Morgantown’s experimental post-jazz punk foursome, Auric Echoes is releasing their much anticipated full length album “Division for Human Ascension” this Friday, July 12th. So far the quartet consisting of Erwin Dorsainville (winds) Jonah Henthorne (drums/percussion) Jacob Noska (guitar) and Conner Rush (bass & vocals) have released three singles from the project ahead of the album’s debut. Their sound is reminiscent of 90s industrial while having pop sensibilities that make them more accessible to a larger audience.

We spoke with them about how Auric Echoes came to be, their approach to music and what’s on the horizon for them. Check out the singles and make sure to get the album on digital and physical formats on Friday.

BB: How did AE come to be and what made you decide this is what you want to do?

Conner: Auric was a solo project for a pretty long time starting in 2017.  It was just a name I used to release my music under.  I did our first EP and our debut album nearly entirely solo under that name.  For album 2, it was almost a solo effort, but I got in contact with Jonah to record the drums.  We’d met years before at an arts summer camp and hit it off.  The creative input on his end was still pretty minimal at that point though, as I was still pretty much dictating to him what I wanted the drums to sound like.  After that album, both of us really wanted to get out and perform the tracks live, so we enlisted the help of Jacob.  Jacob and I actually went to the same high school, but we’d never really talked much at that time.  I was friends with Tyler Rosier though, who played guitar in the band formerly known as Wizard Killer with Jacob, who was their drummer.  The 3 of us were talking about maybe playing sometime, and Jacob mentioned wanting to play guitar for a band.  I mentioned that me and Jonah were looking for a guitarist, so we met to try out a few songs with him, and the 3 of us clicked immediately.  We were playing shows for a while as a trio, but felt like something was missing, and we couldn’t put our finger on it.  We’d decided that for the new album, we wanted it to be more of a group than a solo endeavor, and we wanted to lean more into our eclectic sounds like jazz and electronic.  Jonah suggested we play some of our stuff with Erwin, a sax player at WVU where me and Jonah went to school.  He was originally only brought in as a session musician so that we could  get some winds on the album, but after hearing him play for the first time, we decided we wanted his full input and we wanted him around for performances as a full-time member of the group.

Erwin: I was introduced to Auric Echoes by Jonah, and I believe at the time they just wanted me to record over one or several songs and I did them in a few takes and I guess I made a really nice impression because they wanted me to join their band and gigs, and I was like “Hell yeah”. Auric was very much a learning experience for me because I came from a background of Jazz and nowadays everybody likes to play fast, and complicated licks, and it’s usually expected as a sax player so I came in this band trying to Trane or Brecker my way through but then Conner and Jonah was like “Hey man it’s all good, we’re not Swingheads, you can calm down.”  With that I came about discovering a new perspective of playing music. I’d listen to Jacob, “The Pedal Paladin” and hear his approach of soloing and try to not only mimic him but to mix my background with it. Jacob is awesome because he has a crazy collection of pedals and is creative in how he uses them, he also is known to slay Wizards with a band known as Wizard Killer until it’s unfortunate demise. Jacob also does a lot of Auric Echoes’ art work posters and merch.

BB: Who are some of your obvious influences but who are some musicians that inspire you that people might not expect?

Conner: I think that some clear band inspirations would be some newer post-punk acts coming out, especially around the UK.  Squid and black midi are 2 that I point to often for bands that have really shaped our sound.  I’ve always been super into experimental sub genres of rock, electronic, and hip-hop.  My earliest exposure to more eclectic sounds was hearing “No Surprises” by Radiohead sometime in middle school.  While I know now that this song wasn’t anything too crazy in terms of experimentation or anything, I had never heard anything like it, and it made me realize that music could be a lot more than what I’d previously known.  That sent me on a spiral looking for new and interesting things that could push my understanding of what music could sound like.  I fell into a lot of electronic-oriented acts like Jame Blake, Gorillaz, Bjork, LCD Soundsystem, Gazelle Twin,… Along with a lot of post-punk acts more recently.  Some of these that come to mind are aforementioned black midi and Squid, along with Geese, Foals, feeble little horse, etc.

Erwin: Before Auric I listened to Jazz but not the boring medium swing stuffs that Jazz professor’s like to force feed students like Dextor Gordon. I liked listening to more Eric Dolphy, Wayne Shorter, and Archie Shepp. I’ve always been more interested in Harmony rather than technique and these artists made songs that evokes emotions that’s hard to explain through words like Wayne Shorter’s “Lady Day”, Archie Shepp’s “Quiet Dawn”, Eric Dolphy’s “Eclipse”. But That’s just Jazz that I listen to thirty percent of the time. I listen to a lot of Salami Rose Joe Louis, Metaroom, and Run The Jewels. When I joined Auric, I started to listen to a lot of Machine Girl and The Garden I think Jacob introduced me and I got hooked immediately. When I listened to this songs at the gym I started breaking records.

Jonah: Honestly, my background has been solely jazz and fusion for a majority of my life, so this kind of music was new to me. I grew up listening to Snarky Puppy, the Funky Knuckles, Ghost Note, Tower of Power and Dave Weckl. Being used to that kind of style I’ve attempted to fuse some of that influence into the punk/rock genre that we had been creating. Unknowingly, I had been recreating some similar ideas to Morgan Simpson (drummer of Black Midi) and kept going in that direction after I had heard more of his work.

