Neurosis & Jarboe: Fracturing a Sacred Process
NEUROSIS are a bit of a mythical beast when it comes to the heavy music scene. Heavy music is the only thing you can label this behemoth as well, give their broad soundscape that has not only influenced a number of your favourite bands, but either directly or indirectly has influenced heavy music in general.
Yes it is more than fair to assume that is a bit of hyperbole. But you have to consider that even before TOOL were crushing minds with their subliminal discoveries on Lateralus, NEUROSIS had released Times of Grace, an album designed to be listened in tandem to Grace, an album from TRIBES OF NEUROT, a side project of the group. That level of intricacy is indeed just part of what has made NEUROSIS such a legendary musical machine.
Steve Von Till may have joined the four years into the group’s life cycle, but he is no less a key figure head in the evolution of all things heavy. His unique musical ear, and his love for high fidelity sounds and the best sounding music possible, has played an incredibly big role in the development of the NEUROSIS sound, and also in the development of their own record label, the aptly named Neurot Recordings. As the band evolved, and even before their seminal Through Silver in Blood, the group stumbled across a musical project that would eventually mould into the black sheep of their bands back catalogue.
“At one point we were playing in Atlanta, probably in the early 90s, and Jarboe and Micheal [Gira, SWANS] came out to one of our shows there. She has heard us on some local college radio station, one of the songs of Enemy of The Sun [1993], and uh, was pretty blown away. It was something she had never heard, and kind of the more, for lack of a better term, metal side of music up until that point. And she was really into the energy! She brought us peppers from her garden as well, I remember that.”
Speaking with Steve Von Till from NEUROSIS about the time he received home grown peppers from Jarboe is fantastically surreal as it sounds. It is in those tiny moments that his clear eye for detail shines through in a more wholesome way, as opposed to crushing your eardrums with blisteringly heavy music. The collaboration Steve is telling us about is the recently remastered Neurosis & Jarboe album, an album that similarly reveals the group’s intense ability to create overwhelming, atmospheric, and heavy music, albeit in an entirely new, and as Steve puts it, “ass backwards way.”
“I don’t remember who suggested it, but just one day we all decided we needed to make music together. We didn’t know what form it would take, um, and so yeah, we just agreed to do it,” Steve explains, but also admits that there wasn’t really any real trigger that made the collaboration happen. “We always try to have our influences be as pure as possible. Although, we’re inspired by everything we hear, everything we see, everything we feel, everything we experience in the world, so I guess it all had an influence on it.”
As the conversation evolves, and Steve goes on to mention how NEUROSIS wanted to break their sacred process, it shows how he and the group used the collaboration project as a chance to push themselves in entirely new directions. This is especially clear after Steve explains how deeply respected the NEUROSIS process was up until then, given the success and also the pride that all the members took in the musical output of the band. Still, recognising the clear oddity of a band like NEUROSIS performing and writing with a singer as unique as Jarboe, Steve and his collection of noisy folk proceeded to not only break the process that had wrought so much sonic revolution, but they would try an entirely new, long-winded, and frankly ridiculous writing process that formed the crux of the would be albums rich sounds.
“We pulled ourselves out of our normal process, and we did intentionally not write a NEUROSIS record.” Baffling as this sounds, it all works out in the end. “We still didn’t even know we were gonna call it Neurosis & Jarboe at the time. What we did was Noah [Landis, NEUROSIS] and I went back through all of our old two inch master tapes, going into a recording studio locally and chopping original rhythms and drum beats into loops. So we were starting with looping parts from our own records, and flipping them around. Chopping them up. Starting them in the middle of the beat, starting them in the wrong spot, just to come up with a rhythmic basis, and that’s how a lot of it would start.”
This new and exciting process, alongside the fact that the group would also eventually use consumer level pro-tools of the time in their own living room studios, helped give the Neurosis & Jarboe album a real sense of being genuine lightning in a bottle. Not only was Steve, Noah, and the rest of the band experimenting with unique rhythmic patterns, drone, and noise, but so too was Jarboe extending her wings into territory she never even knew existed before chance luck of hearing NEUROSIS. As a result, Jarboe would send the band multiple takes of her vocal performances, offering different variations, moods, and sounds to offer the group the best chance at finding exactly what they needed to make the album pop. And you can hear, moments into the first track Within, with those wicked tones wrapped around the lyrics ‘I tell ya, if god wants to take me, He will’.
This was all genuine next level creativity of the time. It obviously wasn’t the first time a band had recorded themselves at home, but to do it with the precision, and level of care and intensity that NEUROSIS and Steve achieved on this record was a real feat of the time, and a perfect stamp on why NEUROSIS are such pathfinders when it comes to heavy music and loud noises. It isn’t just loud noises though. As for Steve, it’s about loud noises that sound good. The love for high fidelity is the entire reason behind this year’s remaster of the Neurosis & Jarboe album. To be able to offer the best sound for this album, the sound that gets the official Steve Von Till seal of approval.
As the conversation continues, and Steve finishes discussing the poor analogue to digital converters of the 90s and early noughties, the chat culminates is us finally asking just how one becomes such an audiophile, when for most of us, sound quality is little more than a price on a pair of headphones. “I think it comes back to the first experiences of music. I remember being a kid in the 70s, and my parents had a Sansui system, and I can still remember the smell of it when you turn it on like old 70s electronics, it had that certain smell. I’ve got a Marshall amp that smells the same at that stereo does, and usually i’ll just walk back to the top vent and give it a whiff for some nostalgia!”
And then it all once more becomes a bit surreal. But then again, that is what happens when Steve Von Till tells you all about his childhood nostalgia. He goes deep into hearing the amplifier buzz, or the fingers on the strings of the acoustic guitar, the weird trippy flanger on the fade out of some 70s rock track. It’s all clear just how in love with sound Steve Von Till is, and everything his hand touches bears the same mark of quality. Now remastered, the Neurosis & Jarboe album stands as a creative step for one of the most vital bands veering far out of their comfort zone in search of something different, but still uniquely them. And in the words of Steve, “it’s a trippy and fucked up record.”
Neurosis & Jarboe (remastered) is out now via Neurot Recordings.
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