Fresh off the recent premiere of their new single “Eavesdropping on a Crisis” (listen below), Richmond based experimental avant-garde jazz rockers DUMB WAITER are back with some juicy teasers for their fifth full-length album “Gauche Gists”, out June 24th, 2022 on Ossein Records. We have the utmost pleasure to give you their sick new single “Descending the Same Broken Ladder” and mind-mbending, thought-provoking video interview below!
Formed in 2012 in Richmond, VA, Dumb Waiter was founded by Nick Crider and Nathaniel Roseberry. As Nick explains it, the band’s formation came out of humorous necessity: “Back then, I was the booking agent at non-profit venue space and I had booked Lightning Bolt and wanted to be a complete brat and play the show as well. So I asked Nathaniel to start a noise power violence band. After a few practices, Nath brought in more players (Tristan Brennis and Keith Paul) and Dumb Waiter was formed.”
Since then, the band has mutated to what could be described as avant-garde jazz rock, looking to move away from being pigeonholed into the “math rock” label that they generally don’t relate to. A testament to their dynamic sound, Dumb Waiter has shared the stage with a diverse array of talented bands including Tera Melos, Lightning Bolt, Behold the Arctopus, Ex Eye (Colin Stetson), David Liebe Hart, Eternal Summers, Weasel Walter, Cleric, Young Widows, Jaye Jayle, Zombi, and Screaming Females.
Their new album Gauche Gists was recorded by Kevin Bernsten (Full of Hell, Magrudergrind, Weekend Nachos, Noisem, Pig Destroyer) with technical help from Matt Redenbo (Eyelet, Black Lung, Misled Youth) at Developing Nations in Baltimore. Mastered by James Plotkin (Sunn O))), Isis, Pelican), the album features artwork by Alexandra Borovski. It will be released June 24th, 2022 on Ossein Records. Gauche Gists will be released on cassette (ltd. edition of 50), as well as a limited pressing of 100 copies on citron-colored vinyl, with hand-numbered inserts. Preorder, here.
The author of the cover art , Alexandra Borovski (b.1989), is a Moldovan born Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist, poet and educator. In 1991, as a result of The Transnistria War, Borovski and her family fled as refugees to Omaha Nebraska where they were sponsored by a local Jewish community center.
Borovski’s work mines this unlikely displacement and cultivates new visual forms to challenge the void of lost, muted, or erased cultural legacies. Often achieved through a combination of humor and technical rigor Borovski’s visual language is largely shaped by the influence of her architect parents drawing references from Soviet Constructivism and Bauhaus aesthetics, along with influences from science fiction and American feminist texts and graphic novels.
Borovski earned her BFA from the University of Nebraska and her MFA from Tufts University (School of the Museum of Fine Art), Boston. Her work has been shown at the ICA Boston, Boston Center for the Arts and numerous group shows nationally.
‘Absurdity and self-deprecation’ – a video interview like never before, with DUMB WAITER:
“When I was writing up the list of questions for this interview, I was focused on absurdity and self-deprecation.” – comments the band’s Nick Crider. “Everyone is interested in the life of a not-local-to-them, small band with a less than modest following, right? No. I think the more interesting angle is presenting how it can sometimes feel like everything you do as an experimental band is absurd.”
“The interview is akin to the gut check you feel when a sensible adult asks you why you are still holding on to this fantasy (also implying that reward is directly tied to money and or fame). My hope is that this reverberates with anyone creating. It’s okay. Dumb Waiter understands you.
This is a mock interview, but the reality is that the reward of this endeavor is getting to yell at each other about who is stronger and confessing our love of Shrek. If you are doing it for anything else, you are in the wrong game.”
Gauche Gists is Dumb Waiter’s fifth album.
While the newest record certainly references many of the ideas and discoveries of the band’s previous releases, it also heavily explores the approach of allowing inherently different ideas and attitudes to coexist. Simultaneously, poetic moments are given their breath.
Of the album, guitarist Nick Crider explains: “I think about our music mirroring the chaos of life. Things overlap and clash, different tunes play simultaneously, but in that dissonance is a hidden harmony. What shouldn’t go together does, and different situations / feelings / ideas / problems / solutions all simultaneously exist in the chaos.”
“The experience of the listener mirrors that of the conscious being inundated with all of these elements. They actively decide what they want to pull out of the chaos, and how they’ll interpret that. Other aspects may get left disregarded, and we write our music in a way that leaves the listener with that choice. I think a good example of this is within the title, ‘Experiencing Loss in a Grocery Store,’ where two pallets clash and combine. The listener is presented with banality and despair, all masked with adult contemporary.”
PRESS:
“This is a band that isn’t pushing the envelope so much as they’re shoving it right over the side of a goddamn cliff. If you’re tired of the same old same old, then Dumb Waiter absolutely MUST be on your radar.” — MetalSucks
“Richmond, Virginia instrumental noise/experimental/math rock freakies Dumb Waiter are no stranger to the weird. But on their fourth album, Tsk, the band has only dived deeper into the strange, and they’ve done so by playing things a bit more straight. I mean, if that’s confusing, sure, welcome to the world of Dumb Waiter.” — Decibel Magazine
“…these four horsemen combine their own experiences and insights for improvisational aesthetics that pushes and encourages the elaboration and expansion of one another’s own artistic sensibilities (not to mention the hosts of potentially latent creative possibilities previously untapped until now). — Impose Magazine
“Together they blend a love for heavily distorted tones, melodic complexity, volatile energy, and augmented chord shapes to create “Dumb Waiter”. Thumping blast beats and effected bass grooves lay the bottom layer over which spiraling guitar work and free-wheeling sax noises progress and thrive.” — New Noise Magazine
