The Uncontainable We Contain Multitudes 

Former Bitch Magnet members Jon Fine (guitar, keyboards) and Orestes Morfín (drums) have come back together to form We Contain Multitudes with Simon Kobayashi (bass) of smallgang fame.

Together, this new power trio creates a mammoth slab of transcendent instrumental rock that echoes the growth Fine and Morfín have experienced as musicians since helping establish the post-hardcore sound in the mid-’80s. Somehow, they managed to harness this wild sonic stallion long enough to cut a debut LP. And a double. at that.

Recorded by Abe Seiferth (Car Seat Headrest, Nation Of Language) and produced by Seiferth and the band, Minako is the crossroads where late-period Black Flag and the mid-00s instru-metal scene intertwine, albeit with a more seasoned approach that only comes with getting older.

And the best part is that nobody new WCM was even a thing until they released Minako in June with a limited vinyl run of 300 copies.

“What we loved most about making this album was that almost no one knew about it while we were doing it,” says Fine. “No one knew about our band, and so we did it in a sort of absolute secrecy, and with no expectations from anyone as to what it would ultimately be. It gave us such a sense of freedom.”

Rock & Roll Globe had the chance to catch up with We Contain Multitudes recently to speak with them about how they came together to breathe new life into a classic sound. 

Minako is out now on Expert Work Records.

 

Minako has been out since late June. How has the response been?

Jon: I am amazed anyone has any time to pay attention to anything. Given the tumult of our world, the instant digital accessibility of what seems like every piece of music ever recorded (even tho the true heads know that lots of stuff remains hard to find, but WHATEVER we are all drowning in choice, is my bigger point), and fiendish platforms constantly feeding us short-form videos algorithmically designed to massage our pleasure/outrage centers <pauses to catch his breath>, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would have the bandwidth to deal with a very dense, all-instrumental double album. I mean — the lead-off track is 16 minutes long! But the reviews and reactions have been great, and we’re kind of stunned and honored by them. 

What prompted the formation of We Contain Multitudes?

Jon: In early 2017, I went over to London to do an event at the Windmill in Brixton for my rock memoir, Your Band Sucks. The guy who set it up — the very excellent George Gargan of Damnably — told me that more people would come if I played guitar. To which I immediately thought ah fuck, then realized it could be fun, and ended up playing a few songs with Simon Kobayashi on bass and Matt Atkins on drums. (Their band smallgang had opened for Bitch Magnet a few years previous to said event, and we all got on like a house on fire.) It was really fun to play again, and it woke up something that had been dormant. Shortly after I returned to the U.S., I was at a weird conference for work in Utah, and somewhat impulsively stepped out of it to call Orestes Morfín, the drummer for Bitch Magnet. We’d talked about playing together after the Bitch Magnet reunion shows were done, but nothing came out of it, but I called him and said, ‘listen, I’m serious. Let’s do a band. Also, I just played in London with Simon, and he’d be great.’ 

We got together for the first time in the spring of 2017. The first night we played together was kind of meh. We went out to dinner, had a few bottles of wine, woke up the next day, went back to the practice space, and suddenly it sounded great. We got into a good groove of getting together a couple times a year for four or five days of intensive writing and rehearsing. 

COVID fucked that up for a good couple of years, but we got back into it afterward and here we are. 

 

How did this material come together? Was it largely improvised?

Jon: A great deal of the album is rooted in long improvisations we did around riffs or motifs (like the looped figure in “Minako”). Typically we land on something we like and then we play it together for a loooooooooong time, to see what emerges. This describes how we came up with the title track, “We Are All Fucked” (Simon came up with the second half of that song), “Jeitinho,” and “Bathroom Drugs.” “Atkins,” “D9” and “Can We Just Not?” came from assemblages of guitar riffs that I had, which the band proceeded to mess around with and make much better.  

 

 

I definitely hear the late period Black Flag in the sound of Minako. What was it about that era of the band and their adventures in instrumental music that appealed to you?

Jon: The evolution of Black Flag in its initial incarnation — not whatever the hell Greg Ginn did under its name long after they broke up — really fascinates me. In a pretty short timeframe, that band went from hardcore to sludge metal to, to, to — well, I don’t really know how to characterize late-era albums like The Process of Weeding Out and In My Head. (Which is pretty high praise, in my book.) A big part of me getting competent enough to play in Bitch Magnet involved teenage me spending hours and hours playing along with Side 1 of Slip It In, trying to puzzle out Ginn’s riffs and especially his leads. That definitely left an imprint. I haven’t responded much to anything Ginn or Rollins — or, hell, really anyone in that band — did post-Flag, but, damn, what an adventurous and interesting band they were.   

