M U SIC
We Can’t Believe Our Ears In a 120-year-old memoir of a nervous breakdown, Judge Schreber’s Avian Choir finds an allegory for the hallucinatory power of noise music BY HARRIS WHELESS music@indyweek.com
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Crowmeat Bob performing at Neptune’s Parlour
PHOTO BY JADE WILSON
The woodpeckers, blackbirds, and swallows nesting in the asylum garden shouted the same question at him over and over: “Are you not ashamed?”
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February 19, 2020
INDYweek.com
n 1900, Daniel Paul Schreber, a former judge who had been institutionalized after a series of mental collapses, began writing a comprehensive account of his experiences to use in an appeal for his release. “I hear words from the talking birds impinging on my ears from outside,” Schreber wrote. The woodpeckers, blackbirds, and swallows nesting in the asylum garden shouted the same question at him over and over: “Are you not ashamed?” Our senses can be unreliable narrators of what is going on around us. Especially in abstract genres such as noise music, there are sounds that may or may not just be a trick of the ear. What are all these things we hear amid the crunch of distortion and the hair-raising gale of electronics? Are they really there at all? “I think that’s the attraction of noise music for a lot of people,” says Bob Pence. “You’re never sure what you’re hearing—whether what you’re hearing is in your mind or not.” Pence, who makes music as Crowmeat Bob, is a horn player and guitarist who’s been a mainstay of the Triangle’s experimental and free-improv scene since he moved to Raleigh in 2000. Judge Schreber’s Avian Choir, his latest project, is his first as a bandleader. In October, it released BLEED, an album composed for heavy-metal band and strings. The record takes its concept from Schreber and what he was hearing outside of his window. About 120 years later, Pence hands me the notes Schreber submitted in his defense, printed and bound in a book called Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. We’re sitting on the couch in Pence’s apartment, bordered on all sides by a musician’s equivalent of mounted game: instruments, lecterns, concert posters, and shelves and shelves of records. There is a precarious
stack of books on the coffee table with a little desktop sign that says “Out to Lunch” perched on top. A record by old-school Chapel Hill psychobilly band Flat Duo Jets blares on the turntable. Pence says that the “avian choir” Schreber heard outside of the asylum served as a jumping-off point for the album’s monster-movie string theatrics. “I think the whole string orchestra thing lends itself to hallucination,” Pence says. “I was thinking about those dissonant harmonics on the higher end of the spectrum interacting and creating all these little weird sounds, ghost sounds, whatever you want to call them. If you turn it up really loud, get really high, you can hear all kinds of shit in it.” The album also takes musical cues from two other wildly divergent sources: spectralism, an abstruse style of classical composition informed by the harmonic series, and ‘90s drone metal bands such as Earth. “Just the thought of combining those dense, intense string sounds with the droney heavy metal stuff, I thought would make for some really cool shit,” Pence says. Orchestral metal is something he’s done in live performances since the mid-aughts, with the Micro-East Collective and other large ensembles, but this is the first time he’s done it in a professional recording studio. The blueprint for the record was sketched out in the same place we’re sitting. The acoustic guitar resting against the wall is the one Pence used to compose the riffs at the core of BLEED’s dense harmonic structure. The album is thrillingly frightening, with screaming strings, sharp peals of horns, raunchy guitar riffs, and a drummer who hauls ass like it’s the second coming.
