Vernal Scuzz is a free-form band from Alabama that plays zithers, guitars, winds, drums and voice. They sing about lawnmowers and spectral acquaintances. They play at high schools, city parks, fields, rec centers, womb rooms and yards.
Albums:
Vernal Scuzz
Compilations:
Unsanitary Freeze Thaw Cycle & Wired (d.i.h.d. recs)
Smack Dabbath
Seasonal Séance: Vernal Equinox
Live:
First Cuts in the Psychic Sea: Live on WFMU
Interview excerpt from Sweet Wreath Newsletter No. 30:
Jasper:
“That was my first job, mowing lawns. But the lawnmower is a powerful symbol. It exists at the crux of domestic life, industry, social norms and the human conception of the malleability of nature. And while pouring over the manual for the Lawn-Boy Power Mulch Rider Model 80040, I really got into thinking about this character of "The Rider," and what it means to cut grass with a riding mower versus a push mower. On the album there's a few times when I refer to "the Rider" which is a name for something I see as a psychic force within us. To "ride" is to be a passive participant...if you're not driving, you're riding. To me this word embodies a complacent character out in the world, who is content with the status quo. But it's also the inner "rider" within all of us. A presence that takes up residence in your mind, that is always reassuring you to give in and trust in the powers that be and whatnot. That voice even takes the form of telling yourself it's ok to get lost in distractions or feed surface level cravings rather than connecting with people or doing something meaningful with your time. So "The Rider" came up as a useful metaphor through using the cut-up method on the Lawn-Boy Power Mulch Rider Model 80040 manual.
I've found it really engaging, this physical manipulation of words on a page by cutting them up, and rearranging them in order to say what is harder to get at if you're just writing out things in a normal fashion. It's amazing to see the images that will appear and resonate. You make associations that you might not have seen before...getting at the poetic truth of things. ...There's a long continuum of artists using the imagery and words of the over-culture to critique that culture. So most of these lyrics have that critique embedded in them, but they're also fun to say. This music has different sides to it. One side is dealing with oppressive forces, but it's also really playful. The theme of cutting appears in multiple ways in our music.
Mika:
You brought up the land, which is tied to everything....Alabama is such a wild, wild place. And there's so many structures that we've brought in and put on top of it that are trying to pretend that it's not wild. Like "This is a neighborhood. And in this neighborhood, the local government says that your grass can only be ten inches tall." But that's like a cognitive dissonance to me because I think one of the best things about this state is its diversity and its ecology and its wildness. And then I live in a place where I literally have to mow my grass. Like I'm slowly trying to convert my tiny little plot into a little native grasslands. But I have to do it in a way that is very obvious and intentional and doesn't look like I just didn't cut the grass, because then I get fined. It's like the layering on of a hidden thing...something that's trying to suppress. You know that it's not right, but you can't correct it properly out in the open. Talk about religion...that's all in there. Ghosts.
Sweet Wreath:
I want to ask about the instruments you play, and of course, we're going to talk about euphonium because what rock band has euphonium? It's so cool. What does your voice through the euphonium feel like in this particular musical setting?
Mika:
Euphonium to me is the instrument that I'm the most comfortable on. So I feel like it's the instrument that I can be the most creative on. And as far as voicing in this ensemble, I was really drawn to Jasper's concept when he was like, "I'm going to play the bass." And then I heard him sing and he's like a baritone, really low tenor. And I wanted to bring in my instrument, which is another baritone voicing. So I was like, okay, so this is really low. Really deep and low...the registers just settle down at a very core level, right? I feel like you can get into a situation with ensembles where there's too much in the low register. But for some reason, the timbre of the bass versus the timbre of the horn just complement each other really well. And I recently got this mute that I can actually plug in and run through effects. We were playing around with that today. I've been able to explore more creatively with Jasper than I have in other groups. Because nobody's been like, "hey, come to the jam and bring your euphonium." So this has been really fantastic to have someone that actually wants to sit down and play with me on this instrument. I come from a background of classical music where it's very specific and you play this exact thing, and if you don't, people get really mad at you. It's nice to be outside of that very constrained musical world and to be in a place that's more expressive.
