“We’re not just a band,” Conrad Keely stated rather matter-of-factly. Conrad is one-fourth of the now Austin-based and long-monikered …And You Will Us By The Trail Of Dead. He wasn’t trying to sound pretentious. I was probing him about the band’s dabbling in other forms of expression, specifically his own forays into the visual arts.
“I was originally in the visual arts. I was going to be a comic artist when I grew up. When I was a wee boy of 12, I was really into the X-Men.” Has this interest carried over into his involvement with music? Indeed it has. “One of the great things about music these days is that there’s so much emphasis placed on multimedia. And even if you’re just a visual artist, I think that there’s a lot to be gained from doing a lot of multimedia. And music seems to be like the pinnacle of multimedia where you’ve got a lot of pop stars doing these great installations on stage and they’ve also got websites and stuff like that. Entertainment on that level really runs the whole spectrum of communication: television, video, visual arts, costume design… We generally feel like everything – even the album cover art – is as much a part of the band as any of the songwriting.”
I made the mistake here of mentioning that Jackson Pollock once said that he was trying to paint what music sounded like. Or something to that effect.
“Well, I hate Pollock,” Conrad quickly retorted, “… but that almost gives me an appreciation for his stuff!”
“What was he listening to?” added Jason Reece, friend and band member.
Sonically, The Trail of Dead (as their cumbersome name is often shortened to for convenience) explore the darkest regions of emotion. As evidenced on their two full-length releases, Madonna (Merge, 1999) and their self-titled debut (Trance Syndicate, 1998), theirs is a heavy stack of despair, rage, regret and melancholy crumbling and falling like so many monoliths neglected and decaying. Taj told me that while he lived in Austin, he saw these guys play live five or so times and that they were completely different everytime: at once noisy and chaotic, another very orchestrated, another quite electronic-based and yet another straight-out punk rock. The shit is catchy though. Contagious even. It gets under your skin, burrows and festers until you can’t leave it alone. And they’re not really so sad.
In fact, they’re a bunch of jokers. Attempt any inquiries into the history of this foursome, and you will then know them by the trail of bullshit.
“We started in Plano, Texas,” began a smirking, unable-to-maintain-eye-conact Jason Reece. “A town about 75 miles away from Austin. It’s a small town with like one church and one general store, two bars and one decreped old movie theater… Basically we met in this church youth group and we had a youth minister who helped guide us. With his help, we managed to play music for the church for a while. It was like Christian rock with uplifting chord changes and modulations, but for some reason we started getting a hold of dangerous books and music and that seeped into our music and it created a darker sound. We started changing too. We started getting more and more corrupt. I guess to them we were going to the Dark Side. So we were cast out of our church and exiled to Austin and that’s where the Trail of Dead really got its start…”
“What was the question?” Conrad joined in, returning from getting himself a drink.
“I was asking about the history of the Trail of Dead and Jason here was giving me a line of crap,” I said to clarify the situation.
“Oh,” Conrad said laughing, “That’s what he’s good for.”
“We don’t like to talk about our history that much because our history seems to change day by day… We change history everyday,” Jason said and they both smiled.
“Somebody asked me the other day where we got our name from, and I made up something about it being the last warning Boadicea gave the Roman generals,” Conrad added laughing (Boadicea was an ancient British queen where, upon annexation of her kingdom by Rome, she led a ferocious revolt before finally being crushed by the Roman army).
The truth, as far as I’ve been able to discern, holds that Conrad and Jason met in Hawaii, moved to Olympia (where Reece was an explosive member of the notorious Mukilteo Fairies) and finally to Austin where the Trail of Dead proper was formed. When and where Neil Busch and Kevin Allen came into play is still a mystery. Like so many other things about the Trail of Dead. Reader beware though. Truth is relative with these guys.
As a final case-in-point, Jason closed our talk with, “This is my last interview because I’m dying soon.”
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead is indeed not just a band. It’s a multi-layered, nonlinear, sonic enigma. It is everywhere. And it exists because.
[Copper Press, 2000]
[photo by Jessica Raetzke]
city and trying to have a higher profile. Sometimes it’s really boring, but there’s definitely a community here.”
“I think Hip-hop is more important than any sort of Rock music,” states a resolved Justin Broadrick matter-of-factly. “Most of the beats are fatter and heavier than your average Rock n’ Roll riff.” Justin is the head of one of our planet’s most brutal ensembles. England’s Godflesh plows monolithic basslines and ear-searing guitar riffs over Hip-hop’s most brutal breaks. Their sound has been pummeling eardrums for nearly a decade now, and most of their fans don’t even get where the music is coming from. You see, Justin is a total Hip-hop junkie. 
