats as well using a few other programs, other than Drumkit from Hell.

MN: Can you explain a bit about how that works? About how you make drums sound acoustic on a program like that?

MS:For the first two albums we were just using realistic samples and just programming them ourselves, down to each cymbal, each kick, each snare, all that kind of stuff. Hamilton, the guitarist, he programs all the live-sounding drums, to do the quote-unquote realistic drums, and I program all the sort of hip-hop and glitchy and if you want to call it techno-y stuff. And then we sort of fuse it together and work, you know, make sure all of our shit lines up together. And then with the newer one, Hamilton was using this program called Drumkit from Hell which is far more realistic in that it’s not only triggering samples, but it’s recording velocity hits, so if you tell it to lower the volume of the drum it’s actually triggering a sample in which the person who recorded the drum was actually tapping the drum softer, so it’s not just lowering the volume of one single sample. And then it’s got all this interesting stuff with—it’s recorded like a live drum kit would be recorded so there’s bleed between the mics, so if you were to listen to the overhead mic and you hit the snare you would hear the snare in the overhead mic. And you mix those different mics to get different kinds of tones for your kit. It’s a pretty elaborate program, and when we recorded with Kurt he was way stoked on working with it. He said it was basically like working with drum tracks that he’d recorded himself, in terms of the quality and the way you work with it. So it’s a pretty cool program.

MN: Are many other bands doing this right now?

MS: I know that the band Meshuggah—they’re Swedish, sort of groovy tech-metal band I guess you’d call them—the drummer for that band was actually involved in the production of Drumkit from Hell, and they did an album called Catch 33 a couple years ago where all the drums were programmed with Drumkit from Hell, and those drums sound fucking great. I don’t know many other bands who are using it on such a professional level—I don’t really know who else uses it, to tell you the truth.

MN: Do you think that other bands will start to take this approach?

MS: I don’t see a band that already has a drummer—it wouldn’t be likely for them to fire the drummer and start using Drumkit from Hell. I think it’s useful for bands like us that knew that we never wanted a drummer as part of our identity. And it’s of course good for kids who have guitars and want to write songs who can’t find a drummer who can play as fast or as confidently as they want them to, so it could be helpful for that reason.

MN: So is having Drumkit from Hell part of your identity? Can you explain why you haven’t used a human drummer?

MS: When we started the band, it wasn’t really part of the equation. I knew that I wanted to program electronic beats and stuff, and Hamilton had been messing around with programming, you know, grind-y blast drums and stuff like that, and it was just sort of how it evolved. And then before we knew it we were recording that first EP and we never even talked about, ‘oh, we should find someone to play the drums.’ We were just like, ‘well, this is what we are.’ And then we made the choice to just totally embrace it and never look back. And to this day I think we’re all really surprised and in shock that we’ve had the degree of success that we have had without having a drummer because a lot of people are very suspicious of it, or think it’s, you know, bullshit. But I think once people see us live or listen to the album with a critical ear, they realize it’s an asset for us, not a detraction. But really, there’s no philosophical reason, it’s not that we don’t like drummers or something, and at this point we’ve written a lot of songs that a real drummer could have easily played for us. So it’s just kind of what we are, you know?

MN: How difficult was the journey between being a Vassar band to being a world famous act?

MS: It wasn’t a very difficult journey, I would say. It was probably a lot harder to be in the band when we were in school because we all took academics and going to college pretty seriously. But at the same time we had real commitments to the band while we were in school, so we were touring on every winter break and every spring break and every summer. It was eating up a lot of our downtime, focusing on the band full-time when we were in school. We actually wrote Dead Mountain Mouth while I had graduated but Hamilton and Mookie were still in school, and they were dealing with their senior theses and shit like that. So that was pretty intense. Once we all graduated it was the band full-time, 100%. We knew we wanted to do it after we graduated. That was the plan and we followed through, and we’re still doing it.

MN: What advice might you give to a Vassar band that’s trying to get to where you are?

MS:Write good songs, and don’t try to copy some other band—try to do your own thing. That’s what we did and it works for us. We didn’t set out to copy another band. And I would say if you want to be successful, put the music before absolutely everything else, including your Myspace page or making connections or anything. Because if the music is good, the rest will fall into place. And don’t play The Chance. Actually, that would be my number one advice: Don’t play The Chance.

Genghis Tron will appear at the Blender Theatre at Gramercy in New York City on April 1, 2008, with Converge, The Red Chord, and Baroness.