Photo by Matt Weed
Philadelphia’s Rosetta has been exploring the outer galaxies of post-metal, hardcore, doom, ambient, prog, and more since 2003. The group had a longtime relationship with boutique label Translation Loss that resulted in three albums and a number of splits and EPs before their contract ended and they decided to soldier on as a completely independent band. Following a period of uncertainty and struggle, Rosetta was close to its breaking point when it self-released the bleak, moody The Anaesthete via Bandcamp in 2013. To the band’s happy surprise, the album became a best-seller on the site, the album’s success driven almost entirely by fans and word-of-mouth.
Videos by VICE
Reinvigorated by the positive reception, Rosetta recruited Eric Jernigan, a longtime friend and tourmate with his band City of Ships, for its follow up. The result, Quintessential Ephemera, shakes off much of its predecessor’s darkness to deliver a swirling mass of uplifting post-rock melodies and intense metallic release.
Noisey spoke to guitarist Matt Weed about the new record, the mixed bag modern technology has brought to independent music, and how changing things up can open the gates of musical possibility.
Noisey: First Rosetta had a spacey vibe, then things got really dark. Now with Quintessential Ephemera you’ve come back out of that. It seems more open-ended than the last record.
Matt Weed: It’s a convergence of a whole bunch of stuff. Obviously a huge part is that we had another member on this record. Every other release has been the same lineup of the same four people… Eric is a guitar player and a vocalist, and a very competent songwriter, so his contribution was multi-dimensional. The Anaesthete was super dark. A lot of that had to do with where we were at the time, personally and financially. We wrote it in an unheated garage we ended up getting evicted from because neighbors complained about the noise. We spent all this money on a van that lasted for two weeks worth of shows and then just rolled over and died. We financed the album with basically the last of our personal savings and thought, “If this doesn’t do well, we’re done.” It ended up doing really well, and that experience, which was based almost entirely of fans stepping up, supporting it, and telling their friends about it, was encouraging. That’s obviously going to affect the creative process the next time around.
Can you tell me more about that experience? Where do you see the relationship between bands and listeners?
The band/listener relationship is the central dynamic. Part of the reason we decided to go independent at the end of our last label contract is that we had spent all these years doing everything wrong that was possible to do wrong, but we were still committed to the idea of making music. We were looking at it from a future orientation. What’s going to be the most longterm, stable way to make music with the music industry in such a flux? The trend is towards cutting out the middleman and cultivating this super direct relationship between band and listener. It was a pretty cerebral decision at a time and having it succeed so amazingly well without putting a lot of effort into getting the word out—we only told people on social media—added this emotional element that none of us were expecting. I remember hearing a keynote address at an Australian music conference by Steve Albini where he said, “Fans are more ardent for this music,” in a way that they weren’t 20 years ago. So much of that is because of the way the Internet facilitates direct access to the artist. This time around I was more cognizant of the relationship with the listeners while writing. Not that I wanted to write a record that was going to make everyone happy, but I owe these people my absolute most honest effort and to do the absolute best I can in order to earn that respect and support going forward.
It’s interesting you mention Albini because what you’re saying seems to harken back to old school punk or hardcore principles where the industry is secondary to the relationship between band and listener. Does it go back that far for you, or is it a product of our time and where we are with technology?
Maybe it’s both, now that technology has finally become available to facilitate the ideals people had in punk and hardcore 20 and 25 years ago that couldn’t quite be realized… When we were getting into music it was cool to buy a Fugazi record. Their address was in the liner notes. You could totally write them a letter, but the technology wasn’t there. That kind of contact couldn’t be facilitated on the mass scale it’s able to be facilitated on now. But to get overly nostalgic about that time is a mistake. I feel really privileged to be making music right now in this amazing turning point where suddenly people without huge marketing apparatuses can get heard all over the world.
One of the threads on the new record is whether technology has made our lives better or not. How do you explore that musically?
There’s a kind of optimism about the level of connectedness that’s available to us now, but there’s also sadness that a lot of the relating we do now is mediated by screens and lacks the physicality that was characteristic of almost all human communities prior to fifty years ago. Technology isn’t necessarily making us talk and think about important things to the point we thought it would. It’s filled our lives with noise and distraction. On one hand I get to have a relationship with someone in Russia that’s based on music, which is something I care about deeply, but in order to have this relationship I’m swimming in this sea of YouTube cat videos and Internet memes that is so transient and short-lived that it’s ultimately not capable of meaning anything. We’re harnessing this thing that we’re not 100 percent stoked on, so some of that ambivalence comes out on the album.
It would have been easier in a lot of ways to not bring another player in. What motivated you to challenge yourselves in that way?
Eric sang on a track on our last record. It was a spur of the moment thing because when we were recording the album in Brooklyn, Eric lived in the neighborhood and asked to come to the studio. We asked him to play on a track. He was going to play guitar, but at the last minute he switched to vocals and it totally transformed the song. It was such a delightful experience that everyone was thinking, “What can we do to shake things up?” Our bass player Dave Grossman suggested we ask Eric to come down on weekends and write a record with us. I don’t know how long Eric wants to stay in the band. It’s up to him whether he wants to keep playing on records with us, but having had this experience we’re open to new collaborations in ways we hadn’t been before. I could see Rosetta in a couple of years having more of an open door where there are people moving in and out and contributing in different ways.
It’s really unique to change your whole structure after so many years. So that’s where Rosetta is at this point? Up for anything?
Yeah, I think so. Negotiating that transition provoked all of this anxiety at first, but sticking through it long enough the anxiety gives way to this amazing feeling of freedom. Like, “I can work with anybody I want to work with, make any music I want to make, commit to the process fully, and not feel like it’s undermining the stuff we’ve already done together.” That isn’t going to go away just because we change the way we do something. Every new collaboration adds to who you are, to some extent. It’s been a long time since I felt this happy about something that I’ve worked on, and it’s a really cool feeling.
‘Quintessential Ephemera’ is out today, June 22, and is now available on Rosetta’s Bandcamp page.