Sweet Wreath:
Yeah, you get whole intros and solos. You're a big deal. And there's a lot of space made in some of the compositions for that.
Mika:
For brass, especially I think, it's a very physical instrument. It takes a certain amount of fitness to even be able to make a sound on it. So for me, it's also by necessity a daily practice, which is really meditative to have brought that back....to have had a reason to bring that back into my life.
Jasper:
I find the sound of you playing the horn to be like the tone of a voice. And I find it really calming a lot of times. So, I like listening to you play it, even when we're not playing a song. It has that register like a cello where it feels like someone talking. So just warm up as long as you need to because I really like hearing it...
Mika:
I love that you say that about this horn because that's also one of the things that I fell in love with. When I first started playing the euphonium, one of the things that brass players tell you is to play long tones. That's what you do to build and just be better.....play one note for as long as you can. And there's so much that goes into that. You're doing breath work because you're having to fill your lungs and they control the speed of your air. You're also trying to hold a pitch or you're trying to be in tune and you have a lot of muscle activity going on in your mouth and you're worried about, OK, is my throat open? Like, what's the shape of my mouth? So a lot is going on. But when you do hit a note perfectly and hold it, and then you start to hear, because of the resonance of the instrument, you start to hear all the overtones, things that build on top of that note. And you can get absolutely lost in the sound of it. And that's how I fell in love with it.
Sweet Wreath:
And you're using hammer dulcimer, euphonium, the bass, the drums, the cool chimey things, distortion pedals galore, recorded tapes, cool flutes. But what else?
Jasper:
We're using instrument combinations that I've never heard before....like a euphonium and a dulcimer and a bagpipe chanter. There's also times when you and Walker have played with us...adding guitar or singing...I love it when friends play with us...that adds something special. We're also using this custom made circuit board synth called a "chirper" that comes from this one guy who makes them in England. Which I believe was the last one that he had. The last one! From England! Wow....and we've used the fuck out of that thing. It provides this incredibly exciting chaotic element to our music, but Mika has been learning how to play it.
Mika:
Yeah...talk about wild things. That's a great board. It's very wild. It's really hot...like, it has a bunch of knobs on it, obviously. But it also has these touch sensitive areas where your body connects circuits...to me it just feels very chaotic and random and sometimes you don't even have to be touching it. It's such a reactive little board...like you can just be hovering around it and it starts sounding off. I think that's one of the funnest things...it just seems like either it's going to play with you or it's going to do its own thing...
Sweet Wreath:
I hear a lot of the songs as a conversation you are having with parts of your psyche that are both pre-eminent memory voices and active forces you're contending with in the forms of your family.
Jasper:
Yeah, they are conversations. Not all the lines are from my perspective. Some of them are from other voices. Sometimes, line by line are coming from different places, colliding in one person singing. And commercial voices coming from media and television, from growing up with the television always on. My family seem to get a sense of the world through watching TV. And that's not uncommon. So I'm referring to corporate and mediated entities that become so familiar that they are like active beings in your life. They're like these ghostly phantasms that we're interacting with every day. And I'm interacting with these phantasms in the words.
Sweet Wreath:
Mika, what is working on this kind of music like for you? Do you find resonance with your upbringing and relationships with religion and Southernisms, etc?
