MetalZineVol. 9

PALLBEARERSAINT VITUSPIG DESTROYERANIMETALPHYSICALBLACK BREATHPELICAN

STAFFScion Project Manager: Jeri Yoshizu, SciontistEditor: Eric DuckerCreative Direction: ScionArt Direction: BONContributing Editor: J. BennettGraphic Designer: Jamie Story

CONTRIBUTORSWriter: Andrew EarlesPhotographers: Gregory Bojorquez, Nate Garrett

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Cover: ANIMETALPHYSICAL

SCION A/V SCHEDULE

DECEMBER

Scion A/V Presents:Arsis — Lepers Caress EP

Scion Label Showcase: Metal Blade featuring Gypsy Hawk and Pilgrim

JANUARY

Scion A/V Presents:Gates of Slumber — Storm Crow EP

FEBRUARY

Scion A/V Presents:Seasons of Mist

Scion A/V Presents:Roadburn Records

PLUS

In the coming months check outthese new music videos:

Arsis, “Carve My Cross”

Corrosion of Conformity, “Feed On”

Gates of Slumber, “Son of Hades”

Terror, “The Most High”

The Secret, “Seven Billion Graves”

Story: Andrew Earles

Since unleashing the their sophmore album, Prowler In The Yard, on Relapse in 2001, Pig Destroyer has never ceased to refine, improve, intensify and genuinely intellectualize grindcore, the strain of extreme metal that offers the least amount of wiggle room. 2004’s Terrifyer raised the bar to a level that only Pig Destroyer could clear, which they did with 2007’s Phantom Limb, a breakthrough release that stands as perhaps the heaviest music to also be saturated with brilliant catchiness.

Now almost six years since its last full-length, and 15 years into its career, Pig Destroyer has done the impossible with Book Burner, the band’s fifth album. The Baltimore/Virginia quartet of guitarist Scott Hull, relatively new drummer Adam Jarvis, revered lyricist J.R. Hayes, and noise/soundscape handler Blake Harrison have taken their place among the metal vanguard and made the ultimate statement in thinking-man’s grindcore.

Book Burner goes for a slice-and-dice blitz attack until the curtain falls with the album’s strongest track, “Permanent Funeral,” four minutes and eight seconds of Slayer and Morbid Angel reinvention. The album’s third and shortest track, “The Underground Man” has so much of Hull wound up in its half-minute running length that if the song could be somehow unpacked and unraveled, the entire history of thrash and death metal would tumble onto the floor.

Conducted over the second half of the summer, the Book Burner sessions inaugurated the band’s new self-built studio. It’s officially known as Visceral Sound Studios and is literally attached to the Alexandria, Virginia home that Scott Hull shares with his wife and kids. Much of the unsavory elements inherent to using an outside studio were obviously alleviated this time around, and Hull could also strike homesickness and fatherly absence from his list of concerns. Still, no one was oblivious to the importance of a timely recording process. “We were on a self-imposed timeline, because we thought that the record really, really needed to come out this year,” says Harrison.

When Book Burner’s October release date was solidified and announced during the first week of August, it wasn’t long before the haves, the will-haves, the future converts, the impulse haters, the curious dabblers, the fickle trend hoppers and extreme metal newbies all retreated to their comments sections of choice to weigh in. What became clear through the blather is that there is a horde of old and new fans who truly love, understand and properly appreciate this band. Their superlative-abuse and anticipatory fever-pitch was born from a knowledge that this album is going to give and keep on giving, no matter how many years it takes for a follow-up to continue the process. And that proves Pig Destroyer to be a very special band.

facebook.com/TheRealPigDestroyer

Story: J. Bennett

Call it a labor of love, and distance. Three years ago, the members of hardcore outfit Expire started their career while spread across three different Midwestern States—Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin—before finally converging upon Milwaukee in early 2012. “We didn’t really get to practice at all, and the only time we could really play shows was on tour,” vocalist Josh Kelting explains. “So all we did was tour.”

