Mammoth Riffs and Mammoth DecisionsPart I: Elaborations of YOB
Isamu Sato woke up in a sleeping bag in the front yard of someone’s house; he couldn’t remember whose. He got up, and along with band mates Mike Scheidt and Travis Foster, got in a van and drove to their next gig. And so the Eugene, Oregon doom outfit YOB continued their first tour, a ten day assault on the West Coast in 2003.
Sato, the bassist, had joined the group two years prior at the behest of guitarist/singer Scheidt, with whom he’d played in other bands. At the time, YOB was about to release its first full-length album, Elaborations of Carbon. He took a break from his job as graphic consultant, his long time girlfriend Lori, and their six year old son and teenage step-daughters to go on the road with his friends and band mates in YOB. “The first ten-day tour was like a party for us. No plans. We’d stop wherever,” Sato recalls with a laugh. The night prior they’d taken an invitation to stay at a fan’s house along with the band Graves at Sea after a show. “We weren’t big yet. We were just a DIY band — you crash wherever you can.” It turned out to be a party house, filled with cigarette smoke and raucous kids. All of them slept outside.
Three distinct gagging motions accompany this story, during the second of which Sato sticks out his tongue and rolls his eyes back in his head. He’s a natural storyteller, building dramatic tension and making intense eye contact, leaning back in his chair and punctuating sentences with thoughtful pauses. He also stands out. While the doom scene is more diverse than most sub genres of metal, it’s still largely dominated by white guys with long hair, big beards, tattoos, and leather jackets. Sato`s of average height, his face framed by long dark, straw like hair. It’s obvious from the way he’s always moving his hands when the talks that he grew up somewhere in South America, or perhaps Spain or Italy, though his skin tone and round face are stereotypically Asian.
YOB’s monolithic riffs garnered rave reviews. They were heralded as “one of the most original doom acts” and “heavier than the world`s entire elephant population.” During Sato’s four years in the band, YOB released three more CDs – the last two on Metal Blade Records, a major accomplishment within the scene - and toured the U.S. twice more for month-long stints in the summers of 2004 and 2005. Sato’s hypnotic bass lines were an integral part of the band’s thunderous sound. In addition to playing bass, he created the artwork for the second and third albums, Catharsis and The Illusion of Motion. But after the 2005 tour for The Unreal Never Lived, Sato was exhausted and jaded. He quit the band.
“To me, playing was just a thing I did because I loved it. It was becoming a job, but it wouldn’t pay my bills…you have to make commitments and decisions [on the road], not because of music, but because of peripheral issues; but they have to do with people’s lives. Things start happening outside of your control,” says Sato. Foster exited as well and YOB dissolved. Scheidt started up Middian, while Sato returned to his pet project H.C. Minds and birthed Shadow of the Torturer. Sato still plays music on his own terms, like he always has, long before he ever joined YOB.
Part II: Cathartic Changes
It was the biggest show Sato ever played, and it was the least fulfilling. The thrash influenced trio Metalmorofosis played for more than 4,000 people in a Bolivian arena in 1983 on borrowed amplifiers and a studio drum set. This was the country in which he grew up. “I didn’t feel like a musician. The people were (only) there because it was something new. Metal in Bolivia was an excuse to cause trouble and be violent. People hurt each other,” recalls Sato.
The band consisted of a 15-year-old Sato, Gabriel Davila, and Vladimir (Vlady) Arzabe. Guitars were rare in Bolivia at that time, but Sato had received a bass from his uncle in Japan. Davila, a high school dropout, got his number from a mutual friend. The `80`s metal scene attracted a small but loyal cult following in the South American country, largely operating through person-to-person trades. “I would get these phone calls — ‘My name is such-and-such and I know such-and-such, want to trade?’ Most of the time it was copies of cassettes, but when some had an album it was exciting,” Sato says. After getting a call from Davila he practiced Dio’s “Holy Diver” and Judas Priest’s “Hot Rockin” for an audition but was surprised when he met the other musicians. “The drummer didn’t have a drum set — typical — but he had a box for a snare and banged on some other shit.”
One morning he got a phone call to meet the band at a peculiar street address that turned out to be Heriba Records. The son of a major executive desperately wanted to play drums for a metal band, but just didn’t have the chops. Instead he talked his father into letting him borrow the studio for day so he could record a metal band. Isamu thought nothing of the practice at the studio — he never imagined a record would be pressed. “It just looked like he was playing around with dials,” he recalls. A stack of seven-inch records showed up at his doorstep two months later. Shortly after that, Sato played the arena show. “I remember it, but it didn’t seem real, even at the time.”
At age 18, Sato decided to move to the U.S. and to study architecture at Cañada College in Redwood, California. He quickly got caught up in the ‘80`s Bay Area trash scene. “It was one of the best times and places for music in the world,” recalls Sato. He cut his teeth at Forbidden (then “Forbidden Evil”), Potential Threat, and Testament shows. “It was a really tight scene, a bunch of young kids hanging out.” Sato played bass off and on, but nothing serious. He ran out of money for school and decided to move to a cheaper college town in the Northwest around 1990. “First I tried Idaho, got out, looked around,” Sato says looking left, right, and then left again feigning surprise. “Wrong move — so I hopped back in the car. Eugene was next on the list.”
