Like so many other presumptive genre names – emo, prog, hyphy, etc. – “math rock,” does so little to actually explain the mechanics of the music within the genre. As a term, “math rock” came from post-punk and hardcore bands playing around with asymmetric or changing time signatures. Its original usage was somewhat derogatory and reductive, with the playful ambiguity of the word “math” yielding both endearing and annoying responses. Does “math” mean math-themed, as in “This song goes out to Riemann’s Zeta Function,” or does it mean mathematically derived, as in “This song is composed only using All-Interval Rows?” Both are off the mark. Especially considering math and music have very profound and subtle connections stemming from subfields in set theory, group theory, and number theory, the “math” of math rock only referring to a few unexpected time signatures seems particularly narrow.
For better or worse, we’re stuck with “math rock” as the definitive genre term to helpfully explain a musical movement that ranges from bands like June of 44 and Don Caballero to Battles and Tortoise. The unifying musical traits of math rock are numerous and easily identified. Vocals are played down, with many bands being instrumental; guitar and bass often use two-handed tapping techniques; drumming is unexpected and accents and timbres are varied constantly; songs rarely use the verse-chorus-verse structure; rhythmically, pieces will move through multiple time signatures, tempos, or feels; melodically, the music is highly polyphonic, with no one dominant melodic line coming from any one instrument; harmonically, tonal and atonal paradigms (12-tone, set theory, modal) don’t necessarily apply; shit generally be crazy. The laundry list goes on and those listed don’t even begin to capture the complexity of math rock’s general “sound.”
That “sound” is certainly made up of bizarre commonalities (two-handed tapping). However, some of the most interesting trends of math rock are not the unifying ones, but the ones that separate bands from one another. Taking all of the differences into account allows one to tell interesting stories of geography, influence, and aspirations. For example, take Japanese math rock bands like Ruins, Boredoms, and Koenjihyakkei. All three are highly influenced by the 70s French prog band, Magma, and Magma’s truly oddball sense of melody, instrumentation, and lyrics (all done in an imaginary language called, “Kobaïan”) has left a lasting impression on those three bands. The drummer of Ruins and Koenjihyakkei, Tatsuya Yoshida, even writes lyrics in his own invented language that sounds suspiciously like Kobaïan. There is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to the subgenre of bands influenced by Magma. The subgenre’s name is “zeuhl,” which means “celestial” in Kobaïan. However, this trend goes no deeper than a handful of bands, and even then there is wild diversity from band to band. Koenjihyakkei sounds like electrified prog-rock while The Boredoms are noisier and more off the cuff with their compositions.
As indicated by the strange specificities of Japan’s prominent math rock contingent, the peculiar differences in aim and influence really can affect a math rock band’s sound. Chalk it up to the already progressive and extreme caveats to math rock’s general sound or the peculiarity of Japan specifically, but ultimately, scene matters. With this article I’m going to be d0cumenting a particular brand of math rock that is geographically centered in Northern California, specifically in greater Sacramento and the East Bay areas. This d0cumentation is not going to be musically rigorous nor is it going to sentimentalize the scene’s vibrant community with journalistic pomp. Instead it’s going to give potential listeners and current fans a nice avenue for accessing a compelling and fertile musical scene that, as of yet, doesn’t have the exposure it deserves and hopefully, the commonalities and differences that define this brand of math rock will be clearer.
Proto Math Rock in the San Francisco Bay Area
Math rock’s tendency to have different sounds and scenes makes its Northern California version difficult to trace and demarcate. Before math rock became truly national and pluralistic in nature, it was mostly an offshoot of localized musical movements. An important proto-math rock scene was the San Diego emo movement (later dubbed “screamo”) that thrived on experimentation in rhythmic patterns and dissonance. This San Diego scene centered around Gravity Records, a label that released albums from Heroin, Antioch Arrow, Clikatat Ikatowi, Angel Hair, and others. These bands, while “mathy” considering their focus on intricate rhythmic patterns, hardly qualified as math rock as it is known today, and most of the bridging between the San Diego emo sound and math rock can be heard in the band Drive Like Jehu (pictured below), who deemphasized the importance of overtly emotive vocals and lyrics, which was a cornerstone of emo, and pushed the importance of unconventional rhythmic ideas (listen to the 5/4 time signature that defines the upbeat but complex groove of “Here Come the Rome Plows”) and the angular, sidewinding guitar style that would become the staple of Don Caballero, one of the most prominent math rock artists of all time.
