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 LUDICRA: “Birds of a (Gray) Feather”
By Nathan T. Birk
Without warning, 2002 bore witness to an album so jarringly provocative, so uniquely textured, yet mostly overlooked by the metal legions due to its release via a primarily crust-oriented label: Ludicra’s debut LP, Hollow Psalms. A rare beast indeed, this Bay Area quintet effectively mainlined semi-recent Darkthrone’s atonal twists of the knife into the ravaged, ransacked corpse of S.U.i.Z.i.D.-era Bethlehem, all schizophrenic pulses and frequent plunges into head-shred blast, while even hinting at distant kin Damad’s spiraling psychosis. And, like the best of bands, they sounded nothing like that at all – only Ludicra.
Album #2, the enigmatically titled Another Great Love Song, is even better, even braver, and certifiably one of the most singular black metal spins going; strangely enough, it also comes courtesy of the wildly eclectic Alternative Tentacles (says drummer Aesop: “AT made the most reasonable offer, they have the best logo of any label, and they put out Amebix’s Arise – need we say more?”). Digging deep within the heart of alternately modern/mildewed BM and restructuring the wiring from there, Love Song is one carefully/chaotically careening rollercoaster comprised of seven mini-epics, all coalescing into an epic song-cycle that reverberates with grim ‘n’ ghostly ease…but, yet again, there’s little to no precedent for what results, stymieing is Ludicra’s overall idiosyncrasy. The discourse that follows comprises the band in its entirety: vocalist Laurie Sue Shanaman, guitarists John Cobbett and Christy Cather, the aforementioned Aesop, and bassist Ross Sewage.
From each of your perspectives, what makes Ludicra's black metal sound so unique, so foreign, yet so urgent?
Laurie: “Well, we’re definitely quite a group of strange birds! We all have different influences, but for some reason we mesh well together.”
John: “I don't consider Ludicra to be any specific type of metal, and find such sub-classifications endlessly annoying. What kind of metal are we?! Who cares!? I’m personally not out to be anything but 1/5 of Ludicra, whatever that is.”
Christy: “I believe that the five of us must have some sort of chemical connection and were meant to play together – the musical pheromones said so. When we practice, the music we play seems to just happen naturally, for the most part. We really let loose of a lot of our inhibitions and sometimes express almost too much of ourselves, hence the urgency/foreignness of our sound.”
Aesop: “We don't really set out to write black metal songs or be a black metal band. The genre’s still one of our biggest influences, but an over-saturated scene’s caused us to become bored and go outside of it for inspiration these days.”
Ross: “Black metal’s the means to an end for Ludicra, and that end is for us to be super-alcoholic-necro-death-fuck.”
So, in this context, please define “black metal,” and how Ludicra fit into those conceptions...
Laurie: “Either way, black metal’s dark and depressive furious music, regardless of its themes and content. Because of this, we’re in some way a black metal band, in sound and influence, with a willingness for experimentation. Black metal was the biggest influence that started Ludicra. There’s no real sub-genre called Gray Metal, but it sure makes it easier to describe yourself. Perhaps I’m not sure where we fit in! Damn dark, blackened ash metal...”
John: “Black metal – two cool words that go great together and are used to describe such a wide variety of bands at this point that the phrase has no meaning whatsoever. Hopefully, Ludicra doesn't fit into any conceptions. I think the band’s made up of misfits anyway, and I gave up trying to ‘fit in’ anywhere a long time ago. Gray Metal?! Who came up with that!? It's so stupid, and I hope it goes away soon.”
Christy: “Speaking of not fitting into any conceptions, that’s another reason I like the title Another Great Love Song so much – it doesn’t really fit with the whole ‘metal/black metal’ outlook, we’re just doing whatever it is we like to do.”
Ross: “My teacher at the Army boarding school came up to me and said ‘Is that a Ludicra pin? On your uniform? What do you want to do with your life?!’ To which I replied, ‘I wanna black metal.’ The rest is Ludicra history.”