He settled in Eugene and began attending graphic design classes at the University of Oregon. There he met Lori Jones, the future mother of their 11-year-old son Naookie. Sato is step-father to Lori’s daughters Heather, 18, and Sarah, 22. At this time, he became a fixture in the Eugene metal scene. He played guitar, then bass in the death metal band Thrombus with Mikey Brown and Carl Fowler. “The early Eugene scene wasn’t happening, but there were lots of cool bands,” Sato recalls, naming, among others, Scheidt’s band Chemikill. He also founded and played guitar for the extant sludge band H.C. Minds with Brown, though many members have come and gone from the group over the years — fixtures, after all, need new light bulbs. Thrombus moved to Seattle for two and half years in the mind 1990s just as the grunge movement exploded; it wasn’t the right time for metal there. Sato headed back to Eugene in 1996 and got a graphic design job at Molecular Probes, a local bio-technology company which was purchased eight years later by the multi-national company Invitrogen.
Sato continued playing music. In 2001, Scheidt recorded a demo with a studio drummer that became YOB’s first release. The band went through bassist Lowell Iles and drummers Greg Ocon and Gabe Morely before a more permanent lineup was established. That’s when Scheidt teamed up with Sato and Foster.
Part III: The Illusion of Labels Dispelled
(A Q&A with Isamu Sato at West 11th Archery, February 2008)
Nick: What did you take away from touring?
Isamu: The flyers — from every show — I just ripped them off the wall [laughs]. When I’m home, I open my box of fliers and look at them, because that’s when I really go back to the show and really enjoy it. Because when you’re playing you don’t enjoy it; it just happens so fast, it’s a blur. You go, set up, and by the time you’re done playing you don’t know what happened. Maybe you think about it afterward, but when it’s happening, I don’t know if I enjoy it much. Or \when you’re having trouble with gear or the place is difficult to set up in. Like in New York man, fuck, I’ll never forget that show.
It was this little narrow basement, and outside the club was a bigger club. There were a bunch of hiphoppers flashing guns at us and we we’re pushing our gear into this little basement. We thought we were going to die that night. It was sick, coughing. It wasn’t enjoyable. We were freaking out because we were late. We’re fucking sweating, pushing our gear down the stairs. But that night was one of the most interesting for me. I met all these people. Liz Ciavarella from Metal Maniacs was there, Dave Brenner, my friend Rafa from Secret Order of Tusk. That night I had fun, but I wasn’t just sick, this club was just a shitty basement in New York; but all the great bands were there and the people. We played with awesome bands that night, with Unearthly Trance, Solace, Dozer, all in this little place. Probably all the people in the club were the people in the bands.
In Youngstown, Ohio there was this doom festival, Emissions from the Monolith — it’s not around anymore. It’s pretty amazing. It’s a warm and friendly festival. It’s a killer sounding club, not too big, maybe 500 capacity, sold out all four days. Forty bands a day in Youngstown, this shitty town, one of the highest crime rates in the U.S. The band Deadbird — they had their van stolen right in front of the club. But imagine a couple hundred people in bands plus 300 other people from all over the world. I met this girl from Peru who came to see Solace and YOB. All the killer bands play there, even Boris from Japan, and Orange Goblin.
Nick: How did you feel about signing with Metal Blade Records?
Isamu: Signing with Metal Blade was my little dream come true. I never thought I’d get signed to something as big as Metal Blade. I had always wanted to be on a one-off, indie label, no contract, just an email… and I always wanted to self-produce as well…You know what tripped me out about Metal Blade? There are a lot of people in the music industry looking, listening, going to MySpace. They’re recruiters and there’s a lot of that, but I’d never really thought about it, because I was always thinking underground. I never really wanted to get that exposed. They emailed us. We never sent our demo to Metal Blade — we always sent it to indie labels. But one day Mike got an email. It wasn’t even, like “Hi,” it was “We want to put out your record.” Whoa, are you serious? Why? Have you ever heard it? “Oh yeah we’ve heard your records” — we already had two out at that point — “we’re fans and we want to put out your record.” We said no [laughs], you guys are too big. What are you all about?
They were aggressive… we were getting a lot of offers from indie guys, really cool guys like At a Loss Records. When we said no [to Metal Blade], they said “Why not? We’re offering you this deal like any other label.” They laid it out. We were not expecting that. We said yeah, but I said that I don’t like to do a lot of touring, maybe one a year. They said four records, we said two. They told us they were trying to build us a career. And they kept offering us tours.
It was hard to say no all the time, because there were so many offers. “Do you want to hop on this tour? Do you want to hop on that tour? How about that tour? How about Japan? How about this?” I knew I couldn’t do all that. I was thinking “Japan and Europe in the same year?”
Nick: What about your new band, Shadow of the Torturer? Would you take a record deal?