The San Diego sound made its way up the Pacific Coast from San Diego to the San Francisco Bay Area as early as 1993 with bands like Mohinder, Reach Out, and Portraits of Past playing a style of emo that felt like a halfway point between the more punk-leaning emo of Revolution Summer artists and the heavily dissonant and rhythmically unusual San Diego sound. If anything, these bands sounded more like an extensive of Drive Like Jehu’s sound, with more post-punk, indie, and punk than the chaotic hardcore of Gravity Records bands. However, by 1998, these bands have all broken up and the trail of proto-math rock goes dead in the Bay Area. At this point there was a strong punk scene that obviously benefited from the emo bands of the area, but the nuances and avant garde leanings of these bands were lost on a large scale. Thankfully, this general sound eventually influences a lot of bands that will take on the distinctive math rock sound of the area.
This influence started as early as 1998 though. At that time, true blue math rock starts to make an appearance in the area, though definitely skewed by the punk and hardcore community that preceded math rock. Rumah Sakit, an instrumental 4-piece from San Francisco, started playing Don Cab-inspired math rock. Their songs were organized with song structures that rarely repeated sections and often built towards texturally dense climaxes out of sparse, jazzy slow sections. They had a tinge of Midwestern melody in the spirit of Don Cab, with whimsical-sounding octave guitar lines often acting as surface melodies, but more often than not the guitar parts interwove to create a thicket of angular lead lines, that were often in asymmetric time signatures, which is where Ramuh Sakit earned their label as a math rock band. Interestingly, this tendency is what made Rumah Sakit sound like a product of the Bay Area emo bands of the mid 90s, and made them sound like a clean-tone Drive Like Jesu taking Don Cab’s song structures and guitar techniques to more dissonant territory.
Another band that began playing math rock at the turn of the century was Crime in Choir, also from San Francisco. However, their version of math rock is highly infused with Japanese math rock (remember the aforementioned Zuehl), to create a sound that predicted The Mars Volta in many ways. They are rhythmically oriented, but ultimately quite jam-centric, preferring to create long, open-ended songs that veer off into rhythmically and harmonically strange territory rather than being “mathy” or “dissonant” through carefully interwoven songwriting. That’s not to say their songwriting and sense of arc wasn’t tight, but their aesthetic was much more loose and off-the-cuff. They brought in a harmonically strange sound to math rock. Most bands that had been touched by the Midwest tradition of indie, emo, and math rock all relied on pastoral sounding major key melodies. Crime in Choir brought a zaniness to their harmonic progressions that undid the uniformity of the Midwest sound, but also gave stronger form to the dissonant chord progressions that abounded in the San Diego scene.
Maybe most importantly, was the fact that Crime in Choir was an early project for the drummer Zach Hill, who, along with guitarist Spencer Seim, would blend San Diego intensity and dissonance, Ramuh Sakit’s propensity for asymmetric time signatures, and Crime in Choir’s oddball sense of harmony, in a project that gained critical and popular success, and established a style that would ultimately be imitated and expanded upon by many local bands: Hella.
Hella
Starting around 2001 in Sacramento, Spencer Seim and Zach Hill formally started their work in the band Hella. Named after the iconic Norcal slang term, Hella, though not intentionally writing math rock as indicated by their nonchalant and bemused responses to leading interview questions, were set to compose their own brand of music. Maybe due to the lack of pre-meditation behind Hella’s sound as “math rock,” their sound became what it was. The sound is unpredictable, blending punk, free jazz, and indie, with irregularly changing time signatures and feels, with accompanying two-handed tapping guitar lines.
