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Five Questions with Deep China
Posted by: Necci – Aug 03, 2011
Deep China could be called a Richmond supergroup, but it'd be even more accurate to say that they're a band of very busy dudes. Singer (and original bassist) James Henderson and drummer Chris Brown are also in Race The Sun, and Chris is in Mouthbreather too. Guitarist Reid Attaway is in Murphy's Kids, and brand new bassist Eric Smith is in The Catalyst. Even without Deep China in their lives, all of these guys would stay busy playing music regardless. Nonetheless, they continue to play together, and one would assume that Deep China satisfies a desire that none of their other bands can satisfy--the desire to play dark, skull-crushing METAL. Deep China find a way to extract the brutality from the early 90s sound of bands like Pantera, Alice In Chains, and White Zombie without picking up on any of the cheesier, more dated elements, and then combine that brutality with sounds learned during their years of participation in the underground hardcore scene, from bands such as His Hero Is Gone and The Swarm. The result is a massive, uncompromising wall of sound that never loses an ounce of power, even at moments when Henderson forsakes his usual scream to engage in outright singing--usually a verboten move in today's metal and hardcore scenes. Deep China have only played a handful of local shows thus far in their career, but a band this good won't stay a secret for long. Guitarist Ryan Pupa supplied the answers to my questions about the formation and evolution of Deep China, and the dividing line between hardcore and metal. Read on:
How did Deep China get together? Do you consider this band a continuation of Brain Damage, or is it a separate endeavor that just happens to feature a lot of the same people?
Deep China is definitely a continuation of Brain Damage. We wanted to move away from strictly hardcore and felt like we just needed to reinvent the band to do that. At that point it was Chris, James and I. I have always been really hesitant about adding a second guitarist, so the addition of Reid was almost by accident - after being awoken from a porch nap on a below freezing December night in 2010, Chris drunkenly asked Reid to come out to the farm in Powhatan where we practiced to "shred with us, brooohhhhh..."
The music that most of you have been known for in the past has often been very different from what Deep China is doing. How do you think your experience of playing multiple different styles of music affects the music you create as part of Deep China?
I (Ryan) write a lot of the backbone of songs and then bring what I have to practice where it usuallys gets changed... I listen to a lot of metal and the other guys aren't coming from that same metal-centric background, so it's interesting to me to see how I'll write a part with certain things in mind that end up being interpreted differently by the other guys.
With almost all of you playing in multiple other bands, how do you balance your schedules and find the time to do this band?
At this point, if we don't practice at the scheduled time each week, we will not get together as a whole band. We have one night a week (Sunday) that is reserved for Deep China practice, it's the only night of the week that we can all (usually) get together due to our work and show schedules. That being said, practices without the whole band are often really constructive, because we play so loud that being able to separate the different sounds really helps us hone all our parts.
Do you consider yourselves a metal band, a hardcore band, or somewhere inbetween? Do you feel like distinctions like that are even important?
I think we consider ourselves a metal band, but because we are influenced by such a wide range of heavy/fast/loud bands that distinction doesn't really give a great idea of what we sound like... Really though how can any mixture of thrash, death, hardcore, rock and tech metal be articulated in such a way as to really be differentiated?
What's going on with the split with Hellbear? And what else is coming up in the near future for Deep China?
Hellbear broke up and two of the members moved to NYC to start a new badass band called We Run Music. We're trying to figure out exactly what we should do with the 4 songs we recorded [for the Hellbear split]. Ideally we'd like to do a 7 inch, if we can find someone who likes the tunes enough to help us put them out, but we may just do another free CD demo of the four tunes. We currently have two shows booked at Strange Matter, the first one is Saturday, August 20th with Inter Arma, Murder, Count Von Count and Towers. It's a Best Friend's Day/Hadad's after-party. Then we're doing a $2 show at Strange Matter in September. We are really stoked to be playing at all. We've been really fortunate to get to play with some really badass bands. We're real stoked to get up with Inter Arma in particular. Those dudes rule.
By Andrew Necci
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