Khan8 Wake
February 20 2009 at 08:28:50 PM
Raise a glass to the dead.
For all intents and purposes, New York’s skull-fucking quartet of palpable and existential big D Dread went the way of the dinosaur after Capture & Release
– its final studio effort. Bassist James Plotkin was the first to clear the air. Volk sympathetic to Khanate’s unique and utterly weaponized brand of bad vibes grasped the what-could-have-beens. Others scoffed, called bullshit on the whole thing, and went about their way, which essentially sums up the band’s reception even when they managed to stay – sort of – together, traveling the United States and Europe and razing myriad psyches in their progress. So here’s a wake for the dead, recollection large and small, with some ribbing of course. We wouldn’t have had it any other way.
As far as I recall, I was unemployed and in something of an emotional cul-de-sac, but still had some money in those days so I was drinking heavily. Stephen O'Malley called me up and asked if I wanted to go on the road with Khanate to help carry gear and do the merch: “Sure, sounds great.” It was 2004, and we were hitting Northern Europe: first date Groningen, Holland, then onto Stockholm, Sweden, through Norway, Belgium, London and Scotland...
I don't remember much about the Groningen show apart from 1) It was at Vera, one of the best venues in the world, they treat the bands and crew like royalty. And they have a cellar bar. 2) It was fucking loud. REALLY fucking loud.
Stockholm was a long way to travel for the next day's show and the venue, Debaser, was a suitably bunker-like hole, curiously hidden under a road. I think I recall Tim being suspicious of the water, “does this taste fishy to you?” Again, loud. I think the band expressed some excitement that there were some women in the audience. Apparently this was a first. There were definitely guys with beards, that was a steady fixture you could rely on. I think we slept on a boat? Maybe... I am pretty certain there were some Finnish fans who had taken a ferry to be there and were wasted, drunk as... well, drunk as Fins. The Goteborg show the following day was more memorable: It was at a really pleasant and kind of artsy cafe bar, upstairs. It was completely at odds with the brutal, ear-destroying volume, the shattered vocals, the whole ambience of the band. But it was a great, really busy show after we'd struggled to find the place and Plotkin had made jokes about abducting locals since we had the van anyways. Things just got stranger when we hit Norway.
The Oslo show was organised at an arts space, kind of squat like, and a friend of mine from an earlier visit, an artist named Kalle Runeson, had made a giant wall painting backdrop for the band to play in front of. The scene was a naive rendition, in some bright colours, of a dungeon with some people and skeletons hanging from chains. It worked really well. The craziest thing about this show was there was a real party atmosphere, the crowd was all genuinely excited to be seeing a band: I don't think I had ever thought of Khanate as being “entertainment” in any way, more of an ordeal, part of some rite of passage or cleansing. The audience lapped it up; despite the fact the show was almost totally played in darkness, no stage, ear splitting, hazardous and probably illegal in volume.
Bergen was equally strange, the venue being an incredibly plush arts centre: What kind of country would pay a band arts council money to make a racket as unholy, unpleasant and plain unnecessary as Khanate at a venue with a white carpet? I've thought of moving to Norway on many occasions since. I recall we went out afterwards. Stephen had arranged to meet some dudes, mostly Black Metal guys at a bar in town. It was kind of scary: I'm only 5'7" and everyone at the bar was shitfaced and about eight feet tall. The floor was a carpet of broken glass and I can clearly recall some guy bemoaning how it was tedious to have this rape charge against him: Hey, everyone has them...
