At the Movies

"A child is influenced by the make believe," H.R. advised us on Bad Brains' "At the Movies." As any grown man in his mid-30s who considers his vintage Star Wars toy collection to be his retirement plan can aver, there's something about celluloid that sticks with you your whole life. That same kid smashing his Jedi and Sith action figures together after binging on a movie marathon will probably grow up to start a force-themed grindcore band (Sarlacc, I'm looking at you).
There's something about the power of movies that stick with us and influence our perception of the universe and our place in it. So it's no surprise to find out that movies and grindcore are inextricably intertwined whether it's Graf Orlock's stolen lyrics or everybody sampling the same five or six songs.
Some grinders take their love of film a step further, wearing their favorite movies on their sleeve so to speak. Here's to the bands that just straight up swiped their favorite films' names.

Horrified



Five fingering a movie name for your band is a tradition that is literally as old as grindcore itself. After Michigan's founding fathers of grind sensibly dropped the name Genocide, they went for the more subtle and more effective Repulsion. A pre-rape charge Roman Polanski broke down Catherine Deneuve in this 1965 psychological meltdown movie of the same name. Deneuve turned in a powerhouse performance as a repressed woman who completely cracks up over the course a single murderous afternoon. It's a film whose themes and body count had obvious appeal for the grindcore pioneers.

Paranoid Time



Grindcore has a fundamental distrust of governments and corporations and their unhealthy influence on wider society. Short-lived Michigan grinders (again with Michigan and stealing from movies!) The Parallax View were wont to scream about topics such as "Multi-National Death-Machines." So it's no surprise that the Warren Beaty film of the same name, about a shady corporation that specializes in political assassinations, resonated with their racket. Steeped in post-Watergate paranoia, the film was directed by Alan J. Pakula who also directed its real world counterpart All the President's Men.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK





Ryan Page is a man who loves his robots. He's gone to the cyborg well not once by twice with Robocop and Body Hammer. Both films deal with the nature of humanity as we stand on the cusp of a cybernetic evolutionary leap that may leave our biological shells redundant. Anybody who has sat down to ponder Page's Ballardian lyrical view knows those are themes right in his philosophical wheelhouse. But if he starts up a new project called Roy Batty, we may need to stage an intervention.

Adam and Eve and Eve and Eve



A film about a woman with multiple personality disorder seems like it would be a natural fit for the blastbeat treatment so it was a bit surprising that it was still sitting around unclaimed until Virginia band Three Faces of Eve, who many of you many know from the second This Comp Kills Fascists comp,  snapped it up. Psychological disorders and frantic screaming just seem to make a perfect pairing.

SPF 100



Burnt by the Sun stole the name for a movie that was just as arty and angular as they were. The story follows a Soviet officer and war hero who gets caught up in a Stalinist purge.  Everything he thought he knew about his country and his place in it come crashing around him over the course of a single summer day. Burnt by the Sun were a band steeped in humanist politics and the Oscar winning film pairs perfectly with those themes. It's a great example of a band's aesthetic and their inspiration coiling synergistically, creating a shared space between them.

