Heady or not?
The sonic ambitions of Iota Pachyderm
By: |
Published: March 13, 2012
Published: March 13, 2012
WHO: Iota Pachyderm with Circles and Waves
WHEN: March 17 at 9 p.m.
WHERE: Manga, 2496 Rivermont Avenue
INFO: (434) 846-2585
The guys in Iota Pachyderm are serious players with serious chops and serious ambitions. Check out either of the two live full-concert recordings the Lynchburg-based five-piece instrumental band have up on Soundcloud and you'll quickly appreciate the range of their sonic vision, which incorporates complex polyrhythms, funkified grooves, improvisational jazz, rock-hard guitar riffs, and heady psychedelic explorations. But try to get a straight answer about something as simple as how the group — guitarist Will Diefenderfer and Zac Cox, keyboardist Andy Poindexter, bassist Charlie Boyd, and drummer Ken Brand — first formed, and their general demeanor takes a decided turn in the direction of comic relief.
"I was shooting speedballs outside of school," riffs Boyd, the band's resident humorist and a familiar face to anyone who's spent any time in the general vicinity of Mangia. "Then, a couple of guys who were up to no good in the neighborhood starting making trouble. I got in a conversation with Will Dief and my mom got scared and said, 'You join Iota Pachyderm for a change.'"
Okay, sure. But, really? Poindexter picks up the slack: "I spent eight years in Newport News, came back here, and was hanging out at Rivermont Pizza when this bouncer with long hair and a beard who looked like a Norse god took an interest in the fact that I played keyboards," he recalls, referring to the tall, blond, bearded Diefenderfer, a ubiquitous RP presence who’s Iota Pachyderm's de-facto voice of reason. "He invited me to come out and play some music with these guys, last August and we took it from there."
Diefenderfer, whose imposing presence is offset by his soft-spoken manner and, on this particular occasion, a t-shirt emblazoned with the progressive quip, "The Voice of Change," steps in to clarify: "I started running sound for Bigfoot County," he explains, referencing the local Grateful Dead cover band, "and they had a practice spot downtown. So, I just asked all these guys to come down there and start jamming with me. It was just us just jamming for a while with another drummer. . . And then we started writing."
"We wrote our first song within five minutes of Ken sitting down behind the drums," Cox chimes in. "It's called 'Diddlelogue.’"
The eight-minute epic that is "Diddlelogue" came together in much the same way Iota Pachyderm's other songs are "written," which is to say that it's more about a process of the entire band working through riffs, grooves, and melodies until something good happens, than one person delivering a finished verse-chorus-verse composition to the group. "We record and listen back and then we take what we like after we've gone and listened back to the track," Diefenderfer explains. "For the sake of naming the files I try to come up with something. And on the day we made that song Charlie did this little monologue in a Bill Cosby accent that was totally hilarious. What did you say Charlie?"
"If I was a kind of Diddlelogue," he begins in his best marble mouthed Jello Brand Pudding voice, "what kind of Diddlelogue would I be?" Then, after a short pause, he delivers the random punchline: "Raspberries.”
As for the band’s somewhat obscure name, Diefenderfer chose it because, like “jumbo shrimp,” it’s essentially an oxymoron. “Iota is a very a small thing,” he explains. “And a pachyderm is a very large creature with extremely tough skin. So it means something like ‘tiny giant.’”
It may be a mouthful, but the name also accurately captures something essential about the band’s more brainy prog-rock excursions. But if there’s one thing there’s not total agreement about among the Iota Pachyderm five, it’s how to easily characterize their sound or even the mix of genres that goes into the music they create together.
“It has an element of jam to it,” Cox offers, before Boyd quickly cuts him off at the pass. “We are not a jam band,” he retorts tersely.
“Zac and I are probably the only ones here who are okay with us being a jam band,” Diefenderfer, the peacemaker, says. “I think what's happening when we all get together and play is that, because we don't have a vocalist, it gives us a chance to all put a little of ourselves into the music. And we all have various different backgrounds, and various things that we like to listen to. And all of that comes together and into what we do.”
“But what keeps it from being too jammy,” Boyd interjects, “is that we've got all these explorative sounds and all of this psychedelic stuff going on in the melody side with the guitars and the keyboards, but the rhythm section and even the melodies are not what you'd expect from a jam band. I mean, we have a lot of funk and hip-hop on the rhythm side. It's like if you had a post-rock band that played psychedelic classic rock.”
Everyone seems reasonably pleased with Boyd’s summation. But as the band prepare to head back into their cavernous practice room, which used to be a Virginia School for the Arts dance rehearsal space, Diefenderfer mentions another element Iota Pachyderm are hoping to add to their mix as they move forward.
“One of the directions I want to go with this is using samples of some of the world's greatest thinkers and incorporating that into our music. People like Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, and Stephen Hawking, talking about consciousness and the universe and scientific ideas. The audience we want to go after are kids at festivals — kids who want to just daze out and listen to music. But I want to inspire them to think. We want those people to enjoy our music, but to also have 'Aha' moments. Those are the things that impact you heavily. And those are the things that you end up remembering.”
Of course, there’s also Boyd’s rather memorable “Diddlelogue” spiel, which is generally how the band, however serious their intentions may be, tend to introduce the song. . .
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