An Excellent Outcome, But A Terrible Process: Making The First Pyrrhon Album
The first Pyrrhon album, An Excellent Servant But A Terrible Master, was released on February 7, 2011 – ten years ago today. Though it was picked up by Selfmadegod Records for a CD pressing in September of that year, we originally released it as a name-your-price Bandcamp download. We’re making it name-your-price again for the coming week, until February 14th, 2021. You can grab it here.
Because of the circumstances around the release of An Excellent Servant…, it never got much press. A lot of our newer fans don’t seem to know it even exists. It’s the product of a less developed band, but it’s also a unique work that we still feel a lot of affection for. Before we get so old that we forget all the stories around it, I decided to put together the following recollections from the period we spent writing and recording it.
Pyrrhon wrote An Excellent Servant… throughout 2010, particularly the second half of the year. At the time, the lineup included me, founding members Dylan DiLella (guitar) and Alex Cohen (drums), and our current bassist Erik Malave, who joined towards the end of the preceding year.
An Excellent Servant… is an outgrowth of the environment in which it was conceived. At the time, the US economy was bottoming out in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and it had become clear that everyday Americans would not receive the sort of emergency aid that the government had heaped upon the banking system. The GOP won control of the House of Representatives that November, with help from the Tea Party “movement” – an astroturfed faux populism, fueled by fascist conspiracy theories, that presaged the trajectory of American politics since. Meanwhile, the Obama administration prosecuted a series of incoherent counterinsurgency wars abroad, increasingly without clear objective or purpose, relying more and more on drones and mercenaries to do the killing. These background features of American life permeated An Excellent Servant…, more or less without consent.
Alex and I both graduated from college that summer. I had recently lost faith in my longstanding plan to pursue a law degree; it seemed both a poor career choice and a farcical moral project in the face of all the obvious signs of imperial decline and creeping authoritarianism around me. Instead, in something of an existential panic, I moved from Philadelphia to New York to pursue Pyrrhon – the only project in my life at the time that I felt remotely good about.
In the absence of a job or any pragmatic plan to speak of, I moved into a seedy part of Flatbush and took work bussing tables at a restaurant where Dylan also worked – a job that guaranteed the scheduling flexibility we needed for the band. The restaurant was over an hour from my apartment by train, in an intensely touristy part of Midtown. The class disparity between the two neighborhoods was jarring. A few months after my arrival, a crew of crack dealers set up in the lobby of my building, occasionally letting their clientele hang around and smoke in the stairwells once the weather got cold. One of the dealers would eventually catch a bullet in the head from a rival, right there in the lobby, about a week before Pyrrhon went into the studio to record the album.
Meanwhile, Alex dealt with his own career uncertainty in a different way. About two months after I’d moved to town, he called me up and told me that at his parents’ suggestion, he was going to quit Pyrrhon and focus on seeking session work as a jazz and pop drummer. His departure was to be immediate.
Had he gone through with it, Pyrrhon would have imploded. We didn’t know any other drummers who could play on that level and who’d also consider joining an unproven baby band like ours. Left at an impasse, the rest of us would have likely gone our separate ways without recording another note.
Aware of this risk, I basically refused to let Alex off the phone until I had shamed him into agreeing to at least finish the album we had started before splitting. (He knew I had moved to New York specifically to work on this band and had encouraged me to do so, after all.) Ultimately, Alex reconsidered his path forward and ended up staying in the fold for three more releases after An Excellent Servant…, including one (Running Out Of Skin) that he tracked for us at his home studio.
This combination of internal and external tension left us in a psychologically precarious state through the final stretch of 2010, when we were finishing the material for the album. My lifelong mild insomnia became unbearable; I averaged two or three hours of sleep a night for most of the fall and winter. It appeared unlikely that we would ever record a second album, so we decided to swing for the fences and write an ambitious, diverse batch of songs that we didn’t know whether we could really pull off. None of us had ever completed a full-length album in a single, continuous recording session — an imposing task on its own for a band that had barely played outside of the city limits.
We struggled with the scale and complexity of the material in rehearsals, battling our own creative choices in a cramped space that we shared with the great NYC bands Wetnurse and Flourishing. I had just gotten ahold of my first vocal effects processor, and the room’s PA was completely inadequate to make the damn thing audible over the instrumental unit. (We were in our early 20s, and regarded “turning down” as the path of the weakling.) As a result, we had no idea whether any of the elaborate vocal parts I was planning would actually sound cool until we actually tracked them. At one surreal moment, I emerged from a particularly frustrating practice to find Steve Austin from Today Is The Day standing outside listening. Curran and Ryan from Wetnurse had recently joined TITD as the rhythm section, and they were waiting for us to wrap up so they could get in some pre-tour shed time. “Sounds pretty alright, fellas,” he said.
About a month before we hit the studio, we scraped together some meager funds to pay a friend to record a quick and dirty demo of all the album material. We recorded in the live room of his North Jersey community college’s radio station, showing up at about 10pm and roughly mixing it in the same 4-hour session. The results were a mess; we could barely play through some of the newer songs from the set without losing the thread completely. The experience set off a frantic burst of extra rehearsal as we tried to get up to speed for the real deal.
