Photo by Paulo Gonzales
SUPERSONIC IN CONVERSATION WITH BRIAN COOK OF SUMAC‼
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We caught up with Brian Cook over email ahead of SUMAC’s show at The Castle & Falcon on Wednesday 8th April, where we spoke about the formation of SUMAC, the extensive musical backgrounds each member brings into the project, and their incredible collaboration with Moor Mother, released last year.
Supersonic: How did forming SUMAC come about?
Brian: It was a little unorthodox. Or at least it wasn’t the usual “I answered an ad in the local paper” or “me and my buds jammed one night.” Aaron moved up to the Seattle area from LA in the early 2010s and given that we’d known each other through music stuff since 1998 or so, we started regularly meeting up for coffee hangouts. Both of our old bands had broken up recently so we were commiserating a fair amount on that shared experience. Somewhere along the way we started kicking around ideas for a music project. It was nothing serious in my mind… I had started playing with Russian Circles a year or two earlier and wasn’t looking to add more touring to my plate, but there was a lot of crossover in the kinds of heavy music we appreciated, I remember Caspar Brötzmann Massaker and Khanate coming up a fair amount, and I think we were both interested in tapping into something that our other projects hadn’t explored. Aaron took the initiative and started inquiring about drummers. Kurt Ballou had just recorded a Baptists record and suggested their drummer Nick to Aaron. Next thing I know, I get home from a Russian Circles tour and find out Aaron has an hour’s worth of material with this Canadian guy I’ve never met. A few weeks later I tracked the bass for the album in our friend Mel’s basement. All this time I was thinking it was a pretty interesting endeavour, but it certainly wasn’t a “band.” I hadn’t even met Nick yet. It was a total studio project. But Aaron and Nick felt really good about the musical chemistry between them, and once we got a final mix of the first album The Deal, I realised that maybe there was something here that needed to be explored more deeply. Not long after, we started playing shows, and that’s when it felt like a real band.
Supersonic: How does your history in other projects shape what happens in SUMAC?
Brian: I think there’s always something to learn from working with other musicians, so our other bands all certainly informed SUMAC. One thing that has been frequently mentioned in our discussions is that SUMAC is definitely Aaron’s band. He’s the guy with the vision and the ideas. But Nick and I have plenty of room to shape the songs with our respective instruments. I think playing with other bands allowed me to get to a point where I can play in a band like SUMAC and have enough faith in Aaron’s concepts and Nick’s ability to create patterns and grooves out of Aaron’s riffs that I can play more of a supporting role. Traditionally, all my old bands were at least on the surface, total democracies. Anyone could bring in ideas. Anyone could veto something. There still tended to be an imbalance in creative input, but at least the door was open. But stepping into Russian Circles, where there was this established writing dynamic between Mike and Dave that I didn’t want to undermine, was helpful in learning to serve the band rather than showboat my ideas. So by the time SUMAC came around, I think it was a lot easier to check my ego and lean into a specific role. But strangely enough, there’s so much improvisation in SUMAC that it really does wind up being a sonic democracy in a lot of ways, but it’s housed in a framework built by Aaron.
Supersonic: What has been one of the most memorable gigs you’ve played?
Brian: Well, on a very basic level we’re a big loud rock band, though we do want to push back at and challenge a lot of the norms surrounding that classification. That said… we’re guitar, bass, and drums and we have a lot of gear and we want to play venues where we can do big loud rock band things. But we do occasionally venture into some non-traditional spaces. For example, we somehow got booked in Oxnard, California at this “coffee shop” called Mrs. Olson’s. I don’t really understand how this place was a functioning business. I believe there was a kitchen but they weren’t open for food service. It didn’t look like a place where you’d want to get a coffee. There was a bar, but even that aspect of the venue seemed barely operational. It was situated in a marina, so I imagine the rent wasn’t cheap, but it was fairly derelict, so maybe it was in its death throes at the time. The interior design aesthetic was a combination of patriotic slogans, camo tactical gear, medieval stage props, neon black light paint murals, and Tool memorabilia. As you can imagine, it had a very heavy “everyone here has a meth habit” vibe, which was confirmed at the end of the night when I walked in on a bunch of employees and their friends doing key bumps in the men’s bathroom. There was a stage but almost no PA. And of course, it was booked by an outside promoter, so no one on site seemed to know what was going on, and there was a palpable sense of hostility emanating from the staff. Everything really felt like a bad vibe. About 20 to 30 people showed up for the show. It should’ve been a disaster… one of those nights where you go to sleep wondering where you made the wrong turn in life… but it wound up being one of our favourite shows of the tour. The energy in the room was so fucked up that we just kinda leaned into it. It felt like a truly lawless space, and once we determined that we weren’t going to wind up like that band in The Green Room, we just kinda savoured the fact that we had this platform in this dodgy area where we could just kinda go musically feral. One of the joys of SUMAC is that the songs are very malleable and have a lot of space where we can explore, and as long as we’re allowed to play at our chosen volume, we can usually take advantage of even the weirdest rooms and bend them to our will.
Supersonic: Tell us about your latest album with Moor Mother, how did this collaboration come about?
Brian: Aaron was a big Moor Mother fan early on, and it wound up that there was mutual admiration. I think we’d talked about doing some tour dates together years ago, though they never came to fruition. Maybe that’s how we wound up on her radar. I don’t know. But I believe Camae was the one who initially proposed the collaboration. Though we’ve teamed up with artists like Keiji Haino for collaborative improvised albums in the past, we were trying to create something that was structured but that left a lot of room for Camae to be front and center, so there was a conscious effort to go a more minimalist route with the music. As with any collaboration, it’s an experiment in seeing how different musical approaches can feed into each other.
SUMAC play The Castle & Falcon on Wednesday 8th April, and tickets are on sale now. With April fast approaching, we’d strongly recommend grabbing yours sooner rather than later.