Isamu: I’ll take it if it fits my life. No tour, that’s the major thing for me. I can go anywhere, but I can’t go for too long. I’ll play live a lot, but as only much as I can — in Portland, Seattle, Eugene, five-day stints in Bay Area. It would be a fantasy to think that we could make it big playing this kind of music. If I wanted to make money, I wouldn’t play metal. If I really thought I wanted to play music to make a living out of it, I would play music like Fu Manchu, like AC/DC, stuff that I think is kind of heavy. People like that shit; even the fourteen year old girls like that shit.
What I want is to have the tools to do what I think is heavy for me, and if I end up having a CD and anybody wants to put it out, that’s what I want. If no one wants to put it out, I put it out. I’ll say “Hey record company, press me 500 records — here’s the artwork, here’s everything, here’s my credit card.” And when I get 500 records I’m the happiest guy. I give 100 to my friends and every show I sell a handful of them and that’s all for me. I’m not in this to make money. I spend $5,000 and I make $4,500 back, success, I’m happy.
Me and Mikey — we’ve already have had a level of success in our bands, and in our careers — we’re not little eighteen years old kids anymore. We want to just enjoy playing the music that makes us feel “Aww this feels heavy for us, great.” It happens to be something that right now people like. A lot of kids like this doom metal shit — it’s new, because it wasn’t like this in the mid eighties, nineties, doom wasn’t that cool. Candlemass , Trouble, those bands never got big because it wasn’t cool.
I know a lot of people that want success and they get caught up trying to succeed and for whatever reason they don’t. I don’t think they go anywhere, they just get old. They become negative or they abandon it… especially playing that grind metal, it’s not going to happen. You make a decision — you do it because you really love the music or you do something that you think that’s going to get you there, but that’s may not be grind metal, I don’t even think heavy metal is it.
Part IV: The Unreal Relived
West 11th Archery in Eugene houses a series of $180 a month storage units that serve as makeshift practice spaces for a host of musicians. The only thing related to archery that’s visible from the street is the door handle to the administrative building, fashioned from a composite bow. A drunk kid in grungy clothes skateboards in dimly lit parking area. He’s actually not that bad. There’s a lot of laughing and swearing from emanating from units, doors ajar. Throughout the night punk, death metal, classic rock and doom bans make deafeningly loud music in rooms the size of one-car garages.
The paint on pad 6 was once green — now it’s wood-that-once-was-painted-green colored. The numeral is repeated twice in black Sharpie, slightly smaller than the original. There are pad lock slots at various heights, though only one of them has a lock attached. Inside Sato is looking over Brown’s shoulders writing Shadow of the Torturer lyrics on a PC, while they wait for Gabe Morley to show up for practice. Morley, YOB’s second drummer, also plays with the Eugene doomy experimental outfit Rye Wolves.
The walls are covered in garbage bag plastic and numerous band flyers, many of which are silk-screened. The last few tracks of an old Slayer album playing on a boom box are lost in the din of a new Shadow of the Torturer track blasting through computer speakers. “Just put up the lyric sheet on the wall next to you,” Mikey offers as he italicizes Isamu’s words on the screen. “Yeah, but how will I read them in the dark?” Isamu responds. Mikey keeps typing. The lights flicker a bit, but no one seems to notice. The band has been around since October 2007 and they’ve already played four shows as of February 2008. Their MySpace player has just over 2,500 hits so far.
About thirty-five people show up at the Samurai Duck in Eugene two weeks later. Everything in the bar is painted black, with the exception of the murals on the back wall, including two large ukiyoe faces, with eyes trained at impossible angles. It’s after midnight on a Thursday night and the crowd is exhausted after the relentless sludgy stoner rock of San Francisco’s Black Cobra. Isamu, Mikey and Gabe set up quickly. Shadow of the Torturer begins to play.
They alternate between two power chords for several drawn out bars before churning the song into motion. Knees bent, back arched, head hung, Isamu’s body forms a “S.” He moves sinuously, his whole body bobbing as he faces towards his band mates. Mikey’s guttural growls are occasionally joined by Isamu’s tortured vocal rasps. His fingers dance over the bass strings, commanding prolonged dirges and ethereal fills. The crowd bobs its heads slowly, an undulating sea of motion.
After thirty solid minutes of sound the band closes with a cover of Black Sabbath`s “A Natural Acrobat.” A roar rises from the audience as several glasses are hoisted into the air. Isamu steps up to the microphone and fully faces the crowd. This is the first time he’s done so all night. His high-pitched wails are a fairly good facsimile of Ozzy. Their rendition is a bit thrashier than the original. It’s definitely the fastest they’ve played all night.
After the performance Isamu descends the stairs to the stage and is greeted by a small crowd. He chats with four people about the performance as well as the band’s upcoming gig in Portland for a 4:20 festival [the band ultimately had to cancel, due to health problems with Morely. Shadow of the Torturer is currently on hiatus, although former YOB drummer Travis Foster will probably record drum tracks if they decide to finish the CD]. There’s a lot of smiling, pats on the back, and hand shaking. Sato is grinning ear to ear, a strand of hair glued to his forehead by sweat. As music comes on over the stereo, he suddenly he remembers his band mates, who are tearing down equipment on stage and jumps back up to pack up his gear. He leaps back up puts away his bass, still smiling.