Things only got stranger after this: We travelled across country to play at Stavanger. The van was a splitter with a sleeping platform, nothing fancy, and it was fucking cold. The drive to Bergen went over a high plateau that looked a lot like the moon, but with snow and a lot colder. It was around this point that we started wondering if there would be a Cliff Burton style disaster. The sleeping platform was deemed to be the least safe spot, but it was the warmest as you could get in your sleeping bag. We finally arrived in Stavanger after taking a short ferry journey that avoided having to drive round all the inlets; I remember being on deck with everyone, the freezing winds buffering us, like it would help somehow, and I remember seeing a killer whale briefly. It seemed wholly appropriate. I don't think anyone ever plays Stavanger. Khanate played in what looked like a puppet theatre, a small room with no seats, but a proscenium arch, curtains, stage, the whole shebang... A hot blonde Norwegian woman in high heels and a dress bought the Khanate s/t LP; Dubin refused to believe that this could happen. We were in uncharted territory. I think it was around this point that the “music” was having a profound and bizarre effect on me, I was starting to become wholly acclimatised to the nightly assault: Music is not that slow; chords are not that jarring; drums are not hit that hard; vocals aren't that eviscerating and unpleasant, so harrowing. It was freaking me out to be pummeled by this huge monolith of sound waves, of devastating bass, night after night. It started to make me feel Nietzschean; I could survive anything.
From here on, it was a blur: the Rotterdam show was in giant rave silo and as we loaded out there were hundreds of people lining up for a giant rave ion another floor, we taunted them mercilessly before escaping our accommodations at a youth hostel (?!) and ending up at Scottish bar, exclusively populated by Spanish speaking black people over 40. We fit right in and got shitfaced on whisky. There was a festival at Kontich, Belgium, and I pitied any band that had to play the same stage as Khanate: How could they compete? No fair, when the other bands were just playing music...
Nottingham was the first of three UK shows and the most memorable as it was the usual UK bullshit of a 10.30 curfew so they could fit in some stupid club night, and the audience was totally fucked, falling over, holding each other up. Edinburgh and London followed in much the same way, and I got home, made it out alive, but I don't think it was possible to see that every night and not be altered. The guys were all just guys; sure they all had their foibles and strange ways, but they were (and remain) just humans, but perhaps that is the most frightening thing about this band: Khanate was sound made by humans. Utterly nihilistic, depraved and plumbing the very depths of human experience, but crucially human. Khanate was an ordeal for any audience, quite often over half would leave by the end, but I don't feel it was necessarily for the audience, it was a rite, an exorcism of the depths of the human condition, and if these four guys wouldn't do it, who would?
[Andrew Hartwell]
It was back in the mid 90’s. Earache put out a low price sampler called Naïve. This label had for the last five years changed my life with everything they released….Napalm Death, Carcass, Godflesh, Morbid Angel, Naked City, Pain Killer etc. Judging from this new sampler the label had lost its edge. It was only two bands that caught my attention, Sleep and OLD. The later one as a joke at first, but it grows on me into liking it. A few days later I picked up their album from the cut out bin in the same store I got the Earache Naïve album. From that day I picked up anything with the name Jim Plotkin and Alan Dubin on it (and most of the time from cut out bins).
Two years later, I walked into a record shop – Tiger in Oslo. I was bored with music and asked for something extreme. They guy in the shop smiled and said, check this out. I thought I heard it all, but this… this was painful. “I buy it” I said. It wasn’t until I got home that I saw that Jim and Alan were two of the creators of this painful music I had on disc. A positive surprise that made me even more excited.
A year or so later this Khanate was playing in Oslo. Andrew Hartwell was their merch guy and I know him from before. Through him I got to meet the band, Steve, Tim and my heroes from OLD as well. The show was in an empty warehouse space. Single Unit was opening up and had his home made light show on for the first time. There was no stage, the band played, standing on the floor. Most of the audience was sitting down. The crowd was very mixed, maybe 200 people…everything from metal heads with spiked wristbands on, punks, art people, pop people…never seen a crowd like that before or after in Oslo. Still to this day, I think of that show as one of the top ten live shows I been to. With the light dimmed down the band played with extreme focus, yet relaxed and casual. Alan became a focal point for me. In between the vocal parts, he held the mic with a straight arm out from his body. A minimal stage move, that worked very well and all together it created a very special mood in the room. I got associations like Morton Feldman and Noh theatre, but it was not arty. Yet 200 people were sitting on a concert floor, paying dead serious attention.