Mika:
I'm realizing now that we probably have some commonalities in our past in that regard. I don't think it's uncommon honestly, in the South. But yeah, my family was also very concerned with ensuring that I had a religious upbringing. And I feel like I've spent a lifetime unraveling the effects that had on me as a very young child. There's a lot of things that you're told, especially as a little girl growing up in the Southern Christian culture that makes you want to be very small. So, getting away from that takes a lot of effort. lt takes a lot of kinetic build up to accumulate enough mass of self to get out of that mindset. I'm obviously still working on it, but I resonate with the wrongness of that for me....of being taught to exist in a certain way. Being shown images of a goal....Like "you want to be this amount of beautiful" or "you want to be this amount of fun," or "you want to be this amount of whatever" and that's constantly pumped at you everywhere in school, at church, at home, and it's just so far removed from the actual reality of the self. Yeah, so I totally agree with what you're saying, Jasper. I think that's why I don't always have to understand what the songs mean because I do know that we see things very similarly and I can feel the intention of what you're writing, and it definitely resonates with me.
Jasper:
Yeah, I think music has always been a catharsis. But it's many things. It's a discipline. It's a meditative practice. It's a physical exercise. It's an expression of beauty. And also an assertion, that I myself don't have to sound or look beautiful to be valid. Just being able to, like, have a channel. I find inspiration from bands that manage to deal with really complex issues, but in an exciting way or a way that empowers other people, you know. Music has been the continuum in my life. Hearing songs that resonate with you gives you energy. I think it literally gives you energy to keep going.
Mika:
And I'm a believer that things need to be said out loud. The more you say things and acknowledge what you're seeing, the more people hear it, the more people can normalize it. Like, this is a deep issue of humanity. We're calling this what it is like. It has power, you know, and I think it matters just to normalize calling it like you see it. We live in a place where there's a man behind the curtain situation. I feel like there's always this patina of society and politeness and you don't talk about politics, religion or whatever at dinner, but you should be talking about it. What are we doing?
Jasper:
I feel like our band name is like seeing ourselves as a form of energy. We're harnessing the energy within us that is human, but is also beyond that. It's about the fact that we are composed of organic materials that will dissolve one day....and that we should see ourselves as actors in conjunction with a multitude of other life forms. That's what the music hints at....and it rattles the humans to see that. We want to somehow tune our brains more to what's going on outside the realm of humanity. Scuzz is like an undefinable material floating around in the air or on the surface of water that will one day form new kinds of life that we don't know about yet.
Albums:
Vernal Scuzz
Compilations:
Unsanitary Freeze Thaw Cycle & Wired (d.i.h.d. recs)
Smack Dabbath
Seasonal Séance: Vernal Equinox
Live:
First Cuts in the Psychic Sea: Live on WFMU
Interview excerpt from Sweet Wreath Newsletter No. 30:
Jasper:
“That was my first job, mowing lawns. But the lawnmower is a powerful symbol. It exists at the crux of domestic life, industry, social norms and the human conception of the malleability of nature. And while pouring over the manual for the Lawn-Boy Power Mulch Rider Model 80040, I really got into thinking about this character of "The Rider," and what it means to cut grass with a riding mower versus a push mower. On the album there's a few times when I refer to "the Rider" which is a name for something I see as a psychic force within us. To "ride" is to be a passive participant...if you're not driving, you're riding. To me this word embodies a complacent character out in the world, who is content with the status quo. But it's also the inner "rider" within all of us. A presence that takes up residence in your mind, that is always reassuring you to give in and trust in the powers that be and whatnot. That voice even takes the form of telling yourself it's ok to get lost in distractions or feed surface level cravings rather than connecting with people or doing something meaningful with your time. So "The Rider" came up as a useful metaphor through using the cut-up method on the Lawn-Boy Power Mulch Rider Model 80040 manual.
I've found it really engaging, this physical manipulation of words on a page by cutting them up, and rearranging them in order to say what is harder to get at if you're just writing out things in a normal fashion. It's amazing to see the images that will appear and resonate. You make associations that you might not have seen before...getting at the poetic truth of things. ...There's a long continuum of artists using the imagery and words of the over-culture to critique that culture. So most of these lyrics have that critique embedded in them, but they're also fun to say. This music has different sides to it. One side is dealing with oppressive forces, but it's also really playful. The theme of cutting appears in multiple ways in our music.
