AEM064 Susu

Susu is an aggres­sive art­core machine out of Brook­lyn with one set­ting (loud) and no off switch. Their full-throttle sound is a wel­come holdover from their begin­nings as a larger hardcore/postpunk outift called Surgery Sun­day. The rock-n-roll laws of attri­tion whit­tled down this orig­i­nal group to Andrea Havis (gui­tar, vocals), Mike Gabry (bass, vocals), and former-drummer Justin Bil­icki, prompt­ing a namechange to the shorter Susu. The leaner, meaner unit hooked up with engi­neer Mar­tin Bisi to record their self-titled debut in 2006. Bisi, whose cred­its include John Zorn, Sonic Youth, and Bootsy Collins, helped Susu find their sig­na­ture hard-driving, paint-peeling sound. “I think his influ­ence was mostly present in the actual mix­ing and cap­tur­ing of the song and sound,” as Havis recalls, “His drum sound is amaz­ing. He really brings the instru­ments to life.”

One lineup shuf­fle later (Bil­icki out, Oliver Riviera-Drew in) Susu found the loud and proud trio that has made a name for itself with three sub­se­quent releases of pure sonic onslaught: Win, S/T, and their lat­est full-length R and R and R. The com­mon denom­i­na­tor on all three releases has been a taste for defy­ing con­ven­tional song struc­ture. Exper­i­men­ta­tion, as Havis describes, “…is about going over the line of what would be tra­di­tion­ally done in a “song”, or doing it in a way that is out­side the nor­mal expec­ta­tion. It’s not nec­es­sar­ily reliant on how it will be received/perceived, but cho­sen because col­lec­tively we (Susu) all enjoy it, or it moves us to build upon it.”

Eschew­ing stan­dard verse-chorus-verse for­mats, R and R and R is a provoca­tive musi­cal state­ment that will com­mand you to atten­tion with all the author­ity of a drill sergeant on acid. Most of the sonic vocab­u­lary, the raw gui­tars and the howl­ing vocals, are rem­i­nis­cent of the tex­tures of the No Wave scene of the 80s. Intense, raw, a lit­tle bit dan­ger­ous. Much of the avant-garde music that came out of New York dur­ing the 80s proved tremen­dously influ­en­tial. But when you go back and lis­ten to the record­ings of early Sonic Youth, The­o­ret­i­cal Girl, and so forth, you can’t help but feel the dingy audio doesn’t do jus­tice to the music. Even the “high art” sym­phonies of under­ground leg­end Glenn Branca sound pretty shoddy (Whar­ton Tiers didn’t quite have his “A” game going yet). Susu res­cues some of the musi­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties that are only hinted at in those old record­ings and recon­fig­ures the ele­ments in Rauschen­ber­gian, No Wave assem­blages. The sonic col­lages are some­times punky, some­times proggy, and don’t balk at try­ing some­thing new. Drum­mer Riviera-Drew remarks, “We tend to flut­ter around a few ideas, then hover over one that seems to be of good qual­ity. Much like honey bees pol­li­nat­ing flowers.”

The A-side of the 7”, “M.B.T.”, comes off the R and R and R album, on which Susu teamed up with pro­duc­ers Keith Souza and Seth Man­ches­ter. “M.B.T” takes a few ele­ments, acer­bic gui­tar licks, Kim Gordon-howls, fre­netic bass lines, and the spit­fire drums of Oliver Riviera-Drew, and weaves the min­i­mal­ist, iter­a­tive designs into a brac­ing artrock tableau. In a time when inde­pen­dent music seems over­run by synth tex­tures and some­what foggy com­po­si­tion, the unre­lent­ing pre­ci­sion and musi­cian­ship of Susu’s ana­log sound is gen­uinely shock­ing. Susu is tighter than a guido’s abs. The band flexes in a sin­gle uni­fied motion, hurtling songs for­ward at break­neck speed and chang­ing tem­pos at the drop of a dime. “M.B.T.” is not the sort of song that could be writ­ten alone in your bed­room on Garage­band. The mate­r­ial on R and R and R was writ­ten in a col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­ce­dure. As Havis describes it, “…Every­thing is worked out real time. We get together and impro­vise, jam, what-have-you, until some­one has this part stick­ing out that every­one is feel­ing. And then we tuck it away into our mem­o­ries. And so on. Even­tu­ally we have these 5–25 parts that we name arbi­trar­ily (but all under­stand), and some­one will hear some­thing that goes together. [For exam­ple] the ‘chicken part’ would sound great with the ‘cheer­leader part’. And even­tu­ally we put them together and move the pieces around and we have a song.” The result is a level of organic unity and cohe­sion that holds their music together even as the com­po­si­tional forms push the struc­tural bound­aries of what we expect to hear out of a pop song. The result is, in short, art.

But don’t let the loud noises and art­core machismo fool you. Susu can be goof­balls when they want to be. The track “Las Sire­nas” off their lat­est album will have you search­ing for your Spanish-English dic­tio­nary, and they’ve been know to bust out absur­dist lyrics like “I’ve got a roof/With a view/For when I wake up/And don’t know where I am” on “Clean vs. Dirty.” Naturally!

For their B-side, Susu brings it all the way back to 1983 with a cover of the Gloved One’s epic sin­gle “Bil­lie Jean.” On the selec­tion of the B-side, Havis remarks, “It’s just a killer song. Mike just started whip­ping out the bass line con­stantly so we decided to cover it since it was so fun to hear. That whole album is truly incred­i­ble (obvi­ously!). And then he died. And we hap­pened to be going into the stu­dio.. It’s sort of a de-stresser song for us so we did it after we had tracked the record.. Just a quick take.” Riviera-Drew and Gabry hold down the rhythm sec­tion while Havis floats the dark, brood­ing melody over the top. The result is haunt­ing yet dance­able, as if all those zom­bies from the Thriller video picked up instru­ments and started jam­ming. The King of Pop would have approved.

It’s the com­bi­na­tion of art­core fire­power and absur­dist flair that makes Susu spe­cial, and this 7” is a nice lit­tle intro­duc­tion to their musi­cal, Susu-ical vision. For the full expe­ri­ence of the brash trio out of Brook­lyn, go check out an album or live show. The faint of heart (and short of humor) need not apply.

Mike Gutier­rez

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