 

Why did Minako make sense to you for a title?

Jon: I asked Simon. And Simon says: “I fell down a rabbit hole of Japanese music around 2018 — shortly after WCM started, funnily enough — and one of the initial big discoveries was the music of Minako Yoshida, who started in the early 70s as a jazz/folk singer songwriter and then moved towards what is now loosely known as City Pop. Anyway, I got a copy of her album Monochrome about a year after we first wrote ‘Minako’ (the song), and I was struck by the rhythm of the opening track ‘Tornado’ and its similarity to what we’d done. As such it felt like a fitting name for the track.

“As an album title it made sense as the track is so monolithic, and after we batted around a few track listings we quickly realised that it had to be the opener. Once that was established there didn’t seem to be any other album title worth considering.”

 

AUDIO: Minako Yoshida “Light’n Up”

 

How did you connect with Abe Seiferth to record Minako?

Jon: We’ve been pals for a long time. He did some work with us on some very early demos we did, and we just loved working with him. Dude is freaking awesome. Everyone should know this. Would work with him again in a proverbial heartbeat. 

 

Jon and Orestes have been playing together for 38 years now. How has your connection evolved? 

Jon and Orestes want to stipulate that we came up with these answers without knowing what the other was writing. 

Orestes: From my perspective, originally, there wasn’t one. Not for personal reasons, or artistic differences, or anything. Several factors contributed to that. The fact that I only knew Jon tangentially, and had not grown up listening to the same things didn’t help. The fact that we were not the primary songwriters in Bitch Magnet didn’t help either. 

I think with punk rock there’s a tendency to be much more rigid when it comes to song structure. A lot of times, as a youth, a big part of it is being able to get out onstage and hammer, and the convenience of having those rigid song structures to adhere to is actually comforting because it frees you up to do exactly that and not have to think about much else. The flipside, of course, is that you wind up relating to each other through these oversimplified templates, and that is limiting. If you’re lucky you may eventually get to know something about the other person’s abilities, but you don’t know who they really are musically.

I feel like that changed somewhere in the middle of writing the material for ‘Umber’, when we were able to contribute more to song ideas and felt free to tool around with structure, textures, rhythms, arrangement more.

Also, keep in mind that Jon and I didn’t talk from 1990-2010 so 38 years is not entirely accurate. We were effectively disconnected for 20 of those.

From my perspective, by the time Bitch Magnet came back around for the reunion shows it was like two entirely different people having to get to know each other for the first time, musically. Right out of the gate it felt like I was playing with a completely different person, someone sensitive to the whole vibe in the band throughout the trajectory of a song, the trajectory of a show— someone with enough introspection to know when and how to best contribute, someone who’d been through the grinder, had never given it up in their heart, and had found their musical balance. To me, this is a powerful thing.

At this point, I feel very much like we know who each other are and have grown to the point where we have the tools that we know we need to be able to work with each other.

Jon: Orestes remains incredibly tolerant of my intensities and mood swings and the fact that, after all these years, I’m nowhere near as good on guitar as he is on drums. (And never will be anywhere near as good as he is.) We also have a bunch of inside jokes that are absolutely incomprehensible to anyone else. Maybe that’s why he keeps me around.

 

VIDEO: Bitch Magnet “Mesentery”

 

What is it about the trio format that you enjoy the most?

Jon: I like how it forces the guitar to straddle rhythm and lead roles. I like how it gives the drummer more space. And I really like how it opens up room for bassists to move around melodically and drive the songs that way. 

It also makes it easier to comfortably rent the smallest room in the practice space. 

 

What’s it like to release new music during these very different times? Do you notice any similarities from the heyday of the ’80s underground? 

Jon: The only similarity I can think of is that there is always more interesting stuff to find once you take the time to really dig. In the Eighties, you had to look past whatever radio and MTV were playing. Today, you need to look past the algorithm. 

One very pleasant upside of releasing new music now is that things can go much more smoothly. The pressing plant — Smashed Plastic, we love you — got the albums and jacket to us waaaaay in advance of the release date. This is so wildly different from what bands like ours experienced in the Eighties and Nineties that I kind of can’t even. 

 

Are there any plans to hit the road and stretch these songs out?

Jon: There could be! We are trying to figure that out. Among the (many) things on our massive to-do list is to look into that.