Mika:
You brought up the land, which is tied to everything....Alabama is such a wild, wild place. And there's so many structures that we've brought in and put on top of it that are trying to pretend that it's not wild. Like "This is a neighborhood. And in this neighborhood, the local government says that your grass can only be ten inches tall." But that's like a cognitive dissonance to me because I think one of the best things about this state is its diversity and its ecology and its wildness. And then I live in a place where I literally have to mow my grass. Like I'm slowly trying to convert my tiny little plot into a little native grasslands. But I have to do it in a way that is very obvious and intentional and doesn't look like I just didn't cut the grass, because then I get fined. It's like the layering on of a hidden thing...something that's trying to suppress. You know that it's not right, but you can't correct it properly out in the open. Talk about religion...that's all in there. Ghosts.
Sweet Wreath:
I want to ask about the instruments you play, and of course, we're going to talk about euphonium because what rock band has euphonium? It's so cool. What does your voice through the euphonium feel like in this particular musical setting?
Mika:
Euphonium to me is the instrument that I'm the most comfortable on. So I feel like it's the instrument that I can be the most creative on. And as far as voicing in this ensemble, I was really drawn to Jasper's concept when he was like, "I'm going to play the bass." And then I heard him sing and he's like a baritone, really low tenor. And I wanted to bring in my instrument, which is another baritone voicing. So I was like, okay, so this is really low. Really deep and low...the registers just settle down at a very core level, right? I feel like you can get into a situation with ensembles where there's too much in the low register. But for some reason, the timbre of the bass versus the timbre of the horn just complement each other really well. And I recently got this mute that I can actually plug in and run through effects. We were playing around with that today. I've been able to explore more creatively with Jasper than I have in other groups. Because nobody's been like, "hey, come to the jam and bring your euphonium." So this has been really fantastic to have someone that actually wants to sit down and play with me on this instrument. I come from a background of classical music where it's very specific and you play this exact thing, and if you don't, people get really mad at you. It's nice to be outside of that very constrained musical world and to be in a place that's more expressive.
Sweet Wreath:
Yeah, you get whole intros and solos. You're a big deal. And there's a lot of space made in some of the compositions for that.
Mika:
For brass, especially I think, it's a very physical instrument. It takes a certain amount of fitness to even be able to make a sound on it. So for me, it's also by necessity a daily practice, which is really meditative to have brought that back....to have had a reason to bring that back into my life.
Jasper:
I find the sound of you playing the horn to be like the tone of a voice. And I find it really calming a lot of times. So, I like listening to you play it, even when we're not playing a song. It has that register like a cello where it feels like someone talking. So just warm up as long as you need to because I really like hearing it...
Mika:
I love that you say that about this horn because that's also one of the things that I fell in love with. When I first started playing the euphonium, one of the things that brass players tell you is to play long tones. That's what you do to build and just be better.....play one note for as long as you can. And there's so much that goes into that. You're doing breath work because you're having to fill your lungs and they control the speed of your air. You're also trying to hold a pitch or you're trying to be in tune and you have a lot of muscle activity going on in your mouth and you're worried about, OK, is my throat open? Like, what's the shape of my mouth? So a lot is going on. But when you do hit a note perfectly and hold it, and then you start to hear, because of the resonance of the instrument, you start to hear all the overtones, things that build on top of that note. And you can get absolutely lost in the sound of it. And that's how I fell in love with it.
Sweet Wreath:
And you're using hammer dulcimer, euphonium, the bass, the drums, the cool chimey things, distortion pedals galore, recorded tapes, cool flutes. But what else?
Jasper:
We're using instrument combinations that I've never heard before....like a euphonium and a dulcimer and a bagpipe chanter. There's also times when you and Walker have played with us...adding guitar or singing...I love it when friends play with us...that adds something special. We're also using this custom made circuit board synth called a "chirper" that comes from this one guy who makes them in England. Which I believe was the last one that he had. The last one! From England! Wow....and we've used the fuck out of that thing. It provides this incredibly exciting chaotic element to our music, but Mika has been learning how to play it.
