Zaum brings “old world meditative mantra doom” to the Astoria

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      Zaum makes seriously moody, artful metal, drawing on avant garde electronica and Middle Eastern music, and featuring a pedalboard that weighs as much as an eight-year-old. The band acknowledges a wide range of influences, from Peter Gabriel’s Passion soundtrack to minimal ambient Melvins collaborator Lustmord, with nods to Ravi Shankar and bandleader Kyle Alexander McDonald's collection of Rough Guide world music records. But they do things in a unique, all-their-own kinda way. (It’s still accessible to us lowbrows, for one thing.)

      All that’s a pretty good reason to go see Zaum when the duo comes to the Astoria on Thursday (August 17), but here’s another: they drove all the way from New Brunswick to get here. “We are indeed touring in a van,” McDonald tells the Straight, as we shudder in horror. “It's fully intentional,” he insists. “The drive across Canada in the summer is really one of the most beautiful trips you can experience in the world!”

      McDonald is responsible for the vocals, bass, synths, sitars and “textures” of Zaum—and it sounds like he does most of the driving, too. Percussionist Christopher Lewis “will sleep all the time,” he suspects. But it’s fine: they’ve got a third person along, PJ Dunphy of fellow East-Coasters the Monoxides, who will be on merch duties. “I’ll spend most of the drives talking music and other literal foolishness with him.”

      McDonald describes the outfit as “a two piece old world meditative mantra doom band,” which formed in Moncton, New Brunswick in 2013. “Chris and I have been playing in bands since 1989 and the time had come for me to finally form an outlet solely for my personal ideas. Chris, being a close friend of mine, was the perfect fit, with his patient and profound drumming style.”

      McDonald describes the New Brunswick music scene as "incredible," telling readers that it had even been dubbed, in 1995, as “the Canadian Seattle”. (I guess those of us closer to the American Seattle were too distracted by seeing actual Seattle bands at the Cruel Elephant back then to be noticing what was going on across the country. Speaking of which, the last time Zaum was in town, in 2015, they did a show at the Hindenburg, which, if memory serves, was actually one of the spaces occupied by the Cruel Elephant in its glory days.)

      Zaum—which won a “best loud artist award” in 2016 in New Brunswick, and was nominated for an ECMA for first album, Oracles—has toured pretty abundantly for a young band, it turns out, having done, besides that last cross-Canada trip, a total of something like 200 shows, McDonald estimates. “That includes five four-to-six week European tours throughout 19 countries in the last three years, including showcases at Roadburn Festival and Incubate Festival,” both in the Netherlands.

      European audiences have a bit of an edge up on North American ones, McDonald agrees. They actually listen to the music, instead of talking with their friends the whole time—an unfortunate fate to befall bands with quiet passages in their music when they play in Vancouver. “We have almost never had that issue in Europe that I can recall, actually,” he reports.

      I can vouch for the Japanese, too: having caught Godspeed You! Black Emperor at Tokyo’s Liquid Room circa 2001, I was most impressed that Japanese fans stood listening intently through the whole show. Not only did they not talk, they didn’t even applaud until the concert was over (at which point they became most enthusiastic).

      Vancouver audiences are shitty listeners by comparison—not McDonald’s opinion, I should note, though he does say they “encounter the issue” in Canada. “We just try to crank the quiet parts up so they consume the crowd as much as the ‘loud’ parts do."

      Tours of Europe have also afforded the band the opportunity to play in some fantastic spaces, maybe a bit more conducive to intent listening than any bar might be. “We once played a show in a sixth century bastion with open stone windows in eastern Slovakia, ten miles from the Ukraine border,” he says. He calls it “a life changing experience. Also, we’ve played an old mini castle of sorts in Szeged, Hungary. These are the types of venues we want to play generally!”

      So what is “doom mantra”, exactly? Is that an actual subgenre now?

      “It's not a subgenre, just a tag I came up with to help describe us really. I love creative genre tags. I like being able to get an idea what a band sounds like,” he says.

      “Doom mantra”, indeed, is pretty descriptive.

      McDonald came up with the name “Zaum” before discovering it had other references, based in Russian futurist poetry. “I created this name in 1993 as a personal alias of sorts. I'd never heard of the word or term; I just made a spelling change from ZOM to put my own spin on it. I used to use it as a nickname for logging into bulletin board systems, pre-Internet days, and used it as a term to name my solo ideas and all of my first email addresses.”

      McDonald embraces the comparisons that get drawn to Om. In fact, being told that they remind people of the San Francisco-based experimantal doom three piece “blows my mind,” he says. “They are a fantastic band. We haven’t played with them but I would love to. I know their drummer Emil and have met Al a couple of times." It would be a hell of a double bill, in fact—maybe for some future date.

      The album Zaum is touring, Eidolon, “is influenced by the situation with the Mayan/Aztec people, what may have went down and what resulted in the end."

      The music is “quite planned, though we do have some specifics moments of improv in certain sections. We keep it so it isn’t jammy but the live experience has some neat differences with the recordings. It always evolves. We portray our live show experience as a bit of a ritual. I'm a giant fan of the occult, mythical realm, mysticism and all that is celestial and unknown. The lyrics are fully inspired within this world... I think people will get this message from us for certain.”

      Zaum plays the Astoria on Thursday (August 17)

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