Afterwards I helped out to load their gear into the van. Alan pulled some skunk from Amsterdam out of his underwear. Strong stuff! I remember having problem grabbing the door handle at the bar which we went to. More disorientation was to follow with more smoke, beer and hilarious stories. Some girl at the table next to us was hitting on Tim. She wondered what kind of music his band was playing and his reply was, “We sound like fire.”
[Kalle Runeson]
I remember the first time I saw Khanate. It just so happened to be their very first show. I remember being really fucking excited to see the guy from Burning Witch jam with his new band now that he moved to NYC. Jay and I met up with Stephen O’Malley at an Evoken gig at CBGBs when he moved to NYC around 2000. Anyway, I’ve seen Khanate several times after that, but this first time was an absolute bomb of sound. Intense riff blood-letting of jagged avant bombs. Smoking “gods grass” behind the stage right before they went on helped as well. I was very impressed with and blown out by the harshness of O'Malley’s feedback and just the massiveness of his guitar sound. Clearly, he was not playing around.
A few humor memories:
· Early on Alan had the moniker of the Khanate masterfully embroidered on his black sneakers!
· I also remember once at an early show, someone shouted out in the crowd during a quiet part: "You've got mail!" in reference to Plotkin’s laptop. [This was early 2000's so the humor may not translate as well.]
· Villains playing with Khanate and Harvey Milk and Villains doing stand up comedy between songs to the very artsy and reserved crowd.
[Ryan Lipynsky]
I got to see Khanate three times and I don't think they were ever really what I expected.
Venue: Caledonia Lounge
City: Athens, Georgia
Year: 2004
Support: I forget. Probably something local.
Attendance: Probably 20.
Two sentence report: I drove an hour to see Khanate on a weeknight which I rarely do. Tremendous, confounding and above all, seething with noise.
Venue: Blender Bar
City: Austin, Texas
Year: 2004
Support: A bunch of Southern Lord bands.
Attendance: Probably no more than 150.
Two sentence report: I remember standing next to one of the guys from Kinski as we were enveloped by Khanate's set. I also recollect that I stood on a piano to better see the band perform.
Venue: Drunken Unicorn
City: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2005
Support: Wolf Eyes
Attendance: Full house
Two sentence report: Definitely the best Khanate show I saw of the three, I remember the band were all wearing Earth "Hex" t-shirts when they loaded in and had a hotel out near Tucker that they drove to (in Atlanta rush hour traffic) after soundcheck. Underneath it all though, it seemed like the guys in the band just didn't enjoy being around each other (at least that's what I perceived) and were just hating it all.
[Henry Owings]
Khanate is/was very uncomfortable. There are few times I wish to hear their records and if I do you can be assured I am having a very bad day. Lazy as I am it took me forever to decide whether to fly to London to see them; eventually I did and turns out it was the last show they'd ever play.
It was very uncomfortable. They give me a headache. They will not be surpassed in what they have created.
Oh, and Dubin scares my wife.
[John Philipp Trummer]
I've only seen Khanate once. It had been quite some time since I'd last seen Stephen, four or five years maybe, and I was surprised at how much he'd matured since Burning Witch and even Sunn. He had come into his own playing with Khanate or at least it seemed like that to me and the band had almost a rock star “quality” about it. They tore my head off then loaded their van and left town. Good times.
[G. Stuart Dahlquist]
Their very first show (at Brownie's) really fucked my head. I had known Steve for about 5 years at that point, and had never seen him play with a band - only solo once in an art gallery. Tim was kinda stiff - it just felt like he was aping Dale's tom work the whole time, but the overall thing made me go "Wow, this is what Steve's been doing with his time? FUCK!"
