Heavy experimental music has been getting some mainstream recognition recently, and the ball keeps rolling into 2014. Let me introduce you to Vaura, a progressive, black-metal, psych, etc. band from Brooklyn featuring members Toby Driver (bass) of Kayo Dot / maudilin of the Well, Josh Strawn (vocals / guitar) and Charlie Schmid (drums) of Religious to Damn, and Kevin Hufnagel (guitar)of Gorguts / Dysrythmia . They recently released their second album The Missing an album that serves as the shadow of their debut Selenelion, but not because it’s any worse than their previous effort. The Missing is actually just as good if not better and shows the band exploring the darker more gothic side of the music spectrum, sonically and thematically. I caught up with Strawn to talk about the creation of Vaura, the making of the new album, and to get his thoughts on what he thinks of the world of heavy music as it stands now.
B.G.M. – How did you meet/how did Vaura come to be?
Josh Strawn – I met Kevin at a show, we got to chatting about The Chameleons and I was excited that someone shared my taste for heavier music as well as atmospheric postpunk. Kevin and I both grew up on a lot of the same metal in high school, but branched out in different directions. But whereas industrial and postpunk got most of my attention, Kevin never lost touch with metal. Kevin was into darker gothic rock and postpunk, 4AD and stuff like that, but by the time we met, though, it was like we both had these areas of familiarity and focus but were eager to go in the direction the other was more well-traveled in. I was eager to do something heavier than my previous stuff with Blacklist and Kevin was into doing something song-oriented along the lines of the postpunk stuff that he loved.
Were there any musical compatibility issues when Vaura first got together?
It was musical compatibility that brought us together, so I’d say no, not really.
There’s a handful of different influences involved in your songs. That being said, how do you make everyone’s different musical backgrounds work together in the writing process?
Imagine a film where everyone involved is an actor/director on the level of John Cassavetes and Orson Welles, that’s kind of how it is. You could have a “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario, or you could have a situation where mutual and open collaboration is guided by a single vision. I’m the least trained musician of the four of us, and even though everyone contributes to direction of a song, I’m the one with the overall vibe in my head, so it’s me saying, “maybe try this” or “that’s a killer part but it’s throwing the song into a mood that’s not right.” And this is probably an advantage of how many projects we all have, I don’t think anyone feels like this is their only chance to have their creative voice heard, which I think cuts down on some of the petty squabbling that can come up in other band scenarios. It comes down to trust, really. I know they’re some of the best musicians I could ever hope to work with, so when they do something that at first sounds odd to my ears, I give it the benefit of the doubt and I usually hear how it works and end up loving it. And I think they like what I’m trying to do enough to give me similar allowances.
You guys obviously have created your own unique sound. Was that something you set out to do from the start, or was it natural?
Nobody in this band is content to do something that isn’t at least striving towards uniqueness. It’s nice to hear people perceive it that way. I think our ears tend to shut off when something is too much like something else so we just naturally shy away from those things.
How do you all find the time for Vaura, with all the members being involved with so many other bands?
We often don’t. There are a lot of things we don’t have time for or that we have to turn down because of scheduling issues. It’s probably our biggest headache.
The Missing seems to have a darker almost more gothic type sound compared to Selenelion. Were there any specific influences on The Missing? Was the change in sound intentional?
The change in sound was intentional only as far as the songs we chose to leave off of ‘Selenelion’ all felt a certain way. We made a conscious decision to pursue and explore that feeling as we wrote the remaining tracks.
How did the writing process differ this time around?
In some ways it was exactly the way it was on ‘Selenelion.’ When Vaura started, I had a batch of about 10 demos. Most of those were fairly complete ideas and when we recorded for ‘Selenelion,’ we recorded all, but one of them. I say complete ideas, not complete songs because obviously parts I had written were radically changed and perfected and augmented once Kevin, Toby, and Charlie came to them. But again that’s the really cool thing about this band, they can completely warp and re-imagine something I’ve written without taking away from the feel I was going for. Of those 10 original songs I demoed, 5 ended up on ‘Selenelion’ and 5 ended up on ‘The Missing.’
