I saw the first public appearance of The Terror at 529 one night a few months ago with fellow Dry Ink writer Sean Zearfoss. I really had no idea what to expect, Ryland had been telling me about the idea for a while and I’m still not quite sure how to describe it. It’s loud, bluesy (in a PJ Harvey or Jon Spencer way), raw, dynamic… a sort of music equivalent to getting kicked in the throat. I’m not sure if they’ve smoothed out their edges since that first show, I certainly hope not.

Ryland decided to reply to my question filled email. Here is the result.

Jeffrey Bützer: Tell us about your new project “The Terror.”

Ryland Death:  OK.  The Terror is my new project.  It’s a three-piece ensemble.  I play guitar and sing.  The General Lee (Yasoon Lee) plays drums and Snake (Tres Little) plays bass.  The three of us have been playing together for years; The Terror is the newest name for it, I suppose.  It’s also the first time I’ve played electric guitar in the group, actually the first time I’ve ever played electric guitar ever.  I’m still learning what all the knobs and dials do, and I can’t use pedals or anything because I get confused.  I don’t even have my own amp yet, because I can’t afford to buy one. I’ve been perpetually borrowing one from a senior collogue of mine at the university (Ryland Death is a lecturer of philosophy at Kennesaw State University), a Nietzsche scholar, wrote his dissertation on Nietzsche and Ricoeur and the genealogical method of inquiry, or something.  I don’t know.  Anyway, as a band, The Terror is indebted to this guy for letting me borrow his amp.

JB:  What kind of music is it?

RD:  It’s loud.  I turn the dials all the way up.

JB:  Do you write as a group, or does one person come in with a complete song?

RD:  We write collectively to varying degrees.  Sometimes a song is more this person’s song or more that person’s song, just because one of us will get it more completely, or faster, or will have a larger part in the song, more of a chance to express the individual uniqueness of his secret soul, or whatever.  We all have to like the song, or we tend to forget about it.  It falls out of the hopper.  We don’t play it anymore.  When we like a song, we figure out how it goes pretty quickly as a group.  The question after that is how do we edit the idea down to its essential form.  How do we cut everything out that we don’t need?  I think that 9/10 of art generally is editing, and 9/10 of editing is cutting shit out, throwing it away.  The Terror is a very editorial band.

JB:  Are you working on a record?  Any idea of a release date?

RD:  Umm, yeah.  We’re working on one.  We’ve more or less finished three songs on the record, which we’ll probably put out as a single.  We’ll probably continue to record new material over the rest of the year, and when we get enough material to put it out we will.  We don’t have a definite timeline or anything, but I’d like to have something substantial done by the beginning of next year.

JB: One of the tracks you sent me sounds a bit like an old fashioned murder ballad (banjo and vocals) but the live band I saw was a powerhouse, is there a mix of these styles on the record?

RD:  Well, I would say that the quieter songs share roots with the powerhouse – as you say.  They share the aesthetic.  I guess if I was a painter, you could explain it in terms of using the same palette of colors in the songs whether or not they are loud or soft.  They all share a narrative component, similar content in narrative: death, murder, fucking, booze… fun things like that.  It’s difficult for me to think of the songs in terms of having different styles.  It’s one style, y’know, hopefully; but, to answer your question: yes.  The record will be dynamic.  There will be much more powerhouse though.  It will be a loud record.

JB:  What are some of the big influences musically and non-musically on this project?

RD:  The South.  The French Revolution.  Violence, booze, and sex.  Those are the big ones.  It’s difficult to explain.  We wanted to create a band that had a lot of genre in its aesthetic.  When I say that, I mean that we wanted the image of the band to carry with it extraneous, outside meaning, like the way that genre films carry extra meaning with them.  Like a western, for example, has rules and conventions that exist outside of the film itself:  expectations, rules, themes, and so on.  If you’re watching a western, and a man walks into town dragging a coffin, you know immediately that the coffin is full of guns and that he’s about to kill everyone.  We wanted to sculpt an aesthetic palette for this band that carried all these meanings – meanings like the coffin full of guns - with it.  We wanted to appropriate meanings that have to do with Southern-ness, ATL hipster-ness, I guess, and then scramble it with artificial meanings, hybridize it, nihilize it.  We wanted to take what we thought was already pretty empty – Atlanta culture – and make it more empty.

JB:  Do you think culture in Atlanta is, as you say, empty?

RD:  Well, when I say it’s empty, I don’t mean that it’s any emptier than any other place in America.  I mean, I do genuinely like Southern culture; I identify as Southern.  Maybe I’m being too hard.  One thing I’ll say is that there is a deep history of conflict running through Southern culture, and I mean conflict within the culture as a singular culture.  I consider Atlanta to be one of the most post-modern cities in the world, unknowingly.  The city too busy to hate is the city to busy to know how post-modern it is.  It’s a post-apocalyptic city.  It isn’t at the center of discourse regarding anything.  It has galactic sprawl. It has no mass transportation to speak of.  And it has a very diverse, heterogeneous culture that is conflicted with itself in many ways.  So one of the things I consciously try to do as much as possible in this band is to represent these conflicting perspectives within a single, singular, unified narrative identity.  The eternal dude, who tells all the stories from across time - the narrator - who is violent but caring, cruel but kind, intelligent but brute, and so on.  I also try to do this by choosing the images we use to represent the band carefully.  Images of the French Revolution, from French paining during that time period, the “historical” Terror, the Reign of Terror, for example, I try to pair with camouflage and hunter orange and shotguns.  This is us poking fun at political identity in the South: the hipster left vs. the redneck right.  In a way, I hope that if we appropriate both of these image themes, we annihilate meaning in both poles simultaneously.

JB:  What do you do when you’re not playing in The Terror?

RD:  I’m a philosophy professor at Kennesaw State.  I teach the baby philosophy class, the intro class.  I do philosophy and intellectual history form the Industrial Revolution until now, and I study consumer culture and technology.  I’m also a children’s librarian at the public library.

JB:  What is your biggest music guilty pleasure?

RD:  I don’t know if I have any musical guilty pleasures.  I have literary guilty pleasures.  I love sword and sorcery novels.  I read more than I listen to music, actually.

JB:  What is next for you guys? any upcoming shows?

RD: We have a show on July 16 at the East Side Lounge with The Aristocrats.  I’m looking forward to that show.  It should be good.

JB: What local bands are you into these days?

RD:  Well, Jeff, I’ve always liked your music.  I love Roger Ruzow’s 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra.  I love the Dropsonic guys, and I’m excited about playing this show next month with The Aristocrats, because it’s Dan Dixon’s (from Dropsonic) new side project thing.  It will be the first chance I’ll have to hear it.  I don’t really get out too much, so there are probably other acts that I would like, but I’m poor and I can’t afford the lifestyle.  Drinks and gas are expensive, y’know.

JB:  What do you listen to music on? lps, MP3’s, Cds, reel to reel?

RD:  Reel to reel, clearly.

JB:  I think we should make an album together and release it on reel to reel… that will show em’!

RD:  I think so.  Let’s do it.

JB:  Thanks Ryland!

The Terror plays Friday, July 16th @ East Side Lounge w/ The Aristocrats