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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Band My Favorite Fugazi Song Is Also My New Favorite Band

Posted by Megan Seling on Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 12:41 PM

I was recently turned on to Arpeggiator, a new side-project featuring Ben Wheeler from Colonies and his drum-playing friend Jason Cox. Their math-rock is almost mind-numbingly fast—perfect for fans of Lightening Bolt. I talked to Wheeler a little bit about the newish project in this week's Underage:

"I liked the idea of an entire song based around an abstract musical concept," says Wheeler. "That's mostly what we are trying to do in Arpeggiator, to take a technique, melody, or formal idea and stretch it out and distort it by adding beats to it, slightly altering the rhythms, transposing it, and then giving up on it and transitioning on to another."

Besides other obvious math-rock stars like Hella and Lightning Bolt, Wheeler says he also took a lot of inspiration for Arpeggiator from playing in an Eastern European folk ensemble in college.

"That music, specifically Bulgarian songs, has had more of an effect on me playing in odd meters than any math-rock bands I was listening to. All these pieces are in 11/8, 5/8, 7/8, or some combination of all these meters. My favorite was in 25/8: 3/8 + 2/8 + 2/8 + 3/8 + 2/8 + 2/8 + 2/8 + 2/8 + 3/8 + 2/8 + 2/8."

You can read a little bit more about the band in this week's column. Their music is available for free download here.

And worth mentioning (this show was confirmed after press time), aside from Friday night's show in Tacoma, Arpeggiator are also playing the Vera Project tonight as part of Veracity. The show is free, all-ages, and the doors open at 7:30.