Kiss It Goodbye run their grooves deep into your skull, whether you’re listening or not. Their songs pay no mind to your ears and bore directly into your brain. Live these four guys act as starving caged animals, prowling around the much explored territory between hardcore and metal (Keith is metal. Tim is decidedly not metal). They painstakingly seek out the heaviest and most piercing aspects of both and weild them with deadly precision. It’s more than enough to scare the shit out of you.
John Duncan is a master of minimal sound-scapes and harshly intriguing collages of noise. He’s been creating sound and art projects for nearly twenty years now (since he was 15, he says), and he’s worked with everyone from Chris Keefe to Elliott Sharp. Some of his projects are painfully beautiful in their simplicity while others border on the absurd in their extremism. They often suggest that, if he thought there was something to be learned from it, he wouldn’t have a problem taking your life. 
“We as people outside of the industry are alway trying to learn more,” Posdnous explains. “And whatever we take in, we try our best to convey it on wax. So beyond trying to find the best beats and the best music, we try to convey the best we can the evolution of the group. And not justtrying to have th emost positive message, because it could be in a negative light or us being upset or us not finding peace and tranquility… We try to balance it correctly because sometimes, regardless of how you feel, the best tracks may be focused on negative things. We try to have a balance of positive and negative on an album because there’s a balance to what a the human being is. All we try to do is just stay true to who we are as people. We can’t just focus on doing what we wanna do and let it be on wax. We separate ourselves as rappers and realize we are just people, and we just try to do the best we can as people. And that just naturally shows in our music. I’m just happy people have stuck behind us.”
Pos says seriously. “We can make those easily. I’m not saying that ‘Me, Myself, and I’ is something that was necessarily forgotten, but we can make those for days. It was just never about making that. A lot fo people do focus on that and at the end of the day for them, it’s about money. A lot of people want to get a lot out of Hip-hop and don’t put anything into it. Forget it. This is a dying art form and I wast to put something back into it.”
“Without sounding too patronizing to the music public,” Godflesh mastermind Justin Broadrick says cautiously. “We’re too advanced for your average pop fan. They want something easy…” he pauses. “And we aren’t easy…” That’s a bold statement for anyone, but there’s very little about Godflesh that isn’t bold. In the most general sense, their sound combines the crunch of metal with harsh hip hop beats. There’s nothing here that doesn’t challenge the listener to keep listening or to think about what he’s listening to. Their newest record, Songs of Love and Hate has all these elements in spades. It’s just plain “uneasy listening” and Justin has plenty of philosophy to match.
“With Godflesh, we try to aim at something quite off balance, off kilter, a lot different from anyone else,” he continues. “[With this record] we were aiming at having that form of brutality of Streetcleaner (Earache, 1989). More so than last record. We looked at last record as quite drab and quite clean-cut and not really hard enough for what we want to do now. We aimed for more of the grooves which is where Pure (Earache, 1992) sort of started, but Pure just scratched the surface of that idea.” 1989’s Streetcleaner is still hailed as the seminal Godflesh record, even though their follow-up (after their foray into dance beats with Slavestate [Earache, 1991]), Pure,was more consistent and truly had more attention paid to beats and grooves.
Outside the realm of Godflesh, Justin releases a vast array of projects and collaborations with other people. He plays guitar on a regular basis with Kevin Martin’s noise/jazz-core outfit God, and he and Kevin also pair off as Techno Animal and play together in Ice. And as if that wasn’t enough, Justin has a solo project called Final and recently released an installment of the Sub Rosa label’s Subsonic series with guitar compositions by him and Andy Hawkins of Azonic.
“It was really in search of the groove I think,” Justin says of bringing in Mantia on drums. “When we were shaping up what we wanted to do with the material for this album, it became more evident to us that there was a lack of range in the dynamics of the rhythm. With Selfless (Earache/Columbia, 1994), in retrospect, the rhythms weren’t really coming across. We listened to the record a year later and felt like the rhythms just weren’t punishing enough. It was brutal. It was hard, but it just wasn’t funky or groovy enough, and I think we just lost it with just purely relying on the machine. We feel we’ve gone far enough with being completely mechanized. The aim was to get a drummer who plays like a machine, but we wanted a feeling of movement and motion as opposed to a machine where it’s very, very static. We were really searching for a break-beat sort of dynamic which goes further than just normal Hip-hop.”