Jacob: When it comes to the style of guitar that I currently tend to lean into I think of a lot of noise rock/experimental bands from the 90s and present day on labels like the flenser, touch and go, and merge such as Polvo, Sprain, and Slint. When I was learning guitar around the age of 14 I became sort of captivated by a lot of math rock and Midwest emo that definitely took me down a path of un-guitar sounding guitar which I have bands like Hella and Don Caballero to thank for. The deeper I got into that sound it slowly turned into my obsession with the stomp boxes and the fact that could turn my guitar into anything i wanted. Really nosediving into that I found my next favorite genre, shoegaze. Kicking off my love for sustained notes and very large crushingly beautiful guitar textures I found my next group of weirdos to really motivate my playing with bands like TAGABOW, Lift to Experience, Have a Nice Life and of course, MBV. Some other artists that are just as influential but maybe outside of any aforementioned genre are Animal Collective, Phil Elverum, John Fahey, Boris, and Full of Hell.

BB: Describe your sound for someone that hasn’t listened yet.

Conner: The best label I could give it would be “experimental post-jazz-punk”?  We don’t really corner ourselves into a certain sound a lot of the time because we’d go nuts not being able to branch out.  Every song on the album has its own unique flair.  At points, we go from dark industrial instrumentation to what sounds like a jazz standard.  We just like operating in that “whatever we feel like doing” space.  

Erwin: Punk + Jazz + “God that’s a lot of pedals”

Jacob: In addition to these I feel like we could also be placed in some sort of noise rock subgenre.

BB: What was this recording process like for you all and did it gel well?

BB: Who produced the album and why did you choose them?

Conner: The album was produced and recorded by the 4 of us independently, with Jonah taking on a large majority of the mixing and post-production.  With everyone in the group having an equal say in the creative output of the record, there are no weak links.  Everyone is invested in making sure that whatever is getting made is the best it can be.  Jonah is also just a genius when it comes to mixing and production, so having someone within the group that knows sound as much as he does is a huge benefit.  We can have some incredible sounding mixes because he knows us and the album is just as important to him as the rest of us.  A friend of ours, Reece Rowan from Stereophonic, took on mastering duties.  We’ve been friends with him for a while, and we always that their production was top notch.  When he offered to master for us, we knew he was a fan of ours, and we knew he’d treat the music with the care it needed.  Plus, having him from outside the band gave us a fresh set of ears for unbiased feedback on mixes and general composition.

BB: How do you approach songwriting? Lyrics first? A riff? A melody?

Conner: Every song really starts with one single idea, and that’s almost always just a single instrument.  Whether that’s a cool guitar riff, a drum pattern, or just an idea for the sort of vibe we want to go for, we’ll lock something in and just build off of it.  Sometimes, one of us would hear a song, bring it to the group, and say, “we need to do something like this!”   We also finished nearly the entire album instrumentally before even touching lyrics.  I wrote the lyrics for the album, and I wanted to get a sense of the flow of the record before I wrote a story around it.  I knew the general topics I wanted covered, but just didn’t know what beats to hit and when.  Once the album was nearly complete, I constructed lyrics and vocal melodies around it.

BB: Did you learn anything from this that you will take forward with you or is there anything you would do differently? 

Jonah: We learned a ton from this record, especially considering that this is the first record we have produced as a band. I think we have finally established our sound as a band versus trying to recreate Conner’s previous solo music, and we’ll definitely be going forward with this vibe since it has been resonating with a lot of audiences so far. In terms of things I have learned myself, this was the first project I had ever mixed and done a lot of post production work for. It took a lot of learning, trial and error, and consulting fellow audio engineers on finding solutions to create a sound that was ultimately better than what we had previously put out. I think we have definitely achieved that, and I believe I’m able to take it much further when we start our next record. It’s surprising what you can achieve with some general audio knowledge, good equipment, and a laptop. 

BB: Where do you get your inspiration for what you write? Do you write from personal experience or do you write from the perspective of other people’s situations?

Conner: Lyrically, a lot of the album covers topics of anxiety and existential dread that I struggle with often, so I guess you could say it’s from a pretty personal space.  However, this is the first time I’ve written lyrics that aren’t 100% from my own perspective, but from those of characters.  Most of the tracks on this album are from different individuals dealing with a messed up world in different ways, and I think being able to explore different characters and personas in the music was a super interesting process.  Some characters are even named, and will reappear between tracks.

BB: What is your favorite track on the album and why?

Conner: This is like asking me to pick a favorite child!!!  If I had to give 1 pick, I would have to say “Ballad of Malcolm”.  This was the first song that I started writing for the album.  I came up with that looping guitar and bass riff nearly 3 years ago, and the tracks I recorded for it then at my desk are the ones still in the song today.  It’s also the first time I’ve delved into writing a song that felt really grand and expansive in structure, and it’s the first time I’ve written lyrics using 3rd person characters.  It’s hectic, dense, and chaotic, and it took a long time to get it just right, but in the end, I think we nailed it.

Jacob: I personally love the closer track and how it builds into this epic farewell from a rather mellow and meditative beginning. 

BB: What’s next for the band?

Conner: We’re not sure!  I think we definitely want to expand a bit and start playing more away from home.  Having taken so long with this album, I think we’re all pretty exhausted with recording new material and we’re ready to get out there and play!

I’m of the opinion that we’re just ready to start playing outside of the state. We have an album, a pretty good one at that, and we have a unique sound that a lot of people haven’t heard yet. We’re looking at a potential tour, or more in general getting more shows outside of the Morgantown area.

Jacob: I can wholeheartedly agree with the other guys in saying that I think we’d all love to take this project on the road. I’m also always excited to see what new songs may come out of us while we all hold instruments in the same room haha. 

Links to find Auric Echoes on their social channels and stream their music.

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Photos by Griffin “Danger” McMorrow