I am Ironman: The Life and Grind of Dave Witte

Dave Witte’s fleet feet have powered just about every significant fast band of the last 15 years, but now he wants to put his mettle to the pedal at Hawaii’s Ironman triathlon.
With one triathlon under his belt already, the tattooed triathlete dreams of descending on King Kamehameha’s old stomping grounds for one of the most grueling running/biking/swimming endurance tests on the planet.
And for a chaser? Maybe celebrating from atop Mt. Midoriyama in Japan.
“That would be great. Some of that stuff is really hard,” said Witte, a fan of G4’s Ninja Warrior and Unbeatable Banzuke.
But until he gets his chance to party with Makoto Nagano, he’s content to keep the beat for Municipal Waste and about a bazillion other outings, each equally awesome.
While sitting at home waiting for a new bass drum to arrive – look for it on Muncipal Waste’s upcoming tour with a reunited At the Gates – Witte graciously took time to reminisce over a career that has seen him pound the skins for some of the defining metal bands of the last decade. Turns out the guy has trouble sitting still, which goes a long way to explaining his restless feet.
“At one point I was in six different things, and I said, ‘I must be crazy,’” the part time catering worker said. “I get fidgety. I like to keep busy. I love working. Hard work is something I appreciate.”
The career of one of metal’s most prolific drummers was almost derailed before he blasted out his first beat.
At 10 Witte contracted Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a central nervous system disorder that can cause paralysis. During his lengthy rehabilitation, Witte’s uncle, a blues drummer, handed him a set of drum stick and a 20 year career was born.
“It was the perfect gift at the time,” Witte said.
After two years beating on wooden blocks, the self taught drummer graduated to a “shit kicker” kit where he pounded along with AC/DC albums until he found a new instructor – Dave Lombardo.
“I heard Reign in Blood and that was it,” Witte said. “My mom wanted to kill me. I was in my room playing Reign in Blood over and over. … When I heard that double bass solo [in ‘Angel of Death’] I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
Turns out, the guy’s pretty fricken good at it. From his first foray with Human Remains up through his upcoming powerviolence band with Anodyne/Versoma/Tombs’ Mike Hill, Witte has consistently pushed himself and his skills. Not simply content to play fast, musical polygamist Witte’s playing, from the restraint of his tenure with Anodyne through blastbeatery with Discordance Axis, has always emphasized the whole song rather than individual BPM glory.
“The guy has cultivated a level of musicianship that is near impossible to match,” experimental musician and Phantomsmasher bandmate James Plotkin – no technical slouch himself – said. “Technical precision and creativity are in absolute abundance, but one of his strongest attributes is his incredible attitude and personality. In my opinion there are very few people out there that deserve to be in a band with Dave, or even in the same room with him for that matter.”
Witte’s drumming nurtured with a steady diet of Phil Rudd, Nicko McBrain, Neil Peart, Pete Sandoval and New Jersey death thrashers Ripping Corpse’s Brandon Thomas, who played big brother to Witte’s first serious band, Human Remains. And it was that underappreciated-in-its-time collective of Jersey tape traders, soured on the cookie cutter direction of death, who crafted one of the enduring trademarks of Witte’s career: a determination to be original regardless of the cost.
“That was the first band that played more than one show. That was the first band that traveled out of town, the first band I recorded with,” Witte said. “We knew we didn’t want to sound like everybody else. We were like, ‘Man, all the shit sounds the same.’”
It’s the non-metal influences – Rudd, Peart and others—that challenged the burgeoning talent to stretch his musical repertoire.
“I stepped over the metal line and discovered some other things. The drumming was good but it wasn’t metal. … I never wanted to be sloppy.”
And sloppy he ain’t. But while his tight fills and greyhound speed have made his fame, Witte doesn’t always get the proper credit for just how musical his playing can be.
“Everybody wants to do as many notes as possible, but I got over that pretty quick. I approached it as the whole song,” he said.
While his favorite album in his prodigious back catalogue is the jaw dropping Tokyo on crack grindfest The Inalienable Dreamless, Witte claims his favorite personal performance is actually a one off outing on Andoyne’s Red Was Her Favorite Color EP.
“That was my favorite drumming. It was so barren and stripped down. I learned it the day before and recorded it the next,” he said. “It’s one of my favorites.”
His detour through noise rock bliss also score Witte his first – and to date – only guitar solo credit on the song “Persuasion.”
“I played guitar like I just ran my fingers all over the thing. That was my guitar solo. I don’t have the desire to play guitar. I’m comfortable with drums.”
In fact, the professional musician’s girlfriend is his home’s reigning Guitar Hero champ.
“It was like seeing a fish out of water,” said Escape Artist Records’ Scott Kinkade, how also had a cameo on “Persuasion.” “… It was a very nervous experience that went very quickly. It was a euphoric state that to this day, I wonder if it really happened.”
Witte and Hill have reunited for the power violence band King Generator, whose new 12” is do out this summer.
Though he would be hard pressed to name all of his musical collaborators over the past 20 years, don’t think you can talk Witte into playing on your band’s 7-inch over a lunch break. The reason there’s a distinctive lack of suck on his C.V. is because he’s selective. When you juggle five or six bands at once, you can’t leap into new projects willy nilly, ya know.
And he’s already got a fairly impressive list of musical sidekicks on his wish list, including Louisville’s Patterson brothers, the musical masterminds behind The National Acrobat and a host of others, and New Jersey hip hop explorer Dalek.
“I send him a text message now and then. ‘I’m your drummer this year right?’ He tells me I’m first on the list,” he said.
He’ll have to pencil those in between the Waste, an upcoming Burnt by the Sun Album (finally!), Alec Empire, his math rock band (“to keep my chops up”) and the inevitable solo project.
“I have an electric kit and real kit I want to combine and make songs. … I want to do a lot of improve stuff. I’ll do some fast stuff again, sure. I’m not signing up to win the race for the fastest. I’m over that now. I did that in the ’90s. There’s more to drumming to me.”
But don’t take that to mean the man has sworn off blast beats. He’s sure he’ll get the itch to rattle a snare again before he hangs up his sticks.
“I’m pretty fortunate. That’s what I love. That’s what I was born to do. I can always find something to keep my going,” he said. “My whole life I was always in a few bands at once because I wanted to do everything at once.”