An Excellent Servant… was recorded during the second week of January 2011 by Dan Pilla, a college buddy of mine, in a rural town in southern New Jersey. He had a fairly tricked-out studio set up in the room above his parents’ car port and a ton of experience for a guy in his early twenties. He’d also done good work recording our debut EP, and had offered us a great rate on the project. For reasons that still escape me, Dan also volunteered to mix the album by night while we tracked it during the day, meaning that we emerged from the session with a completed album that was ready for mastering. (It also meant that Dan didn’t sleep much that week, which resulted in a few charmingly dodgy edits in the final mix.)
People from outside the mid-Atlantic might not know just how rural parts of south Jersey are, but Dan’s studio was genuinely isolated, and the local amenities were comically grim. The only nearby food options were a very typical Jersey diner about 45 minutes away, and a Wawa convenience store/gas station about 25 minutes off. We lived mostly off sandwiches from the latter for the duration, which had dire consequences for our digestive tracts. Dan’s studio was comfortable in most respects, but it had no bathroom, and his parents evidently objected to us coming inside the main house to use theirs. Instead, Dan designated a patch of dirt behind the studio building for us to pee on. After a week of everyone drinking coffee and beer around the clock in the studio, this “piss swamp” became quite an expansive landscape feature. If someone had to shit, they were required to drive all the way to the Wawa to do their business. To make matters worse, it snowed heavily throughout the session, so these drives were often dangerous going. As it got colder, the piss swamp became something out of a nightmare.
We set ourselves up in the only lodgings available nearby: a dingy budget motel with a nasty mildew problem and a heating system that failed entirely to keep us warm, even during daylight hours. With nothing else to do, we spent our frigid nights drinking Old Granddad in our motel room and watching the despicable prison documentary show Lock Up for hours, which we thought would put us in the right state for capturing the songs.
Ultimately, we got the job done in the time allotted. It wasn’t as smooth or efficient as our later recording sessions, which are mostly live full-band takes. Instead, we tracked everything but the improvised sections – which were few and far between in that material – on a member-by-member basis. We also used a click most of the time, which we have all but abandoned since. A few instrumental parts went like pulled teeth; I remember the blasting sections in “New Parasite” being particularly grueling to stick. But in the end, we outperformed our own expectations for the session, and did our work with somewhat less strain than we had expected.
I was the exception to that rule. At the time, I still hadn’t mastered the tricks required to keep my voice in working order while doing Pyrrhon vocals for long periods, and I knew my performances would degrade if I took too many repeat passes at my lines. This fact weighed heavily on me, and I was a sleepless wreck when my number came up late in the week. By the time I got to the final cut, “A Terrible Master,” I could tell that I only had one take left in me before my pipes quit – and that song was the newest on the album, with the trickiest timing by far. Luckily, I got what I wanted in one shot. I remember running straight outside into the snow right after the take for some reason, totally out of my mind with nervous energy.
Later in the session, as we focused more on mixing, it became clear that we had some creative disagreements with Dan about how the final product should sound. For us, the desired result was something more akin to the later Pyrrhon records – grosser and more fleshy-sounding than most contemporary death metal, with a prominent, noise rock-esque bass guitar sound. Dan, though, was gunning for a glossy “pro” mix, with the likes of Decapitated and Aborted as his primary touchstones. This led to some pretty tense discussions towards the end of the session. During one memorable dispute, Dan insisted that he literally could not turn up the bass any louder in the mix than it was, because it would ruin every other aspect of the album if he did. Erik’s “ghost bass” on that album is still a recurring joke for us.
Our conflict with Dan came to a head after the session, when we sent him Colin Marston’s final master. We were thrilled with Colin’s work, but Dan was furious — he claimed that Colin had spoiled his mix and insisted that we should use his own rough-strokes demo master as the final product. We naturally refused; Colin’s version sounded better and it wasn’t close. This episode marked the end of our connection to Dan; as far as I know, he’s left the music world entirely since.
The final version of An Excellent Servant… is something of a compromise. It’s more compressed and slick than what we had internally imagined, but gnarlier and messier than what Dan was aiming for. While I still wish the bass was much more audible than it is, we probably benefited from the more recognizably DM aesthetic of the album to some extent. Even then, Pyrrhon was a round peg in a square hole. An Excellent Servant…’s cleaner production probably helped us connect to some listeners who wouldn’t have been ready for the clusterfuck vibe of our later music back in 2011, when it was released.
I remember telling Dylan on the drive home from the session that I didn’t think I could make another album like that one. In retrospect, any sane band would’ve probably quit after wrapping the album. It was a largely miserable, occasionally dangerous process, and it came close to killing Pyrrhon in its cradle. But in making An Excellent Servant But A Terrible Master, we learned just how stubborn we were, and that we could play with forces beyond our control and survive. It brought us closer together as friends, too. The session bestowed upon us a passel of idiotic inside jokes, which are the true fuel of any ‘amateur’ band. Some of these jokes, like screaming “it’s not finished yet!” at each other about a new song regardless of how far along it was, still help us stay in good spirits whenever we wind up to do it again.
And how could we not? While An Excellent Servant… got some very favorable reviews upon release, it wasn’t exactly a smash hit. But that didn’t matter. It gave us glimpse of what we were really capable of, and a taste of the perverse fun that comes from chasing it, piss swamps and all. It turned out that we’re sickos who kind of like to suffer through overwhelming challenges and absurd indignities. The pain-is-gain “ethos” we formed during that first push still shapes our music.
Oh, and the songs hold up pretty well too, I think.
One final thought — we had a vinyl master of this album made some years ago, but the actual pressing fell through. If you run a label and you’re still reading at this point, perhaps we should talk!