Expire’s first-ever show doubled as the opening trial by fire for a 16-date journey across the U.S. “We just hit the ground running, because if you’re from the Midwest and you don’t put in the work, no one cares about your band,” says guitarist Zach Dear. “Not to take anything away from East Coast or West Coast bands, but there’s a lot more history in their scenes. In the Midwest, you couldn’t name ten hardcore bands that stayed relevant for more than three or four years. I feel like you have to put in ten times the amount of work to get half the foothold.”

Expire’s work has started to pay off. Back in May of 2012, the band released its full-length debut, Pendulum Swings, via hardcore powerhouse Bridge Nine Records. Though all four members of the band are straight edge, Dear is quick to point out that Expire is not a straight edge band. “We don’t have any lyrics about being straight edge and we didn’t want to have a label put on us. That instantly limits the amount of people who want to listen to your band,” he says. “I’ve been in a straight edge band before, and it was awesome, but for this band we just wanted to play any kind of show to any kind of crowd and not have anything dissuading kids from wanting to check us out.” facebook.com/expirehc

TFD

Story: J. Bennett Photography: Gregory Bojorquez

“For me, grind is a lifestyle and a way of thinking.” When these words come from the mouth of Rich Hoak, you can trust that they’re the truth. Not only is Hoak the ringleader of grind trio TFD, he’s also the drummer for the legendary Brutal Truth, a band that has spent much of the last two decades taking grind to dizzying new levels of dexterity and complexity. But Hoak’s role in TFD isn’t confined to the drum throne; he’s also the band’s lyricist, vocalist and all-around mastermind. “We’re not singing about cars or girls or hacking up girls,” he explains. “A lot of our lyrics are poetry for the modern age. We address a lot of social problems, and we use humor to do that. But we’re deadly serious about what we do, and that is grind.”

Over the course of 13 years and 20-plus releases, TFD have blasted their way to grind infamy with Hoak as the sole constant member. The band’s current lineup includes guitarist Dan O’Hare and bassist Ryan Moll, who bring a new level of sonic sophistication to TFD’s short, sharp shocks of social commentary. “It’s our strongest lineup yet,” Hoak says. “The other two guys are musicians—they can actually play their instruments. I play the drums as hard and as fast as I can, so you have this kind of yin and yang of one guy pushing the tempo and being crazy while Dan and Ryan bring a more technical aspect to TFD.”

The latest TFD lineup coalesced for the band’s 2011 full-length, Hater. But don’t let the title fool you. “We’re all for peace and love, the end of war, and equality in society,” O’Hare explains. “And all those ideals are more powerful when there’s grind behind them.”

facebook.com/tfdgrind

Elijah Nelson just might be the most unlikely death metal bass player in the history of death metal bass players. His band Black Breath isn’t strictly a death metal band—they play a kind of hybridized form that incorporates thrash and hardcore—but the fact remains that Nelson is motivated by slightly different factors than his bandmates. “The main reason I play heavy metal music is so I can tour the country without paying for gas and go on pinball adventures,” Nelson explains. “Before we go onstage, I always walk around to see if I can find a pinball machine to play. I keep a journal of where the games are, what condition they’re in, what the high scores are, and what kind of score I got on the games.”

Nelson is no amateur when it comes to flippers and bumpers. “I don’t have enough time or money to invest into being a world-class pinball player, but at one point my world ranking was at about 217,” he says. “I got my ex-roommate into pinball, and he was just in the world championships. We’re at about the same skill level, but I’m just not ranked high enough. They pretty much only take the top five people from each country. But I’m always on tour, so I just play for fun.”

BLACK BREATHStory: J. Bennett

Black Breath is notoriously and heavily influenced by classic Swedish death metal from the late 1980s and early 1990s, but Nelson claims he didn’t start appreciating those groups until recently. “I didn’t really listen to Swedish death metal until the last few years. I really had a hard time with death metal in general—the clicky kick drums and the toilet vocals just seemed kinda silly to me,” he says. “Now I’ve come around to Dismember and Grave and some of the American stuff. Deceased’s Luck Of The Corpse is probably one of my favorite death metal albums of all time, which is funny because I don’t really like very much of their other stuff. But for some reason, that sticks out as my definition of what it means to be a really gnarly death metal band.”

