Auric Echoes: The Making of “Jazz Punk”

Punk rock jazz fusion, a strange mesh of genres: that is the best way to describe the sound of Auric Echoes. The Fairmont/Morgantown band has been self-recorded and self-produced since its inception in 2017. Now, six years later the band is in production of their 3rd studio album. The group’s experimental discography includes a range of sounds that includes a solo project, a video game soundtrack and two LPs full teeth-rattling ambient noisescapes. Their live performances come with accompanying shirtless saxophone playing, bass guitar breaking, and in-your-face instrumentation.

“The first thing that the ‘band’ released was an EP called “Out Among the Trees” in 2017, and that was when it was just a solo project. So Auric Echoes was a solo project for a long time, probably four years,” said Rush. “Then 2021 was the second album which I had Jonah for.”

When Conner Rush, the band’s frontman went to release music, he wanted to use the namesake of his step grandfather’s high school band, the Golden Echoes Band. However, since that name had since been taken, he replaced “Golden” with “Auric,” a Latin term meaning “of, relating to, or derived from gold.”

The first EP was very atmospheric and ambient. Acoustic guitars, bird sounds and synths. When the first LP album started, Jonah Henthorne was brought on to play drums and duo embraced a sound more like a controlled white noise machine, embarrassing a purposefully messy, more chaotic sound.

“The best thing I’ve been able to tell people is ‘jazz punk’,” said Rush. “We got this sound on the second album that was like a louder, messier Radiohead.”

“Part of the reason the group is where it is right now is because Conner brought me on to do real drums, and I come from more of a jazz background,” said Henthorne. “I had to adjust my style to play in more of a rock context, but as that evolved, we came to Morgantown and me and Conner wanted to play it live.”

Until this point the band was purely a studio project, so Jacob Noska was brought on to play guitar. “He comes from like a Midwest emo, shoegaze background, so his emphasis is all sound effects and vibes, and he has all those tappy guitar licks and crazy fluttery stuff which is perfect,” said Henthorne.

Noska, who previously only had experience in live music as the drummer of Wizard Killer, had a presence in the band thatsolidified the group as a viable live music option. His aggressively atmospheric guitar style fit a lot of what Auric Echoes was already doing while also improving on it, with Noska being proficient at “making a guitar not sound like a guitar,” according to Rush.

“I definitely play a lot messier and noisier than a typical guitarist. It kind of fits what we play. I feel like that’s kind of what I contributed to what we play live and in the current recordings,” said Noska. “The more we’ve played together the more I’ve gotten into kind of the glitchy nature of electric guitar.”

Moska emphasized the “glitchy” nature of his playing on the next album, and his goal to make loud noisescapes, contributing to the overall new sound that Auric Echoes has. “There are several songs where I kind of just go crazy on the guitar, hardly even playing notes. It’s just like a lot of the pedals are doing the work.”

After the release of the full-length album “The Colossus is Coming” in 2021, the band could finally play live. They primarily remained a three piece with some variations, even experimenting as a five piece for a brief time until Erwin Dorainville was brought on to play saxophone last year.

“We brought him in, and day one, never heard the songs before, nothing. In two takes for each song, we got a track down and it’s been finalized ever since. Ever since he started being with us, it’s been fucking awesome. Like, we put effects on his saxophone, we experiment with pedals and stuff,” said Henthorne. “He plays flute, he plays keys, he’s basically everything we need.”

The entire energy of Auric Echoes dramatically changed with the introduction of Dorainville. Trained in classical jazz, he uses that experience to create explosive improvisations that give the band more of a unique sound filled with contemporary instrumentation.

With the next album being the first time the four artists have shared a studio space together, it will surely be new, unique sound. The project is still unnamed, with the only definitive factors being the first single, Multiplicity,” and the goal of release being within a six-month time frame. The project is slated to be glitchy, jazzy, and loud.

“We finally found how the sound of this group fits together comfortably, and kind of a new outlook on this type of music,” said Henthorne. “You can prove me wrong, but I don’t know any group out there that sounds like this. Whether that be bad or good, it is a very different style than most people are probably used to, but it’s one of those things that you just have to hear out.”