We wrote most of the songs that weren’t from my demos off of riffs Kevin brought. For ‘The Missing,’ we collaborated more collectively, though–“Passage to Vice”, “Pleasure Blind”, “The Things That We All Hide”, and “Braced for Collapse” were some of the first songs we wrote when almost everyone was in the room together from start to finish. Often I would even come to the song last, adding sparse guitar or synth melodies and vocal lines. For “Abeyance” we started from a riff Kevin was playing on electric 12 string and Charlie doing some drum programming on the Akai MPD pads that I use for Azar Swan production, so that was also an approach that was unique to this record as well.
Is there a concept of any sort behind The Missing?
No. ‘Selenelion’ was very conceptual and abstract, but ‘The Missing’ is very immediate and confessional. With ‘Selenelion,’ the concept guided things to a degree partially because the concept was in my mind when I was demoing the songs before the band existed. ‘The Missing’ is just about love, death, loss, obsession, betrayal, addiction, recovery, and rebirth as I experienced it over the last couple of years. I just wrote about things I was going through. I feel like metal is sometimes lacking a vulnerability. I wanted to push some of that to the forefront. There was some level on which I was sort of thinking that had its own sort of confrontational aspects. I love all the theatrics that black metal brought to the foreground, but those things can and do end up acting as layer upon layer of distance. It’s almost jarring now to go listen to a band like Dokken sing about being sad about a girl. Granted in that time period, for what they were doing, that wasn’t very daring. But the authenticity wars in metal circles now revolve around testosterone toughness, undergroundness, and the degree of actual “evil” one is down with. In a climate like that, singing about being sad about a girl is completely different. I’d argue it takes more guts to put that out there than to make long-winded pseudointellectual excuses for NSBM bands.
Both of your full lengths feature images under a sort of rainbow-y filter. Any significance behind that?
Not specifically. The prism effect was a motif in Alexander Binder’s work, which we used as the artwork for the first record. I actually discovered the artwork in the writing process, so the images actually influenced the way I thought about the universe I was writing music about. One of the many things that made Terence Hannum a natural choice to do the follow up was that he was familiar with Binder’s work, was a fan and they had done some collaborations. So it was easy for me to ask him to make something that reflected the new material, but had some cohesion with the previous imagery. I think it has come to reflect the band’s identity, though. I think these records are simultaneously very pitch black dark and rainbow bright.
The Missing was released through Profound Lore Records. Did this come about from Kevin’s relationship with the label?
Yeah.
What is Vaura’s live show like?
Four guys on a stage. That’s about it. We haven’t messed with any specific visual or lighting aspects but who knows, maybe someday we will. For now it’s just us, playing the tracks. Eventually it might be cool to bring someone on to handle some of the extra guitars and keyboards live.
Deafheaven’sSunbather was a huge success in 2013 partly because of their experimentation with black metal. This is something Vaura also seems to be doing as well. Do you see Deafheaven’s success affecting the genre in any way?
A lot of bands are experimenting with black metal that aren’t successful in that way, though. I think Deafheaven’s new one was a huge success because it manages to tap into an emotional field that there’s always a hunger for. And because they are perceived as nice guys who are genuine about what they do and because they pound the pavement touring. I know some people tend to think of Vaura as being part of that scene, I don’t care to bother asserting whether we are or we aren’t. We played with them and Alcest a while back to a roomful of people who seemed into all three bands. If Deafheaven being successful and people thinking of us as living on the same spectrum means more people hear and like what we do, I’m fine with that. It doesn’t effect what we create or how we go about creating it.
Any artists that you’ve been into lately that you’d like to share?
Psalm Zero, The Legendary Pink Dots, and Alice Coltrane.
You had mentioned in a previous interview that the band members share a very similar taste in music. If you had to pick one album or artist as a band favorite, what would it be?
Early-mid 80’s Ozzy, maybe? Not ironically, not apologetically. All the Randy records, all the Jake E. Lee records.
What does the future hold for Vaura?
We’re actually gearing up to start tracking our third record at the end of February. It’s not written, but it’s conceptualized and if that concept is any indication it will be a departure from these first two albums. Both of our records so far have incorporated elements of noise, industrial, and electronics, but our plan is to take all that a bit further.