Since forming in Seattle in 2006, Nelson and his bandmates—vocalist Neil McAdams, guitarist Eric Wallace, drummer Jamie Byrum and guitarist F. Funds—have released an EP and two full-lengths while touring the globe relentlessly. They famously caused a minor riot at a drama college in Stockholm, Sweden, when McAdams suggested that the crowd remove the barrier that had been placed between the stage and the audience. “Having a barrier at a show is like cooking a bunch of really good food and then putting a gate up in front of the kitchen so no one can eat any of it,” says Nelson. When the audience took McAdams up on his offer, chaos ensued—drinks flew, kids got onstage and so on. “Plus, we had a dude on the side of the stage yelling at us to play songs that we’d already played,” Nelson deadpans. “That’s when you know you’ve made it.”

blackbreath.com

Watch Black Breath’s video for “Home of the Grave,” part of the Scion A/V Video Series at scionav.com

Last year, the members of Chicago-based instrumental rock/metal band Pelican found themselves at a crossroads. After a decade of heavy touring, guitarist and founding member Laurent Schroeder-Lebec wanted to stay at home and spend more time with his family. But he gave his blessing to the rest of the band—guitarist Trevor de Brauw, bassist Bryan Herweg and drummer Larry Herweg—to enlist a fill-in guitarist for out-of-town dates. That fill-in guitarist ended up being Dallas Thomas of the Swan King. Shortly after the release of Pelican’s Ataraxia/Taraxis EP earlier this year, it was announced that Schroeder-Lebec would be taking an “indefinite hiatus” from the band. We recently got the details on their new situation from de Brauw, Thomas and Larry Herweg prior to Southern Lord’s installment of the Scion Label Showcase series held in Pomona, California. Trevor de Brauw: Recent live dates that we’ve played have been without a founding member, Laurent. In late 2009 we hit a wall with touring and kind of moved away from the full-time touring experience of being a band. Consequently, we started having more developed home lives, with jobs and families and things like that. Over time, the three of us wanted to continue doing more stuff, but Laurent did not want to tour anymore. We kind of hit an impasse for a while, but in 2011, he suggested that we go ahead and start playing shows out of town with a fill-in guitar player. Dallas Thomas came up as an immediate choice because a) he shreds, b) he’s a guitar wizard, c) he’s handsome and d) he has an entertaining accent, so it’s fun to listen to him talk in the van—which is actually more important than you would think it is.

Photography: Gregory Bojorquez

Dallas Thomas: Why don’t you tell me this all the time?

de Brauw: Because I don’t know how to show people what I appreciate about them until I’m being interrogated and there’s a bright light facing me, a room full of strangers and a line of cameras. Then it’s easy to talk about.

Thomas: Do you wanna hear my version of the story?

de Brauw: Yeah.

Thomas: Basically I filled in a few dates, and then a few dates turned into a tour. And then that went well and Laurent decided he didn’t want to do it anymore, so we went to Europe. We played Roadburn; we played Bonaroo. It was interesting to play those two extremes, but that’s what’s cool about stepping into this band—it spans a lot of subgenres. I think this band has some staying power because new people are still finding out about us. After shows, I’ll have people come up to me saying, “I finally got to see you guys!” And then they’ll ask me to sign this record that I didn’t even play on. Plus, it’s an instrumental band. In my other band back in Chicago, the Swan King, which is how I met the Pelican guys, I do vocals and play guitar. But it’s nice to just play guitar instead of having someone yelling or whining at you about something. Also, being a guitar nerd, it’s nice to be able to turn the guitars up and not have to fight with the vocals in a physical sense.

de Brauw: You’re talking about physically fighting the vocals?

Thomas: My major in college was audio engineering. It’s nice to be able to sonically push the guitars further. So that’s kinda been my Pelican experience. And it’s almost been a year now.

Larry Herweg: The way we found Dallas was kinda cool, too. He was put next door to us. His band was literally rehearsing in the practice space next to ours.

de Brauw: The Swan King are our next door neighbors. We were setting up for Pelican practice one night and we heard them playing. The guitar playing was awesome and the songs were really interesting, so we were like, What intriguing band could this be? It was impressive to hear a heavy band from Chicago that we weren’t familiar with. And then I bumped into my friend Jamie at the record store a couple of days later—he plays bass in the Swan King and he said he’d heard us practicing the other night. So we put two and two together. We started playing some shows with them, and then Dallas just seemed like a natural pick because his style kind of bridges the worlds of metal and rock the same way Pelican does. We don’t really fit into any specific kind of sound, so it’s kind of hard to fill a musician gap like that.

