First, that name: No, Durham’s The Nein isn’t the Triangle’s answer to Can or Kraftwerk, or Nena and her “99 Luftballoons” for that matter. Like many of us, they just didn’t happen to make it all the way through the Lord of the Rings trilogy, opting for the film version instead.”(We) thought that was the spelling for the nine kings of men who turned into ring wraiths,” says Finn Cohen, The Nein’s singer and guitarist. “I’ve not been able to make it through the books. Call it the impatience of 21st century males. The movies were just bad-ass.
“And we hope to be accepted by the German people.”
Their acceptance rate — both here and abroad — could be just a question of exposure. That backstory may conjure up notions of prog rock’s pretentious side, but the music doesn’t. Built in part from the ashes of the Rob Weston (Shellac)-produced White Octave (ex-Cursive member Stephon Pederson’s band), The Nein’s sound hints at Shellac’s undiluted guitar splinters, pulverizing drums and seismic bass, mixed in with the more melodic elements of keys and electronics — think the angular side of The Standard or The Fire Show and you’re in the general neighborhood.
But The Nein is a work in progress at the moment. Though he wasn’t featured on the six-song self-titled EP (officially out on Canada’s Sonic Unyon Records on Oct. 19), former Steel Pole Bathtub and Milk Cult member Dale Flattum’s sampling and electronics will play a vital role in the band’s full length, Cohen says. After joining The Nein onstage for a Wire cover at one of their shows, the trio — Cohen, Casey Burns (bass) and Robert Biggers (drums, keys) — asked Flattum to join up, though they knew his young son would limit his availability (kids do the darnedest things). They even began writing songs with him in mind before he’d become an official member.
Flattum plays both a sampler and tape deck run through effects, manipulating both to create blasts of dissonance or selected samples for individual songs. Cohen says it’s especially effective live.
“We’ve written some songs where both Dale and I only play samplers, and when we do those live it ends up being a nice break from our usual overwrought guitar/bass/drums,” Cohen says. “Lately he hasn’t been able to practice with us, so he’s just been showing up at shows with us and improvising these noise parts over the songs. It ends up adding a really cool tint to our songs, and it’s fun for us because we’re hearing him respond to parts he’s never heard before.”
Though The Nein’s live shows are known to be explosive, Cohen says the band has ripened since the White Octave days.
“We still have “menergy,’ but it’s a refined “menergy,'” he says, referring to White Octave’s last record, 2001’s Menergy. “Like fine wine.”
For Triangle types, or anyone who’s heard Compulation, a collection of songs from 21 Triangle bands (isn’t it time for someone to collect and release another sampler of new material from Charlotte’s bands?), none of this comes as news. The Nein EP has gone through three permutations since the band initially recorded it with Brian Paulson in April of 2003, and the complete EP was self-released in January 2004. Jay Murphy is recording the new as-yet-nameless record (due out in spring of “05) in his Pontchartrain Audio studio because of the band’s fondness for his work mixing the EP.
“The full length will have a lot more going on sonically,” Cohen says, citing Flattum’s full-time presence on the record first. “We’ve got tons of overdub/postproduction ideas…some of the overdub ideas are mainly textural, just lots of vocal tracks, lots of samples, some treated drum sounds.”
On Computation, The Nein is represented by the song “War Is on the Stereo,” one of the few examples of a Carolina band tackling the Iraq war. Cohen says The Nein isn’t interested in “being 100 percent serious all the time,” but the song was a reaction to the pre-war media hype.
“The events leading up to the actual invasion were being broadcast like a football game on CNN, and to me that just trivializes the whole concept of what was really going on,” he says, also citing the Clear Channel ban on songs allegedly bad for morale after 9/11. “So the phrase “war is on the stereo/songs are on the radar’ was just a way of portraying this concept of “war as entertainment’ and “art as a threat to national security.’
“Not all of our songs have political connotations, but when the world around you is falling apart piece by piece, it’s inevitable that the tension that ensues will come out in whatever outlet you have to express yourself.”
The Nein play The Room Thursday. Tickets are $8; openers Sunset Cemetery hit the stage around 10pm.
This article appears in Oct 6-12, 2004.