The drumming often has a double-time feel on the surface, but has so many rhythmic varieties and swung accents within that half-time sense, that feel is constantly changing and subject to Hill’s ornamentation. These feels are wrapped around yet more complex time signature choices. In any given song, Hill can alternate between numerous time signatures, both even and asymmetric, splicing them together end on end. In addition, the actual drum kit Hill uses features some peculiar cymbals. He often makes “trash cymbals” by stacking three or four busted and cracked cymbals on top of one another, giving a sharp, high-pitched attack with little sustain, which lends his lush, detailed style a brittle fragility. The guitar only complements this aesthetic. Seim can sound both machine-gun precise and drunkenly loose in the same measure. When he is not using two-handed tapping techniques, he usually plays melodies that are very angular, producing interesting leaps and unusual melodic contours. He also uses vibrato and bending to create an even more sidewinding sense of melody. Sometime though, he relies on fast pickwork that creates razor sharp tremolo melodies that feel like they’re burning through his fretboard, as the recorded track clips and hisses. Seim’s other option is probably his most distinctive. He uses two-handed tapping, creating polyphonic melodic lines that interweave and overlap, as if to fill the space left by having no other traditional accompaniment. The staccato accents and muted attacks that result from two-handed tapping give his playing a light feel (as in the ascending melody at 0:48 on “1-800-Ghost-Dance”).
Video of“Hello Great Architect of the Universe” and “Big Time and the Kid:”
Though Hella’s style has changed drastically from their math rock beginnings, now embracing electronica, noise, and new band members (including bass and vocals), they produced two albums that stand as genre-defining albums in Hold Your Horse Is (2002) and The Devil Isn’t Red (2005). These two albums laid the groundwork for later bands to take off from.
Tera Melos
Hella’s minimal band set-up and desire for a vibrant, layered, and complex sound led to developments in technique that allowed them to fill space. The two-handed tapping on guitar creates multiple melodic lines coming out of one instrument, and Hill’s highly accented drum playing makes slower beats feel animated and detailed. These exploratory techniques were taken by the Roseville four-piece Tera Melos and expanded to give a sound even more saturated with melodic voices, rapidly changing chord progressions, and complicated drum patterns. The original vibe from their first release, a self-titled LP in 2005, was two-faced; on one hand Tera Melos had a penchant for catchy, Don Cab-inspired anthems (“Melody 4,” “Melody 6”), but on the other was their interest in incorporating electronics and jazz into the equation resulting in tracks like “Melody 8,” a 30-minute, noisy jazz jam, that’s harder to swallow than a handful of horse pills. On more recent releases, those two worlds have found a nice in between. Drugs to the Dear Youth, an EP from 2007, is still really catchy with a track like “A Spoonful of Slurry” that is essentially a collection of complicated hooks, but pushes notions of virtuosity and ingenuity in all categories – song structures, harmonic progressions, melodic layering, the shred, etc. – even by the lofty expectations set by the hypertechnical Hella. Their most recent release, a split with By the End of Tonight, even includes vocals and trumpet, while still pushing the envelope.
Despite furthering the complexity of this Northern California brand of math rock, Tera Melos have a humble and simple explanation for their sound and compositional process: “Melody plays a big part in our songwriting process. Definitely big fans of curious chord progressions. Not just the same chord structure you've heard ten thousand times. Structure is also very carefully thought out. We tend to stray from traditional song layouts, however it's important to not just sound like we're linking random part to random part. There are certainly themes that run throughout the songs, sometimes returning in hidden or obscure ways.” It seems like this iteration of math rock, despite its demanding technical elements, has a natural, organic component. The resulting music is not mathy for its own sake and dependent on complexity, but is more a means of creating fresh sounds and ideas rather than an uphill battle towards creating the most progressive or technical music possible. The complexity blossoms from simple ideas like a few melodies strung together. Technicality is a means to an end, which allows the sound to retain its catchiness, immediacy, and energy, traits that have paid dividends with fans and have aligned Tera Melos and Hella as much with punk as they do with the avant garde. Fans hear the melodies and curious chord progressions even if the music is hidden or obscured. As Tera Melos said themselves when I squeezed them for the best-fit genre for their sound, “I guess I'd say we grew up in the punk scene. The music we are currently playing is seemingly different from what we were doing 10 years ago, but it still maintains the same spirit as the punk bands we used to play in. I mean I would call Tera Melos a punk band absolutely.”