Thomas: The uncomfortable thing for me is that I’m a big fan of bands that stick together—it’s not a name that they hide behind because it’s really one dude doing everything and he changes members every month. I’ve never been a session guy, which is kind of how this started for me, even though Pelican has been the same four guys for 11 years. That’s something I always wanted when I was younger. It’s awkward for me to come into a situation with three other people who have been together for so long. You don’t wanna stand out too much, but at the same time…I guess I can’t really explain it. Plus, most of the shows we’ve done have been fly-in dates, which means I have to use gear that’s not my own. So finding the right sound with different gear at every show has really been a challenge, but it’s also made me a better musician because it’s like, “Here’s what you’ve got to work with. And you get one practice.” And then it’s like, boom, you go on tour. So that’s been frustrating and liberating at the same time. It’s been a really cool experience so far, but I’m still trying to find my place in it.

As told to J. Bennett

facebook.com/pelicansong

PA

Interview: J. Bennett Band Photography: Nate Garrett Live Photography: Gregory Bojorquez

PALLBEARER

PA

Less than a year after releasing its first album, Pallbearer might be the best new doom band on the planet. The Little Rock, Arkansas–based quartet’s magnificently thundering debut, Sorrow and Extinction, was released by Profound Lore in February and received nearly unanimous raves from metal mags across the globe, as well as the ever-fickle blogosphere. As well it should: with Sorrow and Extinction, Pallbearer has managed to simultaneously invoke and transcend traditional doom trappings by creating a truly heightened emotional experience, led by the soaring vocals of guitarist Brett Campbell. Scion A/V recently spoke with Campbell and bassist Joseph D. Rowland.

How would you characterize Pallbearer’s musical philosophy?

Joseph D. Rowland: I’d say Pallbearer’s musical philosophy is essentially taking a lot of the negative life experiences we’ve had and trying to create a sort of musical catharsis out of it for ourselves, with a focus on the primality of the music.

Brett Campbell: We try to make very enveloping music that’s heavy but also interesting on multiple levels rather than just bludgeoning the listener. We try to have interesting rhythms and interplay between all the instruments and vocals, where everything has its own place but works together to create something more massive.

Rowland: We want to create something that’s more of an experience than a song.

Does living in Little Rock factor into the music you play?

Rowland: Living in Little Rock definitely affects our approach in Pallbearer, just based on the legacy of the bands that have come before us in Little Rock and Arkansas in general. We have a lot of respect for many of those bands and we feel like they’ve set a high standard for interesting musicianship and a unique approach to whatever style they’re playing in, which often becomes their own style because they sound like no other band than themselves. That’s kind of a hallmark of Arkansas bands in general. Campbell: There’s only 20 or 30 people that play heavy music there, and everyone’s kinda been in everyone else’s band. Part of why we do this is to help continue the legacy of incredibly crushing and unique music that’s coming from that region. It seems like that’s kind of started to wane a little bit lately because everyone’s getting older and there’s not a lot of younger people coming in, so I hope in some small way we’re contributing to continuing the trend of having awesome, unreal and psychedelic music coming out of a place where most people wouldn’t expect there to be anything.

When you started the band, did you discuss the vibe you wanted to go for?

Rowland: When Brett and I started Pallbearer, we had kind of had a general idea of what we wanted to do with the project. We had a shared love of doom metal and other forms of aggressive rock. Over a very short amount of time, we figured out what the Pallbearer sound was and honed it to the point that now we immediately know when we’re working on new material that, “Yes, this is a Pallbearer riff” or “No, let’s save this for one of our million side projects that we always talk about but never actually do.” Of course every band has to kind of search for what they want to do, but it came to us pretty quickly. Brett and I had already been playing together for years in a heavy psychedelic band called Sports. We just had a rapport with each other.

