Catchy avant-metal: Insect Ark interviewed
The duo, consisting of Dana Schechter and Tim Wyskida, talks about breaking out of genre straitjackets and the concoction of pop and avant-metal in their latest release, Raw Blood Singing.
All photographs by Yani Beel
Mentions of ‘avant’ in music blurbs can act more as a health warning than an enticement. Yet, an album came out last year that straddles the ‘outer realms of avant-Metal, psych-Doom, and experimental Goth’, as the press release would have it, while resisting the ‘avant’ moniker’s more pretentious pitfalls.
Raw Blood Singing is Insect Ark’s fourth full-length and boasts enough attention-catching writing to make you want to listen, ‘avant’ ambitions notwithstanding.
For drummer Tim Wyskida, who joined band leader and multi-instrumentalist Dana Schechter during the writing of the album and was heavily involved in arranging the music, this marriage of ‘avant’ and big moments was an intentional move: “Over time, we started looking to pair two things which aren’t often paired – catchy melodies and avantgarde music. In Dana’s initial ideas, I saw the possibility of developing and marrying those two concepts.”
Much of the catchiness comes from Schechter’s vocals, shot through with darkness, confidence and a nonchalant sneer. Schechter isn’t new to the mic – she handled lead vocals in her previous band Bee and Flower, who released a string of albums between 2001 and 2015. But the vocals are on display for the first time in Insect Ark’s discography since a flash appearance on the B-side of their debut release, the Collapsar / Piledriver 7”, from 2012.
“The idea was always on the table in the back of my mind”, Schechter says about singing again. “And this time around I was also encouraged by Tim and our former manager. I wasn’t certain it would work, but I saw there was an opportunity to try it anew, especially in light of the work Tim and I were doing writing together. I thought I’d have something new to bring to it, instead of starting where I’d left off some years before.”
The maturing of Schechter’s voice into something as-yet-unheard was more of a happy evolution, despite the rare level of intentionality sitting behind her performance. Schechter has elsewhere mentioned PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Carla Bozulich and Thalia Zedek as influences, although she manages to occupy her own frequency. “The connection I feel with all those vocalists is certainly not one-to-one. I didn’t aim to emulate anyone else’s style, regardless of how much I was inspired by their work. The best singers offer something that feels honest and personal. I was surprised that my voice had evolved quite a bit, organically, non-deliberately.”
The approach to the vocals belies something otherwise programmatic in the band’s blood – a profound musical curiosity paired with a wholesale refusal to follow templates. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows that Schechter is also a full-time member of prime experimentalists Swans, and Wyskida a co-founder of permanently livid doom/drone pioneers Khanate.
Insect Ark’s left-field status arguably starts with the removal of heavy music’s quintessential instrument – the electric guitar. Schechter instead handles bass, lapsteel guitar and synths. “The idea is, if you remove the one thing that most rock music is built upon, then you’re bound to have something unique”, she explains. “I always want my music both sonically and creatively to sound unlike anyone else’s.”
Even though Insect Ark came into existence at a time when releasing instrumental or instrumental-leaning rock albums was no longer a novelty, there was always too much in the song structures, instrumentation and, ultimately, atmosphere that swerved past rock-band-without-singer or even post-metal territory. The result could have more easily sat on a heavier sort of Jim Jarmusch soundtrack, likely thanks to Schechter’s adjacent professions as a computer animator and film composer. She’s clear about the band’s stylistic choices: “Insect Ark has never fit cleanly into a genre, and was never intended to. In fact, many of the genres people put us into when I got Insect Ark started, I was largely unaware of. I don’t think about genres at all.”
How the duo achieved such mastery in Raw Blood Singing is part aforementioned vision and experience, part gift of time. Writing and rehearsals for the Insect Ark album happened on the tail end of the pandemic. “At that time, there was little else to do”, Wyskida says, “so it gave us a unique opportunity to really sink into the music.” The band rehearsed every day for a full year to get the album in shape, an unusual commitment by any standard. But it makes sense once you learn more about the personalities involved. When asked what Wyskida values about his bandmate, he answers that she’s “masterful at crafting and layering vocal and music melodies, is a kick-ass bassist and lap steelist, and has a great work ethic. She works on the band from morning to night.” For Wyskida himself, the schedule didn’t feel overly intense: “I spend most of my time working on music anyway. I’m obsessed with sound puzzles so motivation is almost always in place. I don’t need to fish for it, fortunately.”
Wyskida was a hired gun for Insect Ark at first, when he got to Berlin a few years ago, but then ended up heavily collaborating on the album. “It sounds like a different band now”, he says about his involvement. “Dana had written a lot of the music for the album during the pandemic. Aside from writing drum and percussion parts, I had ideas on how to arrange the music differently and how to shape the overall sound of the band. Dana was very open to my input so we dug in. I wanted to tighten the arrangements, add vocals and focus on increasing clarity by taking a strong look at where each instrument was sitting in the frequency spectrum. I think the album sounds great.”