Steve gave me a cd-r of the first one and when I listened to it - in my crib by myself - it seemed like it lasted about ten hours. Some time later - still before the record came out - Steve invited me over to his place in Brooklyn. Steve, Tim and I went to the local Scottish pub, and had a few. Then we went back to Steve's and got ridiculously high on grass, and listened to the first full-length in the living room. I was mortified. It just crept and lurched and I was totally intimidated listening to their very LP, right in front of them. It was during the first jam, I believe, that they started mocking it, and laughing out loud. I wasn't in on the joke and felt totally weird and incapable of laughing.
Great band.
[Patrick Delaney]
I never saw Khanate. I “discovered” them on some MP3 try-it-buy it hub. They were listed under the “Avant-Garde” section. From there it was onto straight-up pilfering; I downloaded all their music off the Internet and bought a vinyl copy of Things Viral from a friend who couldn’t deal with it.
I was unemployed and more broke than I’d ever been. I saw Khanate was playing the Caledonia in Athens on the Southeastern leg in support of s/t. These total doofuses, Wilson & Heath, went to see them, and I pumped them for a show report.
“Man, the crowd was just all these morons screaming, ‘Play something! Play some music!’ Everyone kept begging Tim to let loose on his kit. The crowd was totally stupid, but Khanate killed. You woulda loved it.” Etc.
Years later, I was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in late August. All the windows were down; it was like 100 skin-melting degrees. I was cranking “Pieces of Quiet” and screaming right along with Dubin. There was this beat-up piece of shit sedan hiccoughing alongside me filled with obese redneck parents and their obese redneck daughters. “No more whine! No more whine! Quiet time.” They were speechless. Then the little girls started picking their noses and throwing boogers at me.
My band was supposed to play one of the opening slots for Khanate on their Capture & Release tour Atlanta date (Drunken Unicorn, 2005). I was really stoked and couldn’t believe I was finally going to get to see them. One of my friends suggested we dress up like old ladies with hair curlers, terry-cloth robes, and use walkers to get around. I don’t know why he said that, but it was pretty fucking funny. So it turned out I couldn’t go; my best friend’s wedding was that same night and it was on the Georgia coast. I remember standing there with a plastic cup full of Wild Turkey and water, looking out at the waves thinking, “Man, Khanate’s probably playing right now.” I still don’t know if my friend dressed up like an old lady or not.
One of my “band mates” got me a bunch of merch, including that shitty looking Seldon Hunt poster. I would’ve eGay’d it by now, but he asked all the Khanate guys to sign it on the back, which was hilarious. O’Malley drew this phallic hotdog, and Plotkin drew inverted and upright crucifixes with a question mark beside them. Alan and Tim just signed the damn thing. Of course, I can’t frame it, ‘cause then I wouldn’t be able to see this stupid hotdog O’Malley drew on it.
[Stewart Voegtlin]
The first time I saw Khanate was at the Knitting Factory in NYC which was a release party for the No Joy mini-LP that Load released. Needless to say, I was pretty amped to have been seeing them. During my tenure at college, the 220gm behemoth debut album saw many, many plays. Now, rather than go into detail about my first time seeing Khanate, I'd rather talk about an entirely different show of theirs.
The show in question was in the basement at the First Unitarian Church. The only bands that I remember playing were Dysrhythmia and Pelican but there were more I'm sure. Pelican were just starting to gain momentum at the time with Australasia and I'd say 75% of the patrons there were to see Pelican who were headlining. I know because people were loathing how long it took Khanate to set-up as well as perform their set. As a result, Pelican were only able to squeak out three songs due to curfew and people were pissed.
Upstairs, in the actual church (where SUNN would eventually play two times over in subsequent years) was The Rapture, a 'hipster' band from Brooklyn. This was about the time bands like Hot Hot Heat, etc were taking off. You know, that whole 'white belt' movement. So as the evening progressed you had these unassuming kids sauntering downstairs to see what all the racket was about.