Campbell: [Sports] was fully improvised, so we already had the mind-link, I guess. It was sort of psychedelic music, but it could change at a moment’s notice, so we had to build a sort of mental hive mind for that band. When we started trying to write actual songs [as Pallbearer], it came pretty easily because we were so used to guessing, pretty much, what the other person was thinking. We could just jam and music would happen as it happened. We’d figure out what we liked the most. Once we got “The Legend” done and an earlier form of “Devoid Of Redemption,” we had our vibe, our aesthetic, and we went from there. We knew what we were trying to accomplish from an instrumental standpoint.

How do you see Pallbearer developing beyond the Sorrow and Extinction album?

Rowland: We have a lot of new material, but it’s all in that home demo stage. Some of it is in the same vein [as Sorrow and Extinction] and some of it is different, more expansive. We can’t really say for sure until we’ve worked it out a bit better, though. There’s a lot of different ideas, it’s just a matter of honing what message or feeling we want our next batch of material to have.

Campbell: If whatever we’re working on doesn’t capture the feeling we want, we usually end up throwing it out. We ended up scrapping a lot of stuff completely because it didn’t fit what the feeling needed to be. We’ve got a lot of stuff for the second album, but not enough. We’re leaning more into our progressive rock side and taking things to a more funereal pacing in places.

What do you think initially attracted you to doom?

Rowland: I’ve liked it since I was a teenager. Little Rock has a pretty strong doom or sludge legacy in a certain sense, and when we started the band it was a dark time. It had been a hard year and a half or so, and [playing this kind of music] felt necessary.

Campbell: Pallbearer was an outlet for us to deal with the hardships we were going through, and it continues to be that. This is our method.

So you’re getting something out of Pallbearer other than musical satisfaction.

Rowland: I’d say so, yes. There’s almost kind of an astral presence to it for me. I connect to a lot of the emotionality of it on levels that aren’t just based here.

Campbell: I think that’s essential for any music that I’d want to make. I like to have a sense of eliminating this reality and creating something else while you’re listening to it or watching it live.

How do you feel about the term “funeral doom,” as it might be applied to Pallbearer?

Campbell: Funeral doom could be a descriptor for what we do, but I just think of it as doom—or heavy music. If I was trying to write specifically funeral doom, it would probably box me into something. I’d rather just see what comes out. I describe it differently to everyone who asks. I’ve never personally labeled it doom myself. I guess it’s undeniably doom, but I don’t really think about it too much. I think genres are limiting.

Rowland: Our feelings on Pallbearer change all the time, too. There’s a dynamic to the ebb and flow of the band. Some days I feel like we’re a doom band, and some days I feel like we expand beyond that. Pallbearer is just what we do. Like I said earlier, it’s just our way of expressing ourselves. Whether someone wants to label us doom or funeral doom, that’s up to them. It could be either of those things.

What can you tell us about some of the lyrical themes on the album?

Campbell: I’d honestly prefer not to talk about the lyrics in general because they do mean something to me, either in a general or specific sense, depending on the song, but I kind of intentionally left them open to multiple interpretations because a large aspect of what I enjoy about music is being able to take what you want or need out of it and interpret it your own way. And it’s personal stuff, anyway.

It seems like one of the key aspects of Pallbearer is the overall atmosphere that you’re creating.

Rowland: Atmosphere is totally key to what we do. It can work in a whole album sense or a single song sense. That’s definitely something we strive for. You could say that for just about any music: If it doesn’t have atmosphere, it’s worthless. It just sounds like a manufactured thing that has no soul. And who wants to waste minutes of your life on something with no feeling?

What do you want an audience to get out of a Pallbearer show?

Rowland: It’s tough to know. When we perform live, there’s kind of a disconnect between us and the audience because we get lost in the music. For us, it’s our own experience and it’s different every time. There’s a huge wave of emotionality that comes through the music for us, and I would hope that the audience picks up on that in some way. We don’t wanna come off like it’s this self-indulgent thing. We’re not saying the audience doesn’t matter. We love that people are into Pallbearer and seem to have a great connection with Sorrow and Extinction. I hope everyone who sees us would take away something from seeing us, and I hope it’s different for everyone.

You mentioned getting lost in the music. Are you talking about a trance state?