Such depth of thinking about the sonics lends the album much of its cinematic, stereoscopic quality. The attention to spatial detail turns the listening experience into something genuinely immersive. To achieve this, the duo enlisted studio legend Colin Marston for the mix. Marston is known as the go-to person for death metal experimentalism (e.g., Gorguts, Kralice, Dysrythmia, Afterbirth, Imperial Triumphant, Artificial Brain), but has a much wider CV than that. The first thing you might notice about his work, not just for Insect Ark, is how distinct every instrument sounds, even in dense compositions (and death metal can get extremely dense). Wyskida elaborates: “Colin helped us maximize the use of space, in terms of how things were placed. We spent a good amount of time figuring out what specific point each sound should come from - left, right, center, close, far, etc.”
The result wasn’t easy to come by and took a while to get going in the right direction. Mixing was a remote job and the first couple of attempts weren’t what Schechter and Wyskida had had in mind. Communication was key: “We had a two-hour video chat with Colin and fully described what we were looking for. The next mix was amazing – beyond what we expected”, Wyskida enthuses. “When you work on pieces of music for so long, it’s easy to start thinking it’s obvious what is needed in the mix. After we were in sync with Colin on what to go for, he was off to the races.”
Another ingredient in the idiosyncrasy of Raw Blood Singing’s sonics is that the recording personnel and location – at Unreal Studio in Athens – was separate from the mixing environment. You’re far less likely to end up with conveyer-belt metal that way. Leaving their Berlin home for tracking was something the duo were excited to try. “It was a killer experience”, Schechter says, “and everyone involved, the studio, producers, engineers, were top-notch.”
The recordings were rounded out by a couple of guest appearances. Marston did a synth cameo on ‘Inverted Whirlpool’. And Ville Leppilahti of blackened space/trip rockers Oranssi Pazuzu did the same on three songs. “We had the great pleasure of touring with Oranssi Pazuzu in North America in 2019, right before recording [previous full-length] The Vanishing. Fans and friends, the both.”, Schechter says about the connection. “We met through our former manager, which both bands at one point shared. Ville is a tremendous musician. He was the first guest on an Insect Ark recording in over ten years. He wrote some beautiful parts or re-adapted my synth lines.”
Wyskida’s participation and the guest contributions are proof that Insect Ark has resolutely evolved from a solo endeavour. Schechter founded the band over a decade ago because she wanted to flesh out her ideas and “have the guts to perform solo, to write and record free from anyone else’s input.” But following two singles, an EP and a full-length without anyone but Schechter performing, Insect Ark was ready to move on, like any effort propelled by untrammelled artistic curiosity. The project grew into a duo on LP Marrow Hymns, released in 2018. “I eventually felt ready to see where else the project could go”, Schechter says. “The energy of collaboration and working with like-minded artists was definitely the main reason to shift away.”
Ashley Spungin, the drummer on Marrow Hymns, was replaced by SubRosa’s Andy Patterson for follow-up full-length The Vanishing, which came out in 2020. The oft-cited alchemy between band members is audible on both of those records, short-lived though those partnerships were. Schechter’s move to Berlin during the pandemic meant that she had to search for a new musical partner. She seems to have found her ultimate musical partner in Wyskida: “Tim and I had a collaborative writing experience on this album that bordered on the instinctual. We aligned on so many fronts – on dynamics, power, riffs, melodies, textures. Stunning, really. I still do solo work and will surely do more. But, I think, working with Tim was proof that finding the right collaborator makes all the difference in both process and finished product.”
Wyskida certainly fits in. If you know his work, especially in Khanate, you might notice that his approach to drumming tends towards composition rather than rock backbone. Raw Blood Singing is full of cymbal flourishes and dramatic ‘snare vs kick’ choices that weave themselves into the music in unobvious yet meaningful ways. Wyskida attributes this to a mental shift in his early days as a drummer, when he was looking for “genuine artists” to play with. Frustrated that he couldn’t find anyone who fit that bill, he bought a guitar, bass, keyboard and recording software and started composing music on his own. “From that point on, I’ve viewed drums and percussion composition from a songwriter perspective, rather than a drummer or percussionist perspective”, he says. “I try to understand the initial idea for a song as deeply as possible and then use the drums to achieve whatever the vision for the song calls for. It often starts out as a big mess of too many ideas that over time are whittled down to the strongest ideas. There’s a thrill in playing something in a way I’ve not heard, so I lean toward the freakish ideas.”
Freakishness and songwriting prowess have become Insect Ark’s formula. But change has always been there, too. Whether Schechter and Wyskida will carry the spirit of Raw Blood Singing into the next album or shapeshift again remains to be seen, and that’s what’s so exciting about Insect Ark.