The experimental death metal perpetrators in New York City’s PYRRHON recently revealed the secrets behind the strikingly graphic, often putridly enticing Caroline Harrison artwork comprising their current long player, The Mother Of Virtues.
Now uncovered via Decibel Magazine, Harrison relays her creative process. An excerpt from the interview reads, “When starting a piece, I usually draw out a few rough thumbnails, or small sketches. They’re like visual notes that record your idea, and mine often look incredibly crude. I also spend a lot of time in my sketchbook drawing studies of images I intend to use. Google images is invaluable in finding reference images of textures or forms – I can’t count the number of cockroach pictures I looked at, or the number of image searches I did for different types of tumors. One search led to another: tumors caused by echinococcus multilocularis (a type of tapeworm) in rats were a beautiful and translucent pale yellow, punctuated by red arteries. The cancerous growth on a smoker’s neck was at once horrifying and arresting, both vividly pink and red. I filled pages with different ways of rendering colors and shapes.”
Get down with the visual malignancies of The Mother Of Virtues, courtesy of Decibel Magazine HERE.
Recorded by Ryan Jones (Mutilation Rites) and mastered by Colin Marston (Gorguts, Krallice), the nine tracks occupying The Mother Of Virtues take its listeners on a traumatic sonic voyage into the darkest portals of musical severity. Recommended for perverse souls with a penchant for the audio acuteness of acts like Brutal Truth, Ulcerate, Artificial Brain, Deathspell Omega and Today Is The Day, The Mother Of Virtues offers up a mind-altering synthesis of clanging death, dark jazz rhythms, twisted storytelling and subtle shades of otherworldly psychedelia.
In related news, PYRRHON will bring their manic odes of mayhem to the stage for a handful of NYC area shows with additional live takeovers to be broadcast in the coming weeks.
PYRRHON:
6/14/2014 Pitchfork Northside Showcase @ Saint Vitus – Brooklyn, NY w/ Marissa Nadler, Pharmakon, Youth Code, Couch Slut
7/25/2014 Tombs Record Release Show @ Saint Vitus – Brooklyn, NY w/ Statiqbloom, Passage Between
8/09/2014 Obnoxious Noise Fest @ Even Flow Bar & Grill – Bay Shore, NY w/ Malignancy, Mutilation Rites, Artificial Brain, Mother Brain, more
The Mother Of Virtues is currently streaming in full at the PYRRHON official BandCamp page HERE.
Order The Mother Of Virtues at THIS LOCATION. For iTunes orders, point your browser HERE.
“NYC’s PYRRHON sits alone in the fold between a pair of local giants, Unsane and Suffocation. The band clearly leans on its nerdier than thou technical death metal approach to provide the backbone of what they do, but for some of the breakdowns and parts that surround the fretboard wizardry is a devotion to the noisy, misanthropy found on records by Today Is The Day and most of the early Am-Rep roster. It’s a mix of intelligent hatred that could only come from the five boroughs…” — Vice/Noisey
“…an interesting and audacious record…” – Pitchfork
“It simply flies in the face of traditional death metal and extreme metal and plays by its own rules and has its own unique sound and it manages to still push things to the limits of extremity.” – New Noise
“It’s actually the album’s unpredictability that holds it together. A calculated version of chaos, PYRRHON easily hold their own straddling the line between structure and disorder with the knowledge of exactly how they’re like the pieces to fall.” – Dead Rhetoric
“With The Mother of Virtues, PYRRHON has shed any remaining boundaries. But more than that, they’ve just gone wild. Their unpredictable, laboratorial songs employ death metal only as the basic formula, utilizing deconstruction as a compositional tool, and noise as an invasive texture. While always an accomplished band, the massive leap in maturity here is nothing short of staggering.” – Last Rites
“Delightfully off-kilter and forever twisting, PYRRHON conjure some truly twisted riffs and a sickening atmosphere alongside it. It’s basically the audio equivalent of that truly terrifying [cover] art.” – HeavyBlogIsHeavy