Campbell: I can’t really get into a full trance state because I’d probably stop playing. I never really sang in a band before we started doing this, and it takes too much concentration to sing and play guitar, so I can’t completely lose myself.

Rowland: There are times when I think we can get caught up in the moment as a band. Everything else just slips away, and the music is just coming out of us. It’s muscle memory almost, and the music is just happening in a unique way every time. It might sound corny, but I’d like to be a vessel for the music. The music is there, and I’m only there to recreate it. It’s something that had to be made, and it’s perpetuating itself through us.

pallbearerdoom.com

Hear Pallbearer’s two contributions to the live collection Scion Label Showcase: Profound Lore at scionav.com/profoundlorecords

SAINT VITUSDoom legends Saint Vitus recently released Lillie: F-65, their first new album featuring frontman Scott “Wino” Weinrich in 22 years. Before leaving on tour in support of it, we spoke with founding guitarist Dave Chandler about how a band with more than three decades of history chooses which songs from their vast catalog to play.

What’s your process for putting together a setlist?There’s really not an actual process. We figure out what songs we have to play that people want to hear, like “Born Too Late,” then we figure out what we want to use as an opener. We try to change the opener every so often. We also try to make sure we don’t put too many slow songs in a row, because that will make a lull. We try to change it up as much as we can. For this tour we’ve got a couple songs that we haven’t played for a while that we’re going to throw into the mix. With a tour like this we have to throw in some songs from the new album.

With the songs that you feel like you have to play, do you try to space them out or do you try to get them all out of the way?A song like “Born Too Late,” we try to play it last, because it’s our most popular song. That’s the one song where if we didn’t play it, people would be coming up afterwards really upset. A lot of those songs we’ll use for encores. “I Bleed Black” is a song everybody wants to hear all the time, so we’ll usually pop that one in as the second song, because our opener is usually an upbeat one.

What opener are you using now?We’re using “Blessed Night,” the new single.

Interview: Eric Ducker Photography: Gregory Bojorquez

What’s the response been?We weren’t sure if it was going to work, but because it was the single, everybody knows what it is.

How have people been responding to the new stuff?People are really digging the new record, especially “The Bleeding Ground.” They know the words to the songs, so they’ve obviously been paying attention.

How much does the setlist change from day to day?Once we get it down, we don’t vary from night to night. We try to keep it exactly the same. Once you get it into a set thing, you know exactly what’s coming next, even if you look away and some fan grabs your setlist.

Have you ever been in a group that made up the setlist on the fly during the performance?I’ve done that before, but that usually antagonizes the rest of the band.

Are there lesser-known or rarer songs you pull out to excite the superfans?We try to do that every so often, we try to pull one out of the hat, so to speak. People will yell out to “War is Our Destiny” or “The Walking Dead.” It’s usually our older stuff. People will yell out for “The Psychopath,” which is from our first record.

When people yell out song titles at shows, do you ever decide to play it even if you hadn’t planned on it?No. Unfortunately, we can’t have normal rehearsal days like we should or a I wish we could, because we live in different states. We’re not up on our full catalog. We would rather just pretend we can’t hear this guy yelling than mess it all up.

Instead you make a note that maybe next time you’ll try that one.Yeah, if we hear enough of people yelling for the same song during the entire tour, then we’ll try to learn it before the next one.

facebook.com/saintvitusofficial

Hear three live tracks from Saint Vitus that were recorded at Scion Rock Fest 2012 at scionav.com/saintvitus

Watch panels, intervieWs and Workshops to develop a career in music

Featuring:Frank kozik, relapse records, dave sardy, killer

Mike, Third Man records, david Brodsky, vice, dave sweeTapple, JerMaine rodgers, acTion Bronson, JusTin haMpTon, Mackie osBorne, spoTiFy, Mishka,

and Many More

each presention, Filmed in high deFinition, exists as a digital resource at

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ANIMETALPHYSICALStory: Eric Ducker

Sean Williams is a visual artist who works under the name Animetalphysical. On his first day of college in his native Arkansas he met Joseph D. Rowland, who later would become the bassist in doom metal upstarts Pallbearer. Williams and Rowland’s friendship has lasted nine years, and Williams’ darkly cosmic images—seen on Pallbearer’s album art and T-shirt designs—helped establish the band’s visual identity. Primarily working in hand-done mediums such as watercolors, Williams pulls from comic books and the art on old VHS tapes for inspiration. “We consider them trashy, but the ideal of them was so high in terms of creation of an image,” he says of the tape covers. “The ideal was to replicate all the emotions that can take place over a few hours into a single image. It’s hard to achieve that level of connectivity, but it’s something I’m interested in and something that I pursue.”