Planets
Before looking at the bands that have taken ideas innovated by Hella and Tera Melos and expanded beyond the math rock paradigm, it’d be helpful to look at possibly the most technically impressive musicians in the scene: Planets. As much as I tried to give detailed accounts of the aforementioned bands’ styles, I can’t help but feel like I painted the picture with gauche, broad strokes. Despite coming from similar compositional places, Hella and Tera Melos are immediately distinguishable. Spencer Seim’s tremolo pickwork is never copied in Nick Reinhart’s guitar parts, and on the other side of the coin, the gigantic, fast-moving and vigorously strummed chord progressions of Nick’s style are notably absent from Spencer’s. Zach Hill’s bravado and sheer volume is the yin to Vince Rogers’ more understated, jazz-influenced, and constantly shape-shifting yang. Discerning these nuances is especially important when dissecting the music of Planets, which seems to conform to the style of the aforementioned bands better than that of any other in the scene, while also confounding that logic by having its own subtleties that nobody else in the scene can touch.
Planets are a duo of Paul Slack (bass) and Thomas Crawford (drums) from Napa. Planets are even zanier than Hella in terms of harmonic ideas and even more angular and jutting than Tera Melos, especially in the time signature department. Slack’s bass style is akin to Nick Reinhart’s fretwork, but Slack uses a bass going through an octave pedal to create melodies that can range from the bass’ low E up through registers that would normally be associated with guitar, which is definitely in the spirit of economically filling in textures and melodic lines. On a whole, his playing is about as wild as the playing in Tera Melos, though Slack seems to be performing double-duty, artificially creating guitar lines with his octave pedal. Crawford’s drumming is a fitting complement to Slack’s bass. Though he doesn’t have any fancy electronics other than the sampler he controls, his style is also about filling space, resulting in playing that is paradoxically both loose and precise; Crawford’s ability to flip a rhythm on its head requires a high degree of technical proficiency, but the attitude and flare thrown into the gesture are usually always more whimsical and rubato than one would expect. In short, he almost makes Zach Hill sound like a programmed drum machine.
Planets also did me a solid and put me on the guest list for their show at 924 Gilman earlier this summer. Their live performance is definitely noteworthy. Slack and Crawford don white, full-body unisuits that make them look like mummies, or maybe Spiderman, and they project a video onto themselves (the white picks up the images well) and a screen hung up behind their set. They don’t throw themselves around like Tera Melos but play their instruments hard and with spirit. The fact that they pull off their songs live astounded me every moment of their performance. An example is below:
The Others of an Already "Other" Genre
As far as subgenres go, zooming in on Northern California math rock from math rock is like moving from looking at protons and neutrons to looking at quarks, gluons, and other sub-subatomic particles. It’s just taking a finely cut section of the musical world and subdividing it further. However, there is a characteristic sound that distinguishes this brand of math rock from all others that makes it relevant as its own entity. In addition, despite the singularity of this sound, the physical scene largely comprises bands who have taken the ideas developed by Hella and co., and just run with it. That is, the characteristically Northern California sound has gotten to the point where people are using it as an influence for blending genres, instead of just producing copycats. To give a complete breakdown of every artist would be absurd, but I’m going to try to give a paragraph to a wide range of artists to capture as many variations on the original sound as possible, hopefully giving some more meaning to this version of math rock as its own viable genre trend.
In some ways close to being a “quintessential” math rock band, in other ways, daringly different, Giraffes? Giraffes! are Northern California math rock gone pyschedelic and jammy with less emphasis on the “math” element. They are two-piece from Santa Cruz (via Keene State University in New Hampshire) who apparently can both play guitar and drums, though in recordings and live performances Joseph Andreoli sticks to guitar and Kenneth Topham plays drums (and glockenspiel, which works pretty well). A beautiful etude to explain how their aesthetic operates is on “When the Catholic Girls Go Camping, the Nicotine Vampires Rule” from their second album More Skin With Milk-Mouth. After the opening portion of the song that vamps around a vigorously tapped guitar line and time signature rollercoasters, at 1:45 the track breaks down into a melodic chord progression over a simple 4/4 beat. From here, John springboards into a lofty solo that invokes the verve of Frank Zappa on a track like “Muffin Man.” Underneath that, Kenneth provides ample variation to the original drum pattern, giving the track the feel of an extended jam as much as a taut composition. The whole album works this way, pitting loose feels against tight musicianship, yielding a lighter and possibly more drug-addled iteration of the Northern California math rock sound.