From Blastbeats to Breakdowns and Beyond: A Partial Dave Witte Discography

There’s a very short list of artists whose copious body of work I will follow religiously, picking up new projects sight unseen (sound unheard?). I will fanatically hunt down albums featuring Scott Hull, Jon Chang, Justin Broadrick, Mike Hill or Stephen O’Malley. But the only drummer to hold that honor is Mr. Witte, the Takashi Miike of metal. Unfortunately for fans, the guy’s got a musical rap sheet that would make John Gotti blush. Here’s some selected highlights from Witte’s back catalogue.

Human Remains
Using Sickness as a Hero
Relapse
1996 (Reissued in 2002 on Where Were You When)
Where were any of us when Human Remains were rewriting the death metal/grind template with off kilter songs and truly bizarre movie samples? Coming up on the band’s 20th anniversary, the New Jersey collective’s deliberately original blend of death, grind and out of nowhere guitar scrapes and skronks has yet to be matched.
Swapping tapes with bands around the world, Human Remains quickly became bored with the cookie cutter, Cookie Monster vocalled death that was quickly ossifying into the strictures we know today. So they gave metal a much needed colon cleansing with an enema of carnivalesque guitar work, redonkulous speed and throaty vocal assaults that steered clear of the typical death metal lyrics in favor of horrors more cerebral.
As seems to be a pattern with Witte’s early work, Human Remains never seemed to capture the popular imagination during their brief lifespan, but the band has earned a place as forward looking visionaries in the decades since and Relapse’s rerelease of their discography guarantees them a shot at metal immortality.

Black Army Jacket
222
Reservoir/ Chainsaw Safety
1998
All apologies to Man is the Bastard, but powerviolence was not strictly a West Coast phenomenon. New Jersey’s Black Army Jacket admirably flew the flag of up tempo, gnarled hardcore for those of us living on the right hand side of the country during the ’90s.
Black Army Jacket was the hardcore outlet for a guy who was already sending metal and grind ass over tea kettle with Human Remains and Discordance Axis, respectively. 222’s songs swarm like a pack of feral pitbulls running down a kitten, just a relentless assault of gruff vocalled punk that hit and ran at near-Discordance speeds.
And for those of you curious as to what’s on Mr. Witte’s mind, grok “When I Can’t See You are You There?” featuring a rare lyrical and vocal cameo by the drummer.

Anodyne
Red Was Her Favorite Color
Happy Couples Never Last
1998
Second generation noise rock misanthrope Mike Hill tapped Witte to man the throne for this EP when the band was between the drummers. A Charles Manson cover and three Hill originals gave Witte a chance to back off the BPMs and remind the world he can really drum. As in, the guy knows how to employ restrain and understatement if that’s what a song calls for.
Red Was Her Favorite Color was re-released on the Anodyne compilation The First Four Years, including Witte’s only known guitar credit to date, playing a “solo” on the song “Persuasion.”
Hill tapped Witte again for the first lineup of what would later become Versoma, and though the two never recorded together in that project, they are reuniting this year in the powerviolence band King Generator.

East-West Blast Test
East-West Blast Test

Slap-a-Ham (Reissued by Relapse)
2000
East-West Blast Test is almost more famous for how it was recorded – Witte recording drum tracks in Jersey and then mailing them off to the West Coast where Spazz-oid Chris Dodge recorded guitar lines, perfecting the songs via tape trading – than the actual music itself. But don’t be mistaken; their chattering update on the powerviolence sound contained 45 second bursts of creative insanity wrapped in breathless acceleration. This album shows that not only could powerviolence rupture your tympanum, but it could you challenge you intellectually as well.
When the duo reunited in 2006 on Popular Music for Unpopular People, that’s when things got really weird.