Williams is just getting his career started, but others bands and indie labels have taken notice. For now, he says he’s happy just to keep creating art for band shirts and posters. “If we view ourselves as part of humanity—as the collective unit of all of humanity, not just your friends or the people you know—and if you want to make a difference and all you can offer is your art, then it seems logical that you would want to work with others who have great ideas,” Williams says. “If you want to spread their message out to the world as well, then you can be the hand for them.”

facebook.com/animetalphysical

Interview: Eric Ducker

The B9 started as a message board on the website of Massachusetts-based hardcore label Bridge Nine—a pretty standard feature for indies at the start of the millennium. Then the board took off, with users going deep into expected (and some unexpected) territories, and was eventually given its own site. Bridge Nine owner Chris Wrenn gave some background on how the site has developed over a decade.

What’ s the history of the board?The Bridge Nine message board went live 10 ten years ago, on October 15th, 2002. It has grown over the years to become one of the most frequented (and sadly, infamous) boards generally covering hardcore punk.

Why did The B9 separate from the official Bridge Nine site? The B9 is the social media part of Bridge Nine. It used to be directly connected to the record label website, but over the years the board became known as “The B9” and got somewhat out of control, as it has very little moderation, and almost none from anyone at the label. We’ve given that responsibility to some of the regular posters. The B9 is where people can go to start discussions about bands, records, stuff to do with hardcore punk, and lifestyle stuff in general. You can post auctions, buy and sell merchandise and vinyl, and advertise your eBay listings. Because the board became somewhat of the Wild West, and because it didn’t really represent Bridge Nine as a label, we decided to distance ourselves just enough so that hopefully there would be a distinction between the two.

How many users does The B9 have and how many are active?We currently have over 100,000 users but roughly 65,000 of them post regularly, making it one of the most active message boards in regards to hardcore/punk.

What discussion threads come up the most on The B9? Literally everything gets covered on the board, but it’s usually not just focused on the music. It’s a lot of like-minded people who are brought together by music but want to discuss a broad variety of topics. Personally, my favorite threads are when the “detectives” of the board get together and try to track down information about a person, like the person who posted online that he had stolen items from another record label. One of the more popular threads in recent memory was when a poster wore a really offensive political T-shirt to a Halloween party and was photographed with Taylor Swift. The photo ended up being featured on TMZ and the board was linked from the article, ensuing in all sorts of antics and coverage.

Why was it important to incorporate a user-driven retail aspect into the site?That’s where the people are, so we wanted to make it so that it would be easy to advertise and sell our music, but also make it so that people could promote their own products and auctions.

How would you like to see The B9 develop in the future?I’d like to have it continue to grow. We’re working on an iPhone app specifically for the board community, so hopefully that will be ready soon.

theb9.com

Interview: Eric Ducker

Guests at the opening of “Verita Vltima Vitae” at Scion A/V Installation.

Phobia at Scion Label Showcase: Moshpit Tragedy.

French at the opening of “Verita Vltima Vitae” at Scion A/V Installation.

Guests at the opening of “Verita Vltima Vitae” at Scion A/V Installation.

Gypsyhawk at Scion Label Showcase: Metal Blade.

Morne at Scion Label Showcase: Moshpit Tragedy.

Dave Sweetapple at the Scion Music(less) Music Conference.

Six Feet Under at Scion Label Showcase: Metal Blade.

Guests at Scion Label Showcase: Moshpit Tragedy.

Battlecross at Scion Label Showcase: Metal Blade.

Frank Kozik at the Scion Music(less) Music Conference.

ABOUT TOWNDave Sardy at the Scion Music(less) Music Conference.