Twain Harte, from Livermore, are the green youngsters of the scene. Coming formally into existence around last summer with their first release A Sunny Place for Shady People and their first tour, they feel like the punk younger brother of the archetypal bands of the genre. If it weren’t for the complex interplay between the guitar and bass, these guys would have more in common with Midwest-influenced bands like Owls and Algernon Cadwallader than math rock acts, but there is a technical slant to the fun, uptempo, and brash aesthetic that makes me reluctant to lump this in with Kinsella wannabe projects. Live, Cody and Matt flip between guitar and bass, both showing proficiency with two-handed tapping and dank bass harmonizations, while Logan drums and sings (or shouts). They are highly energetic and the punk enthusiasm of their music is captured in their live performance. They are less unwieldy and technical than Planets and less anarchical than Tera Melos. If I could put my heart but not necessarily my money (they haven’t even put out a formal LP yet) on any band right now, it’d be Twain Harte. The have an immediately likable, yet surprisingly deep sound that doesn’t wear thin.
Tera Melos’ consistent tour mates, Facing New York, take ideas from the sound of the aforementioned bands and force it through a much more pop-driven meat grinder. Their music contains a lot of two-handed tapping and drum pattern and feel changes, but their songs are mostly in standard time signatures and a lot of their songs are structured to have repeating parts. There is even a catchy vocalist to wrap all of the pop together. The result is something that sounds like Damiera or Minus the Bear, but bears crucial resemblances to its geographic locale. Despite the divergent qualities, when hearing some of the tapping parts and the way the diverse bridges of their songs are arranged, it’s easy to hear the Tera Melos influence. However, they are also influenced by bands like Circa Survive, The Dismemberment Plan, and very notably The Beatles (listen to a lot of their chord progressions and vocal melodies), meaning that math rock is more of a component part than the be all and end all of their music. Facing New York provides and interesting idea of how Northern California math rock actually does have the possibility of being decidedly regressive, instead of an intense, progressive musical experience.
A quick run-through of other similar bands provides similar observations. SWIMS is Paul Slack’s (bassist of Planets) other project. It plays like a less acerbic and all over the place Planets. They have a keen sense of progressing a song’s energy and building off of small ideas, making them appeal to post-rockers as well as math rockers. O Lucky Man! are a trio gone duo from the East Bay who feel Algernon Cadwallader using Tera Melos motifs and including wild forays into a bunch of other genres, without vocals (though vocals are used on an old 7"). O! the Joy are devotees to the Facing New York brand of math rock, combining Tera Melos-inspired riffing with post-hardcore, pop punk, emo, and alternative rock to create a poppy yet challenging sound. Another mention-worthy band is Los Webelos, a band from Placerville, who fit right in with the likes of Planets and Hella.
Here’s where I start cheating a little bit geographically. Reno, though equidistant to Sacramento as some places in the Bay Area are, is in Nevada. However, Reno’s Manacle more than make up for the state line division by taking non-repeating song structures, unconventional guitar techniques (including Seim’s tremolo picking, which few other bands in the scene picked up on) and reinventing their function within songs. Instead of being driven by overlapping melodic voices as so many Northern California math rock bands are, Manacle writes heavier, denser music that couples these melodic voices with large, droning chords. The resulting sound strips math rock of its sparseness and lightness, allowing for both sonically and emotionally crushing songs that would normally never come about using traditional math rock tendencies. Another band that is just outside Northern California, but seriously benefits from its sound is Oh No, It’s Birds! (formerly The Sound of Silence), from Roseburg, Oregon. These guys sound like the halfway point between The Fall of Troy and Northern California math rock (and they are geographically as well – The Fall of Troy are from Seattle). The technicality deemphasizes two-handed tapping and gets its speed and leaping intervals from hammers and pulls. The sound is as if post-hardcore was given lessons in how to vary songs structures and rhythms without losing its hardcore backbone.