Discordance Axis
The Inalienable Dreamless
Hyra Head
2001
If this doesn’t have a privileged position in your collection, you’re reading the wrong fucking blog. Witte, Jon Chang and Rob Marton dragged grind across the Pacific and gave it a glittering neon Tokyo sheen. Sleek the is the first word that comes to mind when trying to described the bassless trio’s rapid, slashing assault on conventional songwriting. And for their, sadly, final album they pushed grind to its limits, marrying blastbeats to some of the most intense, emotional and deeply honest lyrics in metal, all wrapped up in the metaphors of anime, manga and video games. Though the band never got the attention it deserved during its on again, off again existence, time has been kind to Discordance Axis, who now rank as one of the most revered and seminal bands in grind’s second wave.

Phantomsmasher
Phantomsmasher

Ipecac
2002
Yes, Witte can ratta tat tat the high BPMS like nobody’s fricken business, but lost amid the guy’s blinding speed and hectic fills is the fact that dude knows how to contribute to songs as a whole. Handpicked by Old Lady Drivers’ James Plotkin for this experimental instrumental ensemble, rounded out by DJ Speedranch, Witte only sacrifices a fraction of his speed to complement Plotkin’s left field songwriting and Speedranch’s shuddering electronic freakouts. Songs lurch along with slantwise rhythms and sputtering time signatures on an album that slots nicely next to the truly bizarre second East-West Blast Test album.

Burnt by the Sun
The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
Relapse
2003
Finally shedding their early Coalesce-isms, a slimmed down four piece Burnt by the Sun perfected metalcore on their second full length. The Jersey quartet, reuniting Witte his song writing partners from Human Remains, not only melded hardcore bark with metal arrangements and progression, but also managed to be political without the mere recitations of “This sucks” that have plagued punk and metal for nigh on thirty years. Instead, frontman Mike Olender casts his keen eye on the intersection of the political and financial sectors to trace the paths of power that covertly influence all of our lives. The band has already written five songs on its much delayed third album after Olender and Witte took a hiatus from the group, so with a little luck, the new platter could be in our hot little hands by the end of the year.

Hope Collapse
Year of the Leper
Inkblot Records
2005
After Black Army Jacket hung up their coats, three-fourths of the band staged a mini reunion, blasting out this rampaging thrash/metal/grind amalgam.
You know exactly what you’re getting just reading the band’s list of influences: Terrorizer, Assuck, Repulsion, Siege, S.O.B (Hey it reads like our countdown of the greatest grind albums of all time!).
We all know Witte is a master blaster, but Hope Collapse lets him show off his impressive double bass work, a side of his playing he shows off all too infrequently. His blasts, rolls and fills anchor a head snapping, horn throwing collection of thrashed out jams. And rumor has it the band actually plans a sequel though Witte calls that “news to me.”
More infectious than a flesh eating virus, once Year of the Leper’s cold steel pierces your flesh you’ll be pleasantly scarred for life.

Birds of Prey
Weight of the Wound
Relapse
2006
Someone at Relapse must have realized that counting on Cretin to hold down the retard-core front (15 years to record a debut? Sheesh) may not be the strongest bet, so they hedged their meathead music portfolio with this collection of Southern metal all stars.
Witte anchors an ensemble of some of Virginia’s most talented musicians through an exercise in Southern fried death metal topped with heaping helpings of lonely chef’s special sauce. A combination of the Troma Films catalogue and Faulkner’s Southern grotesquerie, Birds of Prey is inbred, cretinous fun.

Municipal Waste
The Art of Partying
Earache
2007
For the last few years, thrashin’ has been Witte’s business. And business has been good.
It’s a match made in skater heaven, Witte holding down the fort for a pack of retro goofballs for whom thrash means Corrosion of Conformity, Suicidal Tendencies and DRI rather that Metallica, Megadeth or any of the other major label that dragged the sound down into the hell of platinum album sales, rampant addiction and questionable therapy sessions caught on film.
Instead Municipal Waste hold down thrash for the heshers who have patched up denim vests in their closets and a lasting affection for headbands. With songs about partying, zombies and partying zombies, Waste deflate today’s overly serious metal scene while still remembering to invest the time to write well crafted songs guaranteed to get a pit started, even if it’s just you moshing around your bedroom alone.