A short talk with An Evening Redness on their debut album, Blood Meridian, and getting bored of music.
Diogo: An Evening Redness is an Americana album with a captivating Doom twist. The landscapes it conveys are filled with solitude and distress. Your debut sounds like Hell on Earth... an unpredictable, also unavoidable form of Hell.
Brandon: Before this project, I'd mostly worked in very experimental paradigms (A Crown of Amaranth, Iron Forest, Auditor, Turing Heat, etc), but I've always been focused on telling a story or setting a distinct mood via sound. When I set out to record An Evening Redness, it really started with a very small idea and blossomed into a narrative over the two years of writing and recording: a journey into a hostile unknown that, through isolation and privation, brings the listener into a space where the music allows them to feel reflected in the listening. It tells a story about human beings and how fragile we are in the face of nature, and how ever-present death is around every corner, so I'm glad the solitude and distress these thoughts accompany came through in my music.
Diogo: After listening to the six tracks on your debut album, I'm guessing that you've got eclectic musical references, but most importantly you show a collective urge to create your own sound. It's an ambitious melting pot of genres, but you did manage to pull it off.
Brandon: I'm most interested in the synthesis of styles. I listen to a very broad range of music, constantly. This means that I'm pretty easily jaded when things sound "stereotypical", like who wants to listen to a band rehash the same late-90's HM-2 Entombed worshipping Death Metal all day? I'm sure there are lots of folks out there that do, but for me, music becomes most exciting when it truly is something I've never heard before. Like the first time I ever heard 100 Gecs, or Tinariwen (a huge influence on my compositional style), or really weird shit like Those Darn Gnomes where all times I got REALLY excited by music. And I wanted to take this little idea I had and make it happen in a way that made other people feel that same frisson of excitement.
Diogo: The artwork of An Evening Redness perfectly fits the gloomy sonority and the Gothic Aesthetic evoked. Could you elaborate on the concept behind the album's cover?
Brandon: The cover art is a painting I commissioned by an artist named Sean Deloria BlackWolf that my wife had originally found in a Facebook group. We purchased a few of his pieces as we are building an art collection, and when it came time to think about album art, I immediately contacted him. The painting for the cover art is actually hanging on the wall over my couch as I write! Sean evokes this very bleak and isolated pseudo-religious awe in his pieces. They're all full of screaming faces and off-kilter poses, and I tasked him with creating imagery that evoked the loneliness of traveling across a desert, which I think he nailed perfectly.
Diogo: An Evening Redness has a strong cinematic side to it. In "Winter, 1847", the listener takes part in a journey where the atmospheric details set the mood. You can hear the footwalks, you can hear the wind. Suddenly, the listener is lost inside a movie.
Brandon: I've heard from quite a few listeners that "Winter, 1847" and "The Judge" feel cinematic to them, and I'm glad of it. Both of those tracks are slow and droning, but the elements that move the listener along are the small details, the setting of the scene, and the drama the compositions evoke. "Winter, 1847" was actually inspired by the story of the Donner Party that was lost in the Sierra Nevada mountains and resorted to cannibalism to survive. 1847 was actually towards the tail end of what's been called "The Little Ice Age" and the absolute terror of being stuck in the mountains with no shelter, no food, and no way out during massive weeks-long blizzards still keeps me awake at night.
Diogo: How did the romance Blood Meridian enter your life?
Brandon: I'd been familiar with Cormac McCarthy from reading "The Road" before but originally encountered "Blood Meridian" via an amazing audiobook performance read by Richard Poe. The book is equal parts florid philosophizing and punishing, almost abstract levels of violence that opens the reader up to questions of morality, mortality, and the human relationships that exist between these ragged edges. It's never really left my mind, and I think about it a lot even outside the context of composing music that seeks to approach the literary work. Mind, I don't think that anything I will ever do could approach the genius of McCarthy's writing, but it's good to have something to aim for!
Diogo: This is something that we've been trying to develop during our latest set of interviews: please select a picture taken from the Internet and explain the reasons behind your choice.
Brandon: I recently spent an afternoon reading about the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. As a student of history and the extremes of human experience, I find the fact that the US commanders at the time found the strategic changes involved so effective they went on to deploy them in the European theater. The firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden killed more people than the atomic bombs by an order of magnitude. In this picture, you can see aerial images of Tokyo burning, and the fear and shame I feel when looking at it are almost overwhelming. Human beings are truly hell.
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