Again, the album title would suggest a (loose) lyrical and/or musical concept…
Laurie: “Is this a title not befitting a black metal band? It's an odd one, the title, but it just represents the cynical way we choose to be, but also admitting our emotions/sadness in a scathing way hopefully more than a sappy way. It does suggest a loose, weird concept – the artwork reveals some more meaning. Each song has its personal meaning or theme that in some, sometimes-loose way reflects the title. One song, ‘The Only Cure, The Only Remedy’, is certainly not about heartbreak, but about going on medication and seeing how it helped and worsened the situation – you’re stabilized but numb, left to crave the passion and madness that's been stowed away.”
John: “That title just sorta happened, and it seemed appropriate in a weird way. We kicked the idea around for a while, and then it stuck. I think it's pretty sassy, myself – that's right, sassy!”
Aesop: “John's amp, ‘The Brutal Dictator’ was picking up radio. I guess on Wednesday nights, when we practice, that station has a show where they play a voiceover that says ‘Another Great Love Song’ and then you hear some Air Supply. You can hear some of this radio at the end of the song ‘Why Conquer?’, but you get Soft Cell instead – they were way more black metal than Air Supply. We joked about using that title at first, but then with the lyrics and general feel of the record, it seemed to fit and display some sort of fuck-all to convention. The artwork really wraps it up into a theme, but it was hardly recorded as a concept album.”
Compositionally, Another Great Love Song is your broadest palate of sounds yet, yet somehow even more unified than the first album – any tangible goals, then, when writing the record?
Christy: “We thought about the flow of songs a little more during the songwriting of this album – I think I can speak for everyone in that regard. We also spent a great amount of time and thought deciding the order of the songs, which may make it sound a bit more unified than our first recording.”
John: “We just wanted to make it better than the first one. We've learned a lot since that record came out, and hopefully it shows.”
Aesop: “I have to agree with John, that was our only intent from the day we started writing – just to top ourselves and satisfy our need to be a better band. Everybody really went above and beyond their own abilities and delivered such amazing performances. It’s a logical continuation from Hollow Psalms in that it’s sort of like the same record, only done a hundred times better."
Could a band like Ludicra only come from San Francisco? Meaning, that whole “foreign vs. familiar” thang vs. what's currently being constituted as “Bay Area Black Metal” (Leviathan, Draugar, Crebain, etc.)...? Like, this crazy patchwork of people 'n' sounds forming something so frazzled yet expertly sewn together...
John: “SF’s a pretty strange town, so maybe that has something to do with what you’re talking about. None of those bands you mention play live yet, which is too bad. If we could play shows with them, it’d feel more like a ‘scene’ here. It probably looks way more ‘expertly sewn together’ from the outside.”
Ross: “I'd think you could at least take the time to mention Impaled and Hammers of Misfortune, you cheeky bastard [note: Sewage plays in the former, Cobbett the latter]. As for sewing, you should see when we all get together for our SF black metal needlepoint circle. Upon this rotted earth, we unleash such evil doilies and blankets as have never been seen by eyes other than Satan Himself!”
Lastly, obviously the Ludicra sound has evolved from the first LP, yet your identity's still very much intact – sonically, what can/could the future bring for Ludicra?
Laurie: “I firmly believe that darker times will only bring one good thing – darker music. And some touring would be nice.”
Christy: “I just hope we can keep playing together and make every record a little better than the one before it.”
Aesop: “If we can last as long, I see us sort of being like Voivod was in the ‘80s, getting a bit better with each release, building on what was laid down on the last one, but remaining essentially the same band. Not that I think we come close to the majesty of Voivod, but you know what I'm saying…”
Ross: “I think Aesop’s onto something – like Piggy, Aesop is tubby and plays with ray-guns. Like Jason Newstead, I endured years of bullshit to eventually be free and work on decent projects. Like Snake, Laurie has a dynamic and creepy presence. Like on the Killing Technology album, John eats cockroaches one by one. And like the Voivod himself, Christy is a psychic space-vampire who rules another dimension.”
www.ludicra.org
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