Mika:
Yeah...talk about wild things. That's a great board. It's very wild. It's really hot...like, it has a bunch of knobs on it, obviously. But it also has these touch sensitive areas where your body connects circuits...to me it just feels very chaotic and random and sometimes you don't even have to be touching it. It's such a reactive little board...like you can just be hovering around it and it starts sounding off. I think that's one of the funnest things...it just seems like either it's going to play with you or it's going to do its own thing...
Sweet Wreath:
I hear a lot of the songs as a conversation you are having with parts of your psyche that are both pre-eminent memory voices and active forces you're contending with in the forms of your family.
Jasper:
Yeah, they are conversations. Not all the lines are from my perspective. Some of them are from other voices. Sometimes, line by line are coming from different places, colliding in one person singing. And commercial voices coming from media and television, from growing up with the television always on. My family seem to get a sense of the world through watching TV. And that's not uncommon. So I'm referring to corporate and mediated entities that become so familiar that they are like active beings in your life. They're like these ghostly phantasms that we're interacting with every day. And I'm interacting with these phantasms in the words.
Sweet Wreath:
Mika, what is working on this kind of music like for you? Do you find resonance with your upbringing and relationships with religion and Southernisms, etc?
Mika:
I'm realizing now that we probably have some commonalities in our past in that regard. I don't think it's uncommon honestly, in the South. But yeah, my family was also very concerned with ensuring that I had a religious upbringing. And I feel like I've spent a lifetime unraveling the effects that had on me as a very young child. There's a lot of things that you're told, especially as a little girl growing up in the Southern Christian culture that makes you want to be very small. So, getting away from that takes a lot of effort. lt takes a lot of kinetic build up to accumulate enough mass of self to get out of that mindset. I'm obviously still working on it, but I resonate with the wrongness of that for me....of being taught to exist in a certain way. Being shown images of a goal....Like "you want to be this amount of beautiful" or "you want to be this amount of fun," or "you want to be this amount of whatever" and that's constantly pumped at you everywhere in school, at church, at home, and it's just so far removed from the actual reality of the self. Yeah, so I totally agree with what you're saying, Jasper. I think that's why I don't always have to understand what the songs mean because I do know that we see things very similarly and I can feel the intention of what you're writing, and it definitely resonates with me.
Jasper:
Yeah, I think music has always been a catharsis. But it's many things. It's a discipline. It's a meditative practice. It's a physical exercise. It's an expression of beauty. And also an assertion, that I myself don't have to sound or look beautiful to be valid. Just being able to, like, have a channel. I find inspiration from bands that manage to deal with really complex issues, but in an exciting way or a way that empowers other people, you know. Music has been the continuum in my life. Hearing songs that resonate with you gives you energy. I think it literally gives you energy to keep going.
Mika:
And I'm a believer that things need to be said out loud. The more you say things and acknowledge what you're seeing, the more people hear it, the more people can normalize it. Like, this is a deep issue of humanity. We're calling this what it is like. It has power, you know, and I think it matters just to normalize calling it like you see it. We live in a place where there's a man behind the curtain situation. I feel like there's always this patina of society and politeness and you don't talk about politics, religion or whatever at dinner, but you should be talking about it. What are we doing?
Jasper:
I feel like our band name is like seeing ourselves as a form of energy. We're harnessing the energy within us that is human, but is also beyond that. It's about the fact that we are composed of organic materials that will dissolve one day....and that we should see ourselves as actors in conjunction with a multitude of other life forms. That's what the music hints at....and it rattles the humans to see that. We want to somehow tune our brains more to what's going on outside the realm of humanity. Scuzz is like an undefinable material floating around in the air or on the surface of water that will one day form new kinds of life that we don't know about yet.