ASSACRE: Dark Side of The Rainbow
by Danna Williams

Instead of attending a Saturday night SXSW showcase last month, I was soaking in the experimental madness of Awthum Fest. All thanks to a serendipitous encounter with one man: Assacre. (Like massacre without the "m", get it?)

While looking for a cd on his distribution label Awthum Records, I encountered the almost blindingly colorful artist profile picture flashing on my screen. Then the music started up - "Gayer Than God". A sample of a black preacher begins a dramatic death metal assault that totally rocks. Like gay marriage, gay death metal has finally arrived! Awthum!

Butt seriously, I've been re-introduced to metal by one metal lover on the fringe who dares to bring back over-the-top theatrics, creative sampling and unusual adaptations of popular songs to the already edgy, high adrenaline genre. And while close-minded purists may guffaw, Assacre dares to transcend the genre he loves but doesn't always love him back. Did I already mention the fact that he's gay?

I sat and talked with Assacre before the birth of Awthum Fest asked him if he remembered his first metal experience.
"...Metallica's Master of Puppets. I found it at a Goodwill. Everyone always talks so much shit about Metallica, like they're so commercial... but I was like, 'Oh what the hell, I'll give them a try' and I listened to it and it just blew me away. I had been playing in punk bands at the time, but that was when I really got into metal, about 5 or 6 years ago. So I consider myself pretty new to metal. That's what got me into death - death metal - the faster stuff, the thrashing stuff. I still listen to Metallica a lot. I still love them."

Assacre also clued me in on how it all started, how he combined his passions for performance art and metal:
"Me and some of my friends have been doing this thing called Totally Wreck. It started out as this kind of fake art collective. We were like 'we take ourselves very seriously, we do these shows...', but we were just wild art students who were a little bit jaded with some of the stuff that was going on around is, and we decided to just start our own thing... I still collaborate with a lot of people."

"There's a lot of good music in Austin, in Texas, and bands - I don't know if they want to be distributed, but I want to sell their records from shows to mail order. Awthum Records is around to spread the word about bands whether they like it or not. A lot of the bands I know are cool with it, but they aren't very commercial - they're completely anti-commercial. The kind of bands that play and 5 minutes into their set everybody's gone except their two friends that came along with them. Like noise music, more experimental stuff."

Assacre has a rainbow coalition of non-metalhead friends and fans who assembled for the first Awthum Fest. The bands included Lesbians on Ecstasy from Montreal, Canada, experimental rockers KurseGoBack from North Carolina, and noise orchestration by Austin-based Aunt's Analog. It was a crowded house and front yard, so I could barely catch a glimpse of some of the bands, but the sounds were captured my attention for most of that Saturday night. That's successful considering it was on a Saturday night during SXSW and Texas Rock Fest.

The gay death metal god received rave reviews for his full-length album, "Fantastic Illusions Worth Dying For". I asked the man behind the god how he came up with such a fantastic title. "It's on sale for $6.66..."Fantastic Illusions Worth Dying For" is the epitome of what I'm trying to say with my art and my music. It's everything in one statement. The word "Illusions is usually seen very negatively, but I see illusions as a very positive way of escaping things that seem not the way you want them to be... When things are "Fantastic", sometimes we want to think of these bizarre concoctions of ideas in our head as our means of getting away. Or sometimes it's just normal stuff - playing basketball, or getting ice cream, or other times you might have some weird thoughts. And the "Worth Dying For" is about illusions being all we have when it comes down to it. Everything we see in front of us is a giant perception, like we're all seeing everything happen but it's all in our minds... I mean, it's very real, but it's so very much an illusion to me. And to me that illusion is definitely worth dying for..."

You can find this description of the CD on the Awthum Records web site: "one man fantasy/extreme/homo metal sound collage futuristic spazzfest from Austin, TX" I had to know - was this something The Austin Chronicle wrote, or did he sit down to fantasize and create this image? The gay death metal god confessed, "I wrote that half of it is kind of like a joke, putting as many genres and descriptive words into it, and in the end it just sounds like a bunch of blabber. I don't really know how or want to define myself into a genre. I consider myself more of a performance artist than a musician. Yeah, I play guitar but I do a lot of visual art too."

Perhaps the most striking things about Assacre is his visual assault on his audience. Pun intended. Last year I had the pleasure of experiencing a unique version of "Colors of The Wind" from Pochahantas. Yes, a Disney Inc. movie. My question after this performance was "Why?"
It's nostalgia for me. I used to like - I still like Disney movies. The songs are kind of silly and cliched, but I think there's a lot of simple, powerful things that they're saying in these movies. If kids can understand, then the whole world's gonna understand. Playing shows at places like Flamingo Cantina I love, but the audience is older so we don't listen to those things, we're not supposed to listen to those kind of things, but it's kind of reminding everybody not to forget about the simple things in life, to never forget "the colors of the wind", nature around us, and stuff like that. It's silly, it's goofy, but I think it's important to say those kinds of things. I don't believe in cliches. I don't think things can be said enough. I think our culture is concerned about avoiding cliches, like "Oh my god, it's been done, it's been done before!" So what? Just have fun and do what you think is right... Did you sing along?"

I will admit, with some degree of shame, that I sang along, but only because my four-year-old niece loves Pocahontas and I've watched it with her a dozen times. I came close to pulling out a lighter or a candle when Assacre sang that cornball song. But I digress... I wanted to know why he chose that song, and the equally outlandish outfit - a multi-patterned daishiki and striped tights. His face was obscured by a black stocking mask.