It’s also important to note that this trend has tendrils that reach out across the country as well, and also has parallel scenes. By the End of Tonight is Austin, TX’s version of Tera Melos, so much in fact, that the two released a split LP, Complex Full of Phantoms in 2007. Chicago’s Maps and Atlases are a purely indie band but the guitar and bass playing is all two-handed tapping and is arranged as a collection of melodic voices in the spirit of math rock. San Diego’s Sleeping People capture all of the zaniness of Hella’s new sound but with slightly more traditional instrumentation. Upsilon Acrux are a Los Angeles band with a love for effects pedals and an extensive understanding of two-handed tapping and chromatic harmony. Most remarkable yet is that there is a parallel scene that has developed in Saint Louis, Missouri. Bands like Yowie, Grand Ulena, and Malade de Souci are writing math rock that is similar on paper to the Northern California sound, but is much more atonal and very influenced by the off-center ideas of Mike Patton.
Concluding Thoughts
Math rock in Northern California sprung out of the primordial soup of San Diego’s emo scene but is incredibly diverse, finding ways to incorporate Japanese and Midwest stylings, as well as entirely different genres such as post-hardcore, indie, and even post-rock. The genre is well-etched within the world of math rock yet has been influenced by the scene as a whole. There are groups currently going deeper down the rabbit hole (Tera Melos, Planets) and groups who are using the genre as an opportunity to recombine with other genres and influences (Hella, Twain Harte, Facing New York (pictured above)). They all seem to be creating highly experimental and progressive music, but are doing so without pretentiousness, to the point that these bands just seem like or even identify themselves as punk bands. The comments by Tera Melos really captured this nuance. There seems to be an emphasis on “mathiness” but the search for weird time signatures does not define math rock, but rather math rock is defined by the developments these artists have made while striving to create their own sound. Though, the term “math rock” seems to belittle this process, and alternative terms used to describe Northern California math rock seem even more ridiculous (I’ve read “maze rock” and “wizardcore” as possible genre labels), it serves as a beacon to identify this particularly eclectic and interesting musical subgenre that really transcends its own shallow moniker.
Essential Albums (clicking on album name leads to review)
Well, Battles are from New York City and this is meant to be a scene/geography-specific report. Also, to be real, I don't really like Mirrored, so ya, though that'd wouldn't stop it from being "essential" I suppose.
this article is great. i really like a bunch of these bands (hella, tera melos) and have played shows with/been asked to play shows with a few of them (planets, giraffes? giraffes!). your descriptions of the individual bands and the scene as a whole works really well.
i'm going to check out the twain harte ep because kinsella wannabe bands just happen to be my thing.
THATS MY PHOTO "obscuring" the page! and no one asked me if they can use it. Not like I care but still. lol. Tera Melos.. so much to say about them but it all sums up to they are an amazing band to see, meet, & shoot. It's good music no matter the genre. Sick article!
Hey, sorry man. I got that photo directly from their myspace. If you want I can put a disclaimer at the bottom of the article with a link to your official website and giving you credit and stuff. Let me know.
The response seemed a little bit harsh on Nick. They said they thought it was well-written, but it seemed to be the subtext was that he's just another media asshole/failed musician.
I actually talked to them about it through e-mail. They didn't mean any offense but felt they needed to let fans know directly that they avoid genre tags and some other stuff. I understand what they're saying and it seems about right. You see all these fan responses like "no i kno you guys shouldnt have a tag because youre so original xoxoxo" and stuff. The music speaks for itself and my analysis of the music and how other similar artists are influenced by it doesn't change TM's originality, which I'm not sure their fans really get.
haha maybe I was just trying to start a fight then
I do hate when bands philosophise about genres. It's like no matter what the band sounds like or their ethos, pretty much every band on the planet is in agreement that their own music is far too awesome and unique for traditional categories
this drowned in sound article has a lot of good and bad information (the locust, foals...really?) about math rock, including band profiles on some important midwest bands:
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