Khanate, after some delays, technical I believe, get their gear all set-up and start playing... just droning/feedbacking out... loud as fuck. This wasn't the start of their set but rather a volume check. The uninitiated that wandered downstairs, almost in unison, took an about face and nearly tripped over each other to get the fuck outta the room as fast as possible. Recalling and writing about this still makes me laugh. I'll never forget the look on their faces... fingers in their ears running in terror asking, "what the fuck is this shit?!." It's one of those, 'you had to be there situations,' but it was hysterical.
I can't recall the set list verbatim but I know they played about three songs. I want to say they opened with Skincoat and went into either Commuted or Fields. The closer though, I'll never forget, was Pieces of Quiet. The band until this point was loud, but for this closing song, I don't know what O'Malley did with his amps (he was using three Model-Ts) or if he activated a stomp-box, but all of a sudden his amps felt and sounded like they were on 11. It was pure ugliness and violence in all it's glorious beauty. The very first chord played after the feedback riddled intro was like two freight trains colliding and it just continued for minutes.
I believe this was the last time I saw Khanate perform and it was also their best. Thanx for the memories guys... you're already missed!
[-c]
The first time I saw Khanate was about five years ago in Austin. The thing that burned into my brain the deepest was Tim Wyskida raising his arms above his head, with the drumsticks crossed and just fucking holding them there forever. Just holding them and holding them and I have no idea what the signal was, if Tim was giving it or someone else was, but then he just slammed his arms down and hit. And I mean HIT. HARD! Meanwhile, Alan was crouching down like Actaeon after turning into a stag and fending off the frenzied hounds. Alan was hard not to notice. But Tim, he just kept raising his hands and his drumsticks were crossed, always crossed, and he always held them until you lost all track of time and then came crashing down. Of course the amps and the drums were so loud that I couldn't pick up the subtlety of Alan's words. I didn't get that until I was driving back from Austin to California, though the desert with
Things Viral as loud as our bombed out van's stereo could go. Looking out on the wasted landscape from our insular metal contraption that was flying down the road and listening to Alan I just thought, "We're fucked."
For me, the most important matter of Khanate is their ability to rearrange Time. I will say now and here: There has not been a band that has torn apart the reality of time with direct and similar results since Fushitsusha (circa
Double Live 2). And to my mind, the next precedent before that would be John Coltrane's band circa
Ascension. I have no idea if Khanate meant to destroy time like Coltrane consciously wanted to. I don't know. But they both did, albeit with very different means. Coltrane compacted time by having two bass players, Art Davis and Jimmy Garrison, along with McCoy Turner pounding out rhythm chords on piano and Elvin Jones on drums. Essentially, those men acted as four separate equations that divided time into each other, creating a fractal black hole of immense proportions. Khanate, like Fushitsusha before them, destroys time not by compacting it in the manner of Cotrane but also by expanding it with ridiculously long hits (I'm talking
Things Viral on) so that keeping a beat becomes obsolete and all we are left with is pure attack, pure violence; a bullwhip snap across the face of time. And they didn't need four men on rhythm to do that. Tim and James were enough. The first line of
Things Viral, "ALL STOP!" is a direct command to time itself. And with time put in its subservient place, Khanate was free to make the most disturbing and heavy music possible (I'm sure someone else can explain that to you if you don't know already). The feedback could be unleashed, the throat could be processed, the words spill (or scream) forth. The band was absolutely of one piece, a unit of devastation, unmitigated by the banality of time. Now that's something for young kids to strive for today. Khanate may be dead, but maybe they've planted the (demon)seed somewhere. We hope. Probably not. Kids are fucked. Everything is, I guess. Ah well. Long Live Khanate even if they are dead.
[Ben Chasny]
[Photo by Patrick Delaney]
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I dont think I've ever experienced music more dark or powerful on both CD and stage. Probably one of, if not my biggest inspiration as a musician.