"My outfits have changed. I mean, they've changed over time. Mostly I like really colorful stuff, colors as like a metaphor. A lot of what I do is kind of silly metaphors all over the place. I think part of the colors of my outfit have to do with "the colors of the wind"... To me, the colors of the wind is life. Even the colors of the wind is a fantastic illusion itself. The outfits are supposed to dazzle a little. They're a little bit hard to look at, but I want people to sort of focus on the experience. I don't want to be another band that goes out there and just plays. Talk about cliches...(laughs) I just like doing something that's fun that people can somehow relate to or maybe not, or maybe take something away from it - maybe like "Wow, I haven't seen anything like that before."

That explained his colorful elaborate costumes, and being all over the place on stage, which he explained further: "This is really silly, but I get the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day, and one day the word was "omnipresent". I was like, that's a weird word. It means being everywhere at the same time. I was like, 'That's impossible. How can you be everywhere at the same time?' Well I'm gonna create this illusion that Assacre is everywhere at the same time, that Assacre is the ominpresent being, even when you're sleeping. It's kind of like the way I see religion and beliefs like that - it's another fantastic illusion, like Assacre is a fantastic illusion - how do you know that I was really performing out there? I want the whole thing to be a confusing but surreal experience, and part of that is homo. I'm gay, and I want people to be like "Homo? Death metal is not homo." The heavy metal scene is very homophobic. I know a lot of people who are into heavy metal that are cool, but there's like a weird tension. I never play metal shows, but not on purpose. I tend to know more art kids. So I kind of threw that [homo] into it to hint to people that this is not something you hear everyday. It's all a fantastic illusion."

I understood why he wouldn't necessarily feel at ease at a metal show, although he's places like Headhunters. But I wondered if he still encountered the occasional homophobic heckler or macho asshole. He laughed and said, "Actually, Austin's been pretty cool about Assacre. I have a weird amount of support here. I went to tour over the summer, and that was the first time people were like "Don't touch me." Tonight I didn't really go out and mess with people, but in certain places I got more in people's faces. There was one show I played in a skate park in a tiny town in Ohio. I don't think anybody there was over the age of 16. Everybody was really young, it was really cool. But while I was setting up I guess they didn't know I was gay. They were talking about one of their friends they think is gay and it was like a bunch of 13 -year-olds calling each other fags and gay. And they were like, "Fags can't write music!"

Maybe they never heard of Elton John... Assacre continued. "That was the first time I'd heard something like that at a show. I was like, I guess they don't know that I'm gay, or maybe they were teasing me. But I don't think they were. During my show there's one sample, in "Cyclopse Genesis", and at the end it says "Gay people are the largest beings on earth, created to show the awesome power of God." It's a satirical thing I created, I spliced the samples. The kids were like "What the hell..." They were giving me looks and I went up to the one kids that was saying a lot of the remarks and I just stared at him in the face for a long time. And afterward he apologized to me, which was kinda cool. I don't know if he was sincere, but you can't blame the kids for having those kinds of reactions. Who knows where they got that from. Just like everybody, they've been conditioned to think that way, so our job as human beings is to help people out of that. It's a thing I feel is necessary, and it's a part of my music to kind of pinch people and be like "I'm gay, so what? You can enjoy this as much as you enjoy 'regular' death metal." The only difference is I don't like sleeping with girls. Girls are beautiful, but other than that...

I remember seeing something a little... gay on Assacre's Myspace page - with art banners and instant messenger icons flashing cryptic messages like "The Dark Unicorn is rising..."
I had to know - What the hell does it mean?

"It's kind of like another joke," he said. I pretended to be an indignant unicorn lover. "Are you making fun of unicorns, Assacre? That's not cool." I couldn't keep a straight face for long, though.

"No, I love unicorns," he revealed his shameful secret. "I have all kinds of unicorn stuff." Another closet unicorn lover "outed".

"That fits in with the fantastical illusions, I guess." We laughed and he explained how life imitates his bizarre unicorn art.

"I was a unicorn for Halloween. I have this kind of joke, which is kind of half joke, half reality, that... it's not really unicorns but this dark rainbow, the darker side of the rainbow, you know?
Believe it or not, there's this whole group of gay people, queer people, who aren't into Madonna remixes or going to the club... I like Madonna, but there's a whole other side of me... So it's kind of like a joke - 'I am the embodiment of the dark side of the rainbow. At the end of the rainbow there's satanic flames...' It's a joke towards metal. Everything is dark and mysterious. So talk about something that's not very, unicorns. I did a painting of a unicorn head, decapitated, and the unicorn's screaming, coming out of this starburst... It's kinda gruesome. It's showing a satirical view of very bubbly, colorful things."

This reminded me of his outrageous photos, which I almost forgot to ask him about.
"My images on Myspace are a little bit flashy. People are like, are you trying to give us seizures? I like giving people seizures" Assacre joked. "It's all overload. It's like how much can I do before people start getting annoyed or people love it even more."

So would he consider himself a politcally incorrect homosexual?

"I hardly think about offending people. I just have to go with the flow and use my instincts to guide me. Some people might find me politically incorrect. My fuel, my energy is constantly challenging."

Experience the dark side of the rainbow later this month at Snake Eyes Vinyl, April 23rd, and check out "Fantastic Illusions Worth Dying For" at your local record shop or online at awthum.com.